The Good Life

A PREFACE TO MORALS--Walter Lippmann--Macmillan ($2.50).

MID-CHANNEL--An American Chronicle--Ludwig Lewisohn--Harpers ($3.50).

In the chorus of U. S. philosophizing, somewhere between the deep notes of John Dewey and the loud guggling of the Menckens, two voices are raised--Walter Lippmann's, young and clear, Ludwig Lewisohn's, old and sad. The two have much in common. As Jews, both men can claim rich philosophical heritage. As conscious Americans, both incline to intense modernism. As intellectuals, both prescribe an adaptation of Greek philosophy.

"I want God--the absolute," says Mr.

Lewisohn. "There is none. Very well.

Then something to take his place: permanent values somehow embodied and so to be served." Embodied in Hellenism.

Lewisohn has found "all knowledge and worldly wisdom"; embodied in Hebraism, "righteousness, humanity, and peace.'' These are the permanent values he has resolved to serve, believing that a synthesis of Hellenism and Hebraism is the hope of the world. Christianity has no place--Pauline Christianity which Mr. Lewisohn identifies with the divorce laws of New York and therefore with the root of his troubles. "My country and its Christian laws have no regard for love or virtue or the creative mind but give their support to legalized malignity and moral foulness if only these mouth the moral saws of the market-place."

In Up Stream, Mr. Lewisohn began the spiritual autobiography of a Jew who, conventionally educated in South Carolina, flung his religious ardor into Methodism, progressed miraculously into free thought, attained at last an understanding of his Jewishness. Immersed for seven years in the cause of Zionism, he resumes in Mid-Channel the intimate personal chronicle of himself as a Jew wandering over the face of Europe.

Mr. Lewisohn's meaning is often obscure, his message occasionally fanatical, but the consistent dignity and rhythm of his prose are hypnotic. Mr. Lippmann's meaning, on the contrary, is always clear, his message pragmatic, his diction incisive, effective.

Says Lippmann: "What most distinguishes the generation who have approached maturity since the debacle of idealism at the end of the War is not their rebellion against the religion and moral code of their parents, but their disillusionment with their own rebellion. It is common for young men and women to rebel, but that they should rebel sadly and with out faith in their own rebellion, that they should distrust the new freedom no less than the old certainties--that is something of a novelty."

In A Preface to Morals he analyzes that debacle in religion, in politics, art. He demonstrates that the humanism of the disillusioned sages tallies with modern psychology; he predicates the elastic sort of humanism that will fit a changing age.

The conscious effort, he thinks, devolves upon a study of the Good Life, with Aristotle and Confucius as starting posts --"to follow what the heart desires without transgressing what is right." In his vision of what the heart should desire, "the evidence converges upon the theory that what the sages have prophesied as high religion, what the psychologists delineate as matured personality, and the disinterestedness which the Great Society requires for its practical fulfillment are all of a piece, and are the basic elements of a modern morality. . . .

"The philosophy of the spirit is an al most exact reversal of the worldling's philosophy. The ordinary man believes that he will be blessed if he is virtuous, and therefore virtue seems to him a price he pays now for a blessedness he will some day enjoy. ... In the realm of the spirit, blessedness is not deferred : there is no future which is more auspicious than the present; there are no compensations later for evils now. Evil is to be overcome now and happiness to be achieved now, for the kingdom of God is within you." Author Lippmann. In formal philosophy, Walter Lippmann has had sound training: he assisted George Santayana at Harvard, studied under Politico-Philosopher Graham Wallas, consorted with William James, summered with the first English translator of Freud. He has also studied practical philosophy; in 1911 the Mayor of Schenectady, a Presbyterian minister and Socialist, engaged Lippmann for a few months as secretary. The next year, when he was 23, Lippmann fused these invaluable months with his years of abstract studies, produced a brilliant Preface to Politics which Freud hailed as the first political treatise to be based on Freudian psychology, and which Theodore Roosevelt brandished as a textbook of the Bull-Moose campaign. Enthusiastic, Roosevelt encouraged Lippmann to found The New Republic, progressive weekly. Splendid was Roosevelt's wrath when, two years later, Lippmann had turned the periodical into a handbook on Woodrow Wilson.

