"Catholic Herald" BOOK OF THE WEEK

Great Triumvirate
French Enthusiasm For English Writers
Chesterton, BeRoc, and Baring. By Raymond Las Vergnas. Translated by C. C. Martindale, S.J. (Sheed and Ward, 5s.)
Reviewed by PETER ANSON
FATHER MARTINDALE must be congratulated on the almost flawless translation of this delightful French study of three great English Catholic authors. It is a pleasure to discover that he has not lost that mastery of English prose style which made his earlier works such a pleasure to read. In these latter days his normal method of writing—if one may dare say so—has become so journalese —even if vivid, that one sometimes regrets the loss to serious literature as the inevitable result of feverish activity in so many other fields.
What is more, he has managed to achieve what he tells us he set out to do—that " English readers should themselves feel 11 that they were reading a Frenchman's book about men, two of whom were very English, and of whom the third is, by now (I think), predominantly so." * * * * Raymond Las Vergnas gives us a pic
ture of these famous writers painted from a new angle. He studies the men themselves, their histories, and the influences which have helped to make them what they arc. With a rare and penetrating insight we gain a new understanding and appreciation of their work. He feels that all three are linked together by a common love of France, and French clarity of thought, not forgetting that Catholicism which has been the inspiration of all that is best in French culture.
Sometimes M. Las Vergnas seems at a loss to grasp the infinite subtleties of Chesterton's mentality. He is more at home with Belloc and Baring. Yet in Fr. Martindale's opinion Chesterton was ' so rigidly Aquinalian" that he would be "tempted to call him one of the Great Scholastics."
One is not surprised that Mr. Maurice Baring's delicacy of style should rouse M. Las Vergnas almost to ecstasy. He becomes so enthusiastic over Mr. Baring's novels that those who have not already enjoyed reading them will surely be induced to do so at the first opportunity, not forgetting his perhaps less known poetry.
It is a pity that the excellent reproduction of Mr. Gunn's famous painting "Conversation Piece " (here reproduced), which depicts these three writers, and which appears on the jacket has not been included as a frontispiece.
With Pedigree Reserve
Maurice Baring. By Dame Ethel Smyth (Heinemann, 15s.).
Reviewed by E. J. OLIVER This study is a mixture of the Life and Letters type of biography with the type of memoir which is issued by friends and relatives of famous men; the excellent effect has been to make the Life and Letters more human and the memoir more solid.
It has been suggested—and Dame Ethel Smyth seems to have anticipated this with a slightly apologetic note--that the book is too enthusiastic. It is true that the author admires her subject; but if one did not admire a writer, it would surely be perverse to write a book about him; and the author makes no extravagant claims. It is possible to disagree with some of her judgments, but these are supplemented and corrected particularly well by Vernon Lee's letters in the book and by those of Lawrence of Arabia.
Dame Ethel Smyth analyses Mr. Baring's works in four sections, the poetic dramas, the plays, the miscellaneous works and the novels, to which she rightly assigns the primacy; but here she is critical of two novels which have been admired by French critics; and explains the lapses of great weiteoeinAis most sensible way : "They trAct4orizialpiece of orange peel; and that's all there is to it." But Mr. Baring, perhaps as a result of dodging , the flying crockery at some of his parties, is more. sure-footed than any other living English novelist.
Aid? most illuminating to know, and tAbfeeKcially to learn from Dame Ethel Smyth herself, that Mr. Baring has a great musical sense; for his novels, which are sometimes an atmosphere, are also symphonies—that fusion of music with the spirit of place which produces the deeper enchantment.
There is one gap in the book, perhaps inevitable in the work of a friend: Mr. Baring's personality has not been closely enough related to his work. Dame Ethel Smyth mentions his vast culture, his love of memory, the sense of an exquisite melancholy, which are all the stuff of the novels; but these things form one whole temperament about which much more is needed.
Concerning the unhappiness of the novels, Dame Ethel Smyth only says that man is born to trouble as the sparks'fly upwards; but it is equally true that he is born to sparks as the trouble flies upwards—as Mr. Baring has made it fly in Diminutive Dramas.
The full elucidation of this fascinating personality will perhaps be the work of a literary critic not yet born; hut when he writes he will base himself on the brilliant glimpses and "pedigree reserve" of this book. Mr. Baring may well be grateful to his friend for the book; but not, I think, asgrateful as she and most of us are to him for his work.
Theodicy, by Paul J. Glenn (Herder, 9s.). Text book of natural theology " meant to supply to the modern college student some readily intelligible account of fundamental truths . . to rear a sturdy framework or scaffolding . . . not to seek recognition as the finished building " — is the introduction's description of a sound, but necessarily superficial study.