Evening star., 1937-12-05

IIlTOuSlOuG UIle DOOk can Oe DelleVeQ
and accepted by the reader. The pas
sionate worship which Mile. Curie
shows on almost every one of her
pages does not ring merely as the
feeling of a daughter for famous
parent under whose shadow she has
lived, but instead seems to he the
honest, impersonal emotion of one
who happened to be In a position to
know a great human being intimately.
The story is one of those awe-in-
spring narratives which come at rare,
rare intervals in the history of human
behavior. 1t is the story of a mind
of profound genius functioning, un-
warped and undisturbed, in its proper
sphere, while the howl and clamor of
our semi i-barbarous age went on
around it. That Nine. Curie discov-
cred radium is likely to seem beside
the point to the reader who goes
through this volume The great thing
is that she lived. Had she been a
surgeon, violinist or great religious
leader her contribution to the good
of the world would have been as won
derful. Her life was the marvel, not
its product.
That it was life Of serenely burn
ing beauty lies implicit in her char
acter. She spent her childhood in her
native Poland, feeling intensely the
ardent suppressed nationalism of her
conquered race, studying the history
OF her country Surreptitiously, know
ing that to be discovered speaking
Polish was a severely punishable Of
fense against the Tsars government:
yet she was not warped by any of this
repression. She spent her youth in
poverty, teaching in the homes of the
gentry. who made it plain to her that
she was not considered an equal; the
son of one of her employers wished to
marry her, but was forbidden to make
an alliance with governess. Yet that
Illustration of young love did not en-
bitter her. She spent her middle
20s studying in EXTREMIST poverty at
the Sorbonne. She lived at that time,
we are told, on 3 francs a days, once
fainting from starvation. Yet this
privation in no way daunted her and
she finished her courses always with
the first honors given to the class.
When she finally was awarded a
scholarship she repaid the loan with
the first money which she earned, al
though it had not been stipulat ted that
the money advanced her should ever
be returned.
In those years of emotional tension
and material want. those years of
youth, which are apt to be puzzling
even in fortunate circumstances, her
genius functioned calmly and without
confusion. 1t is plain, indeed, from
this narrative, that she herself knew
that an extraordinary force abode in
her and she allowed nothing to slacken
the movement of that spirit. Of her
days of desperate privation as a stu
dent her daughter says:
She was too fond of her tranquility
to share her lodging with a friend or
two (although this would have les
sened the expense). She was too
haunted by work to bother about her
own comfort. = y .
by deliberate intention she had
suppressed diversions from her sched-
ule, as we'll as friendly meetings and
contact with human beings. In the
same way she decided that material
life had no Importance; that it did
not exist. And, fortified by this prin-
ciple, she made for herself a Spartan
existence, strange and inhuman"
The happiness which lay within her
can be measured by the little which
was needed from without.
The discovery of radium comes fair
ly early in the narrative and that great
achievement naturally determined the
course of Nine. Curie's future work.
Her efforts to get materials to carry
on her research, her labors during
the war when she assumed charge of
the equipping of Pathological cars for
treatment of the wounded and per-
sonally went up to the fighting lines
and supervised the using of the deli
cate apparatus, her trip to America
made as a gesture of thanks to the
American women who bought her her
needed gram of radium; her subse-
quent labors in her laboratory-all
her life, after that momentous dis
covery in 1898 was determined by her
will to follow that discovery up. Yet
how simply did she take the dis
covery itself! It is entered in her
note book between passage recording
that her baby had Is teeth and one
describing how to make gooseberry
jelly!
The story of this supremely natural,
supremely strange life is told very
artlessly here; Mile. Curie has used
no particular technique and has not
hesitated to pour her own love into
her writing whenever she sees occa-
sion. But the story itself bears any
telling. 1t could not, for that matter,
be told we'll enough.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. BY John
Bakeless. New York: William
Morrow g. Co.
IN THIS book are gathered up and
placed in chronological order the
proved facts which recent research
has brought forward concerning the
career of the great Elizabethan. AS
Mr.. Bakeless says, until 1925, when
the facts of Marlowes death were
discovered, little was known of the
stormy poet beyond the names of his
works, and much was falsely said of
him that was accepted as fact. In
recent years. however, there have been
important discoveries made about his
life; they have been the work of diff
ferent researchers, and have been
separately published, Mr.. Bakeless
performs the great service here of
gathering these discoveries together
and putting them. augmented by find
ings of his own, into a single volume.
The amount of study, the hours of
poring over ancient papers scribbled
in the difficult Elizabethan handwrit-
ing which have gone to produce the
work must appall any sympathetic
reader. Yet, when all is said and
done, not more than a dozen or so
facts about the poet are assembled.
He attended Kings School in Can