PRO VITA MONASTICA
Pro Vita Monastica. By Henry Dwight Sedgwick. 8vo. 164 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $3.50.
THIS is a very significant book, but the reading of it is a pleasure apart from this, for it is a model of literary style, delicate, polished, reserved, while the format of the volume is perfectly consonant with its matter, a very masterpiece of book-making.
Perhaps, indeed certainly, the quality of significance reveals itself in these respects as well as in the major fact that the book itself is utterly out of key with all the dominant tendencies of the time wherein lies its significance. So far as the present generation is concerned—perfect style in the writing of English is not a common aim, and even good things come before us in slovenly, headlong shape, or disguised in the cheap trappings of a rough colloquialism. The beauty of English as such (and there is no language that offers greater opportunities or more noble precedents) is almost a lost art and a forsaken ideal, and the jargon of journalism or of the scientific treatise is, if not the model consciously chosen, at least the determining influence working through the sub-conscious mind. Few indeed are the contemporary books like Compton Leith's Sirenica or (for a different genre) Henry Adams' Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, that are artistic triumphs of creative genius in the use of language, masterpieces of great style, and it is in this slender gathering that Mr Sedgwick belongs.
And again in the making of books, we have enough and to spare of "precious" and "distinctive" productions with their exaggerated effects in paper, typography, binding, but the volume that is in itself a work of art just because of its delicate composition of the tempting, subtle, but betraying elements in the printer's craft (some of Mr Updyke's publications for example) is rare, and therefore when so admirable a thing as this from the Atlantic Monthly Press comes before us, "as a stranger give it welcome."
Style, form, and matter are all harmonized here, and all work together to give the impression of escape, of refuge from a too insistent life that in its present estate has little to commend it except
