Books: Kindly Old Fellow

CHAPTERS FOR THE ORTHODOX—Don Marquis—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Last week, as usual since the world began, plain readers were more inclined to listen to the sweet unreason of kindly old fellows like Will Rogers and Don Marquis than to the expert kidding of more incisiveminds.

For Don Marquis has endeared himself to the U. S. by padding his critical punches; his fiercest uppercuts are the merest invigorating taps on a cheerfully welcoming chin. Many a critical reader of Chapters for the Orthodox will get no farther than Author Marquis’s prefacing remarks, in which he dedicates his book to wambling Christopher Morley (because “I think you write better than anyone else writing in the English-speaking world today”). Less captious searchers will find something to hit their fancy in the twelve rambling tales that follow. Some of them :

¶ Jehovah unsuccessfully offers to an aristocratic Manhattan spinster the honor of giving virgin birth to another Messiah.

¶ Satan attends morning service at a fashionable church with a tycoon who is the principal pew-holder, consequently gets away with some very questionable behavior.

¶ All the characters involved in the New Testament miracle of the devils and the Gadarene swine meet in court to establish the costs of the action.

¶ An open-minded artist becomes the embarrassed recipient of the power to work miracles.

¶The legend of Faust is brought up to date and dramatized in Marquisian manner. Sample: “Faust: Is not a Good Woman one of the noblest works of God? Mephisto: It is more terrible than that, even: God is one of the subtlest inventions of the Good Woman.”