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annes

BES. F.&. PAT.OFF.

THERE is just pride in owning a Tavannes Watch

because it is known and sold all over the world.
Tavannes leadership in watch design and crafts-
manship is the result of several generations of tech-
nical experts equipped with the finest and most up-
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Only Tavannes has succeeded in producing watches from
parts made with such accuracy and uniformity that they are
completely interchangeable without the inexact hand-fitting
still required in other makes.

This extraordinary accuracy plus the beautiful and sturdy
cases make every Tavannes good for a lifetime.

What a satisfaction to know that if through an accident your Tavannes needs repairing, any good watchmaker, in North America, Europe, China, Asia, Africa or South America, can easily and quickly make repairs.

"One of the few great watches of the World"

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tice them from the ground. Broad values up here catch your eye-broad streets of unpretentious shaded houses homing quiet citizenship; Washburn College and Bethany School spread out broodingly in their groves; the wide acres planted with visible signs of kind thoughts by the National Benefit Association on the city's edge. Topeka the unstandardized, honest-to-goodness Kansas part of Topeka-still thinks too freely to estimate its eventual prospering in terms of vertical building materials. Topeka's importance to itself does not yet consist in beehive offices and lofts piled on top of one another in gratuitous congestion.

Among the unpretentious roofs down there under the shadow of the Santa Fé may be descried the top of the State Historical Society of Kansas, the Memorial Hall built by money from the settlement of Civil War claims, where you may learn, if you do not already know, the National import of Kansas. The custodian of the archives and presiding genius of the place himself embodies the less obvious spirit of Topeka, the spirit that comes up now with the fragrant heat of the fertile earth to the sixthsense registration of personality. Sitting with him there, you glimpse the great

The State Capitol, Topeka, Kansas

kindness of Kansas. In his leisure moments he has fashioned a musical instrument that you had always held in ment that you had always held in thought sacred to Kubla Khan:

She was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.

A dulcimer of Topeka wood and strings making sounds as though a harp and zither had combined. Echoes of the dulcimer strings come back faintly now as an undertinkle to the theme of the elderly historian of Kansas in five vol

umes.

"No American," says he, "can rightly understand the history of his country until he has some exact knowledge of the history of this State. The struggle for the organization of this Territory caused the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, led to the overthrow of slavery, and precipitated the Civil War. In this soil grew the roots of the Republican Party."

Topeka stands for all that. No region in the Union suffers more from the reputation of virtue and overweening righteousness, but from these counties righteousness, but from these counties came the draft of the most brilliant fighting division of the Argonne cam

paign. Topeka stands for that latent quality of fiber. Prohibition was not imposed upon this people. It grew up out of the soil with its breadstuffs, out of the acres of red Russian wheat brought over by the home-seeking Mennonites with whom the Santa Fé colonized its iron trail, out of the more sporadic crop of churches that spire and tower the land below, out of the average longing for well-being.

Thoughts such as these ascend like emanations from Topeka down below while the big machine wheels slowly round the fringe of Shawnee County, bound homing back to its well-marked landingfield. From the fields of the Old Dominion you may see, on just such hot middays, big buzzards wheel their planing flight with never the flap of a wing as they reconnoiter down on an older terrain of the same Americanism. Speaking of his own State, Governor Ben S. Paulen said, "Kansas is one big family." From the air or from the ground, Topeka's main impression on a sojourner is that of a family town with all that characterization implies of squabbles and recriminations, of domesticated thoughts and habits, of substantial unworried worth, of folded wings.

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L

The Book Table

Edited by EDMUND PEARSON

Four New Novels

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derivations, the novel stands on its own
feet, and Miss Roberts may safely be
ranged with her sister workers in the
Southern field, especially Miss Glasgow
and Miss Kelley, as a force to be reck-
oned with in her ability to infuse the
chronicle of drab lives with some ele-
ments of beauty and strangeness.

Reviews by EARLE F. WALBRIDGE EAVING the purlieus of Greenwich Village and Gramercy Park, and the variety halls of Times Square, Mr. Van Vechten's Comédie Humaine of Manhattan now reaches out to include the region north of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, where dwell all sorts and conditions and all shades and colors of Negroes. "Nigger Heaven!"" Byron moaned. "Nigger Heaven! That's what Harlem is. We sit in our places in the gallery of this New York theater and watch the white world sitting down below in the good seats in the orchestra. Occasionally they turn their faces up towards us, their hard, cruel faces, to laugh or sneer, but they never beckon."

