The Courtesan By KATHLEEN COTTER GROSS Strangely her body hides itself Within a straight, white gown; Her wandering finger-tips are furled, Her purple eyelids down. Cold are her breasts where once, rose-crowned, Lived warm, voluptuous laughter; And still the restless, roving feet That tread strange music after. She knows the silence of the earth And it is ever night to her To A Fly By LOUIS GILMORE O importunate O fly You too Shall appear in my verses The amber Of the mausoleum Is the measure Of its condescension Chou Chang Advises Practicality To A Poet By PAUL ELDRIDGE The stars are radiant queens Walking majestically across Infinity,- Reviews T ROOTABAGA STORIES BY CARL SANDBURG. (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922) HE affinities of Carl Sandburg the story-teller are with Andersen rather than Grimm, with Harris rather than Lewis Carroll. That the stories have an absolutely individual flavor, something of that peculiar mixture of harshness and tenderness which we know as Carl Sandburg, goes without saying. We can even imagine their becoming responsible for a new literary genre for here are fairy tales with strictly proletarian fairies; never a fairy godmother nor a stray prince nor even a disguise of any kind. Among the numerous protagonists are the Potato Faced Blind Man and the Cistern Cleaner and the Rusty Rats, together with the other less spectacular members of the animal kingdom, except for the birds! As regards these latter the poet lets himself loose as to gorgeousness of plumage and of nomenclature. And there are many adorable, dirty children and a few clean ones, engaged in such varied and pleasureable occupations as making crooked hats for snowmen, and walking through spilled molasses, and chubbing their chubs-this last being one of the several fascinating phrases to be added forthwith to the reader's vocabulary. The first story in the book is all poetry opening a door out of the Land Where Everything Is the Same as it Always Was. In defiance of the little sniffer who declares that even in the moon we should find things the same as they always were, the story-teller bustles us off on Zigzag Railway and at once teases us with a glimpse of the Balloon-pickers on stilts picking balloons. And that is only the beginning. The stories vary greatly in mood. "How to Tell the Corn Fairies when You See Them," is purely lyrical. "Sand Flat Shadows" has a touch of the eerie. The story of the two skyscrapers and their too-energetic child, while beautiful, seems to me to be unnecessarily harrowing for the childish imagination. If one reads far enough into the book, he will come across the most delicious of all stupid policemen, and a conductor who quite naturally objects when the flongboos take the roof off the car. "I must have an explanation," he told them. "It was between us and the stars," they told him. The illustrations are profuse and admirable, with the same realism just a trifle askew, the same mixture of the grotesque and the lyrical, which characterizes the tales. The child who does not have a chance to acquaint himself with the folk of the Village of Liverand-Onions, not to mention those idealists who set off in a blizzard to found the Village of Cream-Puffs, is going to be as badly cheated as the little Victorian who didn't find "Alice in Wonderland" in his Christmas stocking. MUNA LEE. I THE SECOND EMPIRE BY PHILIP GUEDALLA. Mr. N his subtle and brilliant and scholarly study of Napoleon III Mr. Guedalla justifies the faith and the expectations of his admirers. Strachey must look to his laurels, for his formidable rival wins from him at all points except, perhaps, in the use of that sardonic undertone which Mr. Strachey has made so peculiarly his own. Queen Victoria-or, more accurately, Mr. Strachey's deft and most diverting portrait of Her Majesty is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but for depth and power it is in no way comparable to this portrait of Napoleon III; even in his marshalling and presentation of facts, Mr. Guedalla's handling is superior. And though he has read through an entire library in his search for historical accuracy his facts never seem to come to him at second hand. He writes with a curiously intimate and authoritative knowledge as though he himself had lived through the whole "gas-lit tragedy of the Second Empire" and had known more truly than is possible in real life the originals of his masterly portraits. One is left with a very vivid and convincing memory of this hectic period. The Second Empire is more than ironic biography: It is social history of the most comprehensive kind. With a lucid and apparently - effortless clarity Mr. Guedalla untangles the maddening snarls of the Bonapartes' family relationships and threads his way through the dishearteningly intricate maze of French political history during that strange and rather raffish period. But, most emphatically, he does not approach his subject from the angle of the chronique scandaleuse. His wit is merciless and devastating, but his sense of values remains undistorted. His estimate of Napoleon III is interesting. He sees him not as a figure of fun-a burlesque conspirator; a rococo equilibrist; a crafty, dangerous, designing sphinx-but rather as a human, all too human, man with ideals in advance of his time and, as it were, a bee in his bonnet. He has an excellent opinion of him, believing him quite strong enough to bear the blame for the collapse of the Empire-which he removes from the white, sloping shoulders of Eugenie where so many more hasty and less thorough and impartial historians have been in the habit of placing it. The book opens with a really superb essay on Napoleon I and the origin and growth of Bonapartism. Then we meet the future Napoleon III as a child; as a youth-"In the years between 1820 and 1830, when the whole western sky of Europe was alight with the afterglow of Byron and the young lions of French Romanticism were beginning to roar in Paris, the young Louis Bonaparte was a mild-eyed German schoolboy, learning