The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-07-12
WHAT A MAN WANTS

By Charles Marriott. The Bobbs Merrill
 Co, publishers, Indianapolis.
 MT. Marriott has here written ex-
 traordinarily clever. extraordinarily sub
 tie novel of ideas A really permanent
 importance can be claimed for it; and
 this on account of the fundamental na-
 ture of the idea Mir. Marriott Is getting
 at He has specialized 1t, after his
 habit of doing things-narrowed 1t
 dcwn to the problems now confronting
 thcug&tfu painters and architects-hut it is bigger idea than that and his
 thoughts about it will be seen to be ap-
 picable 10 other and related problems which penetrate to the core of tine so-
 clal revolution which is now impending
 all over the western world. What is | said in that last clause may well seem like exaggeration-bus that is because
 in America the time has not yet come for us to feel the force of this impend- ing revolution to the same degree that 1 they are now feeling 1t in France and Germany and Englani-even in Spain
 and Italy-and obviously in Portugal But this book has the stuff Of perma- hence stamped on every page.
 sOf the extreme eleverness of this book there can b no doubt, nor can there be l any serious question of the dpth and width of tn authors knowledge and his ! observation. He has looked, apparently, I at life from many standpoints and has considered it from many angles at each | point from which he has viewed it; but more than all this, ne has felt, and he
 continues to be sensitive to all the things that aone cannot see or reason out but ! tfat one knows even more completely ! and surely by means of feeling.
 The idea of the book is that democ- | a a acf fo tD degree that any art of whatever form, that does not express the feel 1ngs of the people is futile. foolish and will soon be dead Long ago we passed from the old romanticism that made art thing apart from life to the | realism that depicts things as we see them. Behind and above this is now | to be expressed the realism that de Dicts things as the people feel them. In | tother words. the demand now is not | that things should be painted merely as | they are; but that they should be paint | ted they seem to the average mortal | who is moved by them. whose life is l inevitably affected by them. This de- | niand, or rather this necessity of dem- | ocracy affects not only art but re ligion. the relation of employer and l employe, of fathers and children, of | married men and women, of lovers; in | short, of the whole world. Along many | of these lines the author has shown 1 V hat he has in mind. But there Is an ! interesting study of woman under such | conditions. The refined, cultivated, in . | felligent woman remains a conserva tive; she can not understand what her | lover, the artist, Is trying to do and | 1t Is made tolerably apparent that if l she could understand she would dis | approve. The woman who does under | stand is one who has experienced sui | fering in her married life, who has | learned the frailty of man and who has | learned, through the things she en- dured, to sympathize. They are of ut | terly different types, these two women. | They are both clever, and yet one of them can not at all see the signifi- canoe of the great social movement of her time. and the other can do so not by force of intellect hut my means of personal experience. Then. too, they both pass by the hero of the story, who is a fine strong man, and prefer a selfish pretentious poseur. These two women are the most interesting char acters in the book. Like many of Henry James novels the author has what may be called a motif which re CUTS many times and finally becomes almost label. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A HAPPY
 WOMAN Anonymous" Moffat, Yard & Co.,, pub
 fishers, New York.
 somehow there IS always a keen fas- | cination about a book that is published "anonymously,' especially if it happends to be as interesting and attractive as ''The Autobiography of Happy Woman"
 The publishers are pledged not to re- | veal the identity of the author of this 1 remarkable book. For reasons which will l be obvious to any reader the author has made this a condition of publication But it is a fact that the author is a woman well known writer and worker and ] the book is the story of her life
 It Is the most vital and interesting bolzk l of the year. A life story. not a love story. The straightforward history of woman's life, full of sympathy and in- l spiraton.
 It is not wir cry for the living | wage" it has nothing to do with un- l healthy sex problems; 1t is not an argu- | ment for or against woman suffrage or femininsm-but it is the actual relation of one womans successes and failures, with a sane deduction for other women.
 NEW GUIDES TO OLD MASTERS" By John C. Van Dyke. In Twelve
 Volumes, Each with Frontispiece. Charles Scribers Sons, Publishers, New
 York.
 No one living, it is probable, knows the European picture galleries as Professor Wan Dyke does. He has studied them