For Mothers & Others

THE MOTHERS' ANTHOLOGY -- Edited by William Lyon Phelps -- Doubleday, Doran ($3).

A publisher's natural for Christmas or any other season, this collection includes all the more favorable things that some 125 writers of prose and verse have had to say about mothers. It is jacketed, as inevitably as baldness, with Whistler's sour old dam. Considering its subject and its editor, The Mothers' Anthology will doubtless become a household classic. Most of its readers will probably be mothers, and they will have every reason to enjoy themselves. For non-mothers, the book has interest too. Representing some of the world's greatest writers and some of the worst, it shows how the idea of motherhood affected them.

Most curious single fact is how inadequate they are to their subject. The Book of Ruth, to be sure, contributes one of the most magnificent passages in the English language;* but it is about a mother-in-law. William Shakespeare himself gets uncommonly fancy and feeble; the one grand piece of eloquence Dr. Phelps allows him to deliver is from Hamlet, is spoken in disgust, and is, at that, the mildest dose of vitriol the good doctor could lift out of Hamlet's tongue-lashing. And Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a sometime master of verbal magic, begins a mother-sonnet:

Charles! my slow heart was only sad,

when first I scann'd that face of feeble infancy. . . .

Generally speaking, in fact, the bards appear to be tongue-tied by their theme --perhaps through awe, perhaps through shame over faked emotions.

If the poets fail, the prosers have at least the virtues of detail and traction. Sir James Barrie, Edna Ferber, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, John Galsworthy, John Donne, Abraham Lincoln, Pearl Buck, Eve Curie and some score of others all contribute their tones of voice. Few of them have much of value to say, and only two of them--Donne and Curie--say it with any nobility; but at least they mesh with their material.

Curiously enough, the bad poets and rank amateurs come off best. Soaked in traditional and obligatory sentiment, drowned in cliche, they nevertheless have an innocence in which, as in a wavy mirror, genuine emotions are somehow reflected. Eugene Field's Little Boy Blue and My Mother's Faith are next door to chromos, but they have an intact nostalgic tone with a true power to move. Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home, even without the music and even thanks in part to the minstrel-show spelling, has gentle, real beauty (but only one line is about Mother). Yet that newspaper level of verse is half brother to folk poetry, and profits by its blood.

The folk poetry itself, the pure anonymous water from the deepest reaches of the human well, is infallible:

He came al so still To his mother's hour,

As dew in April

That falleth on the flour.

Only the Elizabethan songs (of which a few are included) approach that, and only one named poet surpasses it. That is William Blake, in his superb Cradle Song, which in this volume is misquoted, and which is neither to, for, from, with, by or about a mother. It is about a baby, and it is written from the point of view of a poet, or possibly a father.

* Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. . . .

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