Life — February 9, 1911 — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

HERE is a hand organ just outside my window that is playing “Any Little Girl That’s a Nice Little Girl is the Right Lite Girl for Me rippling, catchy, innocently im- pudent bit of ragtime, with a tag that has caught a shred of the cternal verities and is posing as a cynic in consequence. And somchow, while this is the last tune that one would asso- ciate with Jesse Lynch Williams's The Married Life of the Frederick Carrells (Scribners, $1.50), it. makes a singularly appropriate accompaniment to a review of that volume. For Mr. Williams has written with a rippling, catchy, innocently impudent garrulity; he makes an effective and often a witty show of cynicism over exposing the motives that lic just be- neath the surface of social intercourse; and though his amus- ing and entertaiaing dissertations upon the fads and foibles and foolishness of the day are strung upon a thread of narra- tive and do duty as comments upon the marital readjustments of a young American artist and his wife, it is to be noted that any little wife that was a nice little wife, and any young artist that was a good fellow, could be substituted for Molly or for her husband without the exchange being in any way destructive of the chemical equilibrium of the composi- tion, The existence of these agreeable young persons is the excuse, rather than their creation being the object, of the book. Which probably has something to do with the fact that though The Married Life of the Frederick Carrolls runs the full handicap course of six hundrel pages, one hears no complaints from short-winded read- ers that they are unable to go the distance. HE only tenable theory by which one can account for the continued production and presumable consump- tion of the dry, sterile, recapitulatory volumes that are forever offering us resumes of everything from Greek civilization to psychic research, is the assumption that there is a large class of timid seekers after knowledge who object to having ideas mixed with their informa- uuon. Are not the celebrated Educator Biscuits, for in- fants and invalids, also made without yeast? If this assumption is correct, Emily James Putnam's The Lady (Sturgis and Walton, $2.50), a series of studies of va- rious historical phases of the “female of the favored social class,” should be sedulously avoided by intellec- tual dyspeptics. , It is not unleavened bread. The volume contains an introduction and eight independent, yet in- terdependent, essays dealing with the Greek Lady, the Roman Lady, the Lady Abbess and the ladies of the Castle, the Renaissance, the Salon, the Blue Stockings and the Slave States. These sketches, as the author modestly calls them—for if not claborate portraits they are none the less finished pictures—are both distinguished and force- ful; both suaviter in modo and fortiter in re, Individu- ally, they are the delightful outcome of an intelligent acumen at once supple and sincere, reacting upon a genuine scholarship, imaginative and possessed of the power of reconstructive visualization, Collectively, they embody and express a new spirit—frankly feminine yet proudly impersonal; smilingly disdainful of polite make-believe; gracious, but not un- armed, HE title I have taken for this book,” says Professor Irving Babbitt in the preface to The New Laocoon (Houghton Mif- flin, $1.25), “expresses my sense of what needs doing rather than what I myself would claim to have done.” Which sentence comes pretty near to “ Bogey” in the amount of ground it covers in a few strokes. When Lessing, the great German critic, published his famous work upon the obliterated Loundaries and confused overlappings of the arts at the close of the eighteenth century, he named it, with a magnificent sense of the rhetorical possibilities of allusion, after that tangle of twisted serpents and tortured limbs, the marble group of the Laocoon. Since then a new cycle of esthetic evolution has run its course and an artistic confusion infinitely worse confounded (since it represents the excesses of freedom instead of those of formalism) has developed—a confusion in which we paint symphonies, orchestrate philosophy, use words as pigments and reproduce psychological states in water color. Mr. Babbitt is by no means alone in feeling that a “new Laocoon” is, as the physicians say, “indicated” by the symp- toms of the patient as the needed treatment. And the suc- cinct outline of the history of the “case” and the analytical demonstration of its pathology, which he has compressed into his important and interesting work, comes much closer to filling the prescription than he claims credit for. J. B. Kerfoot. AN EXHIBITION OF ARTS AND CRAFTS comicbooks.com