DESMOND MCCARTHY'S ESSAYS

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21506, 22 June 1935, Page 17

DESMOND MCCARTHY'S ESSAYS

MANALIVE AND MAN OF

LETTERS

Experience. Bv Desmond MacCarthy. Putnam. 3H pp. (7/« net.)

In "Portraits" Mr MacCarthy gathered certain personal studies, and of the best of them—Asquith, Henry James, Conrad, perhaps—it wa:; hard not to say at once that they were so good—lucid, consistent, their strong lines restrained, their delicate ones precise—that nobody interested in their subjects could afford to overlook them. "Criticism" was distinguished by its charming balance between lightness and solemnity. Mr MacCarthy is a sort of critic too rare, but. of course to be valued in to his rarity. He can write seriously about literature without inducting himself and his readers into that frightful, that unblessed mood of strained and pious earnestness in which beauty becomes a museum-piece, and all the air a stuffy stillness holds; and he can communicate his pleasure without the Ohs and Ahs of rhapsodical critics, and make the causes of it intelligible. To be interested in books but not obsessed by them, to treat them with respect well short of idolatry, to be intimate with them and about them yet whisper no sly, tender, disgusting confidences, to be easy, humorous, even careless about books and as easily and carelessly avoid flippancy—these are Mr MacCarthy's virtues as critic; or rather, they are not but they suggest the personal, intellectual habit which governs the use of his more specific critical gifts and blesses him with so pleasant a voice. All this is at the heart of Mr MacCarthy's confession, in a dedicatory letter to Clifford Sharp, formerly editor of the "New Statesman," that he has cherished "hankerings after the life of a 'special reporter,'" has wished to write, not always about books or plays, but his "impressions of trials, strikes, public characters, di:.asters," has wanted to "live with a packed bag, ready to dart to trie sc.V.e of any crisis." But had he not let this out, it still was there to be deduced from the variety and the vitality of this miscellaneous book. It is implicit in the extraordinarily moving, indeed disturbing, impression of Sir Roger Casement, his judges, the irresistible mechanism of judgment— and the vast remoteness of Casement and his insane, clear motives from the process and the conceptions and the preconceptions by which they were inevitably condemned. It is implicit in the imaginative vividness and actuality of the 20 or ?,0 cages that, describe Mr M-icCar'ihy's Red Cross service in France; in the s.ad fantasy of the old Emperor Franz Josef, suddenly forced to hear and sec, in a blind, uncomprehending visit to a war h'.snitnl; in the swift, sham sketches of Bob Smillie. Arthur Henderson. Ron Tillett, Will Thome, at the historic Labour Congress of 1917, and in the wisdom of the general observations against which these figures are held up to the Ih'ht. It is somebody much larger than a "literary critic" who writes the very cogent, literary-legal essay on "Obscenity rrul the Law." The ess-iy on "Good T.". 11:" shows the man who rend; and th:> man who "moves about," and i- s as imaginative and as observant in one activity as in the other.

The only talker I nave hoard who in conversation will launch the hhih noetic phrase is Yealn. He will say ill it. "the music of Heaven is full of the clashing of swords" without secmim.; conscious that others might conclude that he was talking for effect. I like that myself. And even if he were talking for effect, I should, for my part, only be the more grateful for a fine ambitious phrase. When 1 meet remarkable: people whose company is coveted, I often wi.sh that they would show oil a little more.

Mr MacCarthy is not a funny man; he is rather better than that, his humour belongs to his view of life and letters, but does not dictate it. The extent of its play may be studied, for instance, in the essays on Snobbishness, on The Duke of York, on Ugliness, on Making Speeches, and so forth. But the last thing to say is that, though the literary critic is here supposed to be pushed into the background, he cannot be ignored, "a noticeable man" with whatever coloured eyes Mr MacCarthy has. C'assified as it may be under "Experience" instead of "Criticism," the essay on Montaigne is excellent criticism. So is the note on Henley; so are, in whole or in part, many other things. Mr MacCarthy cannot, by dream or hankering, escape his destiny, which was to be one of the best literary critics of these days, and to show it, willy-nilly.