Neither this well-written conclusion, nor the opening tirade I have quoted, give the full impression of the book's vital quality, but they may perhaps draw the explorative reader.
"Tarr" finds sex a monstrosity, he finds it "a German study": "Sex, Hobson, is a German study. A German study."
At that we may leave it. "Tarr" "had no social machinery, but the cumbrous one of the intellect.... When he tried to be amiably he usually only succeeded in being ominous."
"Tarr" really gets at something in his last long discussion with Anastasya, when he says that art "has no inside." This is a condition of art, "to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. It is not something impelled like a machine by a little egoistic inside."
"Deadness, in the limited sense in which we use that word, is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of a statue are its soul."
Joyce says something of the sort very differently, he is full of technical scholastic terms: "stasis, kinesis," etc. Any careful statement of this sort is bound to be bafoué, and fumbled over, but this ability to come to a hard definition of anything is one of Lewis' qualities lying at the base of his ability to irritate the mediocre intelligence. The book was written before 1914, but the depiction of the German was not a piece of war propaganda.
AN HISTORICAL ESSAYIST
LYTTON STRACHEY ON LEFT-OVER CELEBRITY
Mr. Strachey, acting as funeral director for a group of bloated reputations, is a welcome addition to the small group of men who continue what Samuel Butler began. The howls going up in the Times Lit. Sup. from the descendants of the ossements are but one curl more of incense to the new author.