The Green-Room

“Here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal”

It is difficult for the most careful world-observer to detach himself from a national point of view in estimating the causes and the results of the World War. With this consideration in mind the editors’ of The Virginia Quarterly Review asked William Martin, editor of the Journal de Geneve, who had been lecturing on this subject in Europe, to prepare a paper answering the questions which more or less everybody bears in mind. “Was the War Useless?” is a paper that will call forth wide discussion in America and abroad. Mr. Martin, in close touch at Geneva with the League of Nations, views the historical aspects of the War dispassionately. He has written on many aspects of its activities and frequently contributes to American journals.

Emily Stone Whiteley lives in Baltimore. She has written before for this magazine and many other American publications, usually on human episodes of history to which she gives a vivacity that few readers associate with the past. George Canning, Christopher Hughes, and now Charles Bagot, are the three figures that she has painted to the life in the pages of the Virginia Quarterly.

In the October number of the Virginia Quarterly, Broad-us Mitchell in his article “Why Cheap Labor Down South?” considered from its broad economic aspects the industrial situation in the Southern states. The recent distressing and spectacular developments in the textile communities of North Carolina, especially Gastonia and Marion, suggested the importance of having the story from its beginnings recapitulated and its broader and deeper significances indicated, as could not be done in articles written currently with the events. Nell Battle Lewis of Raleigh, North Carolina, whose articles in The Nation and elsewhere showed a sympathy for the mill workers, was asked to tell the story as it happened, and Professor Claudius Murchison was invited to analyze as a trained economist the difficulties of the problem as it presented itself to the mill owners. Miss Lewis is author of the report on capital punishment pre-” pared while a member of the Commission on Public Welfare of North Carolina. She is connected with the Raleigh News and Observer, and had reported the Gastonia cases. Her article could not be brought further in date than the middle of November and therefore could not include the disposition of the case of the alleged killers of Mrs. Wiggins and that of the deputies and mill operatives charged with the Marion killings. Miss Lewis in her effort to be as “fair as possible to the State” regretted that the story of these cases could not be added.

“I have tried,” Mr. Murchison wrote, “to tell that part of the story which so far has remained rather well hidden from the general public. Incidentally, it is somewhat complicated, and much had to be omitted that is important.” Professor Claudius Murchison, of the department of economics and commerce at the University of North Carolina, is peculiarly prepared for the writing of “King Cotton is Sick.” He became especially interested in the Southern textile industry because it was “so unique and quaint as compared with other industries” and his ideas were formed while attitudes were still dispassionate. During the past summer he made a field survey both in New England and „ in the South for the Social Science Research Council and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences of his own university. He is now engaged in writing a monograph which will soon be published.

The study of Madame de Maintenon is one of a series of studies of women that Gamaliel Bradford has been making. “Eve as Dove and Serpent” is Mr. Bradford’s own description of his subject for this essay. Mr. Bradford was a contributor to the first number of The Virginia Quarterly Review and he recently contributed articles on Henry Clay and on the writing of autobiography.

Robert Liddell Lowe was a young student at a university in Texas when his first poem was accepted for publication in this Review. He is now a member of the department of English at Purdue University, Indiana. His tribute to Elinor Wylie repeats the title of one of her own poems. Richard Church is an English poet whose exquisite verse is beginning to be better known in America. He is the author of many volumes of poetry, and prose, all written in a spirit sympathetic with that of earlier English Romanticism. The Virginia Quarterly is proud to have been one of the first publications to present the work of the young English poet, Geoffrey Johnson, to an American public, as both he and Mr. Church have published in its pages before. Mr. Johnson’s first volume, “The Quest Unending,” has been announced by Selwyn and Blount for English publication this winter. Geoffrey Johnson lives in Ely, and Richard Church in London. Francis Claiborne Mason, whose first volume, “This Unchanging Mask,” was published recently, is a Virginian now connected with Gettysburg College. Mary Sinton Leitch lives at Lynnhaven, Virginia. She has been an associate editor of “The Lyric” and active in the poetry societies of America and of Virginia. Her published volumes include “The Wagon and the Star” and “The Unrisen Morrow.”

Her book on “Catherine the Great” made the name of Katharine Anthony familiar to most American readers. She has recently published her “Queen Elizabeth.” Miss Anthony is a native of Arkansas and though she now lives in New York, she knows at first hand the Southern scene that is reflected in “New Orleans Portraits.” Two books have recently been added to the list of Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s publications: “Golden Falcon,” a book of poems, and “An Attic Room,” essays that include papers first published in the Virginia Quarterly. Mr. Coffin was born in Brunswick, Maine, and lives at Aurora, New York, where he is a member of the faculty, of WelL College.

Judge Pierre Crabites, for years a distinguished member of the Mixed Tribunals in Cairo, Egypt, has become widely known also as a writer on international topics. He is a native of Louisiana but has been stationed in the Near East since 1911. “For seven years,” Judge Crabites wrote, “I worked at Arabic eighteen hours a week, eight months in the year, with a Sheik (pronounced Shake not Sheek). I think that I understand the basic principles underlying Islam.”

Thomas Mann was this autumn awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. John Galsworthy was, before the award, one of those most often mentioned as a possible recipient. “An Impression of John Galsworthy” was prepared by Thomas Mann on the occasion of the honoring of Galsworthy’s birthday in Germany. Mann is the German author with whom Galsworthy is most often compared. Among his books that have been published in the United States are “Budden-brooks,” “The Magic Mountain,” “Death in Venice,” and “Three Essays,” a new book printed this season.

