Many Occasions : Essays Towards the Appreciation of Several Arts.
By W. B. Honey. (Faber. 18s.) MR. HONEY is not merely an expert in ceramics ; this collection of reprinted broadcasts and essays discusses gardening and ballet, glass- blowing and English literature with ruthless integrity and a very wide appreciation. One cannot accept all his arguments. He main- tains, for example, that the beauty of a landscape "can hardly be said to exist without the observer, but the beautiful creature is beautiful at all times and in itself." But he indulges rarely in such "academic " quibbles. He is fond of eighteenth-century poetry and believes that D. H. Lawrence is, in moments of inspiration, to be ranked with Shakespeare ; it is Mr. Honey's candour, indeed his iconoclasm, which make him so readable. His originality is based on good sense, and he expresses himself in terse, muscular English, with no superfluous comment, even about Shakespeare. Among his few illustrations he includes an etching by Picasso and a statue by Henry Moore, because he insists that an appreciation of modern art is essential to the under- standing of any art at all. One of the most interesting passages, nevertheless, is his " reading " of an eighteenth-century Nymphen- burg group—a valuable lecture expliquee of Bustelli's porcelain. Somewhere in his essays Mr. Honey likens merely formal art to synthetic food with no nutritive value, and one might well adopt the metaphor ; his present book is not easily digested, but it is downright wholesome stuff.
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