BOOKS.
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.
THE two outstanding books of this week are the largest and the smallest. The smallest is Dr. Schiller's Tantalus, or The Future of Man, published by Kegan Paul. Thus neatly does Dr. Schiller cap Mr. Haldane and Mr. Bertrand Russell with their Daedalus and Icarus. Tantalus, he tells us, is clearly of all the heroes of antiquity the best fitted to prog- nosticate the probable future of man. Accordingly Dr. Schiller, having undergone all the necessary rites, consulted Tantalus himself, and is rewarded by a vision in which he sees the hero engaged upon his everlasting task. Dr. Schiller approached and politely addressed him :— " Can I be mistaken in thinking that I see before me the far-famed hero, Tantalus, boon companion of the gods?' And their victim.'
' And what tree is this, I pray you, about which you busy yourself ?' The Tree of Knowledge.' " The results of this vision were, we are told, too plain to need the interpretation of a psycho-analyst, and Dr. Schiller draws several remarkable conclusions from it, all of them of an extremely gloomy kind. Eugenics, as usual, comes in as a rather ill-backed " white-hope " in the last chapters, but his form " is not convincing.
The biggest book of the week is called These Eventful Years: The Twentieth Century in the Making, and is published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It consists of an enormous number of articles on the questions of the day, each by an acknow- ledged expert—thus Freud writes on Psycho-Analysis ; Admiral Jellicoe and Admiral von Scheer on the Battle of Jutland ; Madame Curie on Radium ; Ludendorff on " Ger- many Never Defeated"; Mr. Bertrand Russell on "Govern- ment by Propaganda " ; Mr. Garvin on the Present ; and Mr. H. G. Wells on the Future. We must not be misunder- stood when we say that this is the most indigestible book ever written, for it has undoubtedly great value as a book of refer- ence and as a mine of conflicting opinions.
There are also two novels of note—Arnold Waterlow, by Miss May Sinclair (Hutchinson), and The Boy in the Bush, by Mr. D. H. Lawrence and Mr. M. L. Skinner (Martin Seeker). LITERARY EDITOR.
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