Evening Star Newspaper, January 1, 1933, Page 48

BY SARAH G. BOWERMAN. GROVER CLEVELAND: A Study in Courage. By Allen Nevins. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. E left to subsequent generations l I an example of the courage that - never yields an inch in the cause of truth, and that never surrenders an jota of principle to expediency.” This is part of the eulogy pronounced upon Grover Cleveland by a historian of the modern school of his- torical research, which does not believe in “flattery or indiscriminate praise of a biographi- cal subject. That Mr. Nevins is a thorough- going admirer of Grover Cleveland one dis- covers before reading many of the 766 pages —and they are not too many—which make up .this biography. Bu' acmiration does not pre- vent criticism when impartial consideration seems to demand it. The expulsion of the cattlemen from Indian lands in 1885 was an -instance in which Cleveland did “right too recklessly and harshly.” He made some blunders in appointments, usually through po- litical pressure, but Mr. Nevins says: “When he commiited errors, and the reformcrs made them the subject of noisy criticism, he tried honestly to corréct them.” His attempt, in the interest of fairness, to restore Queen Liliuckalani of Hawaii, after the revolution in which American officials had in his opinion _taken an unjustifiable part, was, according to Mr. Nevins, ill-judged and was most unpopu- ‘lar throughout the United States. The famous Venezuela affair, which, accord- ing to some historians, almost brought us into war with Great Britain, was one of the most important events of Cleveland's second ad- nuni;t:*ndon., Secretary of State Olney and the ‘British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, ex- changed biting notes which failed to advance understanding and agreement. The offer of ‘our State Department to assist in arbitrating “the disputed boundary line between Venezuela -and Guiana was rejected by the British govern- ment. The Monroe Doctrine was, of course, -involved. Lord Salisbury refused to accept its ‘implications and assumed the attitude that the _boundary was none of our business. Cleve- -land finally sent a message to Congress recom- mending an appropriation for a boundary com- mission and declaring that “it would be the .duty of the United States to maintain this boundary (the one fixed by the commission) sgainst any aggression.” Mr. Nevins calls Cleveland’s language ‘“excessively sharp and even belligerent,” and says that “the methods the President employed proved successful. But he had taken an unjustifiable risk of war. He had precipitated a break in the stock market, with a decided setback to economic recovery. And there were incidental consequences of a highly unfortunate character.” Some other historians have looked at the matter more favorably. One of them says: “The defense of the Monroe Doctrine in the Venezuela con- troversy was the only official action of Presi- dent Cleveland’s second administration (with the exception of the opening of the World's Fair at Chicago) that had the general ap- probation of the country.” In nearly all of Cleveland’s acts while he was President Mr. Nevins finds the courage for which he and other historians so admire him. He also lauds the strength, integrity and common sense of his character. “He would display the utmost caution in making up his mind. But once he had reached a conclusion, no force could compel him to quit it.” Four striking achievements of Cleveland are con- sidered by Mr. Nevins as his greatest and most permanent contribution to our national life, He did his utmost to restore honesty and im- partiality to government and to do away with speeial privilege; *in “this his success ‘was not complete. 'He saved the Nation from abandon- ment of the gold standard. By his attitude in the Nicaraguan, Hawaiian and Venezuela af- Sairs, he introduced conscience as a force in the handling of foreign relations., Finally, he left to succeeding generations of political leaders an example of courage. SIR WALTER SCOTT. By John Buchan. New York: Coward-McCann. NE of the best of the books owing their existence to the fact that 1932 was the centenary of Scott’s death, this has the advan- tage of being written by a Scotchman of an old border family, like Scott’s own. Mr. Bu- chan combines the activities of a lawyer, busi- ness man, member of Parliament, novelist and historian. His favorite recreations are those .which Scott especially loved—tramping over the countryside, riding and shooting. Of course, the “Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott,” by John Gibson Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law, will always be the most complete course of information, but its seven voiumes are rather appalling to most readers. This single volume, by John Buchan, draws on Lockhaet for its facts, is written in pleasant narrative style, and succeeds in con- veying an impression of Scott's robust yet gentle personality. That Scott lived to be only 61, in spite of his hardy constitution, not impaired by the attack of infantile