Evening Star Newspaper, July 12, 1931, Page 81

WILSON, THE UNKNOWN: An Explanation of an Enigma of History. By Wells Wells. New York: Omarles Scribner’s Sons. VERY ONE is an enigma. That is, to the extent that eall comes for his un- riddling. Let this one rise above the common level. or stand apart from it. At once, he constitutes an intricate cross-word puzzle, pursued with avidity or abandoned in defeat, according to the com- plexity of the one and the incapacity of the other. Great men are the meat of the puzale- workers. Tossed and worried and wangled in all their acts and attitudes, searched out in their birthright, forecast in the death dole of fame here or ignominy there, men of power and achievement have to be born many times to satisfy the ardors of scholar, historian, romancer, plain tale-bearer. Not till long after their own times, centuries maybe, when the huge bulk of “evidence” has mellowed and-_ ripened to its true essentials, does it hold ul- timate intrinsic value. Good current reading, deposits of information yet to be assayed, but as conclusive evidence—not that; not for a long time yet. Among celebrated moderns not one has cap- tured the imagination more than has Woodrow Wilson. Stedents choose him as their single text book. Writers cannot keep away from him. Advocates worship him. Adversaries loathe him, A most interesting situation. For, after all, here is only a man. But what a birthright for any man to come into. First to come into himself, so richly stored with capacities and tendencies. Next to come into the period specially shaped, or so it seems, to give capacity and tendency gree and full swing. Student, teacher, university president, poli- tician, statesman, president, arbiter of war and, finally, arbiter of post-war interpational settlements—a defeated man, a thwarted ego- tist. Sick in body and mind. Gone. Then the writers, the judges, the hero wor- shipers, the haters and belittlers. Books and books and books, on the great theme, Wood- sow Wilson. Here is one of the best of them. Best by virtue of the fact that Wells Wells not only knows the ground he is traveling, but, much more and much better, he is so constituted as to hold to reason and to common sense where all around is unreason, in the main—is no sense at all in the extravagancies of adoration here and hatred there, all applied to this one man, built as other men are. By his own fair frankness Wells Wells, it seems to me, reduces the “enigma” to very sim- ple terms—natural endowment and mode of life. That Woodrow Wilson had high intel- lectual gifts no one doubts. Nor does one deny him that even greater endowment of per- sonality. Also, early came the conviction of his own high natural equipment. Lift this bulk ready for action into the profession of teaching. There the autocrat is made. Made out of authority that is never questioned. Think what this does to any man, or woman. This supremacy, fed by the devotion of thousands of students, exacted its tribute when the school- master became the political leader, became the President of the United States, an arbiter among world nations seeking peace. Unused to politics and diplomacies, unmindful of them, Mr. Wilson, oblivious, transgressed the pro- prieties of these high callings. He was still the omnipotent schoolmaster, beloved and ad- mired in effect, a law to himself. Was he in- consistent? Oh, yes. Mr. Wells admits it and cites important instances of this. But what of it? A big mind may be, above all else, a changing mind. What of it, anyway? Here is a gallant and self-confident leader, heading the whole world toward righteousness along the road he has so royally chosen for it to follow. Well, it is an old story, one that{ will be told many times yet, before it proves to be anything like a conclusive story. The special value of this particular telling is that a simplicity of outlook, a common sense of interpretation, an undesire toward either undue praise or hasty blame, all of this makes the Wells Wells story a good one for readers who are seeking some safe and sane middle ground from which to look upon this man of truly great endowment. A most significant military heritage besides fell to the lot of Woodrow Wilson. Not only cer- tain vital effects of the World War, but an active legacy from the Civil War must be counted in any political appraisement of this man by public sentiment working for him or against him. SHE WINDMILL ON THE DUNE. By Mary E. Waller, author of “The Wood-Carver of ‘Lympus,” etc. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 91" THE Wood-Carver of 'Lympus” not so long ago rejoiced readers with its second com- ing. Let us hope that the beautiful story will again and again step out to delight readers with its clear and abiding charm. Rather a long time between tales for this gifted writer—but let us mnot be churlish, Rather thankful for the goods the gods provide —and when they see fit to provide them. A story of New England. Of Cape Cod, that outjutting spur into the Atlantic, so self-con- tained in its own personality, its own mode of life, its own turn of feature and cast of mood. It is this—this embodied spirit of the place that Mary Waller lifts into ‘“The Windmill on the Dune” in an artistry of such clean and simple line as to produce, not a similitude of life, but life itself. : An old story in a sense. That is, Michel sitting in the high mill tower retells his own tale. Goes over the things that happened to him years