BOOKS OF THE MOMENT

SEVEN BOOKS OF ESSAYS

12s.)

THERE is clearly a great deal to be said against casting general observations on events and persons in the form of an essay.

You will be tempted on the one hand to the over-simplification and distortion usually involved in a direct statement about anything ; and on the other hand you may easily be led into the pumping up of generalizations and opinions, or the cold mood of putting style first and matter second.

Perhaps the rules of the essay as an aesthetic form were once rigid enough to impose a discipline, but the formal pattern has faded out of usage and out of liking, and we see the essayist—a little like "the last man" in a late eighteenth century moral poem—left bleakly alone with the world. For it often seems as though the value of any literary form is simply that it adds a third condition to the austere duality of writer and subject. We may see the fate of imagined per- sonages in fiction, the rhythms and other verbal patterns in poetry, or the strict technical limitations of the stage and screen, as adding another dimension to the art of writing.

The written world is enriched by them from being a sort of "flat land" to the vigorous three-dimensional universe of a Shakespeare or a Dostoieffsky, in which men and events are seen in natural proportion with opinion. (That is with opinion very small indeed.) The skilful and experienced essayist commands, however, the art of perspective, and so by his skin he can seem to add depth to his world. He does not, like the unwary school-child, involve himself in the hopeless flatness of "another reason for preferring the country is . . . . " and add particular instances to his generalizations. In fact, so close do many essays get to being stories, that Mr. Lynd's and Mr. Agate's essays, for instance, are—to pursue the metaphor—like the nymphs on a baroque ceiling, and you must pry and take account of emphasis before you can be sure if they are in relief or not.

Mr. Robert Lynd is always happiest where he most assumes the three dimensional, and his street preachers, bookies,

French hotel keepers, English publicans, and long-legged little girls stand out in amusing and dramatic relief. The Peal of Bells is charming, for his style is elegant, he is often witty, and his generalizations give evidence of experience and reflection.

Mr. Agate's essays in White Horse and Red Lion are much less urbane, but their author has charm, and though here not

quite perhaps up to his usual form, is yet vigorous and often entertaining.. One first-rate piece, however, consists almost entirely in quotation. It is an account of an early Edwardian society romance, and is unbelievably funny.

"Alpha of the Plough" again has not so distinguished a style as Mr. Lynd. He also forces the pace a little sometimes.

Though he is good-humoured and agreeable, he is often too quick and sliding. "Pour the tea off quickly," he says in his essay on "Tea and Mr. Bennett." Ile has poured his essays off their subjects so quickly that though fresh and aromatic, they are often only just straw-coloured. He has in Mr. Clive Gardiner an illustrator of admirable line and charming and fertile fancy.

But perhaps the most charming essays of the moment are those published try the Hogarth Press. That by Miss Bosan- quet on Henry James at Work I like, because it is not so much an essay as a piece of information garnished with a great deal of literary charm. Miss Theodora Bosanquet was Mr. James' secretary for a number of years, working with him in the old house at Rye, and she tells things about his methods of writing and his way of life which cannot fail to be of immediate interest and entertainment to anybody who has. ever for a moment practised literature or even contemplated doing so. Much of what she tells will, however, one fancies, serve more as an awful warning than Miss Bosanquet quite anticipated.

The other two volumes of the Ifogarth Press's series arc really lectures. One is by .Mr. Roger Fry on The Artist and Psycho-Analysis. In this he tells some much needed home truths, and points out the way in which many simple-hearted analysts have been again and again taken in by artistic charlatans.. He shows also, in an extremely interesting way, the ground. upon which artists and analysts—both workers in the medium of men's minds—can co-operate, and indicates what, in each other's domains, they will find of interest. The reader should be warned that " artist " is used almost entirely in the sense of painter, or anyhow practitioner of one of the visual arts, and that some rather immediate literary problems (for example, how far you could write a novel from having, read a number of psycho-analysts' case reports) are not touched upon.

Much the wittiest of the three essays is Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. This is a thoroughly entertaining and sprightly excursion by one of the best of our modern "mystic realist" novelists upon the work of a slightly earlier generation, the work of Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Bennett, and in a lesser degree Mr. Wells. All readers of novels should get this little essay, which, when read and digested, will, I assure them, enable them to get a great deal more fun out of their library sub- scription. If this present standard is kept up, long may the series of the Hogarth essays be continued.

Just as two of the Hogarth essays are really lectures, so the last book on my pile is not really a book of essays at all. Until you read the entries in a diary such as that of Mr. Havelock Ellis you may probably believe that the modern essay is formless, but in these Impressions and Comments the licence is still greater. I am not sure that I do not like Mr. Havelock Ellis better when he girds up his loins and writes us Little Essays of Lore and Virtue, or one of his queer little novels. With his scientific work it would clearly be unfair to compare Impressions and Comments. There are some brilliant flashes in the book, and here and there an almost prophetic richness which seems the fruit of long contemplation. But there is also a good deal that is insignificant, and the reader will probably find himself resorting to the methods of the lucky dip. Besides a number of trenchant remarks upon current follies—public hypocrisy and short-sightedness as regards birth -control, the curious mix-up of our attitude towards sport and humanitarianism, and the thousand con- tradictions incident to our state—Mr. Ellis has some passages on religion and the fate of the soul which to me seem beautiful, and fit either for Christian or Agnostic.

In the entry for September 5th, for instance, he writes on the passage on the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us," and points out how we went on saying that all through the War ; we genuinely believed, that is, that the Germans had trespassed against us, and were genuinely occupied in killing, starving and thinking ill of those trespassers. "What is wrong," he says, "with our interpretation of this petition ? " And he suggests that we could perhaps fruitfully regard it as a petition to our higher selves :-- "To ask that one's own higher self should forgive one's own trespasses is the hardest prayer to answer that we can over offer up. If wo can breathe this prayer and find it truly answered in a harmony of exalted comprehension and acceptance, then we have learnt what forgiveness is."

. That this is not true of many unspeculative and vigorous persons who can condone their own conduct indefinitely does not prove that it is not extraordinarily true of almost all nicely adjusted and introspective minds, who have in all ages felt a kind of harshness and despair rise in them at their own unceasing fallibility, and who have too often transferred their self-accusation and, lashed mankind.

A. WILLIAMS-ELus.