Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 136

14 -CHICAGO SUNDAY TRIBUNE: DICCKMIiKR. 9. 1915. "That ivTi'ter does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge J' COLTON BOOKS ALIVE JUST PUBLISHED Hotv Wisdom Was Sought and Attained Vincent Sfarrtff AME is notoriously a difficult wench to woo, and nobody knows any Pearl thing about the verdicts of posterity. It was no less a poet than pursuit of vn de it standing," by Esther Cloud man Dunn.

Macmillan, $2.50.1 Reviewed by John Abbot Clark This autobiography of an education," this quest for wisdom and understand by one of America's outstanding teachers and scholars, richly deserves a place beside Bliss i New Novel of American life JT. or ry's "And I 1 Teach." Mary lien I Chase's "A 1 I Goodly Heiit- f' ge," and Mar- TRAIT OF A MARRIAGE or a Emerson Kslhcr loud man Dunn Bailey's Good- Bye, Proud World." The author's respect for literature began, she tells us, when, ns a little girl in the Indian summer of the Victorian world, she recited a poem of Tennyson's one Sunday afternoon for callers, tho "just what it was one was getting thru was not clear, nor why it was recited and listened to." The volumes in her father's library, altho she opened very few of them, made a lasting impression, and were probably more formative and educational than many of the books she later read. "THE penetrating story of an un-I suitable mating that brought happiness and serenity told with Pearl Duck's invariable ar-, tistry and compassion haunting-Jy interesting as an unusual study." Katherine Woods At all bookstores $2.50 THE JOHN DAY COMPANY. "One of the best proofs 7 of the innate taste Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, "I would rather risk for future fame upon one lyric than upon 10 volumes." It is certainly true that many "one lyric" men have won fame, and even more significantly true that some of them were not seeking it. For example, Dr.

Clement Clarke Moore, whose delightful Christmas ballad, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," was not written for publication but Solely for the delectation of his own children. The story Is too well known to need retelling: the poem got into print without the author's knowledge, and Is today America's most famous contribution to the Christmas legend. Less well known is the contention that Dr. Moore did not write the Old ballad so long associated with his name.

A quarter of a century or so ago, the late I)r. William Sturgis Thomas stirred the Christmas historians with his claim that it was actually the work of his ancestor, Mnj. Henry Livingston of Poughkeepsie. He produced document purporting to substantiate tho claim; but in the end everything boiled down to his strong belief in certain family traditions. At his death Dr.

Thomas bequeathed the controversy to his son. IA. William Stephen Thomas, U. S. N.

who has revived it with considerable vigor but without, I think, any more actual evidence. Last Christmas he opened his campaign with a display of documents in the Harvard Club library in New York, and there have been echoes of the dispute ever since. Without entering into the merits of the case too deeply, it may be said that Dr. Moore did not formally acknowledge the ballad until 1811 21 years after its anonymous publication in a Troy, N. newspaper, when he gathered it up with other specimens of his verse in his collected "Poems," and Maj.

Livingston apparently never publicly claimed it at all. An "original manuscript" is lacking in both camps; but it is asserted that a manuscript believed to be Livingston's original was destroyed in a fire at Waukesha, in 1843. Several transcriptions of the ballad exist in Dr. Moore's hand. Much is made by the Livingston partisans of such internal evidence as that the poem is unlike anything else Dr.

Moore ever wrote. Thejr see him as a serious old pedant, a professor, a classical scholar, altogether a no-nonsense sort of man, not given to trivia; whereas Maj. Livingston was a jovial old gentleman of rollicking humor, quite the lad to have written such a ballad, and author of at least one other piece of genial nonsense a bit on the order of the "Visit." It is said that James Thurler, after studying the Livingston case, wrote Dr. Thomas that he would always be inclined to believe Maj. Livingston wrote the poem.

This department, which takes sides just as recklessly as Mr. Thurber, will always be inclined to believe the ballad was written by Dr. Moore, who claimed it, and whose claim was not disputed in his lifetime. I have neglected mystery novels shamefully in my recent reports on new books. Among those I have particularly enjoyed during the Iat few months are F.llery lieen's "The Murderer Is a Fox" I Little, Hrownl.

return to the scenes of this detective's best exploit in "Calamity Town;" Matthew Head's "The Devil in the Bush" ISimon Schuster; II. Branson's "The Fearful Passage" Simon Schuster; and Guy Endore'a "Methinks the Lady Duell, Sloan, and Pearce. Endore's story-is a brilliant psychiatric study of a Jekyll and Hyde female, apparently a kleptomaniac, and perhaps a nymphomaniac, that may leave you as bewildered as it did me. I still have no idea whether the events of the tale are supposed to have occurred in fact or only in the young woman's mind. Either way, and even if you don't like anything about the creature, the book is resistlessly readable.

