Brother of the Coast--

Brother of the Coast-- Joseph Conrad Creates Another World

The Story. Master Gunner Peyrol, old Brother of the Coast, white-haired rover of the outer seas, returned to Toulon some years, before Trafalgar with a hoard of gold mohurs, ducats, guineas stowed away in a canvas jacket next his skin and a case of razors looted from an English prize, intending to spend his last days near the village where he was born, the village he had not seen for 50 years. He found lodging at the Escampobar farm--lodging and the strangest adventure of his life.

At Escampobar lived Citizen Scevola Bron, hysterical, jealous, ex-sansculotte, who mourned for the bloody days of the bygone Terror. The rightful mistress of the farm was lovely Arlette, whom the village thought half-demented --Scevola had saved her body from the massacre that exterminated her Royalist parents, but the memory of the shrieks and the blood of that massacre still walked like a ghost through her mind. Her aunt, the upright, deliberate, tireless Catherine, asserted her a doomed object of God's particular wrath, a fatal woman, not for any man's arms.

How Real, the Naval Lieutenant, sternly devoted to duty, came to the farm and fell in love with its mistress, in spite of himself--how he told Peyrol his plot to delude the English blockading fleet by allowing them to capture certain forged despatches--how Scevola, mad with jealousy, planned to murder Real, and Real, mad with duty, thought the only way out of the pitiful tangle was to let himself be captured with the forged despatches and so leave Arlette forever--and how Peyrol calmly outwitted the lot of them, saved Real for Arlette, removed Scevola from the scene and delivered the forged despatches at the price of his own life-- is the theme of the story. He could not save the French fleet, for the gods were against him, but he saved the Escampobars and fooled the English. Arlette was happy with her man--and as, for the old rover, the Brother of the .Coast, the man of dark deeds but of large heart, when the English bullets found him, he found sleep after toil, port after stormy seas.

The Significance. Mr. Conrad's first novel after a three years' silence belongs with Victory, Rescue, Nostromo and the other major masterpieces of his work. The style is a little simpler, a little less gorgeous, than in some of his novels. But it is no less masterly, and the men and women described are so wholly alive that they haunt the mind. Peyrol himself deserves a place beside Lingard and Heyst and the other great wanderers, and throughout the pages of The Rover, Mr. Conrad gives us anew that impression of space and completion that is stamped upon all his best work--the impression that he has not merely written a novel, but created a world.

The Critics. The New York World: "One feels that Conrad has either revamped an old and discarded idea of his beginnings or written a novel because, as his publishers say, 'three years' have closed since he wrote The Rescue."

The New York Times: "Taking some pains to please a popular audience .... has not been 'able to put out the shining light of Mr. Conrad's genius.

The Author. Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski), born December 6, 1857, in the Ukraine, of Polish parentage, author and sometime Master in the Merchant Service of Great Britain, is the only living man who has written acknowledged masterpieces in a language other than his native one, and the story of the uncanny impulse that led him from a boyhood in inland Poland to the life of an English sea-captain and later to the writing of some of the finest of modern English novels is as strangely adventurous as any tale he has ever told. His principal works include Chance, Victory, Lord Jim, Rescue, Nostromo, Youth, Under Western Eyes.

William Allen White

He Has Humanity and Distinction

William Allen White, white-haired, slightly rotund, filled with enthusiasm and laughing a high little laugh that in a softer degree is not unlike the famous bubbling laugh of Chief Justice Taft, approached a group of young writers. "Here," said he, "is the Revolution!"

Which, being interpreted, is rather funny than otherwise; for there is no writer more thoroughly youthful, there is no writer more thoroughly human than the author of A Certain Rich Man. "I'd rather be young than right," he added; but this was only after he had postulated that "Youth is always right." And this, of course, with the well known humorous twinkle in his eye. A kindly man, a wise man, a man whose heart and abilities have always been devoted to the liberalism of America, who sits in his editorial chair at Emporia and exerts increasing influence for good in American politics and life.

He is completely of Kansas, William Allen White. He was born at Emporia. He was educated at the University of Kansas, he married a Kansas City woman and since 1895 he has been proprietor and editor of the Emporia Daily and Weekly Gazette. He was a member of the Progressive National Committee, an ardent follower of Roosevelt, high in his official councils. As did Roosevelt, he loves dogs and animals. As did Roosevelt, he understands the mind and manners, the whimsies and dialects of America.

In Contemporary American Novelists, Carl Van Doren says of him: "His shorter stories not less than his novels are racy with actualities: he has caught the dialect of his time and place with an ear that is singularly exact; he has cut the costumes of his men and villages so that hardly a wrinkle shows. In particular he understands the pathos of boyhood, seen not so much, however, through the serious eyes of boys themselves as through the eyes of reminiscent men reflecting upon young joys and griefs that will shortly be left behind and upon little pomps that can never come to anything."