before, tragic things they seem to him. For Michel was, it turns out, one of those sad misfits to his time and place. Cape Cod, where he was born, was invented, clearly, for the making of seamen to sail the world over earrying and bringing, forerunners of the great commercial traders of the present. And per- versely, or so it seemed to the Cape Codders, Michel was an artist. One of the mooning, " THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, V. ©, JULY 712, TOO0. ° - % IDA_GILBERT MYER./ An Explanation of an Enigma of History. Mary E. Waller’s New Novel —A Wide Variety for Lovers of Fiction. dawdling tribe, just looking off at nothing for days on end, and only a smudge of paint to show for idleness so wanton, even sinful. However, we are not interested in Michel's old sins. Im his story of the old days instead. Michel ate and drank and slept and breathed the airs and every mood of Cape Cod. He knew its slightest change of face. He knew all about its daily commerce with the Atlantic, now raging, now surging in a tidal monotone, now lying wide and open to its dalliance, with the vast cloudland above it. He knew the peo- ple, too, the fisherfolk, the deep seamen, the women, the boys and the girls. It is of all these that Michel tells us, sitting beside him in the sand-drifted mill tower. s He grows friendly and near. So the love story gradually sifts through the more prosaic re- memberings. Tragic, unhappy that story. It fares across the sea to Brittany, flits to Paris. Always an incompleted story, one of unfulfill- ment. Glad to elude its heartache, its betrayal in actuality—for this is a long-ago love story— one is more than satisfied just to be remem- bering along with Michel things that have lost their deepest poignancy, their bitterest thrust. Richly tranquil, happily reminiscent, Michel goes over the whole of his life and that of the people around him. Now if he had been the good seaman that, clearly, he should have been we could not bave had this soul-and-body legend of that uniquely audacious adventurer into the sea, Cape Cod. Luckily, as it turns out, Michel was an idler. Something of a fail- ure both in life and in love. Michel was an artist and by virtue of this lapse of good New England intent readers are bound to gain many a happy hour in Cape Cod, in its facts and traditions and effects. A fine story. Mary E. Waller is well worth waiting for. CALL HER SAVAGE. By Tiffany Thayer, au- thor of *“Thirteen Men.” Illustrated by Lloyd Coe. New York: Claude Kendall. BIG story. A brutal story. A true story. Big by virtue of it scope in human nature. Brutal because human nature is at bottom just that. True—well, true because of the two preceding essentials. p It begins with the covered wagon. With a company crossing the plains to make a new settlement. Men, women, children, horses, cat- tle, food, seed for new fields. A graphic pic- ture as real as the fact itself could be to any onlooker. An Indian attack—not entirely de- structive but of a nature to reshape the course of the emigrants. Finally a settlement and in the course of time a sort of neighboring with nearby tribes. This, an essential point, since here came the impregnation of savagery that is made to account for many things in the career of the young woman who serves, finally, to carry the matter forward into the present, where judgment must be passed upon her. The earlier parts of Mr. Thayer's novel give a8 picture of the new West. Of business suc- cess to the family under consideration. A typical account of what happened over and over again to capable and courageous pioneers. These, the men of substance and leadership and wealth. Here is the background for the young woman, granddaughter of old Silas, cap- tain of the caravan. Daughter of his girl and her husband? No, not quite that. Instead, the fruitage of a moonlight madness with the young and beautiful brave, down by the river- side. Bo Nasa, the true heroine of the story, is, In fact, half savage. Peter, fine business man and lax lover, never dreams that Nasa is not his girl—damn her! So, money and the city and dress and men, Europe and America, and the new day—don’t forget the new day— take common hand with Nasa, the young half- Indian. To be sure, you are going to condemn her, That's what we are for, we of the good old Puritan stripe. And you are going to slas! right out against Tiffany Thayer for letting such a girl get into his book. But, what would you? Here she is, literally a half-breed, so circumstanced as to have a recognized place right in our midst—our midst, mind you. For a long time we hardly notice her, since all the young folks are clearly mad, and living up to the part. But soon is manifest a deep sin- cerity of lawlessness about this girl that is rather terrifying. A perfect sequence of inheritance here. Nasa is not only half Indian but a quarter of her, at least, is imperious old Silas her grand- father, leading his caravan into the West, put- ting the fear of himself into his followers, into bands of prowling Indians besides. A heavy endowment for Nasa, but not in the least an unlikely one. An overhead program laid out for the girl that, in any other day than this cge of 1931, would be counted as preposterous and unthinkable. It seems to me that Tiffany Thayer has gone a long way back for his running start into the manifest fact that Nasa—old Silas and Indian father as her strict accounting—is not so tre- mendously different from many a girl of the