The African background of Mr. Head's story is principally what gives it distinction, but its other merits are not negligible. Best of all recent books in the detective story field, I think, is Mr. Branson's literate, almost peaceful performance. In which we meet again the quiet, civilized, believable John Bent an American Dr.

Thorndyke and a group of believable people in a believable story. Notable recent reprints are the volumes of Knopfs "Black Widow" series, including the best novels of Dashiell Hamniett, Itaymond Chandler, and Krlc Ambler, and Little, Brown new "European Espionage" series, which begins with four popular titles: "No Surrender," by Martha Albrand; "Rogue Male," by Geoffrey Household; "Above Suspicion," by Helen Maclnnes; "Escape," by Ethel Vance. There are many pleasant paragraphs, beautiful paragraphs, in "Selections from the Note Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins," edited by T. Weiss (New Directions; but the book is so slight it contains only 23 pages of text, plus the four-page introduction that it is Interesting chiefly as a handsome piece of printing by Carl P. Rollins of Yale University Press.

The little volume is the latest addition to the publisher's series of pamphlets, The Poets of the Year," and is possibly a useful introduction to Father Hopkins' poetic prose, the raw material of his poems. The following paragraph is quotable: "It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by Hying thither. Yet from time to time more men go up and either perish In its gullies fluttering excelsior flags or else come down again with full folios and blank countenances. Yet the old fallacy keeps its ground.

Every age has its false alarms." Too true. True, too! So many persons have asked me who the American novelist is whose husband was shipped home to her in a barrel of rum Oct. 28, that may as well tell all I know about it. According to Ambrose Bierce, than whom often there could have been no less truthful authority, George HL Bowen Atherton, the husband of Gertrude Atherton, died this was all many years ago on a vessel en route to his native Chile, and was shipped back to his astonished widow in the manner described. The story was also told to me, myself, personal, some years ago, by the late W.

C. Morrow, a California writer of note, and it appeared recently in an interview with Mrs. Atherton in a San Francisco newspaper altho not from the lip of Mrs. Atherton it was the interviewer's contribution quoting Bierce. 5 4 She saw that to her father those shelves of books were vitally important.

"As he sat silent and absorbed, cross-legged before the fire some electric excitement went on within him. I felt it tho there was no sound in the room but the creak of the chair, the rattle in the pipe bowl, and the muffled thud of a log end falling into the ashes. I saw how powerful a book could be." In other words, to vary somewhat an old but still not outmoded formula, a' case of Mark Hopkins at one end of a book and a blazing log at the other. Hundreds of things cry out for attention In this book. The New England grandmother of 80, for instance, who, Catolike, was intent upon improving her mind to the last.

The spirited high school teacher who cooked up an English course for those of his students who were not going on to college, based on Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, and Charles Lamb. It's enough to cause one to consider seriously throwing everything overboard and going right back, Thurber fashion, to high school. The author's memories of her undergraduate days at Cornell; her short lived but not exactly dull or uneventful trial heat as a high school teacher; her years at Bryn Mawr, and her studies in England. Her vignettes of Matthew Arnold's sister, the grandsons of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Leaf of the once famous team of Lang, Leaf, and Myers.

The refusal of Oliver Wendell Holmes to visit Wellesley in company with Howells and Edmund Gosse, because he preferred to visit there when he could have the young ladies quit to himself." And Miss Dunn says many wise and fetching things about education in general that a great many people today sorely need to be informed or reminded of, especially educators. and mental caliber of that great unknown body, the American reading public, has been the success of "A novel of remarkable vigor and interest strong, dramatic, intense, highly articulate." SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE In its third year as a national best seller 260,000 copies in print CLIP BOUTELL, NEW YORK POST At all bookstores $3.00 DODOS f.lERRILL A Book for Writers Serving Overseas THE WORLD THEIR BEAT," by J. C. Oestrvicher. Essential Books, Want to be a foreign correspondent? The author, who is boss of foreign correspondents for International News Service, tells how, with supplementary notes on how writers bleed and suffer for the reader back home.

There is a great deal about censorship, communications, and press association problems. Recent AP and UP blunders are played up and the impression is given that INS never makes mistakes. Mr. Oestreicher should have a good copyreader go over his next book for errors of grammar and spelling; especially of names. WALTKK SdMON ADVERTISE IN THE TRIBUNE.