The superb intellectual and spiritual vitality of William James was never more evident than in his letters.
Here was a man with an enormous gift for living as well as thinking.
To both persons and ideas he brought the same delighted interest, the same open-minded relish for what was unique in each, the same discriminating sensibility and quicksilver intelligence, the same gallantry of judgment.

For this latest addition to the Great Letters Series, under the general editorship of Louis Kronenberger, Miss Hardwick has made a selection which admirably displays the variety of James's genius, not to mention the felicities of his style.
And how he could write!
His famous criticism of brother Henry's "third style" is surely as subtly, even elegantly, worded an analysis of the latter's intricate air castles as Henry himself could ever have produced.
His letter to his daughter on the pains of growing up is surely as trenchant, forthright, and warmly understanding a piece of advice as ever a grown-up penned to a sensitive child, and with just the right tone of unpatronizing good humor.

Most of all, his letters to his philosophic colleagues show a magnanimity as well as an honesty which help to explain Whitehead's reference to James as "that adorable genius".
Miss Hardwick speaks of his "superb gift for intellectual friendship", and it is certainly a joy to see the intellectual life lived so free from either academic aridity or passionate dogmatism.

This is a virtue of which we have great need in a society where there seems to be an increasing lack of communication -- or even desire for communication -- between differing schools of thought.
It holds an equally valuable lesson for a society where the word "intellectual" has become a term of opprobrium to millions of well-meaning people who somehow imagine that it must be destructive of the simpler human virtues.

To his Harvard colleague, Josiah Royce, whose philosophic position differed radically from his own, James could write, "Different as our minds are, yours has nourished mine, as no other social influence ever has, and in converse with you I have always felt that my life was being lived importantly".

Of another colleague, George Santayana, he could write: "The great event in my life recently has been the reading of Santayana's book.
Although I absolutely reject the Platonism of it, I have literally squealed with delight at the imperturbable perfection with which the position is laid down on page after page".

Writing to his colleague George Herbert Palmer -- "Glorious old Palmer", as he addresses him -- James says that if only the students at Harvard could really understand Royce, Santayana, Palmer, and himself and see that their varying systems are "so many religions, ways of fronting life, and worth fighting for", then Harvard would have a genuine philosophic universe.
"The best condition of it would be an open conflict and rivalry of the diverse systems.
The world might ring with the struggle, if we devoted ourselves exclusively to belaboring each other".

The "belaboring" is of course jocular, yet James was not lacking in fundamental seriousness -- unless we measure him by that ultimate seriousness of the great religious leader or thinker who stakes all on his vision of God.
To James this vision never quite came, despite his appreciation of it in others.

But there is a dignity and even a hint of the inspired prophet in his words to one correspondent: "You ask what I am going to 'reply' to Bradley.
But why need one reply to everything and everybody?
I think that readers generally hate minute polemics and recriminations.
All polemic of ours should, I believe, be either very broad statements of contrast, or fine points treated singly, and as far as possible impersonally.
As far as the rising generation goes, why not simply express ourselves positively, and trust that the truer view quietly will displace the other.
Here again 'God will know his own'".

The collected works of James Thurber, now numbering 25 volumes (including the present exhibit) represent a high standard of literary excellence, as every schoolboy knows.
The primitive-eclogue quality of his drawings, akin to that of graffiti scratched on a cave wall, is equally well known.
About all that remains to be said is that the present selection, most of which appeared first in The New Yorker, comprises (as usual) a slightly unstrung necklace, held together by little more than a slender thread cunningly inserted in the spine of the book.

The one unifying note, if any, is sounded in the initial article entitled: "How To Get Through The Day".
It is repeated at intervals in some rather sadly desperate word-games for insomniacs, the hospitalized, and others forced to rely on inner resources, including (in the P's alone) "palindromes", "paraphrases", and "parodies".

"The Tyranny Of Trivia" suggests arbitrary alphabetical associations to induce slumber.
And new vistas of hairshirt asceticism are opened by scholarly monographs entitled: "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ear-Muffs", "Such a Phrase as Drifts Through Dream", and "The New Vocabularianism".
Some of Thurber's curative methods involve strong potions of mixed metaphor, malapropism, and gobbledygook and are recommended for use only in extreme cases.

A burlesque paean entitled: "Hark The Herald Tribune, Times, And All The Other Angels Sing" brilliantly succeeds in exaggerating even motion-picture ballyhooey.
"How The Kooks Crumble" features an amusingly accurate take-off on sneaky announcers who attempt to homogenize radio-TV commercials, and "The Watchers Of The Night" is a veritable waking nightmare.

A semi-serious literary document entitled "The Wings Of Henry James" is noteworthy, if only for a keenly trenchant though little-known comment on the master's difficult later period by modest Owen Wister, author of "The Virginian".
James, he remarks in a letter to a friend, "is attempting the impossible namely, to produce upon the reader, as a painting produces upon the gazer, a number of superimposed, simultaneous impressions.
He would like to put several sentences on top of each other so that you could read them all at once, and get all at once, the various shadings and complexities".

