34. Spic
im Mordendrauen
K A S AAAA
THE SATI
372
more sympathetically drawn than is Schnitzler’s
wont, is in difficulties; each of the persons whom he
meets comes in—like strangers in real life—as an
enigma to be solved, an enigma which in each case
contains a menace and a promise. One by one these
riddles—Bogner, Consul Schnabel, Uncle Robert,
Leopaldine, and the rest—are all answered, but
when the last riddle is read the lieutenant is not
there to hear it. His failure to solve the enigma
of love has cost him his life. The story runs
swiftly through two days and nights, and its fever¬
ish events are ironically framed in the coolness of
impassive dawns. Thus Schnitzler, with the cool¬
ness and impassivity of nature, looks upon the lives
hie has created, from the far vantage-point of his
station above good and evil.
A Lovelv Book
THE OLD BENCHERS CF THE INNER
TEMPLE. By Sia F. D. Mackiwson. New
Vork: The Oxford University Press. 1027.
Reviewed by A. Enwaxb NEwroN
NHIS is a lovely book. Charles Lamb in
any Vormat is always appealing; and how
pleased and amazed and amused he
would be to think of the great Oxford University
Press making into a beautiful and substantial volume
his little paper on The Old Benchers of the Inner
Temple, where, as he says, he was born and passed
the first seven years of his life.
The best essays are always autobiographical—
the creator of the essay, old Montaigne, taughe us
that—and Charles Lamb’s most delightful papers
are those in which he refers to his own experiences:
the names of dozens of them spring to our lips. But
in essay writing, as Dr. Johnson said of a man
writing an epitaph, one is not under oath: the
essayist may take a thread of truth and string
thereon a pearl—many pearls—of fiction. And
commentators are frequently misled thereby.
have been told that Lamb’s“ Oxford in Vacation''
was written not after a visit to Oxford but after a
visit to Cambridge. The story fits onc place quite
as well as another. Lamb made love to several
shadowy maidens in his essays that may never have
lived at all, and we know—what his contem¬
poraries did not—that he loved and proposed and was
declined by Miss Kelly, “she of the divine plain
face.?
And so we who love the choicest cuts of Lamb
have always taken hisBenchers'’ with a grain of
salt. Did they all live in the flesh and did Lamb
see them clear or only in his mind’s eye! These
questions and many another Sir F. D. Mackinson,
himself a Master of the Bench, has answered for
us and given us little biographies and reproductions
of many portraits which make us wish we were a
Bencher. I might perhaps be mistaken for a wise
man, did I wear a wig and a robe.
* * 3
How fully saturated with London Charles Lamb
is and it with him! Only a few wecks since, one
moonlight night I spent an hour wandering in the
Temple thinking of the realities and the shadows
which once had habitation there, and of the
Shakespeare storv of the white rose and the red, and
box 6/1
Aee
euuch
40
ansceipria Pas
D
Nau19 927
4
D
—
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
at
ther
out
ere is
s you
ession that
k are part
I experience.
ha pe
Drop the book
In the midst of Kasda’s card game,
and you'll walk about with his de¬
pression and sense of loss lingering
over your own head. And not for a
moment will you feel you are clear
of his pain and disgrace because of
his remoteness, because he happens to
be in a book and you out of it.
Daybreak“ mores—inevitahl#o
tfediauithat
EandBtric
#ave me a kick such as I haven't had
nn
trcmeaigets Sirice nnnprc
im Mordendrauen
K A S AAAA
THE SATI
372
more sympathetically drawn than is Schnitzler’s
wont, is in difficulties; each of the persons whom he
meets comes in—like strangers in real life—as an
enigma to be solved, an enigma which in each case
contains a menace and a promise. One by one these
riddles—Bogner, Consul Schnabel, Uncle Robert,
Leopaldine, and the rest—are all answered, but
when the last riddle is read the lieutenant is not
there to hear it. His failure to solve the enigma
of love has cost him his life. The story runs
swiftly through two days and nights, and its fever¬
ish events are ironically framed in the coolness of
impassive dawns. Thus Schnitzler, with the cool¬
ness and impassivity of nature, looks upon the lives
hie has created, from the far vantage-point of his
station above good and evil.
A Lovelv Book
THE OLD BENCHERS CF THE INNER
TEMPLE. By Sia F. D. Mackiwson. New
Vork: The Oxford University Press. 1027.
Reviewed by A. Enwaxb NEwroN
NHIS is a lovely book. Charles Lamb in
any Vormat is always appealing; and how
pleased and amazed and amused he
would be to think of the great Oxford University
Press making into a beautiful and substantial volume
his little paper on The Old Benchers of the Inner
Temple, where, as he says, he was born and passed
the first seven years of his life.
The best essays are always autobiographical—
the creator of the essay, old Montaigne, taughe us
that—and Charles Lamb’s most delightful papers
are those in which he refers to his own experiences:
the names of dozens of them spring to our lips. But
in essay writing, as Dr. Johnson said of a man
writing an epitaph, one is not under oath: the
essayist may take a thread of truth and string
thereon a pearl—many pearls—of fiction. And
commentators are frequently misled thereby.
have been told that Lamb’s“ Oxford in Vacation''
was written not after a visit to Oxford but after a
visit to Cambridge. The story fits onc place quite
as well as another. Lamb made love to several
shadowy maidens in his essays that may never have
lived at all, and we know—what his contem¬
poraries did not—that he loved and proposed and was
declined by Miss Kelly, “she of the divine plain
face.?
And so we who love the choicest cuts of Lamb
have always taken hisBenchers'’ with a grain of
salt. Did they all live in the flesh and did Lamb
see them clear or only in his mind’s eye! These
questions and many another Sir F. D. Mackinson,
himself a Master of the Bench, has answered for
us and given us little biographies and reproductions
of many portraits which make us wish we were a
Bencher. I might perhaps be mistaken for a wise
man, did I wear a wig and a robe.
* * 3
How fully saturated with London Charles Lamb
is and it with him! Only a few wecks since, one
moonlight night I spent an hour wandering in the
Temple thinking of the realities and the shadows
which once had habitation there, and of the
Shakespeare storv of the white rose and the red, and
box 6/1
Aee
euuch
40
ansceipria Pas
D
Nau19 927
4
D
—
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
at
ther
out
ere is
s you
ession that
k are part
I experience.
ha pe
Drop the book
In the midst of Kasda’s card game,
and you'll walk about with his de¬
pression and sense of loss lingering
over your own head. And not for a
moment will you feel you are clear
of his pain and disgrace because of
his remoteness, because he happens to
be in a book and you out of it.
Daybreak“ mores—inevitahl#o
tfediauithat
EandBtric
#ave me a kick such as I haven't had
nn
trcmeaigets Sirice nnnprc