moment who can lay claim to such savagery only as rests at the bottom of human nature it- self, Better look into it before jumping Tif- fany Thayer. The young man may be serious of intent, admonitory of mission, as he is cer- tainly of a constructive talent, of an illumi- nating genius in the portrayal of a single mo- mentous aspect of the astonishment of time, known as the “current day.” NV SPEED. By Frank Hawks. New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam. YOU recall in your English course at school coming to the place and time when piety set itself against those gorgeous myths and legends representing pagan beliefs and heathen practices, Clearly, something had to be done about it, something to counteract, to obliterate even, such contaminative writings. = And there rose the fashion of taking abstract attributes of man—honesty, courage, truthfulness, meek- ness and so on and so on—of filling these out to individual measure for the purpose of puri- fying legend, story, literature. It was no great success. That is, it was no lasting success. Nobody ever reads these platitudes of morality, dressed up in clothes 2nd behaving as no red- blooded human ever did bechave. All this to say, that right here in “Speed” is an example of that very age, of that very kind of literature. But—in nothing short of genius itself Frank Hawks has created,-out of an idea, nothing more, a hero that belongs by right—not with the moralities—but with the old heroic myths where Jupiter and Apollo and Neptune and the rest of the gods made the world a rather glo- rious place to move around in. Hawks has taken “Speed,” just speed. This he has visualized to its own tremendous soul, action. He has traced it from its birth— maybe a savage lying ¢n a log in the river and making the godlike discovery that by using his hands, maybe his legs, too, he could make the log move faster, sending him on his way in an incredible celerity—for him. Again and again, Hawks cites the savage, gaining time. And the slowly growing man, also gaining time in his new ways, till at last—and at last, through a thousand inventions and growths and changed conditions, Speed comes to be the ruler of the world. I advise you to read that chapter of Frank Hawks' new book. Don't miss it. Then, lighting on the ground, so to speak, you will go along with this very live book to survey some of the sequences of speed and some of its prom- ises for every part of the inclusive present world of economics—commerce, industry, sup- ply and demand. “What Speed Means to Business,” “Non- Stop Across the Continent,” “It Gets to Be a Habit,” “the Flying Reporter” and so on, with everybody flying in a series of adventures, so stirring, so well put, so authentic and so prom- ising as to incline the reader to drop the story and rush out in search of wings and the taking on of this new ““habit.” A writer, if you please, as well as a fiyer. THE MONK'S-HOOD MURDERS. By the Edingtons, authors of “The Studio Murder Mystery,” etc. New York: The Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. H, come on. Let's siop working. Let's go to & murder. This one. You readily recall that pretty, flowering plant in the old garden wolfsbane, monk's- hood. Innocent there. But distilled, chemical- ized, that guilleless plant becomes the poison aconite. Not unclever, the choice of this mode of sending people off. It works while the mur- derer sleeps, provided he has taken care to leave smudges of the deadly stuff just where the victim, whose habit he knows, will be sure to pass his hands over it, and then, as cer- tainly, to touch his lips in any one of a dozen accidental ways. Short shrift this gives the luckless con- demned one. A short story, too. Hardly longer than the usual obituary notice. But these are story tellers, and so, with just this weapon in hand, they cast about for a setting of interest. A newspaper office and old Josiah Wardock, the est man alive, for its owner and editor. good start, or so it looks. Nobody has a bigger load of hatred piled up against him ardock. He knows it and glories He is rich, he has a powerful paper. At moments Josiah almost thinks he's God. one day the big newsman is found his office. Just outside, with glazed in between, is the news room. But was seen in his room, nothing was eard. That is the beginning of a well and plausibly complicated plot involving other deaths and & more than commonly ingenious program of trailing clues and abandoning the most of them for the slowly narrowing net of ultimate disclosure. There are elements of new outlook here, of fresh attack, that nowadays are hard to find in the hard-pushed crime story. The detective work, as such, is good, not exaggerated and overdrawn, as so much of it has come to be. A young police court re- porter is a reality of clever and engaging boy- hood, manhood. It comes in the nature of something like personal loss when Sherry gets his. I wish the Edingtons hadn’t done that. Detective Smith is admirable. Off the com- mon line—maybe better because of that. Plot good, personnel excellent, action not too unbe- lievable—not for this astounding day. All told, a much above the average crime story. GREEN BONDAGE. By Frances Ogilvie, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. N basic motive “Green Bondage” is not un- like Shirland Quin's “Dark Heritage,” & story of Wales in its grip upon the heart of the x;.llllnln, no matter where destiny may call SCON. In mood and movement and effect “Green Bondage” is, however, quite different. Maybe because it is a tale of our ocwn land, familar in its ways of life and love and work, it seems of less dour, of lighter import than does that other picturesque, almost tragic and highly beautiful story. However, here we are in Ken- tucky, a family held to the land by poverty tnd resisting this fate with might and main There may be poetry in serried ranks of to- Bacco, green and high and haughty, but there is grinding work as well. The mother hates it most of all. Por has she not all her life been frustrated in plans for leaving it? Then, as mothers do the world over, she transfers hew ambitions and hopes to her children. They, surely, should be set free from the tyranny of tcbacco fields. Not the tyranny of the fields, Just the tyranny of life, though the mother did not know this. And in this sincere re- cording it appears that the life of the lapd, so prosaic in seeming, 8o dull in its moods and behaviors, so deadening in its changeless hum- drum—that this of all lives is most ad- venturous. Filled with fear and suspense, with uncertainty and quite pcssibie failure. What sort of failure? Why, the kind that shuts off means of bare existence, just the unlovely bread-and-butter lack of every day. In the economy of the farmer a cloud in the sky be- comes a threatening monster. A gust of wind is the potential destroyer of his very founda- ticns. Here is a record of fact, taking shape as poignant drama. The writer is a young woman born of Kentucky soil and outlook. If, how- ever, appearances count for anything and ace- complishment is any sign, Frances Ogilvie, novelist, ccllege woman, young and beautiful, will never come hand to hand with the “green bondage” of which she here writes so sincerely and feelingly. A pretty grim true story. A strong one from the points of theme and treat- ment. Evidence here of an excellently equip~ ped writer and a gifted one besides. WHALERS AND WHALING. By E. Keble Chatterton. The Deep Sea Library. New York: Willlam Farquhar Payson. HE Deep Sea Library is a true inspiration whose object is to provide sea stories, true and dependable, for the great body of readers who, even though they have no knowl- edge of the sea, no contacts with it, G to it irresistibly as if, somehow and som e, this, too, was their own native element I wonder. Do you know why this is? ‘Tell us, if you do. However, here is another sea tale offered by the “Library” on the epic of whaling, of the whaler’s life. The new regions opened up by this calling, the new weathers and growths and peoples are all here. The personal ardors of this industry, its dangers, its rewards, the decline of this business from a depletion of the stock, from substitutes of its marketable parts, from-—changes in women's fashions. The newer mode of whale capture—more ef- ficient, less adventurous, less atrtactive. In spirited manner the story of this great business is given out, a part primarily of early explorations, then becoming an enterprise of its own in various countries sending out ex- peditions to the hazards, and rewards, of weathering the frozen North in behalf of trade and the growth of the old and vanishing in- dustry of whaling. If you like adventure, with truth as its core, here it is. Hardly any field that can surpass this one for pure daring and endurance, Cement Named After Isle: PORTLAND cement gets its name, not, as might be supposed, from the geographical location of the first manufacture of the product, but from the fact that the first concrete made from it resembled remarkably a building stexe quarried on the Isle of Portland, in the English Channel. The hazy notion is held by many persons that the production of cement is a more or less sim- ple process of crushing various raw materials, mixing them, roasting them and then grind- ing the clinkers. To some extent this does cover the general outline of the process, but when it is looked into more closely there are found to be in reality 80 different operations, all of them more or less costly, involved, from the quartying of the first material to the sack- ing of the finished product. In order to acquaint the public with the de- tails of operation, the Bureau of Mines has produced a movie, entitled, “From Mountain to Cement Sack,” which shows the entire process in detail. In addition to the limestone, which is the bueotaneemmt,chy,s&elmm:hxund shale are also ingredients. These materials are ground even finer than powder and then mix- ed and burned at a temperature of 3,000 de- grees Fahrenheit. The clinker thus obtained is then ground and gypsum is added to regulate the setting qualities of the cement. During the mixing a sample is taken every 8 seconds and tested. These careful tests are continued during the entire operation in order thati she standard for the “mix” may be obtained. Hog Raising Loses Ground. THE present trend of the pork productige of Europe is not particularly promising to the hog raisers of this country, for every country Europe, but Denmark is reporting af increas- ing production. Even Denmark is ahead of last year, but the tendency seems io be downs ward. This increased production abroad has had a deterring effect already on the exporta tion of American pork and lard supplies. The Canadian raisers, too, have suffered from the European competition, and the British market, formerly of great importance to Ameriean raisers, is beginning to turn to the ‘b stead of the West for 'supplies. h