BOOKS
551
Stephen Crane on (a perhaps ambiguous case), has had more than
its
share of abortive careers. "Books are like brothers," wrote Fitzgerald in
his Note-Books. "I am an only child. Gatsby my imaginary eldest bro–
ther, Amory my younger, Anthony my worry, Dick my comparatively
good brother, but all of them far from home. When I have the courage
to put the old white light on the home of my heart, then.... "
The
Crack-up
makes the white light seem nearer home than Fitzgerald
admitted; perhaps it would have been better for him if some of the
brothers had been acquaintances or at least cousins. The old white light
on the heart, it seems safe to say, is a particular focus with a higher price
than most in human vitality
~nd
personality.
ANDREWS WANNING
THE FOREST AND THE TREES
ANGEL IN THE FOREST.
By Margu erite Young. R eyna[
&
Hitchcock.
$3.00
T
o
MY MIND,
the significance of Miss Young's book lies in its extension
of literature to other fields. The introduction of literary and descrip–
tive elements into predominantly analytical disciplines has had the effect
of displacing the more traditional, particularly the historical, modes of
analysis-as in philosophy, through the activity of the existentialists.
Angel
in the Forest
seems to be a step in this direction, at least in so far as it
shows that history, too, can be ahistorical.
The facts of history and of literature are the same, as far as facts
go; the facts of poetry, all the better, are even superior to those of history,
for they are more typical-which is an old truth with a modern moral,
(at any rate, one that is winning wide respect) namely, that the imagina–
tion is also a
Forschungsmittel
into the nature of man. So far there is no
cause for conflict because the trained imagination, harnessed to a task,
is always welcome, even in some academic circles. It is when the imagi–
nation becomes a thing in itself, as literal in its claims as it is in poetry
that the trouble begins, for then one must sublimate one perspective or
the other, the poetic or the historical one, genius, as a rul e, not being
there to combine the two. So it is with this "Fairy Tale of Two Utopias."
' The facts are that Father Rapp, leader of a German religious sect,
established a celibate community, dictatorial and unreasonable, at Har–
mony, Indiana, along the banks of the Wabash, and met with a qualified
but considerable worldly success, although he and his disciples expected
the world to end in 1842 and kept their backs turned against it. The
site of the Rapp community, together with buildings and installations,
was taken over by Robert Owen and his followers who met with no
success whatsoever, although they were oriented toward the world, free-