He is another of these figures, all too few, who add both humanity and distinction to the American literary scene --and who add wholesomeness mixed with a sense of humor, to the American Credo. J. F.

Dial Prize

Van Wyck Brooks, an editor of The Freeman, was awarded The Dial Prize for "the best work of the year in American letters." His essays on Henry James were described as his most signal work for 1923. Two previous awards of this $2,000-prize have gone to Sherwood Anderson and T. S. Eliot.

Browsers

"Thanks, I'm Only Looking Around!"

A bookshop is an insidious thing. Its portals are as inviting as the jaws of a trap. The unwary passerby is almost irresistibly lured into its mellow interior, perhaps to while away a pleasant hour in contemplation of its variegated shelves, perhaps only to escape a sudden shower. There is so agreeable an absence of obligation. No one feels the least demand upon his purse when he enters a bookshop, any more than when he strays into a friend's library. He means only to "look around," feels a. certain pride in assuring the unobtrusive salesman that he is hardly even doing that.

On the other hand, the doors of a bookshop take on an entirely new aspect to him who turns to go. He is assailed with an entirely unforeseen sense of obligation. The jaws of the trap close suddenly. The very unconcern of the salesmen, their perfect willingness to let him be, becomes a burden. He feels something like a moral obligation to buy. It seems the only fitting return for the hospitality of his welcome, for the reassuring absence of the officious floorwalker.

There is, further, an unsuspected power in books themselves. Nowhere does a volume look so diabolically alluring as on the shelves of a bookshop. Books of all colors, sizes, shapes, fairly leap from the tastefully arranged display tables. They shout at one in unmistakable superlatives of blurbs. On one jacket a lurid cubist decoration fairly startles the unwilling hand into the sparsely lined pocket; on another, the charming features of its young authoress entice with promises of a vicarious intimacy; on still another, the names of the great array themselves in an overwhelming aggregate of authority, making it almost a duty to one's intellectual integrity at least ;to have the volume on one's library shelves. The thought of when and why you will read the book never for an instant obtrudes itself. The question is purely one of the lust for possession. It is not the content of the book that you want to master. It is the book itself, the hard, concrete reality of it, whose ownership you crave. You want its title, its binding, its vibrant individuality.

There is, of course, the professional haunter of the bookshops and stalls--the man who lounges and reads. He starts at the first shop with the first chapter, proceeds to the next for the second, and so on until the book may be discarded for another. His method has all the charm of stolen fruits, all the elusive precariousness that arises from the imminent possibility of the last copy being sold under his very pince-nez. He may be seen by the hundred in the second-hand bookshops of Fourth Avenue, the fantastic bookshops of Greenwich Village, the tradition-hallowed book shrines of Charing Cross Road, the ancient stalls along the Seine.

Who knows what treasures may not be uncovered by the inquiring eye of the haunter of bookshops? Who knows what bibliographic gem may not fall beneath his searching fingers, what miraculous volume, lost through the years, may not turn up to give the thrill that comes once in a lifetime, filling his brain with the pride of discovery and his pockets with the gold of treasure-trove?

The bookshop is among the last strongholds of romance, the last refuges of the unexpected in an age of the predictable;

J. A. T.

New Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

DR. GRAESLER--Arthur Schnitzler-- Seltzer ($2.50). Dr. Graesler, middle-aged physician at a small German health-resort, reserved, dry, serious, melancholy, had never had the success in life that his natural abilities promised. Left alone by the sudden suicide of his sister, he was vaguely drawn into a search for belated romance and spiritual content. Three women crossed his path. He quite intended to marry the first, but they misunderstood each other fatally, and nothing came of it. The second became his mistress--and died of scarlet fever contracted from little Fanny, Frau Sommer's child, a patient of Graesler's. Graesler felt horribly about it--but Frau Sommer was so unostentatiously kind to him that he married her in the end. Precise, ironic, beautifully self-contained, this admirable little novel by the author of the much-discussed Casanova's Homecoming progresses to its odd conclusion with smooth felicity.

THE COLLECTOR'S WHATNOT--Van Loot, Kilgallen and Elphinstone -- Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). If you have ever bickered with an antique dealer for a genuine rat-tail spoon or a Jacobean chair that was made in Newark, you will enjoy this hilarious take-off on antiquing and antiquers. The Collector's Whatnot does for the antique-mania what The Cruise of the Kawa did for the South-Sea-craze.

--THE ROVER--Joseph Conrad--Doubleday-Page ($2.00).