THE AGE OF CONFIDENCE : LIFE IN THE NINETIES By
Henry Seidel Canby .
In The Age of Confidence (Constable, 7s. 6d.) Dr. Canby sets out to recreate as he knew it the small town of Wilmington 40 years ago ; partly_ to please himself, partly to offer to historians the study of a place and time, now vanished, which had its inevitable effects upon the new age that followed. He sets before us the limited world in which he was brought up ; its streets, its Quaker homes, its social life which 'could only be understood by those born and bred in it, its parents, its children, its business methods and its books. That is the part of his story for which he almost chose (and wisely rejected) the title Nostalgia. The other part of it can be instanced by a single quotation—one of a hundred such. " What the modern gets from music, if he is capable of music, we got from nature for the taking and with no technique but- desire." The Age of Confidence is a study in memory, but it is also a study in values. If at one moment it recalls The Golden Age, at the next—and with no inconsistency— it is shrewd social history. That it is written with balance and humour no reader of the Saturday Review of Literature will need to be told.
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