Equally penetrating in its fashion is the following remark by a lady in the course of a literary conversation: "So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it".
Or the mildly epigrammatic utterance (also a quotation): "Woman's place is in the wrong".
Who but Thurber can be counted on to glean such nectareous essences?

A tribute to midsummer "bang-sashes" seems terribly funny, though it would be hard to explain why.
"One of them banged the sash of the window nearest my bed around midnight in July and I leaped out of sleep and out of bed.
'It's just a bat', said my wife reassuringly, and I sighed with relief.
'Thank God for that', I said;
'I thought it was a human being'".

In a sense, perhaps, Thurber is indebted artistically to the surrealist painter (was it Salvador Dali?
) who first conceived the startling fancy of a picture window in the abdomen.
That is, it is literally a picture window: you don't see into the viscera;
you see a picture -- trees, or flowers.
This is something like what Thurber's best effects are like, if I am not mistaken.

Though no longer able to turn out his protoplasmic pen-and-ink sketches (several old favorites are scattered through the present volume) Thurber has retained unimpaired his vision of humor as a thing of simple, unaffected humanness.
In his concluding paragraph he writes: "The devoted writer of humor will continue to try to come as close to truth as he can".
For many readers Thurber comes closer than anyone else in sight.

The latest Low is a puzzler.
The master's hand has lost none of its craft.
He is at his usual best in exposing the shams and self-deceptions of political and diplomatic life in the fifties.
The reader meets a few old friends like Blimp and the TUC horse, and becomes better acquainted with new members of the cast of characters like the bomb itself, and civilization in her classic robe watching the nuclear arms race, her hair standing straight out.

But there is a difference between the present volume and the early Low.
There is fear in the fifties as his title suggests and as his competent drawings show.
But there was terror in the thirties when the Nazis were on the loose and in those days Low struck like lightning.

Anyone can draw his own conclusions from this difference.
It might be argued that the Communists are less inhuman than the Nazis and furnish the artist with drama in a lower key.
But this argument cannot be pushed very far because the Communist system makes up for any shortcomings of its leaders in respect to corrosion.
The Communists wield a power unknown to Hitler.
And the leading issue, that of piecemeal aggression, remains the same.
This is drama enough.

Do we ourselves offer Mr. Low less of a crusade?
In the thirties we would not face our enemy;
that was a nightmarish situation and Low was in his element.
Now we have stood up to the Communists;
we are stronger and more self-confident -- and Low cannot so easily put us to rights.

Or does the reason for less Jovian drawings lie elsewhere?
It might be that Low has seen too many stupidities and that they do not outrage him now.
He writes, "Confucius held that in times of stress one should take short views -- only up to lunchtime".

Whatever the cause, his mood in the fifties rarely rises above the level of the capably sardonic.
Dulles?
He does not seem to have caught the subtleties of the man.
McCarthy?
The skies turn dark but the clouds do not loose their wrath.
Suez?
Low seems to have supported Eden at first and then relented because things worked out differently, so there is no fire in his eye.

Stalin's death, Churchill's farewell to public life, Hillary and Tensing on Everest, Quemoy and Matsu -- all subjects for a noble anger or an accolade.
Instead the cartoons seem to deal with foibles.
Their Eisenhower is insubstantial.
Did Low decide to let well enough alone when he made his selections?

He often drew the bomb.
He showed puny men attacked by splendidly tyrannical machines.
And Khrushchev turned out to be prime copy for the most witty caricaturist of them all.
But, but and but.

Look in this book for weak mortals and only on occasion for virtues and vices on the heroic scale.
Read the moderately brief text, not for captions, sometimes for tart epigrams, once in a while for an explosion in the middle of your fixed ideas.

A gray fox with a patch on one eye -- confidence man, city slicker, lebensraum specialist -- tries to take over Catfish Bend in this third relaxed allegory from Mr. Burman's refreshing Louisiana animal community.

The fox is all ingratiating smiles when he arrives from New Orleans, accompanied by one wharf rat.
But like all despots, as he builds his following from among the gullible, he grows more threatening toward those who won't follow -- such solid citizens as Doc Raccoon;
Judge Black, the vegetarian black snake;
and the eagle, who leads the bird community when he is not too busy in Washington posing for fifty-cent pieces.

As soon as the fox has taken hold on most of the populace he imports more wharf rats, who, of course, say they are the aggrieved victims of an extermination campaign in the city.
(The followers of bullies invariably are aggrieved about the very things they plan to do to others.
) They train the mink and other animals to fight.
And pretty soon gray fox is announcing that he won't have anyone around that's against him, and setting out to break his second territorial treaty with the birds.

Robert Hillyer, the poet, writes in his introduction to this brief animal fable that Mr. Burman ought to win a Nobel Prize for the Catfish Bend series.
He may have a point in urging that decadent themes be given fewer prizes.
But it's hard to imagine Mr. Burman as a Nobel laureate on the basis of these charming but not really momentous fables.

In substance they lie somewhere between the Southern dialect animal stories of Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus) and the polished, witty fables of James Thurber.