T Colored chain gang chansons collected at Chapel Hill HE difference between the white "bad man" and the black variety is as marked as the difference in their color. The black bad man is much more given to words than deeds. The wicked white is just the reverse; he is a person of few words. The Negro likes to measure "meanness." One of the best examples in point is that of the two members of a dark regiment who were disputing in France during the World War: "Look out, niggah. Look out what you're a-doin'. Out whar I come frum le folks calls me 'Tiger Bill.'" "Huh!" said the other. "Out whar I come frum dey'd call you 'Sweet William.'" This is but a prelude to mention of an interesting collection of Negro "Worka-Day Songs," collected by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, of the University of North Carolina, and published by the University Press at Chapel Hill. This is the third valuable volume of Negro originals so issued by the University. It may grieve the good to note that a large share of the lyrics was gathered in construction camps and among the chain gangs. North Carolina uses Negro convicts for outdoor service on the highways. There is a good deal of this sort of work to be done, and in time of need a Negro does not have to be very bad to acquire a place in one of the "gangs." Simple laziness has often been construed as vagrancy, to be translated into diligence on the hard highway. Thus a membership in a chain gang need not imply great culpability of any sort beyond being black. The shame of it does not seem to sink in deeply, as these songs show, even though— . . . eyes wuz red en' his gums wus blue, 'Cause he was a nigger right through and through. Here is the scenario for twenty-six verses of "Bad Man Lazarus:" Oh, bad man Lazarus Oh, bad man Lazarus He broke in de commissary, The outcome of this was that the sheriff spied Po' Lazarus, "way between Bald Mountain." Then: They shot Po' Lazarus, By DON C. SEITZ The chanteys vary in treating the same subject. "Lazarus" is trotted out in a great variety of ventures. So is the "Travelin' Man," whose character was certainly suspicious: Now I jus' wanna tell you about travelin' man His home was in Tennessee; From this there emanates a regular Odyssey. Though the tone is generally one of abnegation, as befalls a "downtrodden" race, now and then a note of triumph sounds: Bolin Jones wus Here is further descriptive: I steal dat corn An' sells it back again! "When He Grin” has a merry note: His nose wus long an' p'inted, The chain gang songs are minor-keyed and melancholy. For example: De rabbits in de briar patch, Dig in de road band, Dig in de ditch, Perfectly proper query is this: What's a fellah gonnah do Some there will be to consider this a truthful statement: If I can git to Georgia line, All I gits to eat- Better'n I has at home. On the other hand, a constructioncamp follower avers: I don't want no corn bread, black molasses, Supper time, O my Lawd, supper time. Don't you give me corn bread, black molasses, Supper time, O Lawd, my supper time. Cracking stone by hand evokes this plaint: This ol' hammer, hammer, Mus' be loaded; This ol' hammer, hammer, Mus' be loaded. Do bear down, Do bear down! The economic side of colored life rings out in this madrigal: Niggers plant de cotton, Niggers pick it out, White man pockets money, Nigger does without. The "hands" part is succinctly described thus: Plenty to eat, Place to sleep, All night to stray about; But nothin' fer a feller, Lawd, nothin' fer A feller to keep. Now and then there are lines on the female lot: Missus in de big house, Mammy in de yard, Missus holdin' her white hands, The African desire for fine funerals is voiced in this quatrain: Dig-a my grave wid a silver spade, The careful compilers have gathered together over 250 examples of Negro chants, many of them doggerel and repetitions, but carrying through all a rude minstrelsy that shows a keen consciousness of what is going on and the black man's part in it, whether he be "good" or "bad." T Edited by EDMUND PEARSON How to Hunt With the Camera HE title of this book' suggests photographs of wild animals, and the frontispiece, a fine portrait of a Rocky Mountain goat, carries on the suggestion. As a matter of fact, it is a general and popular work on photography, made attractive by its great variety of illustrations-beautiful, odd, or amusing. The photographic hunters whose work is reproduced have, like Martin Johnson, hunted wild animals in Africa; like Dr. Ditmars, they have pictured serpents nearer home; like Mr. Baynes, they have snapped the mild chickadee; and like Mr. Chapman, they have performed tricks with cameras and unconscious birds. Woodchucks have sat up and looked pretty; 'possums have played their famous game; squirrels and bears have taken their own beautiful selves by flash-light; deer have posed on the banks of lily ponds; and grasshoppers, by coming close to the lens, have looked as fierce and as much like President Hindenburg as possible. Weasels are taken eating cheese sandwiches, and hippos having a shower bath. Zebras come down to the water-hole to drink; garter snakes twist themselves into the letter S, and cheetahs obligingly turn their heads over their shoulders to 1 How to Hunt With the Camera. By William Nesbit. With many Illustrations. