BOOKS ON THE TABLE.*
MR. Enirown GossE prefaces his little monographs, reprinted from the Sunday Times, with some charming pats from a velvet paw. He makes, he says, no apology for their brevity—that, in a Sunday paper, was inevitable. " If Literature were bigger, Golf would have to be less bulky, and how dreadful that would be ! " What is printed in a newspaper, he says, " is like breath upon glass ; miss it for a week and it is lost for ever." And so, as he :` clung to some of these pigmy children of his pen," when a number of their original readers asked to have them reprinted, he " responded with alacrity lest the request should be withdrawn."
Mr. Gosse belongs to the older school of critics; that is to say, he is not first and foremost interested in analysis. In reviewing a book such commentators are apt to give the reader, not so much a careful evaluation of the work, its merits and demerits, and an equally careful placing of it in the appropriate literary category ; they give us rather something analogous to an additional chapter of the book itself. Both schools have their merits. If we are really interested in an author, if he is a great man, if we care immensely about him and his methods, we shall almost certainly prefer the modem school; but if the author of the original work is more or less mediocre, his book charming but unimportant, and especially if we happen not to have already read the particular book of his that is criticized, we shall certainly prefer the older method. We may come in perfect ignorance to Mr. Gosse's book and yet enjoy ourselves. Mr. Gosse writes in the older manner from choice and not from necessity, for in his review of Mr. J. I. Osbome's life of Arthur Hugh Clough he gives a study which decidedly has a smack of the newer style. Incidentally, we cannot agree with him that the quotation from The Highland Lassie is " Clough at his best." Quite delightful is the essay on Count d'Orsay's Portraits, also, in a very different way, that on the Psychology of the Blind, and that on the Letters of Tchekhov. This latter is one which many of his readers will enjoy particularly, for in it Mr. Gosse asks a good many questions about Russian novelists, which vary from the way they spell their names to the way they spent their youth, questions which we have no more dared to ask than we should have dared to ask Major Lionel Tennyson to explain the rules of cricket to us; questions, in fact, such as can only be asked from the height of hi.r. Gosse's sneer-proof reputation for learning. And here we have perhaps the one complaint with which a grateful reader may possibly close the • Books on the Table. By Edmund Gime. London : Heinemann. [Si. 6d. net.)
present book—he will wish that Mr. Geese had given himself more opportunity for the display of his charming erudition.
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