We are sailing in a gondola along exotic shores. Crystal castles, dewy meadows, weeping cypresses, glowing craters.... We pass through the dreamy regions of Shelley and Keats, we envisage the gigantic cosmos of Shakespeare, of Dante, of Milton, of Goethe, we perceive in a haze the purple-crimson crucifixion of Nietzsche, the cruel gloom of Dostoyevsky, the dizzy abysses of Poe, the all-human chaos of Whitman.... We sail on—but ah, our picturesque gondolier! He is so excited, so restless, so loud—we are forced to turn our eyes from the grandiose landscape and follow bewildered our conscientious cicerone. In his anxiety lest we fail to notice the passing “places of importance,” our industrious guide shrieks and yells, wriggles and gesticulates, beats upon our senses, pricks and tickles, and all this he performs to the accompaniment of a mellow mandolin, so sweet, so touching, so exasperating. We are weary. * * * * * With some apprehension I looked forward to Mr. Powys’s book of “Literary Devotions,”[4] for I had the good luck of listening to his lectures. They are unforgettable, those bewitched moments in the darkened Little Theater, where we sat hypnotized by “the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light of the stage,” invoking the spirits of the Great. How will those invocations appear, I worried, when congealed in the static book-form, minus the catacomb-atmosphere, minus the serpent-like, mesmerizing cant of the meteoric sorcerer, minus Raymond Johnson’s light-effects? “And, ah! sweet, tender reader,” to use Mr. Powys’s style, my fears came true: the book is a libretto, sans orchestra, sans singer. I know that many of the lecturer’s devotees, especially the worshipping young ladies, will find little difficulty in mentally supplying the libretto with the dynamic personality of the performer; but my imagination is dewinged at the sight of the motionless symmetric lines, and I fail to vocalize the legions of exclamation-marks, the innumerable capital-letters, the profuse superlatives. With a kaleidoscopic velocity the author displays his personal reflections upon the greatest minds of the world; he bends them, he liquifies them, he moulds them, recreates them according to his whim—good, bravissimo! I am the last person to depreciate subjective criticism; I am tolerant enough to digest even such a statement as that Goethe was typically and intrinsically German, or that Nietzsche was thoroughly Christian. It is not Mr. Powys’s What that nauseates me, but his How, his butaforial Grand Style, his monotonous tremolo, his constant air of discovering new planets, his Pateresque worship of beauty which lacks Pater’s aristocratic calm and reservedness, his Oscaresque paradoxicalness deprived of Wilde’s chiselled wit, his continuous ruminating of a limited stock of long, high words, of dizzying adjectives, of saccharine adverbs.