ntire situation and finds that the
essential conditions of success of a democracy are peace, education and
adequate nutrition. But he shows that a great problem exists which must be
worked out; and he shows how it must be worked out. Dr. Guest is not alone
a thinker, but an observer; not a theorist, but a man of practical
understanding, who has studied a problem at first hand and shows it forth
simply but comprehensively and with an eye single to the needs of
humanity."

=iv=

Of _Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic_, by Raymond M. Weaver, Carl Van
Vechten, writing in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post (31
December 1921), said:

"No biography of Melville, no important personal memorandum of the man,
was published during his lifetime. It is only now, thirty years after his
death and one hundred and two years after his birth, that Raymond M.
Weaver's _Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic_ has appeared.

"Under the circumstances, Mr. Weaver may be said to have done his work
well. The weakness of the book is due to the conditions controlling its
creation. Personal records in any great number do not exist. There are, to
be sure, Melville's letters to Hawthorne, published by Julian Hawthorne,
in his _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_. There are a few references to
Melville in the diary of Mrs. Hawthorne and in her letters to her mother.
There remain the short account given by J. E. A. Smith, a man with no kind
of mental approach to his hero, a few casual memories of Richard Henry
Stoddard, whose further testimony would have been invaluable had he been
inclined to be more loquacious, and a few more by Dr. Titus Munson Coan
and Arthur Stedman; but both these men, perhaps the nearest to Melville in
his later years, were agreed that he ceased to be an artist when he
deserted the prescribed field of _Typee_ and _Omoo_, and they harassed his
last days in their efforts to make him perceive this, much as if an
admirer of Verdi's early manner had attempted to persuade the composer
that work on 'Aida' and 'Otello' was a waste of time that might much
better be occupied in creating another 'Trovatore.' In desperation,
Melville refused to be lured into conversation about the South Seas, and
whenever the subject was broached he took refuge in quoting Plato. No very
competent witnesses, therefore, these. Aside from these sources, long open
to an investigator, Mr. Weaver has had the assistance of Mr. Melville's
granddaughter