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York. $10. FLIGHT. Fiction By Walter White. A. A. Knopf, New Several race-question novels have lately appeared. Mr. White's story is less emotional than the others, although it does give a nerve-worrying account of the race riots in Atlanta. Mimi is the daughter of a New Orleans Creole who has in his veins the blood of a San Domingo Negro who was a leader in the introduction of sugarmaking in America. He marries for second wife the mulatto daughter of a prosperous colored man, moves to Atlanta, and there first feels the pinch of race contempt. The book is particularly graphic in showing the social jealousies and prejudices between different groups of colored people. Mimi's flight is to the North, away from her own people, but she returns, convinced that her place is with them. look into the camera, in exactly the man- From "How to Hunt With the Camera" are examples of landscape photography and of portraiture; of pictures of lightning flashes; and of quiet scenes in a snow-covered landscape by moonlight. There is an impressive picture of the solar eclipse of 1925 as it looked in New York, and a number of photographic jests, like the one reproduced here. The text includes chapters on these subjects, and also on the most successful practitioners of nature photography, with technical chapters on cameras and lenses. Evidence Difficult to Combat in Court cluding "lips as pink as a pigeon's feet." After much male pursuit, evil and other- PRODIGALS OF MONTE CARLO. By E. Phillips As part of an experiment, this millionaire sportsman takes two strange impoverished young people from London to his villa at Monte Carlo for a two months' holiday, tout compris. More or less involved with a Russian princess, and carrying the knowledge of a tragic secret, Wendever falls slowly but surely in love with Violet, his beautiful young protegée. There follow all the complications possible in a middleaged bachelor's life. Adventures for everybody! Several times murder is almost done. But with a final eye to the movies, the author brings villainy to account, and virtue gets its due. Art WHY WE LOOK AT PICTURES. By Carl H. P. Thurston. Dodd Mead & Co., New York. $4. The author does not answer this astounding question, but he does give a very comprehensive discussion of taste in art. It is his theory that before a person can appreciate a picture he must know at least as much of how pictures are painted as the average football or fight fan knows about those two sports. It sounds reasonable, but in supplying the information he has made a book that many readers will find indigestible, that can only be taken in small Turn $2,000 into $20,000 in ten years at a cost of less than $99 a month WITH an average semi-annual investment of $588.86 ($98.14 a month) you can build an investment of $2,000 up to $20,000 in 10 years in Adair Guaranteed-Insurable 62% Bonds Only by investing in Adair Bonds can you obtain the liberal yield of 6%, secured by (1) conservative loans on income-producing city properties; (2) the unconditional guarantee of the house of issue, with capital, surplus and profits of $2,500,000; and (3) the right to insure your holdings against loss at any time on application to an independent surety company, with resources over $27,000,000. The coupon will bring you an infor mative illustrated guide to the safe and profitable investment of your funds. 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This is no book to be read in the quiet "One cannot dream over his pages," says Mr. de Casseres of Leconte de Lisle, and Ocit is no less true of the author's own. casionally his explosive method justifies itself, as in the essay on "Baudelaire: Ironic Dante," but in the main the essays are absurd but exciting, resembling some unholy mixture of nitro-glycerine and adrenalin, or eisel and crocodile. THE BEST LETTERS OF THOMAS JEFFER- man. far from being mutually repellent particles. The familiar cycle of "romanticism to realism to naturalism" is another binding element. There is nevertheless a definitely felt lack of complete continuity in the book as a whole. Romanticism leads off with a chapter on "A Renaissance Vision: Goethe's Italy," which is also a summary of practically everybody's pronouncements on Italy, and is continued by "A Romantic View of Art: German Predecessors of Ruskin." Fiction, as practiced by Keller and Meyer, next presents realism and neo-romanticism; Kleist, Hebbel, Grillparzer, and other dramatists illustrate naturalism. The terminal essay compares Hauptmann and his treatment of the "noble proletarian" with Tolstoy and Zola. There are a formidable bibliography and an index. History and Politics ITALY UNDER MUSSOLINI. By William Bolitho. