[In the following excerpt, Hutchison favorably reviews Enjoyment of Literature.]

For upward of forty years Mr. Powys has traveled widely in the realms of gold, and his individualistic and penetrating appraisals of their States and goodly kingdoms have won him the confidence of hosts of readers. The present book embodies the maturity of Mr. Powys's thinking; in it he reviews his literary adventures among the masterpieces of the world. The pages flame with what is almost a religious ardor of passionate love for these masterpieces. And because Mr. Powys has the power to communicate his own buoyant pleasure in reading he is the adventurer who infects others with the high spirit of the quest. In consequence this book is out of the ordinary in its field; the gigantic effort of a truly critical mind that is strongly buttressed by imagination and deeply imbued with a sense of spiritual values.

Significant of this is the fact that Mr. Powys devotes his first two chapters to the Bible as literature, although the Bible, certainly the New Testament, does not antedate the Iliad and the Odyssey. But from these two testaments to eternal truths, so the thesis would run, emerged forces which were destined to shape a great deal of the thought and the imagination of the world for centuries to come. Homer, by elevating men above the cheap and vulgar, was to deepen human consciousness. But not even the mighty Greek, who was on familiar terms with heroes and with gods alike, could give other than secular stirring to the Christian mind. And the Greek tragic dramatist, virtually unknown to the Western world for centuries, had little influence on Western though. Yet Powys finds today the influence of Sophocles and Aeschylus great indeed. Dostoievsky, Hardy, Eugene O'Neill, he finds stemming back to the ancient tragedians of Athens. One should know these antique play-wrights better, would be Mr. Powys's admonition.

Enjoyment of Literature proceeds in the main chronologically, but it is not to be concluded, therefore, that Mr. Powys is engaged on literary history, for that is the very thing on which Mr. Powys is not engaged. But he is convinced by the evidence that there is in literature a subterranean "river of tradition," not only as to the kind of subject but even the kind of treatment of that subject, "that will strike deepest into what is universal and unchanging." Hence, although each of the chapters in this book appears to be an independent study, each is but a wave in one same strong stream.

It is Dante who is taken up next, and with the great Florentine Western literature moves definitely into the Christian path. Refusing the Greek idea of fate, Dante reaffirms to the world the concepts of good and evil, gives to them tragic recognition as forces to make or mar. Yet Mr. Powys feels that there has been an overemphasis on Dante as a moral guide. For him, Dante's stress upon endurance as the greatest of human virtues is what renders him supreme. Many, of course, will dissent from this and will cling to Dante, as others will cling to Milton, for something akin to guidance. But Powys is never so happy as when he can be provocative.

Rabelais, Montaigne and Cervantes follow in order. And we are not sure but that we should recommend the chapter on Rabelais as an introduction to the mind of Mr. Powys, because in its seeming paradoxes, which are not paradoxes at all, but are all beautifully, even wittily, resolved, we find this adventurer and critic at his supreme best. Rabelais, although just emerged from the censor's ban and not yet on the library's free shelves, held a commanding position in the literature of the Renaissance. And although Mr. Powys is willing to say that he cannot stomach all of the muddied outpourings of the ex-monk, he places him higher than Plato, Cervantes or Montaigne, ranging him beside Homer and Shakespeare because of his "cosmic optimism," his "Cyclopean drollery." And, rejecting a conventional interpretation of Rabelais, that he uses his extravagant humor as a mask to placate authority, Mr. Powys rises to indignant heights. For him that humor is the man's complete philosophy; while he has managed to retain "the mystical quintessence of medieval piety," he has also a vein of unctuous, homely piety that has something of the best of Protestantism in it.

With a book so large as Enjoyment of Literature, and ranging so widely, a reviewer can but be eclectic. Hence, we shall move on to the moderns, only noting by the way that Mr. Powys recommends those who read Montaigne in their youth to reread him in their later years for his great help in integrating one's essential personality, and Cervantes both for his irony and for the livingness of the story. Mr. Powys's study of Shakespeare we shall leave for the reader to take in relation to his study of the Greek dramatists, and the study of Milton with the chapter on Dante. Also the keen and delightful analysis of the humor of Charles Dickens in connection with the humor of Cervantes and Rabelais.

Coming to America, although Mr. Powys gives a few paragraphs to Emerson, the Sage of Concord does not get an entire chapter; and Longfellow and Whittier receive no mention. Whitman has a niche by himself, and Melville and Poe share one together.

Stating the fairly obvious fact that the striking characteristic of Whitman's poetry is an astounding optimism which is entirely heathen and profane, Mr. Powys, with his ability to show how in an individual mind there can be reconciliation of opposites, also gives Whitman credit for a metaphysic while he staggers the rational mind with the vast scope of his "mystical pluralism." Whitman, of course, has been almost as fiercely debated as Rabelais, and, earlier at least, with as bated breath. Mr. Powys's sane and discerning probings here should go far to bring him into clearer perspective. Say what you will, he sums up, Whitman's poetry "offers a triumphant response to the natural heart's desire of the natural man."

Poe is valued by Mr. Powys for his metrical virtuosity; and Melville (with this critic we are ever getting back to philosophy) for "his dark, satanic mysticism." And Powys finds the first as much underrated in the twentieth century as the latter was during the nineteenth. For Mr. Powys, "Moby Dick" is the greatest of all novels of the sea, more profoundly significant than the particularized stories of Joseph Conrad.

Essays on Goethe, Wordsworth, the neglected and unappreciated Matthew Arnold, Nietzsche, Proust, Dostoievsky and Hardy, complete the generous contents of this book, with Mr. Powys's highest encomiums reserved for the last two. Indeed, he says of Dostoievsky that he is as much greater than all other novelists as Homer and Shakespeare than all other poets: "For he is superior to the rest in all the main essentials of fiction. He is a greater artist, a greater psychologist, a greater prophet, a greater thinker." And Mr. Powys refuses to except even Thomas Hardy, his Dorsetshire neighbor, although, clearly, he places the man whom in his youth he called "Promethean," only second to the Russian. Hardy's strength, for Powys, lies in his arraignment of the ways of God to man, quite the reverse of justification. Does Powys exhibit rather too marked a preference for the dark, the satanic, the pessimistic in literature? If so, how can he call his writings "enjoyment of literature"?

That these apparent contradictions may be seen as not incompatible is the achievement of this book. It is not a perverse achievement. Mr. Powys does not delight in pessimism as a child delights in rubbing a bruise to experience the hurt. But, with the Prophets of Israel, with the Greek tragedians, Rabelais, Hardy, Dostoievsky, he looks life squarely in the eyes and says that life is not good. But the countenance of life, as reflected by the mirror of art—one can enjoy the reflection and derive from it a sustaining power. Enjoyment of Literature is a profound excursion into literature, an adventure ennobling and inspiring of mind and imagination.