Word: relentlessness
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ETCHED IN MOONLIGHT-James Stephens-Macmillan ($2.50). Variety is color. Etched in moonlight there is no variety-only the alternating black and silver of sparse trees afar off, and the relentless greys of the vegetation underfoot. Striding through this spectral world they come, these three, to the deserted castle, where the jealous lover imprisoned his love and her betrothed. Fugitive, he roams the ends of the earth year after year, tormented by fear and remorse, until at last his cycle of self-recrimination brings him again to the silent castle and the "faces cut by the moon to a sternness...
...Matter. Long years in scientific study got him a doctor's degree at the age of 34. Six years later, 1890, he was appointed director of the physiology department of the Institute of Experimental Medicine at St. Petersburg (Leningrad). From then on, his path was undeviating, scrupulous, relentless. His "Work of the Digestive Glands" was crowned by the Nobel Prize in 1904. Having mastered the mechanics of digestion he started speculating on psychic stimulation, the power of suggestion on the lower organs. He conditioned various animals to a bell, to a light, to a color, to the beats...
...Rubber Exchange in Manhattan (Francis R. Henderson, President), is a quiet-looking place. The architecture is sort of Dutch, about as Dutch as the Stock Exchange is Greek: a burgomaster's mansion, not the temple of a relentless cult. The quiet winding stretches of South William Street have just enough of Amsterdam's canals to make the visiting Dutch rubber trader homesick. The dark-red bricks are so well woven together, the boxes of flowers on the window ledges are so neatly kept, the whole place is so clean-it is a bit of Holland low-country snuggling...
...minded, bad-tempered. Fighting heavily, with more goodwill than technique, he is defeated time and again by the subtler feints of a canny rival editor, a burly bartender, a cautious banker. His children, with the exception of the faithful Ruth, leave him stranded on his editorial high ground. The relentless climax of Marvin's failure gives dignity to a rather repetitious tale of puny struggles and mean treacheries...
...misfit melodrama in the way he arranges a thunderstorm to enlarge the climax of every tragedy, a false fatality in the coincidence that so often generates his plots. But these faults are rooted in deeper virtues: an intense sincerity, unconcerned with merely literary effects, a profound, pitying pessimism, a relentless humanism that condemns the disorderly dieties who make men's lives sterile and without joy. There is also the scope, the inclusiveness that permits him to deal with large effects, to call, in the sweeping vigorous lines of The Dynasts, for Napoleon's army to appear upon...