BOOKS AND PERSONALITIES.
Books and Personalities. By H. W. Nevinson. (John Lane. 5s. net.)—Mr. Nevinson has collected in this volume some thirty- odd reviews of books and literary sketches and studies. We have read them all with interest—seldom, indeed, have met with a book of the kind which we were so unwilling to lay down—and many with much pleasure. The three which deal with the miserable quarrel about Carlyle and his wife have our hearty approval. The paper in which Mr. Nevinson discusses the love- letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett is especially good ; so are the three on translations of Omar Khayyam. - The criticism of the character of Admetus, on the other hand, seems not a little beside the mark. Admetus was a very typical Greek, for the Greek was certainly not romantic. If he had hold of a good thing—and life was the best thing that he knew—he kept his hold of it as long as he could. " The rollicking deliverer," by the way, "is not brought drunk upon the stage." When he plays the deliverer's part Hercules is quite sober. Now and then Mr. Nevinson is more offensive to those who believe in a divine government of the world than he is probably aware of. His scoff at another literary man on p. 107 is in exceedingly bad taste. He is quite free not to admire this gentleman's verse—and here we agree with him—but there was no occasion to give an opinion on the matter, and it is given in a discourteous way. Surely it is an exaggeration to say that the Aeschylean trilogy would have taken "at full length nine or ten hours in the original Greek." The three plays contain together about three thousand eight hundred lines. Romeo and Juliet is about two-thirds as long.
Previous page