paralysis in childhood which left him lame, seems to argue either ill luck or some mismanagement of his life conditions. That other great Scot, Carlyle, never enjoying good health, always dyspeptic and hypochondriac, always poor, lived to the age of 86. Scott “had behind him the most historic of the border stock in Scott and Murray and Rutherford and Swinton” and his father was a solicitor, a writer to the signet in Edinburgh, a man able to pro- vide well for his family. The early childhood of Walter Scott was spent in the country, at his grandfather’s farm of Sandy Knowe, with- in sight of the triple peaks of Eildon and the line of the Cheviot hills. When his formal education was completed and he had passed his law ex- aminations and assumed the gown of the advo- cate, prosperity attended him almost from the start. Income-béaring public offices' came to hiriy *! easily, his earnings as advocate were fatrly THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, JANUARY 1, 1933, Historian’s Life of Grover Cleveland Is Called “A Study in Courage”—Novels for the New Year—Story of Bath. good, and his wife brought some income to the family partnership. In addition, he began early to write, poetry at first, and was success- ful from the very first poem. By the time he was 43, “Waverly,” the first of his long series of novels, had just been published, he had be- come the owner of Abbotsford, had an unusually large income for the time, and was considered one of the most prosperous landowners of the Tweed country. Had Scott been content to remain a country gentleman and a writer, he might perhaps have lived to enjoy for many years longer Abbotsford and the lands he was continually adding to his estate. But he made what proved a costly mistake when he conceived himself as a busi- ness man, Friendship contributed to lead him astray in this respect; His seeret partnership in the printing business with his old grammar school friend, James Ballantyne, in which Scott furnished most of the money, was the begin- ning. The establishment of a publishing house, as a branch of the printing business, under John Ballantyne, brother of James, was the next step. The two ventures, as time went on and the lack of financial ability on the part of the Ballantynes became apparent, absorbed all of the large sums which Scott made by his writing. In 1826 came the financial crash in which both the Ballantyne firm and Constable, whose affairs were inextricably entangled, be- came bankrupt. Scott could have shared the bankruptcy, personally, but he chose instead to attempt to pay the creditors in full—that is, to assume a burden of debt which ultimately crushed him. Thenceforth he knew no leisure, but his life became a state of servitude to his pen. “My own right hand shall pay my debt,” he said, and this was literally accomplished. Between 1826 and 1831 he wrote eight novels, in addition to “Tales of a Grandfather” and a “History of Scotland.” In 1832, “the slave of the lamp,” as Stephen Gwynn calls Scott, was released, and happily at the end his mind was 50 clouded that he thought his debts were all paid—those debts which killed him and which were finally settled by the income from his works after his death. In his concluding estimate of Scott, Mr. Buchan cays: “Carlyle spoke truth when he said that a sounder piece of British manhood was not put together in that eighteenth century of time.” THE NARROW CORNER. By W. Somerset Maugham. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co. HE technique of “The Narrow Corner” is backward moving Operating a lugger in the Malay Archipelago is a certain Capt. Nich- ols, whom we suspect from the start to have had an unsavory past. His chronic dyspepsia might easily be of the nervous type, due to an uneasy conscience, but it turns out to be caused by bad tceth—a lost opportunity on the part of the author to point a moral. On board the lugger, as passenger or deck hand, is a youth called Fred Blake—we know that is not his real name—who is so afraid of something or some one that he also obviously has a past from which he is trying to escape. With these two, on a voyage from Takana to a regular ship port, is a doctor whom Mr. Maugham has drawn with great skill and sympathy. Dr. Saunders is kin to Sherlock Holmes—world weary, entirely disillusioned about humanity, yet ready to help any individuals who need him, past all possibility of being shocked, com- pletely self-dependent. He is a deliberate exlle from England, living among the Chinese of Fu-chou. Dr. Saunders is summoned to Ta- kana to operate for cataract upon a wealthy Chinese merchant and, when his patient is on the way to recovery, departs on the lugger. The lugger stops, because of a storm, at an old Dutch settlement on one of the Kanda Is- lands and there the already fated Fred brings upon himself further tragedy. The episode of the Dane, Erik, who to his disastrous undoing lives in his own ideals, and Louise Frith, out- wardly the perfection of girlish innocence, is & story within the story. Through the conversa- tions of Dr. Saunders and Capt. Nichols, we