Book Reviews
Imagine Yale College without appendages, and New Haven without slums or business section, and life just as it is now and you will have the setting for Mr. Lewis’ ’17 first novel, “Tutor’s Lane”.
You are given as hero a young English instructor, a graduate from about the same class as Mr. Lewis, probably with a Chi Delta Theta charm, and a heroine not greatly sophisticated, of good family, mildly fond of “doing good” to “the people.” These two fondly follow a Quixotic scheme of uplift (which he doesn’t even like, and about which she’s a fool), and come out of it ashamed but at one in their shame. The inevitable marriage ensues. The plot is the weakness of the book. It is a thin-spun web, and disappointing.
But the non-plot characters, and the phrasing of the Syllabus, and the satire scattered through the pages are features over which no one can pass without delight. Mrs. Norris talks, the reader is amused; Mr. Lewis talks, the reader is wholly captivated. It is not the genial gay humor of Punch; it is something with a sharper touch than that, more witty, more satirical. It is only when Mr. Lewis becomes sympathetic with his character or with his reader that he fails. He is superb when he is laughing at both simultaneously.
If he ever gets hold of a plot, the result will be a fine novel. He has the power of restraint and objectivity which most moderns lack. He is refreshing in the midst of so much that is conspicuously heavy and bent with the weight of the world. His product is not marred by continual reference to the travail and labor its creation caused. He seems to have enjoyed writing the book, and not to have written it in order to save the world, or the destinies of nations. To amuse himself and his friends seems to be his only purpose in writing, which is probably why “Tutor’s Lane” will also amuse so many other people.
M. E. F.
There are probably very few men now at Yale who are destined to look back, after an equally short span of years, upon a more enviable literary record than that already possessed by Stephen Vincent Benét. And yet, we had to read a good deal of “Young Peoples Pride” before we began to enjoy it. Perhaps the reason was that we had expected another “serious novel” or “character study” somewhat along the lines of Mr. Benét’s “The Beginning of Wisdom”. The rather affectedly “super smart” illustrations with which the present book is garnished annoyed us, and the occurrence of passages like the following caused us to fear that Mr. Benét, with an eye to the box office, had joined the Fitzgeraldine ranks of tale-tellers-out-of-school.
“‘The trouble with Art is that it doesn’t pay a decent living wage unless you’re willing to commercialize—’‘The trouble with Art is that it never did, except for a few chance lucky people—’‘The trouble with Art is Women.’‘The trouble with Women is Art.’‘The trouble with Art—with women I mean—change signals! What do I mean?’”
“‘The trouble with Art is that it doesn’t pay a decent living wage unless you’re willing to commercialize—’
‘The trouble with Art is that it never did, except for a few chance lucky people—’
‘The trouble with Art is Women.’
‘The trouble with Women is Art.’
‘The trouble with Art—with women I mean—change signals! What do I mean?’”
But there is not much of that sort of “cleverism”. In fact, in so far as “We Wild Young People” enter, Mr. Benét holds the mirror very sanely and skillfully up to nature.
However, “Young Peoples Pride” scarcely requires all this analyzing. It is not an “important novel” anyway—simply a rattling good yarn, and must be judged as such. For sheer sustained excitement we have seldom read anything better than the long scene in the apartment of Mrs. Severance and the gentleman whom Mr. Benét so quaintly calls “Mr. Severance”. It is a scene that we shall hope to see on Broadway later, when its author becomes a playwright—if he ever does. Read the book for that, by all means—and you’ll like a good deal of the rest.
L. S. G.
A reference, in the present volume, to Thomas Beddoes as “the last Elizabethan” suggests, at once, Mr. Lytton Strachey’s preëminent right to the title of “the last Victorian”—using the word in its best sense, to denote an individual very far removed indeed from any desire to go “tobaggoning down Parnassus”. Mr. Strachey’s bland progress through the realm of letters is, in fact, the very antithesis of that adopted by the tobaggoning school of modern critics. To analyze the characteristics of his style is to call up a host of adjectives long all but forgotten amid the present scramble for pseudo-culture. He is scholarly without being pedantic, erudite without being obscure. And the queer, musing, almost anecdotal manner in which he rambles from Johnson’s wit to Madame du Deffand’s, from Shakespeare’s tragedies to Voltaire’s, is always giving way to lightning flashes of true critical insight expressed with the netteté of a Racine.
As might be gathered from the foregoing remarks, “Books and Characters” is a volume of collected critical essays, which first appeared individually between the years 1905 and 1919 in various publications, such as theEdinburgh Review. Incidentally, it is a book which should have an especial and peculiar appeal to the college man. For the books and characters touched upon are, one or two excepted, the very ones with which the reading essential to a college course has made him most familiar. He will thus have freshly in mind the background of literary acquaintanceships, which the guileless Mr. Strachey apparently supposes is possessed by everyone, and upon which he proceeds to etch his portraits with the aid of a wit so delightful and so acutely sharpened as to be quite irresistible. For it was true wit, in the Victorian sense, mingled with a quaint, sly humor, which made Strachey’s “Queen Victoria” the consummate master-portrait that it is, and which reappears in “Books and Characters”. Perhaps a quotation fromthe chapter entitled, “The Lives of the Poets”, may show what we mean:
“Johnson’s aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them—except one. They are never right. That is an unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong so cleverly, that nobody minds. When Gray, for instance, points the moral to his poem on Walpole’s cat with a reminder to the fair that all that glisters is not gold, Johnson remarks that this is ‘of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if she had, would no less have been drowned.’ Could anything be more ingenious, or more neatly put, or more obviously true? But then, to use Johnson’s own phrase, could anything be of less ‘relation to the purpose’?”
