“Who is John Reed?”, asked the newspapers when, forgetting for the moment their name-worshipping arrogance, they discovered that the best reports from Mexico were coming, not from the veteran correspondents, but from an unknown. The answer is that John Reed is the only “correspondent” that the Mexican mix-up or the present European struggle has yet brought to light, who has a really new and individual method of reporting. These are not dogmatic, cock-sure, crisis-solving “articles” from the front, but simple, vivid reporting of scenes and actions that have some reason for being reported. And John Reed is about the only reporter who has shown us that the Mexican people have visions of a future. The newspapers and those whose duty it seems to be to uphold the old idea are now crying that Reed’s simple realism is too slight to be of value as history, and that he does not “get beneath the surface”—but these people have still to see which kind of reporting can endure as history.
Incorrect Values
Life and Law, by Maude Glasgow. [G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.]
A secondary title—“The Development of the Exercise of the Sex Function Together with a Study of the Effect of Certain Natural and Human Laws and a Consideration of the Hygiene of Sex”—is evidence per se that the book is inadequate and superficial. In less than two hundred pages no writer can more than hint at all these topics, and in trying to cover so much ground the author really covers nothing. She tells over old facts and frequently gives them what are now accepted as incorrect values. Her statements are as sweeping as the scare heads of the old quack medicine almanacs. She describes men as ignorant, intolerable, immoral monsters; and women as being universally down-trodden and the sexual victims of man’s unbridled appetite. The book is as full of “musts” and “shoulds” as the rules of an old-fashioned school master. The author tells nothing new; veers from science to sentimentality in a most disconcerting way; and adds nothing to the constantly-increasing library of valuable sex books.
Mary Adams Stearns.
Sentence Reviews
Abroad at Home, by Julian Street. [The Century Company, New York.] So far as what he will write is concerned we don’t give a rap whether Shaw visits America or not. Yes, we don’t believe even he could lay out the statisticians as Street does when he advises us on the purchase of pig iron; or display such fiendish glee at the chance of hurting the feelings of a professional Fair booster: or—well, every paragraph of every chapter is worth reading.
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, by Count Ilya Tolstoy. [The Century Company, New York.] The book is richly illustrated; this is its main value. Nothing is added to what we have known about Tolstoy’s personality; we have had numerous, perhaps too many, works on his intimate life; Sergeyenko nearly exhausted the subject. True, we gain considerable information about the great man’s son, Count Ilya, but, pray, who is interested in it?
American Public Opinion, by James Davenport Whelpley. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.] The name is misleading: the book presents a series of articles on American internal and foreign problems, written from the point of view of a conservative. Why call Mr. Whelpley’s personal opinion “American Public Opinion”? The articles on our foreign diplomacy are valuable; they reveal our infancy in this peculiarly European art.
Jael, by Florence Kiper Frank. [Chicago Little Theater.] The production of this play was treated subjectively in the last issue of this magazine. In the reading of it the verse impresses one in much the same manner as the viewing of the production. The two effects are so similar as to impress one with the coherence and wonderful worth of the Chicago Little Theatre in harmonizing the value of the play as literature with the importance of the production.