This book has developed from lectures given at Harvard between 1904 and 1917. The author says: “Years of dealing with Harvard students had shown me not only that Americans now know little of the literary traditions of our ancestral Europe, but also that they are seldom aware even of the little they know.” (Introd.) He adopts the point of view of “English-speaking Americans of the twentieth century of the Christian era” and concerns himself with those traditions of literature “which, we need not ask why, have chanced among ourselves to survive the times of their origin.” His task is somewhat simplified by the fact that during the period covered, from Homer to Dante, the traditions “originating in the primal European civilisation of Greece, and extending throughout imperial dominion of Rome, remained for many centuries a common possession of all Europe.” It has been possible therefore to treat the subject as a whole. This is done in five books: The traditions of Greece; The traditions of Rome; The traditions of Christianity; The traditions of Christendom; The traditions of the middle ages. Bibliographical suggestions occupy twenty-three pages and there is an index.
+ Booklist 17:147 Ja ’21
“Nothing brings a keener joy to the heart of a conscientious reviewer than to have in his hands to appraise and to praise a book which seems to him altogether good—worthy in theme, comprehensive in conception, shapely in plan and skillful in execution. This joy is mine now that I have read this admirable example of interpretive scholarship.” Brander Matthews
+ N Y Times p3 D 26 ’20 1750w
WEST, WILLIS MASON. Story of modern progress; with a preliminary survey of earlier progress. (Allyn and Bacon’s ser. of school histories) il $2 Allyn 940.2
20–7751
This work is a successor to the author’s “The modern world” written with a redistribution of time to give more space and emphasis to the period since 1870. The author says, “I have taken glad advantage of the chance to write a new book, better suited, I hope, to elementary high-school students; and I have used the treatment in the ‘Modern world’ only when I have found it simpler and clearer than any change I could make today.” (Foreword) An unusual amount of space has been given to English history, while American history, which is sure of full treatment elsewhere, is omitted “except where the connection of events demands its introduction.” Contents: Introduction: a survey of earlier progress; Age of the reformation, 1520–1648; England in the seventeenth century; The age of Louis XIV and Frederick II, 1648–1789; The French revolution; Reaction, 1815–1848; England and the industrial revolution; Continental Europe, 1848–1871; England, 1815–1914; Western Europe, 1871–1914; Slav Europe to 1914; The war and the new age. There is a list of books for high schools, followed by an index and pronouncing vocabulary.
“This present ‘Story of modern progress’ is consoling in a measure, but also provoking. The writer has some straight views, then again, the three-hundred-year-old tradition enfolds him.”