The Strange Necessity is almost as tedious as Das Kapital, and with much less justification. It is so intrinsically unreadable that the printer's reader will surely be the last and only man who will ever be able to claim that he has read all through the sixty or seventy thousand words of it. In the first place, in so far as it contains any fresh or useful idea on the problem of aesthetics—and we are not sure that it does—the adequate expression of that idea need certainly not have occupied more than a quarter of the space it does. A very great deal of the essay seems to be just incoherent rambling, and the amount of sheer self-repetition in it is, to say the least, irritating. Page after page upon which Miss West seeks to trace the connection and sequence of her own thoughts and feelings, reads more like an exercise in elementary Pelmanism than anything else we know of, and since the whole is clothed in the jargon of psychoanalysis imperfectly comprehended, the result is inevitably most depressing….

The title of the essay refers to the "strange necessity" of art in life. Art, in Miss West's view, is the force which enables the "will to live" to triumph over the "will to die"; but it is difficult to disentangle from her torrent of long words what her ideas of art really are, and therefore it is difficult to discuss them. If they seem to us a little naive, that may be because we have not grasped her intended meaning. When she asserts, for example, that "it is no use saying that what we call beauty in life is that which is most useful to man in life" or "that what we call beauty in art is that which is most useful to man in art," there seems to be no comment to make save the question, "Who ever has said any such things?" On another page, discussing the difficulty of defining what we mean by the difference between good art and bad art Miss West writes:

If one says that one likes meat if it is good and dislikes it if it is bad, one knows as one speaks that one means by good meat that which has been well fed when it walked this earth, has been killed in the right way, kept the right time after killing, and has been properly cooked so that it is tender and juicy and full of flavour, and by bad meat that which, not having been as justly dealt with, is stringy and dry and tasteless. But good art …

Surely if Miss West had pursued this line of thought a little more closely she would have realised that there is no greater difficulty in defining good art than in defining good meat. A good picture is one which has been composed of the right materials, has been painted in the right tradition by the right man—who has rightly apprehended the essential possibilities of his subject—has been properly framed and hung, and, in the result, produces a poignant and enlightening effect upon our aesthetic sensibilities. This definition begs no more questions than Miss West's definition of good meat. In both cases we are able in fact to judge only by the result. Does the steak please our palate? Does the picture produce the aesthetic emotion we are looking for? One sensibility may be more delicate, more sublime than the other, but the only possible criterion in either case is the same…. It is just as easy and just as impossible for the gourmet as for the art critic to define his sensations. Apart from the difference of plane the parallel is in all respects exact. A realisation of this fact must surely be the starting point of any valuable contribution to the science of aesthetics.

A great part of Miss West's essay is devoted to a discussion of the artistic value of Mr. James Joyce's Ulysses. But even here, when she is on her own ground, it is very difficult to make out what is her real opinion of that at any rate remarkable book. She refers to Mr. Joyce as a writer of "majestic genius" and speaks of his "titanic imagination," but elsewhere she suggests that in composing his masterpiece he "simply did not understand what he was doing."… This is characteristic of Miss West's fundamentally sentimental view of the nature of art. Art is something which marvellously happens, and the intellect must not be allowed to have anything to do with it. The artist must "achieve identity" with what he makes. In one place Miss West tells us that "to communicate his experience to an audience is no trouble to an artist"; in another, apropos of Ingres, she writes "astoundingly his medium seemed a friend and not the enemy—which it is to nearly all artists." What is one to make of such contradictions?

These strictures, however, are by no means intended to imply an opinion that Miss West's essay is all rubbish. Certainly a good deal of it is rubbish, or, more exactly, a medley of imperfectly digested external impressions and subjective ideas. But she has some excellent things to say, particularly for example about the tremendous handicap under which an artist inevitably works if he is divorced, by choice or circumstances, from his own land, that is to say from a body of tradition which he has imbibed from his earliest youth, and does not have to think about because it is part of himself. In general, however, Miss West gives the impression of having thought too little about her subject, of being too glib, of having treated one of the greatest and most difficult problems in the world with much the same quality of care and attention as she might reasonably devote to a newspaper review of the latest novel of Mr. Swinnerton or Mr. Galsworthy. She is insufficiently critical of her own work, too apt to be influenced by the glamour of her own sentences. She appears to think in words rather than in ideas. If a good phrase has bubbled up in her mind it must be a just phrase; if a sentence that pleases her has somehow found its way on to her writing block she cannot bring herself to believe that it does not embody some essential and profound truth. That, we suppose, is why so much of her work is superficial and contradictory. Thinking in words is for the journalist an excellent and most useful habit, but for anyone who aspires to be more than that it is a very bad habit indeed—suicidal. Miss West's final conclusion about art is that it is nothing less than "a way of making joys perpetual." It is the word "less" that may shock artists. Nothing less indeed! (pp. 566-67)