Evening star., 1937-03-06
.KIPLING> IN HIS OWN MIRROR
Master of Beauty Prose- Offers Life Story in Recognized Se
@ Which Only Golden Few Have Ever Equaled Somerset
Vaughan Appears at His Gayest

usually been treated with solemn por-
tentousness, and when the young man
inevitably falls in love Swith girl
of his own age. the plight of the older
woman is painted as sad, sad indeed.
Writers doing this kind of thing gen.
orally tell you that they are probing
their heroine's soul. or something
similar.
Somerset Vaughan performs no
such banal trick. He keeps close
enough to the old outline, but fills
it with sparkling new stun. His
heroine gets her jilting, but goes into
no mauve passage because of it. The
story is nothing but an exposition Of
he will to triumph, and triumph she
does. gayly, unscrupulously and very
thoroughly. In taking this line Mr..
Vaughan is doing what the writer's
referred to have claimed to do. That
is, he probes the heroine's soul. but
he also does what they for the most
part do not do-that is, he endows her
with soul to probe efore he UNDER
takes the operation. In other words,
he has written of a woman as an
individual and not as Woman with a
great gloomy symbolic capital w. 1t
Is about time somebody did 1t, the
dear Lord knows.
Well, and as has been said.
Theatre" is great fun. You must
have a copy.
THE OLIVE TREE. BY Aldous Hux-
ley. New York: Harper g. Bros.
A RATHER pedestrian collection of
essays this. considering that 1t
comes from the pen OF Aldous Huxley.
Good enough 1t would be If it ap-
peared under the name OF an un-
known writer, to arrest attention. But
it does not meet the expectations that
Mr.. Huxley'S name has come to
arouse. With the exception Of three
long pieces. Writers and Readers"
1T. H. Huxley as Literary Man."
and ID. H. Lawrence" it seems to be
little more than jottings from a writ
er's notebook. Mr.. Huxley's notebook.
of course, would be an interesting one.
But jottings, one fears, are jottingS
still. They are personal vices. of
which it is we'll known that every
man prefers his own to another's.
The three pieces named have been
published previously. Writers and
Readers" appeared. at least in part, in
Harper's Magazine last Summer. 1T.
H. Huxley as Literary Man" was de-
livered as the Huxley memorial lee
ture in 1882, and the Lawrence thing
appeared as the introduction to The
Letters Of D. H. Lawrence" None OF
them is particularly noteworthy.
They reveal their author as careful
gatherer of facts. rather than as
critic and thinker. They are, in fact,
dangerously near being dull No. they
are more than that. They are dull.
It may as well be written.
The rest of the collection is made
up of shorter pieces on a vide variety
of subjects-the art of Crebillon fils,
Christmas, school examinations.
snobbery, fetishism and the like They
are worth reading without being in
any way memorable. That is about as
much as one can say of them.
A SOUTHERN TREASURY OF LIFE
AND LITERATURE. By Stark
Young, New York: Charles Serb
ner'S Sons.
THE reviewer has never quite been
able to understand the reasoning
back OF the custom OF mixing geog-
raphy and literature, but nevertheless
she goes on record here as saying that,
if you can admit the habit, you will
find as satisfactory a collection of
works in this volume as has been put
out in a long time. Mr. Young. in his
preface, gives an eloquent and. one
must admit, a misunderstanding de-
fense of the geographical basis OF lit
erary criticism. pointing out that since
other sections of the country have
adopted it, the South may as well do
likewise to keep her credit.
He then goes on to say that the
writer's of New England were in their
day popular because they followed the
popular trend of initiating the English,
while contrarily in the South literary
men and women were developing. in
obscurity, truly American school Of
writing. With the eventual shift of
critical values, the works of these pio-
neers have come into the credit which
they deserve, while dust seems to be
settling more and more thickly over
Longfellow, Whittier and Bryant.
Mr.. Young has endeavored, in his
present anthology. to give a cross-sec-
ton of Southern letters, prose and
poetry, from the earliest times to the
present. One has to admit that while
the study value of his volume is con-
siderable, there is much in it that is
worth having on the grounds of merit
alone.
It is impossible here to list the writ
erS whose works are represented. They
begin with Cabeza de Vava G490-
l557, and end with such n1oderns as
James Branch Cabe,l and Henry
Mencken. They take in l20 names
and several collections of anonymous
ballads. To give a few, there are
works by Daniel Boone. Francis Scott
Key, George Washington, Thomas JEFF
ferson, Patrick Hen1y, David Crockett,
John James Audubon, Edgar Allan
Poe. jefferson Davis, Joel Chandler
Harris, Woodrow Wilson, Cora Harris,
Roark Bradford, John Peale Bishop.
Conrad Aiken, Alice Hogan Rice and
Mark Twain.
PORTRAIT OF MEXICO. BY Diego
Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe. New
York: Covici Friede.
THIS book purports to be a history
of Mexico as Mexico's history
has been interpreted by that artist Of
appalling genius, Diego Rivera. It
contains 249 reproductions Of Rivera's
work, taken from the frescoes of the
Education Building, the Agricultural
School, the Palace Of Cortez at Cuer-
navaca, murals of the National Pal.
ace and Health Buildings, the origi-
nal Hotel Reforma carnival paint
inps (theSe have recentlv been mutt.