When "Nigger Heaven" was in the writing there was a rumor that it was to extend to two volumes. It seems a pity that Mr. Van Vechten did not stick to his original intention, for he has material and to spare. It frequently spills over into the tragedy of an educated Negro, which constitutes the plot of the novel. Not that there is any lack of highly spiced entertainment between its appros priately high-brown covers, especially near the end of the book, where scenes in Negro cabarets alternate with the protracted orgy of a colored Tannhäuser inside the Venusberg. A glossary is a desirable adjunct to all the Van Vechten fiction. This time he has provided one; usually adequate, but sometimes unfairly defining one word in terms of another,

and vice versa.

One might surmise, without being told by the publishers, that years of painstaking effort went into this first novel by Miss Roberts. The sharp authenticity of her detail and of the conversation and

bearing of her Kentucky mountain people show that she has lived close to her models. The "stream of consciousness" method, sometimes pushed to lengths of monotonous repetition, and the occasional introduction of a nauseous phrase or blunt monosyllable are evidences that she has studied the approved literary gods of the day.

Except for these not too important

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Hot afternoons have been in Montana, a "Nation" prize poet once assured us. On such an afternoon in New Mexico it was that Ruth Bruck, an oversexed and slightly shop-worn young woman, set herself seriously to the task of capturing a husband. Hampered by a Philistine family, the unwelcome recrudescence of her own soiled reputation, and the shyness of the "nice boy" who was the object of her pursuit, she was nevertheless successful in the end. Mr. Fergusson's methods are fresh in more senses than one. Tingle from his audacities though you may, it is impossible not to admire his sure control of the situation as it flickers from Ruth's present to past and back, until it culminates in the gorgeous irony of the dénouement.

"Rasmine sat close to the stove at a

tiny square table with a tallow dip on it,
carding or spinning; Mary had a book,
and Martha played, if she had nothing
useful to do. Over by the window sat
Father smoking, with Jens Thresher
chewing and spitting till there was a
regular pond in front of him, and Ras-
mine would say he was a pig or a baby
that couldn't keep itself clean, which
made Martha and Mary laugh. Their
brother and the hired lad lay on a bench
snoring.""

This idyllic picture seemed so typical
of the entire Scandinavian school of

fiction, or at least so much of it as has
found its way into English translation,
that a nervous effort was required before
one could push ahead with equanimity
into the story of the spiritual progress of
the sisters. Fortunately, the novel gains
in adult quality as the sisters increase in
age, and the upshot of the matter is a
tale of grave beauty, with enough variety
in the other characters to make up for

3 Hot Saturday. By Harvey Fergusson.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York. $2.50.

'Martha and Mary. By J. Anker Larsen. Translated from the Danish by Arthur G. Chater. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. $2.50.

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the cut-and-dried development of Martha and Mary, who remain true throughout to their Biblical prototypes.

Other Fiction

By Leonard Cline. The Viking

a

LISTEN, MOON! Press. $2. "However motley-minded a man may act, if he finds treasure he is forgiven, even commended." This may also be applied to books. "Listen, motleyMoon!" is minded book. The treasure it uncovers is slight, but, as the parrot said, "What there is, is good." Dr. Higbie Chaffinch, Latin professor at Johns Hopkins University and recently widowed, is a lovable character. In his loneliness and eagerness for a gayer contact with life, he is a nucleus around which gather an amusing company: Ruth Pudley, hoyden daughter of the local minister; Hiltonshurley Moggs, founder of the "Society for the Purveying of Useless Things to Worthy People;" Amy Potter, itinerant housekeeper; and John Kendrick, This queer a young newspaper reporter. crew foregather at the home of Higbie They have a Chaffinch. hand-to-hand fight with the Ku Klux Klan and kidnap the main Kleagle, the Rev. Mr. Cyril Pudley. Abetted by John Kendrick, for purposes of his own, the Chaffinch crowd hire a schooner and a trunk of pirate costumes, hoist the Jolly Roger, and go pirating down the Chesapeake Bay. The rest is a pure adventure in humor. What happened on that voyage must have caused the moon to stop and look as well as listen.

THE BIG HOUSE. By Mildred Wasson. Houghton Miffin Company, Boston. $2.

The old Big House is a bone of contention between the younger members of the their grandfather's Price family after death, and naturally the girl to whom it is left has family trouble as well as love complexities. The novel has moderate interest and is altogether free from absurdities or offensiveness, but it will never set novel readers' hearts to beating fast with excitement.

CYNTHIA CODENTRY. By Ernest Pascal. Bren$2. tano's, New York.

The unlovely heroine of this novel seems to have believed that the world was created and run for her especial benefit, and that she might therefore do as she pleased in it. She was surprised to find that the going was not always smooth, but, being gifted with much-needed callousness and with a rare lightness of mind, she emerged time after time from the worst possible scenes, to ride along again on the surface of life like a drop of oil on troubled waters. She is a crude and dreadful person, for whom the reader has scant sympathy.

