FICTION

Romance Renounced

A lot of people are talking about the return of respectability. Here* is proof that they may be right. A young lady, once frisky as you please, writes a book about Romance being all very well but not half so dependable as the sterling oldtime conventions--emphasis on family, worldly goods, comfort and the like.

A first novel, it is distinctly commendable. The young lady knows whereof she writes, on both sides of the argument, and she writes with the vivacity and warmth of Irish blood reared "down South." None knows better than she the tragedy of good taste ruined by poor execution. She has labored over her execution until it is deft and capable except for the first-novelist's last fault, propping the characters up and making them expound the argument sometimes.

The author and her heroine, between whom it is hard to distinguish, have one rare thing in abundance. They have race. They react sharply and lastingly to experiences like Sara Spain's (the heroine's) rescue from the surf by Siercy Hodd, her sweetheart and lover in lazy, lovely Georgia. They abominate the starched prosiness of the northern Haskell clan into which Sara marries, but they are game. After screaming, "Hop-toads!" at elder Haskells, they apologize.

And they are honest. They tell William Henry Haskell IV that he must win Sara or she may run off with Siercy Hodd some day; as she does, to the usual hotel in Atlantic City. Greedy and spoiled though they are, they are captivating ladies, this author and heroine--up to a point.

At that point, when Siercy has come back into Sara's life as an architect whose fine instincts are being tortured by his unhappy marriage, so that you will scarcely blame Sara for leaving child and housekeeping to abscond with him --at that point they turn on Siercy, who was sadly dished in the first place, and they transform him into a bounder. Incapable of carrying further what they have called Romance, they revile and belittle and finally pity it. They send Siercy away in shabby disgrace and exalt dull William Henry into a nobly understanding husband who mutters modestly about his part in the Great War. It is anything but fair, yet it builds into a formidable argument for the Grundies, the defeatists.

The Author is Humorist Irvin Cobb's only daughter. Her looks are from her pretty mother's side. About as big as a minute--an exciting minute--she took to writing when other girls her age were seeing how their hair looked "up." The pleasant New York landscape (near Ossining) amid which she spent her 'teens is distinguished also by the estate of Publisher George A. Doran.

"Buff" Cobb did not permit college proms and parades to trample, nor her father's literary cigar smoke to stifle, her dancing spark of originality. She irreverently wrote in the Bookman, when she should have been thinking that the Bad Boys of the oldtime Smart Set were Great Intellects:

Mencken and Nathan and

God, ha, ha,

Mencken and Nathan and God.

Lately she undertook the responsibilities of matrimony and motherhood. She wrote Falling Seeds in a deserted monastery outside of Florence (Italy), in an opposite wing of which, her husband, Frank Michler Chapman Jr., able Princeton ('23) baritone (son of the author of What Bird Is That? and many another ornithological classic), was exercising for grand opera.

NON-FICTION

Unmelted Africa

THE SOUTH AFRICANS--Sarah Gertrude Millin--Boni & Liveright ($3.50). South Africa and its little muttering wars, the noise of the mines under the hot sun, the songs that the Dutch vintners sing and the old curses that black men shout in the alleys of Johannes-burg--for most people these are far away. They are heard only as a confused murmur, a distant and broken music.

In this book Mrs. Millin untangles the dark pattern of its sound. Going as far back as the legendary days when Phoenician sailors stared at the bleak Cape coasts, and going into the forests where the natives have the roots of their semi-civilization, she has brought to her study of the contemporary situation a wide and valuable background.

Of the present she has much to say. She describes the diamond mines, the adventurers who first saw the glint of a hard fire under the dark continent, the blacks who sweat, fight and struggle to harvest the pebbles of these arid orchards. Author Millin knows about the golddiggers too, their labor unions, Johannesburg where the great companies have their offices and where, when the city is hushed at night, ftiere is still audible the pounding of battery stamps that crush the ore for gold.

She examines the figures who have made themselves noticed in the South Africa of today--General Smuts, the enigmatic statesman and dictator; the Prince of Wales who came to Africa and smiled less and danced more than people expected; leaders in the Union political movements. She analyzes the various currents of commerce, government, economics. The effects of the Boer War she finds revealed in the remark of a young British-South African who refers to-"the place we South Africans licked the English."

Most of all, the people are important to her. The Boer, the Briton, the Jew, the Asiatic, the half-caste--with each she deals separately because each is in himself an entity. South Africa, she seems to say, is a melting pot that lacks a fire. Finally she considers the Kaffirs. These, a brown Northern people who conquered the native blacks at the time of the Dutch Discovery in the 17th Century, are now the cheap labor class. They are the burden which the white man has been too weak to carry but not too weak to destroy. At the heart of the mat- ter Author Millin feels that: "The black man is not so different from, as he is inferior to, the white man." For him, she tacitly observes, there is no hope.

The Author lives in South Africa, at the centre of the scenes she depicts. She writes with truth and understanding--two qualities which have made her novels (God's Stepchildren, Mary Glenn) interesting, and which make this, a broader work, not only interesting but important.

Half-Wanton Wagner

Creeps in half wanton, half asleep,

One with a fat wide hairless face.

He likes love-music that is cheap;

Likes women in a crowded place;

And wants to hear the noise they're making.

Rupert Brooke, who wrote the above, and Louis Barthou, who has just written a biography,* view the same aspect of Richard Wagner. Both see his crude love-affairs as inherent, important surfaces of his genius rather than detached experiences remote from the mind which was capable of Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Opening his study with a phrase which the composer put in one of his letters to Elise Wille, "I ... adorer of women," M. Barthou proceeds to detailed accounts of Wagner's amorous adventures. He was the adorer of many women but most notably three: Minna (Wilhelmina Planer), a stupid, clamorous, third-rate actress whom he married; Mathilde (Mme. Weson-donck) who inspired Tristan; and Cosima (Frau von Buelow, natural daughter of Franz Liszt) who provided the stimulus for the Ring series and whom Wagner loved most of all. In his relations with these ladies, Wagner provided the world with one of those astonishing paradoxes by which a brilliant man is enabled to write love letters which in their idiotic banality would have disgraced Daddy Browning, to conduct his indiscretions in a manner of an unfaithful cloak-and-suit drummer, and to make these mediocrities important by virtue of the astounding music into which the chemistry of genius transformed them.

The fact remains that Wagner's amours have only such significance as they have attained in their mutation into art. Louis Barthou's book competently threads together previously known facts, describes with Gallic wit and speed encounters of that nature which Frenchmen, both in funny papers and reality, enjoy with special gusto. But since it tells little that is new and only brushes over the old, it is to be regarded more as a series of entertaining anecdotes than as a consequential item in the lists of Wagnerian biography.

As Wagner's loves are important because of his music, so, reversely, this sketch is important because of the personal distinction of the writer. Louis Barthou was Premier of France from March to December of 1913, is Minister of Justice in the present Cabinet, is a member of the French Academy. His other books have been numerous. One is a study of Victor Hugo's affairs of the heart, Les D'Amours d'un Poete.

(Notices of books of special interest and significance to students of FOREIGN NEWS will be found under that heading in this issue of TIME.)

*FALLING SEEDS--Elisabeth Cobb Chapman--Doubleday, Page ($2.50).

*THE PRODIGIOUS LOVER -- Louis Barthou (translated by Henry Irving Brock) --

*Duffield ($2.50).