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BRIEFER MENTION
Old English Poetry, by J. Duncan Spaeth (8vo, 268 pages; Princeton University Press: $2) surveys the field of metric literature between the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the Norman conquest, not merely skimming it, but reproducing in alliterative verse complete poems, and the greater part of Beowulf and the Biblical Epic. They make cool reading, these adventures by sea, these "ale-spilling frays" when the banqueting halls of the king were suddenly invaded by the pirate Danes. Even religion takes on a seafaring aspect, when faith, after the "ceaseless surges of life" "holds with hawsers our horses of the deep." The translator has been more than commonly successful in transfusing the life blood of the vigorous old poems in translation.
Star-Dust and Gardens, by Virginia Taylor McCormick (8vo, 77 pages; privately printed). These verses make no experiments in rhythm, and, for the most part, the thought they express is conventional enough. Here and there the feeling for nature detaches itself into a pleasurable image, and a fine fancy impresses its idea delicately through the rather monotonous tread of iambics, but the general level is that of newspaper verse, pastime, not poetry.
Sex and Common Sense, by A. Maude Royden (12mo, 211 pages; Putnam: $2). The author, assistant preacher at the City Temple, London, and worker in the Victoria Women's Settlement at Liverpool, has been lecturing for several years on the questions arising from women's position in England since the war left them so greatly in the majority. It is rather a relief to find a woman analyzing her own sex. There is less theorizing here than one finds in the many treatises by men on the same subject. Miss Royden begins where Freud leaves off. She grants desires, and the consequences of repression, but unlike Freud, she makes no god of the individual nor of his moment of existence. Civilization, and that other individual who is to come as the expression of the conduct of to-day's people, seem to her sufficient reason for distinguishing between desire and need.
An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, by Ernest Weekley (8vo, 1659 pages; Dutton: $15) has all the quality of a biography. In controversy Mr Weekley has proved that some of the errors reported in his work are imaginary; errors and omissions there may be. The concision and wit of the work, the general atmosphere of being interested in words and the general effect of making them interesting are equally admirable.
Mr. Punch's History of Modern England, by Charles L. Graves (illus., vols. III and IV, 8vo, 770 pages; Stokes: $10) concludes as brilliantly as it began. Retrospectively one sees again the change in the social attitudes of Punch, as with the earlier volumes in hand one saw what was coming. Reactionary or radical, Punch's humour seems to have been about the same in quality, with if anything a shade in favour of its present conservative course. "Thunder is cheap to-day" on the announcement that The Times would go down to one penny is outside political lines, and the criticism of manners throughout is of the same quality. The History ends just before the war began.