And it is a relief to state quite honestly that, in spite of the blurb on the jacket, Cynthia Codentry cannot in any sense be She called "the modern American girl." appears to be pure fiction, and rather Hers is a pathspiteful fiction at that. ological case, and a perusal of the case record will show up by contrast the consoling normalcy of almost any real young woman of the present day.

AGAINST THE GRAIN. (À Rebours). By Karl Joris Huysmans. Groves & Michaux, Paris. "Against the Grain" (A Rebours) is no less curious to-day than it was when Oscar Wilde said, "It was the strangest book he had ever read." It is an experiment in decadence, an adventure in exoticism, by a man with subtle imagination and wide knowledge of the decadent writers, Latin and monastic, of the early ages. The book is excellently translated (by a translator who modestly withholds his name), with a preface by the author written twenty years after the book. It is an elaborate example

of the jeweled style of the French school of Symbolists.

A novel without a plot, it is a psychological study of Des Esseintes, a young Parisian. Bored with contemporary society, and worn from excesses, he seeks in seclusion to interest himself in an artificial world of the senses. The bizarre house he decorates, with a living turtle for a pet, the shell of which is inlaid with jewels in an Oriental flower design; the monstrous flowers; the insinuating perfumes with which he surrounds himself; and the violet-colored "Pearls of the Pyrenees" bonbons he nibbles to invoke memories of past loves, are descriptive models for many books of today. Mr. Van Vechten's clever "Peter Whiffle" owes a tremendous debt to this book.

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George H. Doran Company, New York.

The

$2.50.

At the age of twenty-five Beverley Nichols seems to have much to look back on, and his glances are impudent and delightful. He is a person full of zest and humor, on whom very little of life seems to be lost. He has evidently disarmed completely his famous acquaintances and friends. Many of them were with him in their off moments: Chesterton, the Queen of Greece, Noel Coward, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Winston Churchill, Elinor Glyn, Yeats, Michael Arlen-to name only a few. Perhaps Mr. Nichols is rather rash to record these moments; but he does it amusingly and in a way that could scarcely give offense.

What one of the author's own "elders and betters" has called "the engaging flaws of youth" may be found all through the volume. There is too much smartness in it, but there is also warmth and sincerity. The best thing in the book is perhaps the account of the hanging of Edith Thompson, London murderess, who was put to death for a passionate crime in 1923.

By Dame Nellie MELODIES AND MEMORIES. Melba. The George H. Doran Company, New York. $5.

Something of the sureness of attack that marks every great singer's art marks also the pleasing autobiography of Madame Melba. Hers is a simple story of hard work and gradually increasing success, leading to triumphs which miracles of chance, but the result of rare ability, flowering in due time and under the dictates of a strong personality.

were never

The author gives a fascinating account of her childhood in Australia, and of her early studies in Paris under a great teacher -at a time when her finances were so low that she could have but one dress to wear. She then tells of the beginnings of her career, of her travels, and at length of her great successes. Her tales of encounters with musicians and managers, and of the warm friendships which she formed all over the world, make very pleasant reading and reveal the author as a person of great soundness-not at all like the public's popular conception of a gay opera starbut warm and likable and real.

Travel

By

A WAYFARER IN UNFAMILIAR JAPAN. Walter Weston. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $3.

It seems incredible in this day of swift and easy communication that there are human beings who have never heard of a race different from their own, of the Christian religion, or of the Great War. A large part of "A Wayfarer in Unfamiliar Japan" is about such people, living far from the Mr. familiar paths of the guide-book. Weston was the first European to visit many of the places described in his book. Among the most interesting are five little villages near Kiushiu, known collectively

In writing to the above advertisers please mention The Outlook

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as Goka-no-sho. There were, at the time, no roads leading to the outside world; the inhabitants had preserved their ancient customs, and never intermarried elsewhere. It was only through a curious accident that the existence of the little hamlets was ever suspected.

Having lived in Japan for many years, as British chaplain in Yokohama, Mr. Weston's comments on Japan are from two He angles of explorer and of scholar. finds the Japanese peasantry the most diligent and friendly in the world. Battling against nature in the form of floods, typhoons, fires, and earthquakes, from which Japan has suffered more terribly than any people on the face of the globe, has modeled a fine national solidity of character. The author gives a graphic account of the appalling earthquake in 1923, and pays a tribute to the United States for the assistance sent so promptly and in such good measure. There is an interesting chapter about Ontake San and the pilgrims who yearly climb this "august peak." Another chapter tells of that ancient sport and weird spectacle, cormorant fishing. Fishermen hold the cormorant in leash by a tough cord of spruce fiber, attached to a belt of hemp encircling its body. Around the base of its gullet is a metal ring which is loose enough to permit swallowing the smaller fish; the larger fish it must disgorge, a business arrangement not nearly approaching 50-50 between master and man. A well-trained bird will catch for his owner as many as 150 fish in an hour.

