Books: Romancer and Romanticism

JULES VERNE—Kennefh Allott—Macmillan ($3).

This book is a life of Jules Verne (the first in English) and an analysis of the romantic-scientific viewpoint of the 19th Century. Industrious Jules Verne was a perfect exponent of that viewpoint. His books, tremendously popular, not only stimulated "progress," but furnished a grateful escape from it.

Verne's life was as quiet as his stories were lively. A lawyer's son, he went to Paris in 1848, tried his hand at playwriting, lived poor, became a stockbroker to support his wife. After the success of his Five Weeks in A...