Life and Letters, the new shilling monthly edited by Mr.
Desmond MacCarthy, has no tiresome-prefatory explanation. We plunge straight into a delightful reminiscence of Mr. I3eerbohm's two meetings' with Andrew Lang and go on to a Hardy fragment on " The Science of Fiction." Mr. George Santayana is quite simple (for him) and intelligible about " Hamlet "—and we learn at the end that it is a twenty- year-old essay. No one can criticize Shakespeare without rzvealing his own character, as witness " Shakespeare's genius shines in the texture of his poems rather than their structure, in imagery and happy strokes rather than in integrating ideas. He feels no vocation to call the stones themselves to their ideal places. How blind to him, and to Hamlet, are all ultimate issues and the sum total of things how unseizable ! " But there is more than self-revelation here (else we had hardly turned two- pages of such well- cemented but ponderous prose), there is a youthful and vivid description of Hamlet as prototype of the Nordics. The editor's own contribution is a short paper on the inferiority of Herr Emil Ludwig as a biographer. He is justly censorious of The Son of Mom Although he admits the uncommon qualities of the Napoleon, he seems to us to do less than justice to that remarkable piece of portraiture. But every- thing Mr. MacCarthy writes is informed with his 'clarity -and- sensitiveness and the " Reports from Readers " which conclude the magazine appear to have passed through the filter of his mind. They are really admirable short criticisms. The printing is excellent and we must say a word Tor the advertise- ments at the beginning and end, which while not obtruding themselves (when will advertisers learn that civility pays ?) are so pleasantly laid out that the reader will turn to them for pleasure and counsel. Life and Letters, devoted to good literature yet in touch with life, learned and not highbrow, ready for new talent but removed from fads and cliques, will certainly have a good public. This first number is inter- esting from cover to cover. If it maintains this standard (as it should) it will find a definite and permanent place in
English letters. * * * *
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