Sinsens."" By H.W, vinson. Christophers. 6s, net, Those of us who believe, at times a little ashamedly, that art matters more than causes, have often regretted Mr. Nevinson's absorption in gallant crusades. So many men, we think, can attack the follies and wickednesses of the politicians; but there are few men who can interpret life so easily and beautifully as the author of 'Between the Acts." The complaint is really as foolish as unjust. No one can read these searching, revealing stories without realizing that Mr. Nevinson would not be the artist he is if he were not the man' he was.
I make no apology for dragging the man into this brief notice. For the man, with his fiery hatred of cruelty, his detestation of bureaucracy, his anger at the smug existence of fat officials, is shown, wide-eyed, in this book. Yet none of the stories are political. There are. two sketches of the Roman Empire in the ages of Nero and Diocletian an epilogue to "The Taming of the brew,"? an incomparable sketch of a schoolmaster's frustrated suicide an almost unbearable account of life among the traders ''on the Coast"; a tale of Grimsby fishermen which reads as if Jacobs had written a tragi-comedy; a_ less successful tragedy of a lawyer; and a wonderful piece of irony on modern moral taboos.
I know no author who has at once so distinctive a literary and so distinctive a personal note as Mr. Nevinson. There is nothing in his work of the makeshift or the secondhand. You may agree with, or dislike, him; but he is always unaffected and candid. Then he has the gift of expressing those moral qualities of his in a style which, for its purpose, is as good as that of any man now writing. He never expatiates or moralizes—yet he has not the somewhat inhuman scholarly detachment of a writer like Anatole France. It is here I feel that his life, his devotion to the causes of the future, give to his art a preserving, vital quality which is lacking in the writings of the men who live only in the world of books, too often of their own books.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.