to seek philosophy in a sunset and romance in a ruined castle." And we watch him make his abortive attempts to repeat the return from Elba-at which the whole world rocked with mirth and Louis became a godsend to cartoonists- and yet retain his innate dignity and unshaken faith in the beckoning star that shone above the Tuileries. Just before the coup d'etat we share his progress through France as he opens railways and unveils statues. "The cheers, the flowers, the speeches went on in the summer weather of 1850. Alsace and Lorraine ran shouting by his carriage; at Metz the King of Prussia sent his respects, and on the bare hill of Gravelotte (the war and the Prussian guns were twenty years away) they had made a little triumphal arch." Later, during the heydey of that odd Empire, we mingle with the crowds going by "in the Champs Elysees to see the Exhibition....but it was all a shade more modish, a thought less improving, than the gleaming monument of good intentions with which Prince Albert had obliterated Hyde Park four years before. It was a rustling age of millinery and dance music.... and the town was beginning to sway to that measure which swung and quickened and rose until the Second Empire danced to an air of Offenbach out of the gaslight into the cruel sunshine of 1870." Mr. Guedalla has an intriguing way of allowing us little stolen peeps into the future that heighten the significance and effectiveness of the scene he is describing, and of introducing casually some irrelevant detail-for instance, Mr. Clough's sojourn in Rome that emphasizes in a startling manner the reality of that preposterously unreal time. And to make his array of portraits seem indubitably authentic he brings in those characters of fiction who are so much more alive for us than their flesh and blood contemporariesas in speaking of Morny who was "an adroit person, something in the taste of one of Balzac's heroes: he would have known the Nucingens and married well." pire was the appalling end of the Mexican adventure. Maximilian was dead; Charlotte was mad; Morny was dead; Jecker dragged on until the Commune shot him; the French lay dead in their graves; and to Napoleon the sudden fall of an Empire in Mexico must have come with the vague menace of lightning below the horizon." And here is a dramatic passage, a prelude to the Downfall, in which fact and fiction are combined: "They were cheering on the streets of Berlin; and while Paris rored 'A Berlin! in the fading light, Nana was dying in her room on the boulevard, and in a garden at Blackheath Mr. Morley was telling the news to Mr. John Stuart Mill. The war had come." And with the war the rather ghastly pictures "a queer, pitiable ending to the long tale of Bonapartes in the field-of a sick, bewildered, cruelly suffering Emperor trailing patiently after his beaten armies... his ragged hair was long and almost white. They made little meals for him but he would not eat; and at night someone outside his door heard him crying out in pain.... The tragedy of Napoleon III was that "on attaining his purpose he had lost it. It was the tragedy of an arriviste who arrived." Among the inimitable, slyly cynical portraits with which the book is enriched are some that will cause the most irreverent laughter-unless, of course, one is such a narrow lover of the originals that one prefers to know them only through the cold perfection of an official biography. Mr. Guedalla's pictorial sense is a delight. And against his quite tangible The first great tragedy of the Em- backgrounds his figures live and move in a manner, strange as it may seem, that is at once lifelike and comprehensible. He is to be congratulated upon an extraordinarily fine book, and we, his readers, are to be congratulated upon the fact that he still remains sufficiently unabsorbed by his legal and political activities to make and hold for himself such an enviable place among the leaders in the front rank of literature. M ALICE SESSUMS LEOVY. SAMPHIRE BY JOHN COWPER POWYS. (Thomas Seltzer, 1922) Y personal recollection of John Cowper Powys dates back a good many years. He was lecturing on Russian literature, and he paced back and forth across a pitifully inadequate stage, shouting, waving his arms wildly, shaking his long ragged black hair back out of his eyes. In his Oxford gown, he looked very much like an excited crow, flapping its wings and cawing loudly. From "Samphire," a book of poems which he has just lately published, I think there is still something of the cawing crow about Mr. Powys. The name "Samphire" is taken from the lines in "King Lear." Half way down Hangs one that gathers Samphire, Methinks he seems no bigger than his My curiosity was aroused sufficiently to send me to the dictionary, and there I discovered that samphire is an herb, used as a salad on the island of St. Helena. It must be an indigestible ad junct to a meal; certainly the book named for it is enough to give one a spiritual mal de mer. The poems in this volume are all very intense, pulsating with the strange dreadful forces of life. "Demogorgon" reads in this fashion: I am the Devil of Notre Dame. I dance my dance and I work my charm. I cling to terror by the hair of her head, I hug the Nightmare until she is dead. At the beginning I stood by the Lord God! At the last I shall be the Worm of the Pit Uncurled Who swallows Him and who swallows It And "The Ultimate" is in the same vein : So this is the ultimate That we bleed with our backs to the While the rats and weasels of fate Stop gasping at this point. And in crowds they flee from the ship And turns the prow of its bleeding lip There are several poems in the book written with the psuedo-simplicity of the imitation ballad, and at least one, "The Castle of Gathore," which smacks of Poe, or rather, of the Poe tradition, especially in the lines Black murky pools about it lie. And the trees are sick with its mystery; Mr. Powys writes with a careful eye on his rhymes. A forced metrical scheme, such as he uses in "The Face," makes one realize that there is more |