“Johnson’s aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them—except one. They are never right. That is an unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong so cleverly, that nobody minds. When Gray, for instance, points the moral to his poem on Walpole’s cat with a reminder to the fair that all that glisters is not gold, Johnson remarks that this is ‘of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if she had, would no less have been drowned.’ Could anything be more ingenious, or more neatly put, or more obviously true? But then, to use Johnson’s own phrase, could anything be of less ‘relation to the purpose’?”
Well, we only restrain ourselves with difficulty from seeming to commit sacrilege upon Johnson by proclaiming the rightness of Mr. Strachey’s aesthetic judgments, as well as their wit.
The essays dealing with French life and letters, just prior to the revolution, are equally a mine of interest. They are all brilliant pieces of writing; from the flickering sidelights thrown upon the undignified and incredible squabbles of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, to the half-pitiful, half-comic details concerning the salon of Madame du Deffande—Madame du Deffande, who was for twenty years, at once, blind, hopelessly in love with Walpole, and the cultural autocrat of Paris. Skeptics, all of them—and skeptics essentially Gallic, before whose unabashed indifference to God, and cynical contempt for man the Anglo-Saxon mind is apt to recoil, gymnastically unable to assume the necessary shift in point of view. For instance, there is Madame La Maréchale de Luxembourg:
“‘Quel ton! Quel effroyable ton!’ she is said to have exclaimed after a shuddering glance at the Bible. ‘Ah, Madame, quel dommage que la Sainte Esprit eut aussi peu de gout!’”
“‘Quel ton! Quel effroyable ton!’ she is said to have exclaimed after a shuddering glance at the Bible. ‘Ah, Madame, quel dommage que la Sainte Esprit eut aussi peu de gout!’”
At least they seem to have been sincere, these most un-Victorian French. And they round out Mr. Strachey’s book into something which really must not be missed.
L. S. G.
A. S. M. Hutchinson’s latest novel, “This Freedom,” is the life story of an English girl. Brought up in an old-fashioned home where the duty of the women is but to serve the men, she breaks from conventional ties and becomes a thoroughly modern creature in thought and action.
Her ideal is man’s position of social independence. This she attains to the fullest measure in the business world. But trouble comes after she has experienced love, marriage and the duties of a mother of a family. After a series of crushing disasters, she discovers that modern teaching does not tend to make for that home life to which she, in her youth, had been accustomed, and from whose charm she had never really freed herself.
The book has the same weak point as its predecessor, “If Winter Comes”. Mr. Hutchinson does not seem to have the courage to write a tragedy. After he has masterfully created a heap of wreckage, he vainly attempts restoration in a few concluding paragraphs. It is as impossible for the reader to conceive of recovery in the case of Rosalie and Harry as it was to imagine a future happiness for Nona and Marco.
It is to be hoped that we shall soon have a real tragedy from the pen of this popular author, for then we shall put down the book perhaps sadder but at least more impressed.
M. T.
If “Babbitt” is a better book than “Main Street”, as its publishers would have us believe, then Mr. Lewis’ improvement is to be found in an even greater application to the details; the minute cataloguing of commonplace incident. It is infinitely painstaking. But for those of us who believe that “Main Street” in itself showed an unnecessary virtuosity in that talent, this is hardly to be rated as an advance.
“Babbitt” is not so much to be considered as better or worse than “Main Street”, as a companion volume in Mr. Lewis’ seriesof compendiums of all that is tawdry, and hypocritical, and typical, in the contemporary life of the American middle class.
Babbitt is the “average” American business man; a real estate dealer (“realtor”, as he pridefully insists on being called); a Rotarian, Booster, member of the Athletic Club, and solid citizen. He has a squabbling family; a wife whom he tolerates, and three children whom he loves impatiently—because he cannot understand them. Little attention is given to a plot; the development is rather in exhaustive study and analysis. From the time when Babbitt gets up to shave, until the time when he makes sure (for the second time) that all the doors in the house are locked, no detail of his life, personal, family, business, or social, is omitted. And each detail is analyzed. Sometimes it is satirized; and often the attempted satirization becomes an over-done burlesque.
Like Carol Kennicott, Babbitt is filled with dissatisfaction; and a realization (more vague than hers, because he cannot understand it) of the meaningless hypocrisy of his life. But his revolt is not intellectual, and therefore the pain of frustration in the inevitable defeat at the end is not so keen.
I do not hold with those critics who condemn Mr. Lewis for presenting only one side of his picture. I agree that he does present only one side—but are there not a great many times as many authors who write only of the so-called “pleasant” side? And are not Mr. Lewis’ characterizations far closer to the actual verities?
I think that they are; and that historians of the future will do well to turn to such books as “Babbitt” for their data on the “typical” American citizen of the third decade of the twentieth century.
C. G. P.