learn little abnut the life of the latter, except that he 1s a thorough scamp and that he has a wife somewhere who always finds him, how- ever hard he has tried to conceal his where- abouts, and appears just as he has begun to feel a false security. Incidentally, she does ap- pear at the end of the story and remarks: “You want a shave if you ask me, captain.” After the tragedy at the Kanda Island, Pred confides to the doctor the story of the crime which has made him an exile. It is a pathetic tale of youth ensnared by maturity and of youth repudiated by those responsible for its existence. So, almost at the end of the story, we learn the mystery of Fred and know at the same time that for him there is no solution. In its subtlety of style and vividness of Far Eastern atmosphere “The Narrow Corner” holds the grade established by Mr. Maugham's earlier novels, BATH. By Edith Sitwell. With a jacket drawing by Rex Whistler. Illustrated with contemporary prints. New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas. BATH. of the eighteenth century was .mot all fashion and frivolity, swashbuckling gal- lants and fan-coquetting ladies. Miss Sitwell tells us that the fine coat of Beau Nash “hid but little underlinen,” and Goldsmith in his time observed that “wherever people of fash- ion came, needy adventurers were generally found in waiting.” Mingling with the fash- ionable throngs and the swarms of adventurers and gamblers were also the invalids, who, in- deed, felt a pre-emptive right in the place, and their attendant locust-cloud of quack doctors. These gentlemen assiduously practiced their art by means of bleeding, the baths and strong physic, and during their visits dispensed the day’s gossip as well. Miss Sitwell, who is an authority on the eighteenth century, has brought much research to the making of this book. She has discovered the officials names of some of the remedies administered by the Bath doctors: “New gathered earth worms,” “black tips of crabs’ claws,” “man’s bones cal- cined,” “inward skin of a capon’s gizzard,” “goose dung gather’d in the Springtime, dry’d in the sun,” “unicorn’s horn” and “jaw of a pike.” As compared with these, cod liver oil and thyroid extract seem very mild. Of the five medicinal baths at Bath, only two were fashionable, the King’s Bath and the Cross Bath. One of the many pictures of Bath as a health resort to be found in English literature is that drawn by Smellett in his picaresque novel “Humphrey Clinker,” in which the hypo- chondriac Mathew Brambie, supposed to repre- sent Smollett himself, goes with his sister Ta- bitha on an expedition in search of health and spends some time at Bath. Mr. Bramble for- gets his health in the excitement of discover- ing a son he knew nothing about, and Miss Tabitha secures a husband. During the best years of the eighteenth cen- tury, Bath was socially dominated by Beau Nash, who first entered the town on foot in the Summer of 1702, “a young man with a brown wig, beneath a tall, white hat, a red, heavy face with watery blue eyes, and a rather clumsy figure.” Miss Sitwell is almost as frank an adorer of the Beau as were the ladies who sought his favor at Bath and accepted his public reproof when he considered them guilty of rudeness or of not dancing properly. It was at the instigation of Beau Nash that the famous pump room was built in 1706, as a shelter for bathers and those drinking the waters. It soon became the center of all fashionable life, where the Beau reigned as master of ceremonies. Later, when he found the various impertinences of people of fashion toc numerous to be dealt with informally, he drew up his famous code of behavior, which was posted in the pump room and other public places. Two of the amusing rules in this code are as follows: “That no gentleman gives his ticket for the balls to any but gentlemen. N. B. Unless he has none of his acquaintance.” And “That the elder ladies and children be content with a second bench at the ball, as being past, or not come to perfection.” Not all of “Bath” is spice. Sometimes Miss Sitwell's research and thoroughness have led her into tedious detail, but most of the chap- ters are full of interesting information about the life of the period. Some of the best chap- ters are: “The Arrival of Beau Nash,” “The Rules of Bath,” “The Ghosts of a Long Sum- mer Day,” “The Balls at Bath,” “Games of Hazard,” “The Religious Revival in Bath,” “The Old Age of Beau Nash” and “The Theater in Bath.” And, of course, Miss Sitwell is one of the Sitwells, and knows how to write. " AS WE ARE: A MODERN REVUE. By E. F. Benson. