book, the better its format and typography is likely to be, although one would have thought that only the books which sold in half-millions would justify careful printing. Perhaps, in another sense, they are the only ones which do not and their publishers are smiling cheerfully at those who buy shoddy.
The plaint against modernity has the consoling virtue of being at least as old as antiquity itself, but we cannot help repeating it. Imagine reading
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
and, turning from the romance and magic of those lines, discovering that in Jamalpur, Bengal, the thirty thousand employees of the Tata Steel Works have gone out on strike. There is a new and separate cruelty about modern society. It informs us of so many things we are helpless to change and of which we would rather remain ignorant. What corruption has come over Jamalpur that it must have steel works, and having steel works, why cannot things be so arranged that we, at least, know nothing of them?
Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has collected specimens of English prose writing from the time of Chaucer to our own day and his book, A Treasury of English Prose (Houghton Mifflin), gives us, in the smart English style of speaking, furiously to think. His excerpts from the novelists are few, giving an overbalance to the ancients because in the last century the English novel has by its own dignity and decency absorbed almost all of the creative talent to which prose was the natural medium. Chaucer stands on the first page and Santayana on the last, and one wonders whether we haven't well lost the sonority of the old manner for the style which can with grace and a consummate rightness convey every subtlety of the modern mind. The pages of Walter Pater have a flowering and living beauty no more hard and gem-like than the textures of Henry James. It is well that Mr. Smith included a few of the fakers with these honest creators of the beauty of the written word. Otherwise we might be even too deeply moved by the magnificence of our language and never use it again without shame for our fumbling.