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2. You can have it about Fascist Italy any way you want it, just as you can have it about Soviet Russia. All depends on who tells the tale. Mr. Bolitho, who now publishes in book form the articles printed in the New York "World" last December, finds the Fascist régime an intolerable tyranny. There is no freedom, every tenth man and woman is a spy, every known opponent of the régime is in constant danger, wages are low, the cost of living is relatively high, and taxes are levied and decrees promulgated in the sole interest of the possessing classes. "Italy is efficiently quiet," he admits, but the statement is evidently intended to mean much the same thing as the famous despatch that "order reigns in Warsaw." at The sesquicentennial of the Declaration Essays and Criticism AS I LIKE IT. By William Lyon Phelps. Third So many books to read, so many plays FROM GOETHE TO HAUPTMANN: Studies in a It happens not infrequently that a title In writing to the above advertiser please mention The Pre The future is uncertain. Mussolini is his the peak of power and can make no further inroads upon the kingly prerogative unless by a successful war. Evidently the author believes that war is inevitable and that the only possible nation for Italy to war against is Turkey. sumably an unsuccessful war would finish the dictator, while the consequences of a successful one are difficult to predict. To most readers it is likely that the picture presented will seem grotesquely overdrawn. Fascism is the negation of every political and social principle accepted in America; but one may reject it in toto and still decline to believe in the accuracy of Mr. Bolitho's description. There are volumes of contrary testimony by observers from democratic countries, and there are also the inherent defects of the account itself. It is pitched on too extravagant a note. THE STORY OF THE LITTLE BIG HORN: Cus- Outlook tail is omitted-but in the sense that it is a fully rounded account of the battle, written in the light of all the vast amount of material that has accumulated. It is, moreover, beautifully printed and illustrated. THE FUGGER NEWS-LETTERS, 1568-1605. Second Series. Edited by Victor von Klarwill. Translated by L. S. R. Byrne, Late Modern Language Master at Eton College. With 46 Illustrations. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. Among the richest treasures of the Vienna State Library are the collection of Philip Edward Fugger, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and citizen of Augsburg, who died in 1618, and the even more valuable Fugger News-Letters, which are contemporary reports of political and commercial events between 1568 and 1605 sent to him by the Count's agents from Europe. For generations the Fugger family were merchant princes who were also financiers, money-lenders to popes and kings, exploiters of mines and manufactories. Consequently they were as vitally interested in the turn of the political wheel as any international banker of to-day. This selection comprises only items especially referring to Queen Elizabeth and matters. relating to England, a small fraction of the entire mass which yet fills 350 pages. Few of the reports in this series emanate from London, a great many from Antwerp, Cologne, Prague, Middelburg, Venice, Rome, and even Constantinople. The general impression is of unceasing warfare and of bitter commercial competition, in which Elizabeth appears as the sturdy protagonist of British trade expansion. Her statecraft and dominance of English policy are tacitly implied by these correspondents, whose sincerity is the more to be believed because they are frequently hostile witnesses. Whaling PURSUING THE WHALE: A QUARTER-CENTURY OF WHALING IN THE ARCTIC. By John A. Cook. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $4. When Melville wrote his epic of Moby Dick, New Bedford, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Provincetown, Sag Harbor, were sending whaling fleets into the seven seas and the United States was the greatest maritime nation. The first chop of deepsea sailors were the Yankee whale men, who thought nothing of three-year cruises in the uncharted Pacific, venturing even into the Arctic Circle. The fifties saw a decline, or rather, a deflection of the pioneer spirit which propelled commercial enterprise and missionaries into the Orient and opened up Japan to Western civilization. Young men discovered a continent at home-gold in California, rich farm lands in the West. The Civil War dealt the coup de grâce to our commercial supremacy, but the price of oil and