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BRIEFER MENTION
Modern Russian Poetry, chosen and translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky (12mo, 179 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $1.75). It is practically impossible to make really fine translations from Russian poetry, but the co-authors of this book have, at least, permitted an idea of its values to filter through their attempts, and the book is the more valuable because the subject is elsewhere so little canvassed. There are selections from thirty-seven poets included and they range from Pushkin to Anatoly Marienhof, the Russian imagist. The biographical notes, although necessarily sketchy and tentative, are interesting.
The Veil, by Walter de la Mare (8vo, 84 pages; Holt: $2) is as full of thin music and ghostly allusion as the author's previous work has led us to expect it would be. The volume is touched with delicate fantasy and thrilling with eerie imagery, but one leaves it feeling that this poet's strange wine is to be sipped at slow intervals, never drunk at a single draught. The one way, it is exquisitely intoxicating; the other, it makes one merely to drowse.
One Act Plays, by Alice Brown (12mo, 235 pages; Macmillan: $2.25). These plays are written with dramatic power fortified by a shrewd understanding of human nature. The dialogue flows naturally, and the situations develop persuasively; the themes are simple, and for the most part follow conventional lines; but the author has too pronounced a tendency to soothe the reader with the "sugar-coated" ending, often at the expense of dramatic effect. None the less, the plays are all ingenuously conceived and carefully written, the atmosphere and the background of each stamps itself vividly upon the mind, and the characters stand forth in bold relief.
The Poetry of Dante, by Benedetto Croce (8vo, 313 pages; Holt: $2). A methodological guide to The Divine Comedy by one of the most distinguished of living critics. Signor Croce's book should bring a surge of comfort to those of us who have been overawed by the elaborate machinery of the Comedy. Briefly this is his consolatory advice: we should not bother our heads over the cosmogony; we should centre our attention elsewhere, reading Dante in the fashion of all ingenuous readers, paying little attention to the other world, very little to the moral division, none at all to the allegories, and greatly enjoying the poetic representations. The work is a remarkably lucid application of Croce's famous aesthetic: all art is lyrical, and technique either does not exist or coincides with art itself.
William Wycherly: sa Vie, son Oeuvre, by Charles Perromat (8vo, 468 pages; Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris) is a defence of the earliest of the great Restoration comedians; in bulk and completeness it resembles the dossier of the Landru trial. Earlier critics judged Wycherley too often as if he were an author of chamber dramas; they talked in library terms, whereas M Perromat never forgets to think in terms of the stage. His other virtue is thoroughness. Plays, poems, sources, influence, biography: he omits nothing and uses no asterisks; his book cannot well be neglected by a student of the Restoration drama.
