The Little Review, February 1915 (Vol. 1, No. 11)Various
General
The Little Review, February 1915 (Vol. 1, No. 11)
Various
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- Periodicals
I cannot let another issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW go to press without some
mention of Ethel Sidgwick. Last year, with a sense of worship, I read
_Succession_, the second volume of a trilogy devoted to the story of a
boy-wonder violinist. To find such subtlety, such radiance, such art—to
find such music!—in a piece of fiction was an unforgettable experience.
Music has never been so richly treated in fiction—except in _Jean
Christophe_, which of course is the master work of the last years. I
felt that I had never comprehended any character so fully as I did
little Antoine, and I still feel that way. This year on Christmas day,
as a sort of special celebration, I read the first volume, _Promise_. It
is just as interesting, though there is not such a brilliant
concentration of art in it. But isn’t there some way to make these books
known? They will never be popular; but it is tragic to think of their
not getting to the people who would value them. Their publishers would
far rather advertise their cheap fiction than to try to force Ethel
Sidgwick on a nation that does not demand good work of novelists.
Oxford and Genius
_Sinister Street, by Compton Mackenzie._ [_D. Appleton and
Company, New York._]
E. Temple Thurston attracted attention here before Compton Mackenzie
did, but the latter is as far ahead of him now as is Gilbert Canaan,
whose _Peter Homunculus_ came out about the time of Thurston’s _City of
Beautiful Nonsense_. These three young Englishmen know how to write
English prose; Mackenzie and Canaan know how to tell big stories.
_Sinister Street_ is much too important a book to be reviewed in less
than three or four pages at least. The first part of it tells of the
modern man at Oxford—“a more complete account of the mind of a young man
of our day than has been written previously in English, an account which
presents some of the things that Thackeray meant when he complained that
his public would not permit him to tell all he wished about Pendennis,
and a good many more besides,” as Lucien Cary has said. It is so
extremely well done that the second part of the volume—the hero’s
reactions to life after Oxford—comes with a sense of forced writing.
Perhaps the war had something to do with it. We shall try to review this
book more at length later.
“Without Machiavellian Subtlety”
_The War and Culture, by John Cowper Powys._ [_G. Arnold Shaw,
New York._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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