BOOKS
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doyen.
Yet together with these something else went: a sense of old
commitments; and Hofmannsthal, in the thick of his troubles, was glad.
He began to liberalize his talents, to scatter abroad the coins, both large
and small, of his imagination; and that he continued to do this in the
teeth of hectoring, obloquy and neglect is immensely to his credit.
The record of
his
progress along the new path-to the extent that
the terrain is prose-will be found in the pages of this book: an admirable
choice, well managed in English, and exploding the ignoble myth still
whispered in certain quarters of Hofmannsthal's steady decline after,
say, 1907. The selections include the fragment of a novel,
Andreas
(earlier published in England, in a different translation), a number of
tales, travel notes, essays, aphorisms and the exquisite scenario
Lucidor:
Characters for an Unwritten Comedy.
Francis Golffing
SOCIALISM AND THE SCHOLARS
SOCIALISM AND AMERICAN LIFE. Edited by Donold Drew Egbert ond
Stow Persons. 2 volumes. Princeton University Press. $17.50.
Here, thanks to Princeton industry and Rockefeller subsidy, is
a big, sympathetic survey of American socialism-appropriately, and
disastrously, a collective enterprise. The first volume, the work of two
editors and fourteen sovereign scholars, is the survey proper; the second,
worked up by three editors and countless learned consultants, is "Biblio–
graphy: Descriptive and Critical." Since Volume II cites nothing com–
parable in aim or scope to Volume I or to itself, the work must, I
suppose, be said to fill a need, even while it fails to satisfy a want. Now
and then, though, it satisfies. Daniel Bell's long article on Marxist and
semi-Marxist parties is painstaking, meaty, and, when it appraises, un–
commonly shrewd.
(It
is also, for those of us who have attained a certain
ripeness, rich as memorabilia. Along with his formidable gifts as a
political analyst, Bell has some of the instincts of a genealogist and a
class historian, with the result that his chapter often yields a mixture of
delight and revulsion similar to what one gets from an hour spent with
old letter files, family records, and college yearbooks-"WeIl, I'Il be
damned, Mother, here's old Albert Weisbord! That's a name to con–
jure with, eh?") There are some other rewarding pieces-Sidney Hook
on Marxism as philosophy, Will Herberg on Marxism as political
theory, and Donald Drew Egbert on socialist art-but the study as a
