LITERARY STUDIES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21716, 3 February 1934, Page 8 (Supplement)

LITERARY STUDIES

LYTTON STRACHEY'S GENIUS In the rooontlj'-publishod collection of the late Lytton Strachey's essays on literary and historical subjects his Lrotlicr has arranged a series of articles contributed to leading English periodicals during a long period, and 'forming an epitome of their author's genius as a critic of literature. Some of the essays formed originally introductions to books, others were written while Strachey was a young man at Cambridge with the hope of winning a certain prize (for which, by tho way, no award was made). This section of the book forms a virile sequence on English letter-writers from tho Elizabethans to Shelloy, Keats and Lamb. What great letter writers the English as a nation have been! It is remarkable what a mass of their correspondence has been preserved to delight a later age and add to more ambitious pictures of their era those intimate touches which the pen can only give when no thought of the printer restrains its flow It is inconceivable to us in this ago of telephones, when we would almost always choose to say rather than to write it, how the eighteenth century, and tho nineteenth too, preserved the literary character of its privato correspondence; how polished, how impersonal that correspondence often was, and yet how very readable, endearing to us the- persons of those long-dead writers. The Eighteenth Century This section of the book forms a fresh and vital sequence, and often in subsequent pages does Strachey return to the eighteenth century on which he touched here so lingeringly! " An enchanted island of delight and repose," he calls that stately age, and in numerous other criticisms, on Pope, on Lady Mary Wortley Montague, on Horace Walpole and on the Eighteenth Century itself does he go back to that period which he must have considered one of the most favoured of epochs, wherein life " moved in some wellordered garden where the afternoons are long and the peaches are plump and soft and the library and the wine and the servants are within comfortable distance." " The days of coaches and of chairs, of pluralities and of sinecures, of jewelled snuff-boxes and powdered hair " was an age of great charm to this so convincing an interpreter of a period. Of the 38 essays of " Characters and Commentaries " nearly one-third deal with the eighteenth century in such a manner that even those who have hitherto thought of it as dull and prosy cannot fail to find something irresistible in its charm. Sunset Light Other studies deal with Voltaire, Rabelais and Madame de Lespinasse, with Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Hardy's poems and Shakespeare, with "Dizzy" and Sarah Bernhardt, Frederick tho Great and Chinese poetry. But whichever one out of the varied collection we happen to light on there is sure to be found that in it which has the touch of an author who knew and felt his subject, or the sheen of a new and different view cast over an old and well-worn theme like sunset light on green leaves. The leaves are still the same leaves, but there are greens and shadows of green ad infinitum; and this is the charm which a master hand with the soul of an artist can shed over the well-trodden tracks which lead down to the springing wells of English literature. " Characters and Commentaries," by Lytton Strachey. (Chatto and Windus.)