Volume 15, Number 10 · December 3, 1970
Jesus' Other Life
By I.A. Richards
The Brook Kerith, A Syrian Story
by George Moore
Liveright, 391 pp., $5.95
When a writer takes, as it would seem, every imaginable risk in subject, handling, plot…opening himself most widely to charges of triviality, sensationalism, imperceptiveness, impiety, and blasphemy, and yet incredibly triumphs over them all, another danger is incurred. The reader may become too curiously interested in how the feat has been accomplished to attend duly to what has actually been achieved. Wonderment at the ingenuity of his design, the adroitness of his transitions, the indirections of his presentation, his daring and discretion of invention at all levels, and what else has saved him from so many disasters can becloud our view of what in the end he has done. Not the least of his problems has been to keep all this technical management unobtrusive. Ars est celare artem. Yes, but this, as epigrams often are, is itself too showy to be just. The inquisitive and critical eye can usually search out more than a little of the means employed in even what may seem the least contrived performances. The need is, as Coleridge reminds us, to subordinate 'our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.'
Review, 2046 words
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