BRIEFER MENTION
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Plots and Personalities, by Edwin E. Slosson and June E. Downey (12mo, 238 pages; Century: $1.75) is described as a new method of testing and training the creative imagination. It actually is an exceedingly interesting compendium of the tricks of the trade of writing, the tricks being on parade in the new garments of psychoanalytic terms, the whole being addressed to the fantasy which combines and not to the imagination which creates. Apart from this error in description the book is interesting because it stresses what the American short-story writer already has in abundance: ingenuity. It should be popular with those European writers who envy the proceeds of the American short story.
Random Memories, by Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow (illus., 8vo, 263 pages; Houghton Mifflin: $4) does not pretend to be other than literature in a dressing-gown and slippers. Yet even a dishabille, to be successful, must suggest a certain firmness of line and modelling beneath the loose folds of its exterior. Ernest Longfellow, artist, and son of the New England poet, has at hand rich stores of reminiscence gleaned from a most prolific period of American art and letters, yet in his zeal to be intimate, gossipy, entre nous, he has shredded his material too fine, becoming petty rather than personal, prosy instead of pungent, and patronizing rather than hospitable towards the finenesses of the period.
Novissima Verba: Last Words, by Frederic Harrison (8vo, 203 pages; Holt: $3). Not the least of the problems which oppress us in this age of sabotage and reparations, is what to do with the elderly, distinguished littérateurs. We have ours. England has Frederic Harrison, who has been publishing books and magazines on literature, politics, mountain climbing, the younger generation, the Victorians, and Auguste Comte, ever since the publication in 1860 of the epochal Essays and Reviews of Jowett, Pattison, Maurice, and their heterodox associates. These latest words embody the running comment which Harrison passed upon the political and literary events of the year 1920, published originally in The Fortnightly Review. The conservatism of advanced age has crept upon Harrison's sturdy liberalism, so that it wabbles badly at times. Age, too, accounts for the alarm with which Harrison views the march of events.
A Dictionary of English Phrases, by Albert M. Hyamson (12mo, 365 pages; Dutton: $5) is the first issue of a book for the completion of which the author calls upon his readers. It includes phrases, slang words, nicknames, stereotyped expressions, with their history and their meanings. The omission of Poker-face will be a fair indication that the American phrases have not been fully canvassed.
A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, by John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley (8vo, 534 pages; Dutton: $5) is a reissue of the abridgment of the Farmer-Henley masterpiece on Slang and its Analogues. It is if anything too much condensed, because once the habit is formed of tracing words the lack of a complete genealogy becomes irritating. But in the majority of cases nearly everything essential is put in. Like Farmer's Americanisms, Old and New, the book needs a supplement or a revision to date.
