Abstract

Gold and Tinsel

This article presents information on several books. The book "Dreamer Under Arms," by F.G. Hurrell, owes part of its effectiveness, one should say, to its being the work not of a professional novelist, but of a thoughtful man with a good instinct for story-telling and with a story that he very much wants to tell. His preface expresses a modest opinion of the book as a humble effort to present this great world war in the terms of an inward individual experience. Another book "The Manse at Barren Rocks," by Albert Benjamin Cunningham, is a step from the popular theatre into the open. Here is a vernacular not of the streets but of the soil, the homely Americanism of the backwoods; here is a chronicle without artifice, a work of ingenuous localism honestly and lovingly performed, so as to add a tiny chapter to the Great American Novel that is being so steadily added to of late by such hands as this. "The Magnificent Ambersons" by By Booth Tarkington, is a different sort of family story, a study of caste more than of clan. The Ambersons typify that mushroom aristocracy of the Middle West which for a generation or two after their settlement days, up to the time when town life ceased to develop and was brusquely superseded by city conditions, held a well-nigh feudal state.