A MORALIST'S SCRAPBOOK
A CRAFTSMAN’S ANTHOLOGY. By A. Romney Green. Allen and Unwin. Enflish price, 12/6. AN anthology made by a craftsman, not an anthology of special interest to craftsmen, this selection of verse and prose is closer to Robert Bridges’ Spirit of Man than to any other garnering of the sweet, the wise, and the sententious that I know. It is designed to express a philosophy of life rather than to illusstrate any phase of literature: it is Romney Green looking out at the world, not peering in through some library window and scanning the serried ranks on shelves. The compiler is a man who has travelled and worked with his hands and, from the photograph supplied, one suspects that he was brought up at a time when people were more readily taken in by the exclamatory rhapsodings of those intolerably windy old gentlemen, Carlyle and Nietzsche. These authors, it is true, are quoted too copiously. We are better pleased to find a good deal of Emerson (a writer who tends to be underestimated outside America), of Bertrand Russell and of Plato. The taste in verse is dubious. There is over-much Tennyson. and A. Romney Green (their diction has points in common), but the extracts from Browning, Whitman and Wordsworth are happier. In spite of its faults, due to the bad time he chose to be born (who doesn’t) or to a certain exceeding idealism which makes him too inclined to take words at face value and thus fall a prey to the rhetorician, Romney Green has made an antholagy which is individual and alive. A strong moral bias is evident throughout. This book is sane rather than brilliant, contains few discoveries, and reaffirms a faith in the essential
nobility of man\
David
Hall
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19490311.2.37.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 507, 11 March 1949, Page 14
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295A MORALIST'S SCRAPBOOK New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 507, 11 March 1949, Page 14
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