Among the books by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton of the University of North Carolina are “Reconstruction in North Carolina,” and “The Papers of Thomas Ruffin.” Dexter Perkins of the University of Rochester is author of “The Monroe Doctrine, 1823-26.” Herbert Heaton is professor of history in the University of Minnesota. Gerald W. Johnson of the Baltimore Evening Sun is author of “Andrew Jackson—An Epic in Homespun.” Carroll Mason Sparrow is professor of physics at the University of Virginia and a writer on spectroscopy. He is Associate Editor of the Virginia Quarterly. Walter L. Myers of the University of Pittsburgh is author of “The Later Real: ism,” a study of the recent English novel. Louise Pound of the University of Nebraska is editor of American Speech and a writer in the field of the English ballad. James Southall Wilson is the editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review.

THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

Edited by JAMES SOUTHALL WILSON

Advisory Editors

Edwin A. Alderman  John Calvin Metcalf

F. Stringfellow Barr  Carroll M. Sparrow

The Virginia Quarterly Review is published at the University of Virginia: in April, July, October, and January. Subscription rates: $3.00 the year. Canadian, $3,25; Foreign, $3.50. Single copies, 75 cents.

Contributions should be accompanied by postage for return and addressed to The Editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, University, Virginia. The University of Virginia and the Editors do not assume responsibility for the views expressed by contributors of signed articles.

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Lambert Davis, Managing Editor

PUBLICATION AND EDITORIAL OFFICE: 1 WEST RANGE UNIVERSITY, VIRGINIA PETER QUINCE OPENS HIS MAILBAG

“If we offend, it is with our good will”—Peter Quince

IDON’T intend to apologize; in fact, I shall probably end by boasting. I’m just going to start off by quoting The Publishers’ Weekly to the effect that their list of books to be published this fall and winter is far and away the longest they have printed in their fifty, years of existence, and add that I have been jumping from one stack of books to another, and from catalogues with vermilion covers to catalogues with purple covers, so fast that I am dizzy and color blind, and rather shaky in the knees. And Peter Quince is supposed to live on books I . . . There—now that I’ve made my confession of weakness, I feel myself again, and can go on with my Quincianic mission. Particularly since Philip Alexander Bruce’s “The Virginia Plutarch” (North Carolina Press. $9.00) reached me a few days ago, and proved that publishers’ blurbs sometimes do turn out to be true. In addition to its being the work of a distinguished Virginia historian on the lives of thirty-three Virginians who figured most prominently in the history of the state and the nation, it is probably the most beautiful book in its typography and format that has ever been written, published, and printed in the South. . . . This seems, though, to be a generally good year for biography; fiction, with notable exceptions, is running a poor second. The first flush of the period of biographical debunking is over, and the newer biographers manage to be as entertaining as ever, and at the same time less set upon providing their readers with exposes. Both Gilbert Chinard’s “Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism” (Little, Brown. $5.00) and Bernard Faffs “Benjamin Franklin: The Apostle of Modern Times” (Little, Brown. $5.00) are valuable interpretations of familiar figures, approved by scholars, and at the same time surprisingly interesting to read. Brand Whitlock’s “La Fayette” (Appleton. 2 Vol.

You can order your books through the Virginia Quarterly Book Service. $10.00) is another significant biography of a figure of the same period—with the Frenchman posing and the American doing the biography! Three other biographies covering a later period in American history are Robert Penn Warren’s “John Brown: The Making of a Martyr” (Payson k Clarke. $5.00), Marquis James’s “The Raven” (Bobbs-Merrill. $5.00) and Allen Tate’s “Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall” (Minton, Balch. $3.50). Warren’s book is interesting as a counter to Oswald Garrison Villard’s earlier rather laudatory biography of Brown, which has now been re-issued. “The Raven” is not about Poe, but about one of the most fascinating of his contemporaries, General Sam Houston: it’s curious that a figure as romantic as Houston has escaped the biographers so long. James’s book is authoritative and at the same time intensely exciting—a unique combination. Two capable literary biographies of the same period are “Hawthorne,” by Newton Arvin (Little, Brown, $3.50), and “Emerson: The Wisest American,” by Phillips Russell (Brentano’s. $5.00). To match these in the more nearly contemporary field are two notable volumes of “Lives and Letters”: Elizabeth Roberts Pennell’s “Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell” (Little, Brown. 2 Vol. $10.00), and “Life and Letters of Stuart P. Sherman,” by Jacob Zeitlin and Homer Wood-bridge (Farrar & Rinehart. 2 Vol. $10.00). Each of these men occupied a unique position in his field, each was a distinctive personality aside from his profession, and both have found sympathetic biographers, the former in the person of his wife, the latter in the persons of two of his friends.

Francois Rabelais can claim two biographies this winter: Samuel Putnam’s “Francois Rabelais: Man of the Renaissance”. (Cape and Smith. $8.50), and “Francis Rabelais: The Man and His Time,” by Albert Jay Nock and C. R. Wilson (Harper. $5.00). Putnam’s book is a vigorous and

brilliant protest against applying the word Rabelaisian to

(Continued to advertising section at the back.) You can order your books through the Virginia Quarterly Book Service.