Salvation Without Salves

MENTAL HEALERS -- Stefan Zweig -- Viking ($3-50).

Since self-righteousness so often accompanies good health, bad health must result from unrighteousness, or so have reasoned the generations of mankind. His first serious twinge sends the sick man to doctor or priest, for pills sometimes, for confession always. M.D.'s diagnose them outside in, priests diagnose them inside out; together they cover all the ground. When one man combines the abilities of both, he can hang out his shingle on the moon. Scores of sick men will then scurry to live on the moon. Should he, like Freud, open his office on Venus, half the world will scurry to live there.

Mental Healers narrates the life-history, describes the practices of three such doctor-priests--the discoverers of Mesmerism, Christian Science, Psychoanalysis. Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-1814) started the snowball rolling with a bit of magnetized iron. In 1774 Maximilian Hell, astronomer of the Society of Jesus, fashioned a magnet which, on application, cured a lady's stomach trouble. Mesmer tried similar tricks with Hell magnets himself; to his amazement they worked. An enormous practice sprang up at Mesmer's Vienna home. Soon, however, he discovered that the magnet was unnecessary, that he could cure his patients by merely touching them. This pawer he called animal magnetism. Mesmer's successes infuriated the Viennese medicos. They looked for some pungent failure, found one in the case of a blind girl, Maria Theresia Paradies, who was, said rumor, Mesmer's mistress.

Mesmer left Vienna, went to Switzerland, then to Paris where, after two years of successful practice, he offered his services to Louis XVI. But, as with other salvagers, it took bullion-room gold to keep him dredging up wrecks. He told the king "for the purposes I have in mind, the sum of four or five hundred thousand francs is neither here nor there. My discoveries and myself must be endowed with a generous hand. . . ." Parsimonious Louis declined, whereupon the money was raised for Mesmer by private subscription. Mesmeromania became the rage. He continued practicing, though without official recognition, until the French Revolution drove him, discredited and poor, out of France into obscurity. On the shores of Lake Constance he still worked on, mesmerized his own declining years with music from his glass harmonica. Though not fully understanding his own discoveries he was "the first of the new psychologists."

Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science turns hypnotism upwards and inwards, makes it mostly self-hypnotism. Cured of incipient paralysis by a professional healer, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, she borrowed his practice, added to it a religious fervor all her own. Faith and churches were her remedies for almost every disease.

More scientific, more sympathetic to Author Zweig is Sigmund Freud, whose pyscho-analysis makes "comprehensible . . . the voices that exhort us or allure us behind our waking words and our waking consciousness and to whose bidding we generally pay more heed than to that of our recognized will." Freud got his first real start in Paris under the famed Charcot who cured hysterical paralysis by hypnotic suggestion. Thereafter Freud made a systematic study of the subconscious, discovered the truth of the Chinese proverb: "What is pent up in the deepest recesses of the heart, sneezes itself out in the dream." More doctor than priest. Freud has founded no churches; his hope ful cures are based on an essentially hopeless philosophy. Of his teaching Author Zweig concludes: "Freud has done marvels, but there remain other marvels still to do. Now that his art of interpretation has revealed to the mind its hidden bonds, we await others who will once more disclose to it its own freedom, showing it how to stream out of its own confines into the universe."

The Author, Born in Vienna in 1881, of rich Jewish parents, Stefan Zweig until the World War was more of a traveler than an author. His first popular work was an anti-War play, Jeremiah, produced in Switzerland to avoid German and Austrian censorship. He now writes to carry out a conscious literary program. Other translated works: Paul Verlaine, Emile Verhaeren, Romain Rolland, Passion and Pain, Invisible Collection, Conflicts, Adepts in Self-Portraiture, Joseph Fouche, Amok.

Real Illusions

JEAN -JACQUES ROUSSEAU -- Matthew Josephson--Harcourt, Brace ($5).*

When a man has money, he thinks; when he has none, he realizes. Strange mixture of thoughts not fully realized, realizations not all thought out was Rousseau, archetype of modern Hamlets and revolutionaries, "the only man in Europe who believed in God." He never wanted, never had much money; even when he accepted his patronesses' hospitality he copied music scores for a living. For all his poverty, his neuroses, he saw life more wholly than perhaps any other literatus of his time.

In his life of Rousseau, Matthew Josephson gets down to the roots of many modern ideas. To him "JeanJacques Rousseau was a source-man, one who went back instinctively to the springs of life." Karl Marx, James Joyce, the new psychology, have all been traced back to Social Contract, Emile, New Heloise, Confessions.

Rousseau's life was made gruesome by sexual troubles, miserable by quarrels with contemporary writers and the State. With the Encyclopaedists. (Diderot and friends) and with Voltaire he fought to the death, flagellated himself with a persecution-mania regarding them. Biographile Josephson sets forth facts showing that his mania was not without cause. The manuscript of Mme d'Epinay's Memoirs, one of the sourcebooks of gossip about Rousseau, was deliberately tampered with, falsified by his enemies. He was driven from France for his political theories, abdicated his Genevese citizenship, fled to England under the protection of "turtle-eating alderman" David Hume. He returned to Paris thoroughly demented. To ease his conscience, protect his writings from his enemies, he made a false attempt to place the manuscript of his paranoiac Dialogues on the high altar of Notre Dame. At long last he came to himself. "All is ended for me on earth: neither good nor evil can be done me. . . . And so I am at peace in the depth of the abyss, poor, ill-fated mortal, but impassible as God himself."

Rousseau's sufferings and depressions are embroidered with a little humor here and there. When the quarrel between him and Diderot had all Paris by the ears, one of the high nobility, the Marechal de Castrees, exclaimed: "Ye gods! Everywhere I go, I hear talk of nobody but this Rousseau and this Diderot! Who ever heard of such a thing! People of the lowest sort, people who do not even own their own houses, who live on the fourth floor!"

Biographile Josephson has edited Broom, contributed to Secession, The Little Review, transition; written Portrait of the Artist as American, Zola and His Time. He broke down during the Wall Street debacle; recently had to rescue from his burning home some of his manuscripts, some of his skin.

*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.

*Published Jan. 12.

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