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. E still remember the fat, hard pincushion Mr. Benson's mother made for her guest room when she was expecting a visit from Queen Victoria, the life story of which was told in “As We Were.” If we do not enjoy “As We Are” quite as much as we did “As We Were,” perhaps that signifies that we are which we are living. As we read, however, impression grows that Mr. Benson more pleasure in writing his reminiscences his early life than he has in lish life as he finds it today. which has come about since this side of “the chasm time in two.” . The first House.” furnishes contrast of the book by describing a week Hakluyt Park, the country estate bolical Lord and Lady Buryan, a previous to the war. Propriety—and dor and his wife, who had not intended going some miles to mass, but were told at what hour the motor would be at the door for them. A Russian grand duke coming for dinner Sunday evening asked for “a game of britch” afterward and was politely, but firmly, told by Lady Bur- yan: “I am so very sorry, sir. But we do not play cards on Sunday in my house.” Even before the war the receding Victorians were beginning to shake their heads at the oncoming moderns. In wartime England changes came with such astonishing velocity that Lord and Lady Buryan and their kind were left breathless. That their sons and the other young men at home from the front on leave should turn white and be “jumpy” when the warning of an air raid sounded—after all the real danger -they ‘had been through-Lord Buryan could not understand. He himself showed his contempt for this petty German terrorizing by continuing to read his evening paper, calmly, though there was a slight sweating in the palms of his hands. By the end of the war, the older generation had either settled into a condition of sad reminiscence of a good past, or had begun to adapt itself to a new and less satisfactory future. Disillusion about everything, the scrapping of traditional standards of morality, impatience with all re- straint, hectic pursuit of pleasure which in the savoring ucually turns out not to be pleas- ure, contributcd to making the generation which grew up during the war seem old while yet it was ycung. Another side of the post- war scene has becen a new turning to religion as a refuge and a solution, frequently experi- mentation with unaccustomed religious sys- tems, at times willing credence in charlatanry. “No one could grud= comfort to those who were bewildered by their bitter losses, but it is sick- ening to think frcm what trumpery cheating they often derived it.” Mr. Benson concludes his survey with the events of the Autumn of 1931 and the forma- tion of the national cealition government, an emergency achievement which he thoroughly approves. He says that “the policy which had so nearly wrecked England” was that of “pute ting the interesis of party before national needs.” He is not hopeless about England's future, even while recognizing the seriousness of the war’s aftermath. “For England during the wasted years that had elapsed since the war had become a second-rate power, and she was on the verge of insolvency. To think of her thus was very difficult, but thé sooner ‘we managed to do so, the better. The question was if, nationally, we could . . ., behave in such a way as to accept our humiliation without bit- terness, and to recover the respect of others and our own. It looks as if there is a chance.” Books Received GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY. By Same uel Nisenson and Alfred Parker, New York: Grosset & Dunlap LEGENDARY GERMANY: OBERAMMER- GAU AND BAYREUTH. By Regina Jais. New York: Lincoln MacVeach. The Dial Press. - BEN JONSON AND THE FIRST FOLIO. By W. Lansdown Goldsworthy. London: Cecil Palmer. TONIGHT WE IMPROVISE (Drama). By Luigi Pirandello. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc, I'VE GOT YOUR NUMBER, Second Series. By Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins. New York: The Century Co. PROHIBITION AGENT NO. 1. By Izzy Ein- stein. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. THE CHAMPION CROSS-WORD PUZZLE BOOK. By J. Van Cleft Cooper. Philadel- phia: John C. Winston Co. THE WAY OF BEAUTY (Poetry). By Mary S. Pitzgerald. Dallas, Tex.: The Kaleido- scope Publishers. £ FRANCES NEWMAN'S LETTERS. Edited by Hansell Baugh. New York: Horace Liv- eright, NINE WOMEN. By Halina Sokolnikova. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. FLAMING ARROW’S PEOPLE. By an Acoma,:. Indian, James Paytiamo. New York: Duf- field & Green. JUVENILE. CAPTAIN TRIPP. By Rupert Sargent Holland, New York: The Century Co. THE PRAIRIE PIRATES. By Earl Chapin May. New York: Duffield & Green. GOLD IS WHERE YOU FIND IT. By Aann Spence Warner. Indianapolis: The Bobbs- Merrill Co. THE PACK TRAIN STEAMBOAT. By Mar- garet Loring Thomas. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co. y KATRINKA GROWS UP. By Helen Eggles- ton Haskell. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. {3 H v =F _ of the so-called flat fish, varies greatly in size from the so-called chicken halibut, which weighs from 10 to 20 pounds up to the largest!» ' type, which weigh as much as 600 pounds The most usual type average around 50 pounds for the males and between 100 and 150 pounds for the females. 5 e They prefer cold water and usually lie deep, being caught at depths of 250 fathoms. When in pursuit of other fish, however, the halibut will often rise clear to the surface of the waler and sometimes ‘hit the pursued fish ‘with’' the i tail before seizing it and devouring it.