whalebone for a generation to come made whaling a profitable venture. When Captain John Cook, a Cape man of Provincetown, descendant of a long line of seafarers, embarked on his first cruise, the surrender at Appomattox was three years past. From this youthful début (he was eleven) until 1916 he was almost continuously at sea. Written in the simple, direct manner of one whose life has been a constant struggle with the elements, this book records the ways of the last of the whalers, but chiefly of those who sought bowheads in the frigid waters of Bering Sea, Point Barrow, and the Mackenzie River region. Once, off the West African coast, out of a sperm whale he took a hundred and fifty pounds of ambergrisa rich haul. The great interest of the narrative is in the way in which men deprived of most of the tools of civilization are able to cope with the implacable forces of nature. Kipling did not tell the whole story of life north of 53°. At Herschel Island, in the Arctic, where the whaling fleet wintered, there were natural deaths, a child was born, the crews and officers played baseball. They gave theatrical perform STAMMERING If the stammerer can talk with ease when alone, and most of them can, but staminers in the presence of others, it must be that in the presence of others he does something that interferes; and if we know what it is that interferes, and the stammerer be taught how to avoid that, it cannot but be that he is getting rid of the thing that makes him stammer. That's the philosophy of our method of cure. Let us tell you about it. 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The booklet also contains several interesting tables which show the results you can accomplish by systematic investment. For copies of these booklets, send your name and address on the form below. THE F. H. SMITH CO. Founded 1873 Smith Building, Washington, D.C. 582 Fifth Avenue, New York Boston Philadelphia Albany NO LOSS TO ANY INVESTOR IN 53 YEARS Name Address. A STUDENT IN SICILY. By Mrs. Nevill Jackson. ON THE MANDARIN ROAD. By Roland Dorgelès. The Century Company, New York. $3. Roland Dorgelès is more interested in the living present of the peoples of Indo-China than in their thousand-year-old past. Intoxicated by the splendor of the twelfthcentury Brahmanic temple at Angkor Wat or the faded beauty of cities such as Hué, his interest is keener in the active dazzling city of Cholon or in the lives of some primitive race like the Mnongs, who pray to their gods for protection from sickness and work. The book is written in a speculative vein of philosophical humor, and from a viewpoint typically French. A village where the inhabitants are "washing rice, clothes, buffaloes, everything that is washable in the community pond;" the curious ceremony at the start of an elephant hunt; the antics of a native first-night movie audience at Ban Methuot-these things are in amusing contrast to the pitiful spectacle of the leper colony at Kienluang, the lonely home of some pioneer colonial rubber planter, and the wistful pictures of little painted girls singing for piasters. Equally fascinating are the author's descriptions and anecdotes of this little-known country, where the era of the steam-engine is fast superseding that of the palanquin. HOMES OF FAMOUS AMERICANS. By Chesla C. Sherlock. Vol. I. The Meredith Publications, Des Moines, Iowa. A firm believer in the influence of environment on our lives, Mr. Sherlock has been confirmed in his opinion by his visits to the homes of great men. The houses in which they lived accurately expressed their characters. Certainly such dignified, four-square houses as Elmwood and Craigie House do no injustice to the memory of Lowell and Longfellow; Monticello was Jefferson's own creation; and no one should be surprised to learn that of the six or seven people claiming title to Benedict Arnold's somewhat rococo Philadelphia mansion, Mount Pleasant, every one has come to an untimely end. equally revealing erections are Grant's Hardscrabble, and Beauvoir, the home of Jefferson Davis. Other General Evidently not all the good-looking books are manufactured east of the Hudson. The binding of this book is a trifle unfortunate, but the interior is most attractive. The text does well what it sets out to do, none the worse for an unobtrusive strain of didacticism. $3. Ten years have passed since the reviewer dropped his "Angell and Lickley." Since then waves of Trotter, Coué, Freud, Ber The Outlook for The Hotel and Travel Bureau is at the service of every Outlook reader; it is a clearing-house of travel information. Here are kept constantly on hand the latest and most authoritative data on railroad and steamship rates, hotel facilities, resort advantages—everything that is needed to assure the success of your trip. By mail and by personal consultation the experts In writing to the above advertiser please mention The Outlook |