PROPHETS AND POETS Current Literature
By Andre Maurois
M. Maurois' new book (Cassell, lOs. (d.) is composed of a series of lectures on nine modern English writers, Kipling, Wells, Shaw, Conrad, Chesterton, Lytton Strachey, Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Katherine Mansfield, which he delivered to a French audience a short time ago.- They were probably good lectures for an audience which was presuMably mainly in need of simple information about their subjects, but it is difficult to see much justification for their translation and publication in this country. M. Maurois devotes a great deal more space to biography and synopsis than to criticism. An English reader with an average amount of knowledge and I he usual reference-books at his disposal, and an average familiarity with the better known works produced in his own life-time, has no need of the biography or the synopsis ; arid what criticism there is is generally of the sort which he 4-mild provide himself. Where it is not, it is as often as not of a kind which there is no point in attempting. For example, M. Maurois has a curious partiality for comparisons between English and French writers, " Has Shaw been the equal of Voltaire ? " he asks, adding, as though he were aware of the futility of his question, " Comparisons of this sort have little meaning." But he nevertheless proceeds to make it.
In a s' 'tar manner he remarks of Lytton Strachey, " It would be a very rough and ready approximation to compare him to Voltaire," and devotes the next two pages to doing so. Mr. Wells' " intellectual dominion " today is compared with Voltaire's in the eighteenth century. When Voltaire will not lit, Moliere and others take his place. It is consequently a pleasant shock to find that, though he cannot refrain from mentioning its existence, M. Maurois virtuously discards the usual comparison between Mr. Wells and Jules Verne. But the book provides few other occasions for gratitude to its author.
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