THIS is not a critical work but a piece of
professional journalism, a guide-book to recent English literature written apparently for foreigners—either to English or to literature. There are brief chapters on Forster, Joyce, Lawrence, Huxley and others, designed to convey the general idea of what their work is all about, which certainly could be useful to none except those who have not read those authors. Dr. Evans's book, in fact, is a protracted generalisa- tion, which can serve only to perpetuate the thoughtlessness of current valuations, and as such it must be stigmatised as critically vicious. Where he ventures an original remark his judgement is unreliable, as when he declares Huxley's worst-but-one novel, Point Counter Point, to be his best, and where he writes of Eliot's early poems that they " had a prestige beyond anything which the quality of the verse warrants," adding: " The effects (sic) in many of the poems is merely one of romantic nostalgia." That last sentence is careless, and it is careless, too, to refer (on p. 45) to a fictional character in Ulysses as " Stephen Bloom." This is, in fact, a careless book written evidently for a careless public ; and both aspects of the matter are regrettable.
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