BOOKS
55
headlong into ·the waters below. In this scene, the confusion and help–
lessness of a mass of people is set vividly before us-in such a way,
moreover, as to remind us of the demoralization of the whole war-torn
South, the collapse of an entire social structure. And one wonders why
so many of the other episodes throughout this book, which are written
more or less in the same key of violence, should fall so far below it in
poetic suggestiveness, or in sheer narrative vigor. Shocking as many of
these episodes are in themselves, they seem to have become strangely
depleted, in the process of narration, of all of their power to shock: the
reader apprehends them, so to speak, intellectually, and sometimes not
until after they have taken place.
HELEN NEVILLE
BUSINESS AND POWER
A HISTORY OF THE BUSINESS MAN.
By Miriam Biard. Macmil–
lan. $5.00.
It is surprising, and yet not entirely so, that this book should have
received such a cool reception at the hands of the literary reviews. For
it is the kind of historical writing that has been developed to a fine
point in America: I refer to the so-called text-book or popularizing
historical work which is at the same time a competent synthesis of the
best products of original scholarship. It should not be assumed, however,
that Miss Beard's
A History of the Eusiness
Man
is only a journeyman's
job. The book has wit and pace as well as a shrewd understanding of
the effects of the interactions of economic affairs and less mundane mat–
ters; for Miss Beard can write-and does-as competently of the Medici
qua
art patrons as she has of them
qua
traders and bankers; as
wisely of Calvin and Savonarola as she has of the Fuggers and Jacques
Coller. In short, the book is an excellent example of the one-volume
survey type of work that James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard
(the author's father) have pioneered in this country. For this reason,
it
should have been a publishing "natural."
It hasn't been. I suspect that a partial explanation of the book's
failure, from the viewpoint of its reception, has been the unfamiliarity
of its subject matter. From the Civil War to the end of the World War
a curious kind of parochialism descended upon America; and this
retirement into a national self-sufficiency reflected itself in our cultural
interests. It can be argued convincingly that a commercial people-–
simply because it is visiting around all the time in the course of its buying
and selling---develops catholic tastes; while an exclusively industrial
people, whose contacts with the outside world are through the occasional
intervention of foreigners, becomes more and more limited in its horizons.
Before the Civil War we were the former: our ships thronged the ports
of all the countries fringing the seven seas; our young men visited Eu–
rope, the Levant and the Orient and learned the languages, customs and
