CIVILISED MAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 781, 9 July 1954, Page 12

CIVILISED MAN

HUMANITIES, by Desmond MacCarthy; MacGibbon and Kee, English price 15/-. IR DESMOND MacCARTHY was a civilised man. That is the reflection that comes into one’s mind again and again on reading this last very mixed bag of his essays, with a preface by Lord David Cecil, which is itself a quite admirable review. The essays are autobiographical, they are on the theatre, on T. S. Eliot as critic, on eight or ten different writers; and the collection ends with two short stories which must be,

really, autobiographical, too. MacCarthy was a civilised man, and fundamentally a critic, a critic of life: a critic of literature, certainly, but of literature as an expression of life. He was, too, a classical critic, argues Lord David Cecil, in contradistinction to the romantic T. S. Eliot: "He examined literature always in relation to important and permanent aspects of man’s experience, and estimated it by rational and _ timeless standards deeply grounded in the European tradition of culture, and not biased by the prejudice of any school or period." That was how he examined life, 1 too, but with added humour and tolerance for those’ things that were not absolutely unforgivable; and it is significant that he called one of his earlier books of essays (mixed, like this one) simply Experience. He writes with warmth, subtlety, sometimes an almost casual individuality, but all his casual words tell. He was a masterly reviewer, analytical, percipient; see, in this book (as Katherine Mansfield is so much in the air) the essay from 1921, entitled "A New Writer." He writes with wit and with grace, with a play of light; passion infrequently spills over, but obviously he was a man of deep feeling. He was half Irish, half German-French, he could be engaged and yet detached. Here is a taste of his descriptive quality (it is towards the end of a Labour Party conference that he was "observing," in 1917, and pandemonium has broken out): "I perceived, as in the end did the chairman, who was as busy as a conductor at a Wagnerian climax, that Mr. Ben Tillett was anxious about an amendment of his. One of the small impressions I. carry away with me is the picture of him advancing up the gangway, in a neat grey suit of remarkably smart cut, bawling to the point of congestion and with both hands round his mouth: ‘Point of Order.’ Suddenly he sat down, with the repose, I thought, of a man who has made a great speech." If you don’t like that, read him on Ibsen or Shelley or the early history of the New Statesman. As a title for the book, Humanities

could not be bettered.

J.C.

B.