"Artists as a class are notoriously an ignorant lot, and scholars, as we all know, are dry as dust. Mr. Sperlin's plunge into imaginative writing has, however, been in large measure successful.

Wagenknecht, Edward

English

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BOOK REVIEWSThe Heart of the Skyloo. By OT'l'IS BEDNEY SPERLIN. (Portland:The Metropolitan Press. Pp. 344. $2.00.)Long Beach, California, is the capital of Iowa; so it is fittingthat the author of The Heart of the Skyloo should have been born inKokomo, Indiana. He came to Washington in 1908. As head ofthe English department in Stadium High School, Tacoma; as prin-cipal of the Moran School; now, as lecturer in English and educa-tion at the University of Washington, he has lived himself into thelife of the State.His interest in his present subject may be said to have begunwith the edition of The Oregon Trail which he prepared for Long-mans, Green and Company in 1910. He went on to a careful studyof the Northwest Indian, supplementing actual field work with anextensive course of reading in the published and unpublished jour-nals of early traders and explorers.In The Heart of the Skyloo, his problem has been to describethe native culture, first as it existed before the coming of the whiteman, later as modified by contact with the fur-traders and the Cath-olic missionaries. David Thompson, Alexander Ross, and others areamong the characters who appear in the later part of the book.Gamaliel Bradford used to insist that our modern age was pre-eminently the age of ignorance, the true Dark Age, not because thereis no information available but because there is too much. We areswamped under the accumulating mass of our own knownedge, ab-solutely incapable of assimilating more than an infinitesimal amountof it. To gather information about Northwest history or any othersubject can be of very little importance if we stop there. We mustgo on to relate our knowledge to our lives, to appreciate its humansignificance, and I know of no better way of doing this than for theartist to make it real for us in a work of the imagination.There are difficulties in the way. It is always hard to see thesignificance of what lies close at home. For years American ro-mancers spun sword-and-cloak romances of European intrigue; itwas not until Emerson Hough wrote a book in Evanston, Illinois,that most Americans began to realize there had once been suchthings as covered wagons in America and that covered wagons werecapable of imaginative re-creation in art. Carl Sandburg's Root(])-baga Stories proved that the stuff of faery may be derived from the(65)The appearance of this book is an occasion for thankfulnessamong all serious students of our cultural heritage. The need for aThe Renaissance and the Reformation. By HENRY STEPHEN LUCAS.(New York: Harper Brothers, 1934. Pp. 765. $4.00.)very skyscrapers and railroad trains of our mechanical age. AndRobert Nathan's One More Spring found comedy, gaiety, and ro-mance in the depression itself.Another difficulty is that only rarely, as in Sir Walter Scott, forexample, are the artist and the scholar united. Perhaps that is whyScott is the greatest of all British novelists. Artists as a class arenotoriously an ignorant lot, and scholars, as we all know, are dry asdust. Mr. Sperlin's plunge into imaginative writing has, however,been in large measure successful. He has a sense of drama, a flairfor character, and distinctly a sense of style. I would urge, however,that if he goes on to write more books in this field-as I hope hemay-his style ought to be made more simple. He has used Indianwords so freely that many passages are nearly if not quite unintel-ligible without reference to the glossary, and this makes his book un-commonly hard reading.I should add that Mr. Sperlin has learned from the Indianssome of the secrets that reveal themselves to love alone. Their lifewas different from ours. If they were weak where we are strong,they were also strong where we are weak, and those who have beenreared on dime novels and movie serials will hardly be prepared forwhat they find here. There are passages in The Heart of the Skyloowhich remind me of the late Mary Austin, whose experience withthe Indians of the Southwest was so illuminating. There was a timein her life when Mrs. Austin was cut from all close contact with theculture of her own people in the east. Instead of allowing her intel-lectual life to stagnate, as nine people out of ten would have done,she seized this opportunity to learn to know the Indians. Fromthem she learned many valuable secrets, secrets which white menhave forgotten and which they need desperately to learn.Mr. Sperlin has designed The Heart of the Skyloo as a tributeto his wife, the late Grace Smith Sperlin-"Hire spirit chaungedhous"-during her long residence in Washington so useful and sokindly a citizen. As a piece of bookmaking, it is the best thing I haveseen so far from the Metropolitan Press.EDWARD WAGENKNECHTBook Reviews66

The Heart of the Skyloo

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The Heart of the Skyloo

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