The public bath is a familiar scene in Japan. Mineral hot springs in the mountains and the many bath-houses scattered in the cities form important parts of the social life of "the cleanest nation on earth." Here they will sit soaking in hot water for hours. It is the poor man's club. "Out of deference to foreign prejudice, it is now more usual for the sexes to bathe apart." No book about Japan could be complete without mention of the rice fields and "the Honorable little Gentleman," the silkworm. On these two industries hang most of the prosperity of Japan.

Politics

SURVIVAL OF THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE INCLUDING THE TARIFF ISSUE. By Perry Belmont. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. $2.50.

Mr. Belmont's book is a campaign document with sundry historical notations that wander rather widely over the lot, including as they do a defense of Major-General Leonard B. McMillan, who long ago ceased to be a part of any principle. In his discussion of the tariff the author relies mainly upon records of others. This does not mean that they are without value. The rising feeling in the West indicates that the tariff issue has in it force for revival. EUGENICS AND POLITICS. Essays by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, Fellow and Senior Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $2.50.

"The time," says Dr. Schiller, "is scarcely ripe for a systematic treatise on eugenics. It will be needed on the distant day when the question arises of putting into execution a well-thought-out scheme of eugenical reform; what is needed now is lighter literature to arouse interest in the subject, and a conviction of its vital import, and to prepare an audience for the biological expert if, and when, he descends from the Sinai of Science with the New Commandments which are to insure our salvation by eugenics."

tices, but he persuades us that it could, and, if it would, to its immense betterment. No doubt man will continue to combine the qualities of ignoramus and jackass, but after this book he can't say he hasn't been properly warned.

Philosophy

MIND MAKES MEN GIANTS. By Richard Lynch. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $2. Inspirational literature. Habits, phobias, attention, will, self-expression through work, personality, character, sex-love, and marriage discussed from the point of view of aids and detriments to success. Didactic but readable, and replete with apt anecdotes.

HISTORY OF ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY. By Horatio W. Dresser, Ph.D. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York. $2.50.

A résumé of philosophical thought from its birth in Greece, 600 B.C., to the death of Bruno, 1600 A.D. Designed as a text for college courses, it is a scholarly, compact survey of sources and provides ample references. Two-thirds of the three hundred and fifty pages are devoted to the Greek philosophers.

IMAGINATION, MIND'S DOMINANT POWER. By Benjamin Christopher Leeming. The M. H. Schroeder Company, New York. $3. A friend of the author is good enough to explain in a foreword that the book is a "common-sense statement of the principles of behavior," that it will put any reader in the way of understanding "the basis for other people's behavior towards himself as well as his behavior toward others." Perhaps it should, but it hasn't done so as far as we can see. We find the book rambling, inconsecutive, vague, and incult.

HUMAN EXPERIENCE: A STUDY OF ITS
STRUCTURE. By Viscount Haldane. E. P.
Dutton & Co., New York.
$2.

This "introduction to the study of philosophy" resolves itself into a one-sided debate between Viscount Haldane and John Dewey on the relation between knowledge and experience. For Professor Dewey experience is a final and self-contained entity which produces knowledge as its outcome, For a mere phase evolved within itself. Viscount Haldane experience divorced from knowledge is a mere unreal abstraction. Furthermore, "beauty, morals, and the divine play too large a part in the world which confronts Man to admit of mind being made a mere product." This leads into discussions of knowledge and reality, objective and subjective, and particular and universal, which will prove no sinecure for "those interested but not trained in philosophical inquiry" in spite of Viscount Haldane's deceptively simple style and the careful introductory summaries of his chapters.

Radio

YOU'RE ON THE AIR. By Graham McNamee and Robert Gordon Anderson, with a Preface by Heywood Broun. Harper & Brothers, New York. $1.75.

A volume of reminiscences chiefly by one who, if there is truth in trophies, is the World's Most Popular Radio Announcer does not sound too promising, and apparently the brothers Harper, in agreeing to publish it, have let their responsibility end there. It is printed on not the best of paper, and the proofs have been read by some one who needed practice badly. None the less, here is an amusing and interesting book.

Mr. McNamee tells the story of his four years' connection with broadcasting-from A stimulating, instructive, and reason- the day when his inimitable manner of sayable book; and, though profound and gen- ing "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of uinely philosophic, yet written lightly, as the radio audience" first caught the fancy proposed. Dr. Schiller is by no means con- of Mr. Weaf, to the evening, last May, vinced that society will substitute eugenic when he was presented with a gold cup. for its present outrageously dysgenic prac- In between are descriptions and pictures of

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