The Real America The Road to the Temple. By Susan

Glaspell. (Bean. 15s.) 14E approached Miss Susan Glaspell's latest book with the maxi- mum of prejudice. It seemed to have nothing to recommend it. It was the publisher told us, " part biography, part auto- biography." Turning the pages, it appeared to be a sketchily written life of a Mr. George Cram Cook, Miss Glaspell's late

husband.

Mr. Cook appeared to have been an intellectual young American, born in the Middle West, who had yearnings for culture and art, went to Ileidleburg, Florence, and later to Greece, was at times a University Professor, at times a farmer, tried and failed to write books, and finally died at Delphi. No material could seem less .promising, and we began reading, with that familiar feeling that each page was going to be our

last.

To English readers there are many annoyances in Miss Glaspell's style and presentation.. Her method of narration is oblique and sometimes obscure. She never tells us the salient facts of Mr. Cook's life. They gradually emerge from multitudes of short impressionistic chapters, extracts from letters, quotations from his diary, &c., &c., which arc flung at in a seemingly purposeless confusion. But slowly and unwillingly the conviction was born in upon us that there is method in Miss Glaspell's literary madness. The external details of Mr. Cook's- life-story are commonplace enough, and we could not have endured their narrative in a book. All the drama, all the interest of the man was within himself. Obviously this makes his biographer's task immensely more difficult. She has to convince us that in spite of appearances her subject really. was the remarkable man she claims him to have been. Brilliantly .she succeeds.

Almost against our will we do become interested in this

strange American. We do want to know how he solved his mental confusions and perplexities. We do become interested and impressed by his curious Western view of the world. We use the word "Western advisedly, for one thing strikes one par- ticularly in Mr. Cook's own writing and also in Miss Glaspell's

story.. Herela something original, distinct and different from anything else-coming out of America.. We may like it or we

may aut,-but it is -conclusively and-irrefutably American.- It is the true American culture; sure enough of itself to know and

appreciate and. soak itself in European culture,. but yet never afraid of being absorbed. This is what Mr. Cook himself says

The best Europe has given me is the power to see America. . . . I am a part of that hemisphere, my body built of its fertile soil and electric air, my soul moulded in-that big nation's prosaic, powerful KOul. 'My father and his father helped yough-hew one of those forty new western nations which are one. - With their own hands they hewed the logs for a first house, It is a commonplace dreary town to-day, dreary because there burns in it no light of the ideal. The fairest destiny for me is to help roar upon the Cyclopean foundations of my fathers a beacon tower, shaping for my nation one city governed by scientific wisdom, by enlightenment lifted into the beauty."

Miss Glaspell represents the new and true America : the America the nose-in-air visitor never sees, nor the stay-at- home reader of Mr. Mencken imagines. Take this passage on idealism :-

"There is a certain inflexible idealism based on ignorance of and lack of respect for the laws of life as it is and must be. This idealism is a phase of impenetrable conceit. A true idealism does not exceed possibility, and is gathered drop by drop like honey by the searching bee—thoughts working across the actual world. Shallow people cling desperately, to. a theory in cases where a good mind docilely readjusts itself to facts."

.

Here is something of the native shrewdness of the Western

pioneer linked up with the modern point of view. In that direction lie infinite possibilities.