Albion

ENGLAND THE UNKNOWN ISLE--Paul Cohen-Portheim--Dutton ($3). If you had been caught by the outbreak of war in what you thought a friendly country and interned behind barbed wire as an enemy alien for four years; if later you wrote a book about your captors, their ways & means, you might be pardoned for taking a somewhat acid view. Paul Cohen-Portheim was in just that case, but his book about England is one of the most tolerant, friendly, sympathetic retaliations imaginable. A Jew, a cosmopolite (he now lives in Paris), a well & truly educated man, Cohen-Portheim wields an Anglophilous pen, his other cheek turned but both eyes wide open. ''The intention of this book is to throw light on the character of a nation and an Empire whose significance for Humanity is overwhelmingly great. They are far too little known, and if this book contributes ... to the spread of a knowledge of them, it will have fulfilled its purpose." Never brilliant or startlingly original. England The Unknown Isle is the kind of book an English Tory might have written if he had been calm enough to be coherent in these troublous-to-Tory times. His defense (it amounts to that) of England, the English and their Empire, covers: climate & physical features, history, traits, London, the Universities. Society (large and small s}, politics, art, literature, the Press. He thinks the English irrational, humorous, sentimental, prone to exaggerated understatement, believers in character rather than intelligence. And he thinks this is on the whole a .good way to be. "The fact that the late Lord Balfour was in his seventies still a keen tennis player was a much greater title to fame than the fact that he had written important philosophical works." Even when Author Cohen-Portheim exaggerates it is to make a friendly point: ''London harbours an international exhibition like Wembley, but the Londoner is hardly aware of it; the General Strike scarcely touched the surface of the place, and even the Great War hardly made any difference in its daily life." Real ruler of England is Society, which controls the permanent, appointive offices of State, understands "the art of making talented individuals serve its interests and ideals by taking them up; so Disraeli is made Lord Beaconsfield, Rufus Isaacs Lord Reading and Viceroy of India, and [Joseph] Chamberlain, a Birmingham manufacturer, becomes the champion of the aristocratic point of view." Though Apologist Cohen-Portheim grants that "in politics the English have a world-wide reputation for treachery and hypocrisy," he explains: "that only means that [England] definitely does not allow herself to be deflected from her straight course by any principles." Speaking literarily he becomes more critical, thinks that: "Together with what is perhaps the greatest literature of Europe, England, since the middle of the nineteenth century at least, has also produced the largest and most degraded body of trash in Europe; it is only quite recently that she has yielded in this sphere too to American competition." Of thumping and bethumped Bernard Shaw he avers: "He is at bottom a typical Puritan and a typical Protestant: the English middle classes regarded him for years as a terrible revolutionary and iconoclast, but Society always found his eagerness a little comical, because it believes in the underlying truth of the conventions . . . quite as little as Shaw him self does." He concludes: "The English genius is intuitive and the British Empire a chaos, like the works of Shakespeare or like its metropolis, London." But, he implies. England, her people, her Empire, are the chief hope of the world against Communism; they are Communism's negation.

Nutshells

LIVING PHILOSOPHIES--Albert Einstein, Theodore Dreiser, Hu Shih, John Dewey, H. L. Mencken, Irving Babbitt, H. G. Wells, Julia Peterkin, George Jean Nathan, Robert Andrews Millikan,Fridtjof Nansen, Sir Arthur Keith, James Truslow Adams, Irwin Edman, Joseph Wrood Krutch, Bertrand Russell, Bronislaw Malinowski, Beatrice Webb, Lewis Mumford, Sir James Jeans, J. B. S. Haldane, Hilaire Belloc-- Simon & Schuster ($2.50). Not that it will help people to live a beautiful and true life but because it is always interesting to hear famed men praise or blame the eternal verities, this collection of credos is offered for serious summer reading. Perhaps from this display of fireworks you may catch a guiding flash; you may end up a Confucian worse confounded. Views represented are various. Unanthropomorphic Einstein "cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity . . . and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature."

Lucid Bertrand Russell's attitude "is not really one of hostility to moral rules; it is essentially that expressed by Saint Paul in the famous passage on charity . . . namely, that no obedience to moral rules can take the place of love, and that where love is genuine, it will, if combined with intelligence, suffice to generate whatever moral rules are necessary."

Says dusty-tongued U. S. Philosopher John Dewey: "A philosophic faith, being a tendency to action, can be tried and tested only in action. I know of no viable alternative in the present day to such a philosophy. . . ."

Clumsy but honest Theodore Dreiser, although he would not like to write himself down "as a total pessimist," and thinks Life "taken all in all, a fairly good show," has "not the faintest notion of what it is all about."

Utopianissimist Herbert George Wells believes "Man is immortal, but not men. . . . Man ... is more important than the things in the individual life, and this I believe not as a mere sentimentality, but as a rigorously true statement of biological and mental fact. Our individuality is, so to speak, an inborn obsession from which we shall escape as we become more intelligent."

Henry Louis Mencken: "If, while the taxidermists are stuffing my integument for some fortunate museum of anatomy. a celestial catchpole summons my psyche to Heaven, I shall be very gravely disappointed, but (unless my habits of mind change radically at death) I shall accept the command as calmly as possible, and face eternity without repining."

Young U. S. Critic Lewis Mumjord's ends, "difficult of achievement," are: "To be alive, to act, to contemplate, to embody significance and value, to become fully human."

The Significance. In this cross section of intelligentsian opinion you may observe two common tendencies (perhaps different aspects of the same thing): disbelief in personal immortality, a growing preoccu- pation with practical problems.

Living Philosophies is July choice of the Book-of-the-Month-Club.

Murder Might-Have-Been

THE COLUMNIST MURDER--Lawrence Saunders--Farrar & Rinehart ($2).-- No one has yet shot smooth-haired, Gossip-Monger Walter Winchell (New York Mirror's "On Broadway") though Zit's Theatrical Newspaper hinted more than six months ago he would be killed within six months (TIME, Nov. 3). Author "Lawrence Saunders" (Burton Davis) calls the victim of his murder-story "Tommy Twitchell," has him shot in a theatre telephone booth during a first-night performance, proceeds with his unraveling tale in a style that owes much to his hero's prototype. As a murder story The Columnist Murder is not above the average; but in germ and treatment it is Times Squareish, up-to-date, Winchellesque.

^Published June 25.

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