Judge — March 10, 1923 — page 26: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Notion Counter by Walter Prichard Eaton auriceE Francts Ecan is an elderly gentleman who has been United States minister to Denmark and a book reviewer for the New York Times. His love of literature has survived both experiences. In “Con- fessions of a Book Lover” (Doubleday, Page) he ambles amiably through his library shelves, and talks about his likes and disli When an elderly reviewer chastises Carl Sandburg for not writing like Tennyson, he is ridiculous. But when he tells us, merely, why he likes Tennyson and doesn’t like Sandburg, he is informative and entertaining. Mr. Egan, in this book, makes no pretense at anything but a rambling chat about his own reactions; and, as is usually the case when a person is honest, we are surprised to find him admiring things we would have expected him to dislike, and failing to understand things which are clear to us, and in general being just as incon- sistent and provocative as any mere lay reader. He abominates Mark Twain as a pessimistic vulgarian; he makes the quaint discovery that Shakespeare had Fa Beki(ipA = (Under Contract with Bermuda Gov't) All Sports in a Climate of Everlasting Spring —Only 2 Days from New York Golf (Two 18-Hole Courses), Tennis, Motor Boating, Sailing, Bath- ing, Riding, Horse Rac- ing, Trapshooting, etc. No Passports. Sailings Twice Weekly From New York Wed. and Sat. Via Palatial, Twin-Screw, Oil-Burning, Transatlantic Liners S. S. “Fort Victoria”’ S.S. “Fort St. George”’ Each 14,000 Tons Displacement. Fastest and Most Luxurious steamers, Fin- cat Cuisine passengers landed directly at lamilton Special E. 8 to 12 Days—Saili West India Lines Steamers sailing fortnightly for St. Thomas, St. Croix, St. Kitts, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Lucia, Barbados, Trin- idad, Demerara. Furness Bermuda-Line 34 Whitehall St., New York Or any Local Tourist Agent | volume of | of poetry, | the | by both the the paper the faith; his Catholicism (we ads him to apologize profusely for bracketing Henry Adams's “Educa- tion” with Cardinal Newman's ‘“Apolo- gia”; he quite misses the mocking irony of T. S. Eliot; he is bored by ‘Tom Jones : he enjoys Menken; he rereads Jane Austen - year; he adores Tarkington's venteen”; he holds, evidently, Burroughs in higher esteem than The in, perhaps, because the latter's anarchism offends his religious training. But to agree or disagree with him doesn’t matter. You will, if you too like books, enjoy the fine flavor of his love for them, and wonder if you yourself, at seventy, will retain half as much, or read half so many. It is the fashion just now, we are aware, to sneer at anybody who likes anything written before 1914. But some of us can’t help having been born in the Ninet 1 toshave read certain tighteenth. What is good in them, we like. And what we like we wish to talk about. Y for one, don’t propose to sneer at Mr. Egan because he happened to grow up when Tennyson and Browning and Swin- burne were the poets, instead of Amy Lowell and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Christi suspect) ERE are two books, as a result of W. Somerset Maugham’s trip to China, of Sue play (acted by Florence Reed in New York this winter), and “On a Chinese Screen,” a brief prose sketches (both published by Doran). It is almost incredible that they are by the same hand. The play is cheap, erotic melo- drama, 99 44/100 sham. The book of sketches is a work of mordant observ tion, vivid, terse, colorful, with gleams flashes of drama, and a cynice sarcasm. Some of the little indeed, are worth more as drama than whole of “East of Suez.” In one of the most sarcastic and least attractive though acidly vivid, sketches, Maugham converses with a Chinese “professor” of dramatic literature, a humorless soul who has studied European drama with more earnestness than insight. He has a superb time spoofing the poor little Oriental, but evidently in all seriousness he tells him that anybody can write a very short time, if he possesses Fi Arnold Bennett in_ times past has emitted similar wordy boasts. Odd, isn’t it, that w just had plays men, which aren't worth re printed on? We have a suspicio little bigger place than Mr. ¥ “ast ae 4 spite of his vivid suspicion that China “, a bit more humility wouldn't make Maugham any less likable And, in I “Fair Harbor,” his latest Cape Cod story (D. Appleton & Co.), Joseph Lincoln goes back to the Brewster of the 1870's, when little Joe himself was tramp- ing the sandy road to school where now the motors purr over oiled macadam. That's all right. Why shouldn't he? It's “quaintness” he’s after. But we can't help. recalling one evening last summer when we sat with an old tar and his sweet, white-haired sister before their satin-gray house above the water of Cape Cod Bay, and watched a summer resident some twenty years old, female gender, go humming past steering her Ford with one hand and holding a cigar- ette to her lips with the other. The comments of my aged companions were less picturesque but more terse than the conversations Mr. Lincoln ords, But the real point is that the young fe male kept right on, and she was tw they were four times twenty. the past, but hers is the future. We suspect, however, that to question a best-seller because it doesn’t help to light the devious ways of our modern world, is a somewhat ridiculous proceed- ing. To the people who eagerly read best-sellers, Cape Cod is “quaint,” and that’s that, and “there’s enough un- happiness in life Qeakine of the Cape, h 1 real Thoreau’s “Cape Coc picture was as one-sided but for a different reason, s Joe Lincoln's, He tramped TE BARBER SHOP ~+ Thompson—I suppose the idea is to leave one chin to be shaved and called for the next day. I guess I'll try it; I've got two.