The best thing about this project is finding weird and wonderful things to read. Edgar Mowrer provides the most unusual moment of this issue in his review of Georges Polti's The Art of Inventing Personages: the XII Principle Types , Their 36 Subdivisions and 154,980 Varieties Still Unedited. This book is a catalog of every possible character in fiction. Mowrer writes that he was nearly driven mad while reading it. A sample paragraph:
"From this classification of world literature exactly 369 possible characters are lacking. Multiply this number by five, for the five ages of man (childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, old age) and you obtain 1,845 varieties. But for each of these one can count seven social classes (royal, high-society or elegant, rich middle class, small middle class, working class, indigent, peasant). Multiplying we obtain 12,915 unedited types. Multiply again by twelve in accord ance with a mystical mathematic, and you obtain a grand total of 154,980 varieties of literary character still absent from any book. These are what writers are asked to get busy and create. As I write these lines my wits begin to wander anew. (192)"
Perhaps as useful as the review itself, Mowrer provides a lot of commentary on the relationship of science and literature, and pseudoscience and literature (he explains that psychology is pseudoscience because it doesn't accept telepathy).
Quick notes:
Allen Upward continues his translations of Chinese literature, this time in little proverbs labeled "Chinese Lanterns."
"Views and Comments" is a critique of Constance Lytton, a suffragette. The Egoist is solidly anti-.
Aldington writes a review of of W.H. Hudson.
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