Mr.- Hamilton's Latch-Key
Majority, 1931-1952: An Anthology of 21 Years of Publishing. (Hamish Hamilton. 25s.)
THE time has come when some of us face anthologies with appre- hension. We should like nowadays to form our own opinion of Wordsworth, to read, perhaps, FitzGerald's letters, not the inevitable lines. We feel a strong dislike of stale or predigested writing, and we fear, understandably, that, when selections grow so popular, initiative and discretion and even enjoyment must suffer. But there is always a place for good books and a welcome for celebrations ; and in a handsome literary manner the firm of Hamish Hamilton commemorate their coming of age. Majority is an anthology which should placate-the purist, and the most accomplished hostess could leave it about the house. It looks prepossessing, and it must satisfy the general reader in his intellectual moment, the dilettante in his many moods, even the critic in his unguarded, slippered hour.
The contributors are. only linked by having the same publisher ; indeed, there could hardly be a denominator common to Mr. runlet, who discourses on Proust, and Miss Mitford, whose sophisti- cated naivete is so.pleasantly recalled. Mr. Robertson's tribute to our Lady of the Lyceum is a cordial, delightful appreciation of Ellen Terry ; it is imaginative, largely unfamiliar, written with pleasantly restrained emotion. The Browning Version is touching in print as it was on the stage, and from the repressed drama in an English public school one may turn to such inebriating Americana as Thurber's The Catbird Seat or The Lilies-and-Bluebird Delusion. Thurber is strangely kind among cartoonists, and there is little to compare with his genius for inconsequential truth, intricate simplicity and straight-faced humour. He could raise a laugh in the Reading Room at the British Museum. And then, by way of Bloomsbury, one comes to Mr. Spender's recollections, and Mr. Cruikshank's meditation on The Mood of Squares, on the " green sanctuaries " of London, the " tiny pin-points of emerald " that mark the converted burial-grounds and the lozenges and circles and crescents all given the one geometrical name. There has been a book on London squares, but it leaves no such diverting memory. It is sad that no Steinberg creatures-gambol through the pages of Majority ; one misses a contribution from Miss Rose Macaulay, a chapter on Rimbaud by Dr. Enid Starkie. But in this anthology, under the green bay-tree of the Hamish Hamilton imprint, there is
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