Representative of Lippmann's work during the War was his elucidation of Wilson's Fourteen Points. His memoranda lay on the table at the Peace Conference, were daily fluttered through and consulted.

In 1921 when his friend, the late Frank Irving Cobb-- was still editor, Lippmann joined the staff of the New York World as editorial writer. At 39, this last February, he gained the official title of Editor.

Most conspicuous have been his editorials on the logic, if not the merit, of Fundamentalism; most earnest, his editorials in support of Alfred Emanuel Smith in the late campaign. He virtually dictated the 1928 platform of the Democracy.

After Domesday

THE FATE OF THE JURY--An Epilogue to Domesday Book--Edgar Lee Masters --Appleton ($2.50).

Shaken by their joint experience as jurymen in Poet Masters' earlier Domesday Book, seven representative men of Le Roy, Ill., resolve to confess the inmost secret of their lives. The confessions, mulled by the coroner, complicate his decision to marry Arielle, young, beautiful, mysterious. Her mystery resolves itself into insanity. The coroner devotes the rest of his life to guarding Arielle. Undaunted, he insists: ... I believe, and ride By this belief vast wings from star to star; From which I look on death beneath as a shadow Thrown from a mountain by the rising sun; . . . the love of truth, The love of love, in spite of all the loss, The anguish, reckless hatred of our kind Sustain and justify and help to prove The inscrutable mission of the million years, In -which each incident is destiny. . . .

Poet Masters is seldom so "poetic" as that. He is more particularly a creator of people in laconic, lead-colored phrases.

Example:

"When I was fourteen," Arielle resumed, "My good aunt in Chicago sent for me.

By this time father was a rattled wreck; He didn't drink, he had anxiety, My mother, everything; he couldn't solve The money matter. My brother had flown off To work his way through School. And there I was In rooms that fronted on a business street Over a candy shop, there in that old, Lonely and desolate Virginia town. . . ."

Lightning Girl

THE BURNING FOUNTAIN--Eleanor Carroll Chilton--John Day ($2.50).

The Kenwyns had three children, two "normal" pleasant members of society, Alan and Joan; one ethereal sprite, Lynneth, lover of winds, rains, fierce lightning, awful thunder. Alan despised her for the hysteria she indulged whenever her family kept her indoors from a thunder storm. Joan hated her, too, partly from jealousy, partly from nerves. But Claire, the girl Alan loved, adored Lynneth, credited her with an "elemental tenderness." And Douglas, the man engaged to marry Joan, reverenced Lynneth, white daughter of the moon. "Looking at Lynneth with her remote and crystal innocence was like seeing one of his moments take form and move through the trees in radiance." But for all her innocence, Lynneth held the household hypnotized, worked a sinister charm over carnal Douglas. One electric day, detailed to keep her indoors, he succumbed to her eerie charm only to be tossed aside when a flash of lightning lured her into the storm. Forced into her room, she moaned and wailed like a caged animal till Joan, unnerved by the noise, unshackled by jealousy, let her out--"a white flame of freedom, blown steadily through the dark rain, carrying with it its own light." Inevitably, hideous lightning struck Lynneth's favorite tree, killed her beneath it.

Miss Chilton develops her curious theme with conviction. The relationship of each character to Lynneth she reports with delicate precision, thereby creating seven people in their sharp contrasts.

Mentions

LITANY OF WASHINGTON STREET--Vachel Lindsay--Macmillan ($3). A curious potpourri of U. S. lore, in rhythmic U. S. language, which ranks Walt Whitman with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln as a patriot, and proposes to celebrate his birthday (May 31) "with new great maypole dances."

SARAH ORNE JEWETT--Francis Otto Matthiessen -- H ought on Mifflin ($3).

Neat and polished biography of the distinguished New Englander who wrote The Country of the Pointed Firs, "that little masterpiece."