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 the Edinburgh 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 from the 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’?”
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!’”
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.
This Freedom. By A. S. M. Hutchinson. (Little, Brown & Co.)
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.