‘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.
Books and Characters. By Lytton Strachey. (Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York.)
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.