BRIEFER MENTION
509
Gods of Modern Grub Street, by A. St John Adcock, with thirty-two portraits after photographs by E. O. Hoppé (12mo, 326 pages; Stokes: $2.50) is a collection of notes documenting Mr Hoppé's photographs. Mr Adcock furnishes the bones of biography, with some timid comments—this book seems better than that, or a certain book is about this or that; but he fails to possess, or submerges, any particular appetites in literature. His writing lacks personality; and he is the perfect "book in breeches." Mr Hoppé's portraits are very plain and public—an identifiable mask and conventional posing of hands and pipe in a moderate murk. Nevertheless certain faces, such as Hardy's or Hilaire Belloc's, are like to endure as he has recorded them. It is pleasant to see Mr E. Phillips Oppenheim's mild proletariat face, not unlike the late John Bunny's, Mr McKenna's ideal aristocracy, and Miss Kaye-Smith's acrid sunniness. But in this case the quality of godliness is success; and the book would have more interest if they had sought certain distinguished faces which the great publishers have not yet made as trite as the Smith Brothers'.
Men of Letters, by Dixon Scott, with an Introduction by Max Beerbohm (12mo, 313 pages; Doran: $3). England's long alienation from constructive movements in the other arts has intensified a remarkable impure delight in literature, in which a dim sense of design and formal beauty became inextricably confused with accidental and social interests. That the critic dominated the reader and not the writer is indicated by the fact that a school of ornate romantic critics preceded a group of novels strictly designed, of an intricate cold carved quality, which irritated and dismayed the unprepared public. The late Mr Dixon Scott says that "one of the chief joys of criticism is the joy of detection—an actual hounding-down of a live human being," with no suspicion that this pleasure ought to be somewhat illicit. His comments are sensitive and shapely, but mostly a little beside the point. True critical acumen, which reproduces in diagram the process of creation, is a little overlaid by the irrelevant things he saw in his subject. That he possessed it is clear in the Whitman note. He observed Whitman's all but secure position between poetical rhetoric and exact creation; and wrote of the poignance of his particular in sharp relief against the universal, his image against a primitive atmosphere, as in Oriental verse.
Harmonism and Conscious Evolution, by Sir Charles Walston (12mo, 463 pages; Macmillan: $6). The sequel to the dictum that "everything flows" is the discovery of the unchanging principle which underlies this flow. Sir Charles Walston, then, is writing the sequel to pragmatism when he attempts to bring the emphasis on the free creative will back to some principle underlying this will. And he sees what the pragmatists have missed: that the creative will involves first of all an aesthetic principle rather than an ethical one. But we do wish that this really vital formulation of aesthetic priority had permeated the author's style more deeply, so that his plea for beauty in living might have been more a thing of beauty in itself.
