Evening star., 1926-10-23
THE LIBRARY TABLE
By the BookIoreT.

Fashions change in literature as II
clothes. Standards Of critical Judg
ments are fundamentally altered o.
are profoundly modified with the laps
Of time. Books at one time considered
immoral have now become required
reading for high school girls Stnk
| ing examples Of the truth OF theS'
statements have been collected in tn.
book. Notorious Literary Attacks,
by Albert Mordell, who has edited th'
| volume and written an introductloi
to the Is curious and hostile article:
and reviews on great English anf
American authors and books OF the
later nineteenth century. The edltol
has deliberately avoided repr1nt1ng Gel
ebrated or notorious reviews already
available in the collected works of es
Sayists or in earlier similar collections
( but has brought together for edif1ca
| ton or warning mOrdant criticisms OF
HaZlitt, Leigh Hunt, Coler1dge, Shel
! ley, Byron, Carlyle. Dickens, Tenny
son, Swinburne, Rossetti, Charlotte
Stevenson, Hawthorne and Walt W hit
man.
In view of what present-day critics
| and readers accept as good literature
and good morals, it is curious to find
that an American bishop In 1851 slated
THE Scarlet Letter" as a work that
had already done not little to de-
grade our literature and to encourage
social licentiousneSs," and that
woman critic, writing in 1848 OF Jane
Eyre" in the Quarterly Review, pro-
ino N i
Christian composition" and said Of the
author, "Whoever it be. it is a person
who, with great mental powers, COM
bines a total ignorance of the habits
of society, a great coarseness OF taste
and a heatheniSh doctrine Of religion y
From internal evidence this woman
critic satisfied herself that the author
of ''Jene Eyre" could not be woman!
The English Saturday Review in 1858
predicted that fifty years hence our
grandchildren will wonder what their
ancestors could have meant by putting
Mr.. Dickens at the head of the novel
lists of the day." Twenty years later
the same review expressed an equally
unfavorable opinion Of Walt Whitman, /,
saying. Apart from his scandalous
eccentriclties, his writings are poor
stuff" When Carlyle's French Rev
olution" appeared in 1887, the Athe-
naeum described it as "three long vol
umes Of misplaced persiflage and flip
pant philosophy" The only
criticism Of a book by living writer
included in this collection is one by
Andrew Lang attacking Thomas
Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles." "
Though Lang criticized the book
severely, he confessed that in doing
so he was 'ins an insignificant minor
ity." One is glad to have rescued from
the files of the Pail Mall Magazine
w. f. Henley's very interesting and
very personal review of Graham Bal
four's Life Of Robert Louis Steven
son." In which he charged Balfour
with making Stevenson a "Seraph in
Chocolate. this barley-sugar eff1gy of
a real man."
The Kenworthys, that Illinois small
town family introduced by Margaret
Wilson in her novel, 1.-THE Ken
worthys." are again the persons of a
novel - her third THE Painted
Room" The family is now sadly de-
pleted. The brilliant, erratic boy, who
held our interest in 1.-THE Kenworthys, "
is dead, and his cousin Martha hardly
takes his place. 1t is Martha, how
ever, whom we are asked to follow
through the book, to New York, Chi
cago and other places, where her be-
havior worries her nice mother. Emily.
Emily, it will be remembered, was the
guardian angel of everybody in 1.-The
Kenworthys." Being Emily's daugh-
ter, Martha does not turn out so
badly, though things look black for a
time.
Il IL II
Memory often gives more poignant
Joy than experience, and the fear that
memory may fade sometimes mars
the happiest moments. William
Beebe Is especially sensitive to the
treasures which may be taken forth
and enjoyed from the storehouse of
memory, and in many of his books
refers to the necessity of filling the
storehouse well and guarding it's con-
tents carefully. He continually ad-
monishes his memory to retain some
unsual sight, sound or smell He
pauses at critical moments of jungle
experience and concentrates all his
senses in order to make a lasting i'm
preston on his brain. This storing of
new memories is evidently one of the
more personal detectives of all his
OF a strange, silvery sound which led
him to a luminous tree in the jungle
at night he says in Jungle Peace:
"As I left I remembered with graft
tude the silver wire of sound which
had guided me, and in a far corner of
my mind I stored a new memory, one
which I could draw upon at need in
distant times of pain, or of intoler-
ance, or perhaps in some lull of bat
tle-the thought of tree all aglow
with living flames (fireflies), in the
moonlight of the Convict Trail" OF
this same rare moonlight night in the
jungle he says: so, with the mist set
Ting down and furnishing the great
plaque Of silver, left the Jungle, glad
that I could be far away before the
first hint Of dawn came to mar the
magic. Thus in memory can always
keep the dawn away until 1 return. -
X X X x
Dual personality stories in psychol
ogy pale before Fanny Hurst's latest
heroine, Joan Herrick, alias Orchid
Sargasso. Joan Is born the child of
a rising New York lawyer but is
stolen from her devoted parents and
thenceforth becomes acquainted at
close quarters with the slums, under
the name of Orchid Sargasso, surely
far more colorful than the name as
signed her by her parents. The
name of the novel in which she car
r1es on her disjointed life is Name
quin" and it has been awarded a
$4,000 prize by the judges of Liberty,
as the best novel by an American
author written in 1925.
X
The paths by which success has
been reached are always being
searched for by youth. One of these
paths Is traced from it's beginning by
Harvey S. Firestone In his book "Men
and Rubber" Harvey Firestone COM
menced his business career 80 years
ago hY selling cough strnnr ana