THE MEANING OF CULTURE

By John Cowper Powys, W. W. Norton & Company,Inc., 1929.

This English novelist here gives his personal attitude toward culture "which is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art." Powys is an individualist, and a poet who, prone to brood and to meditate, is forever focusing his own "imaginative reason" on the mystery of life. He is describing his own culture when he says, "real culture has almost a certain tendency to combine infinite subtlety with a kind of childish naivete." He writes very often with great beauty.

The book is particularly good, I think, for the graduate a few years out who has not entirely forgotten his own high hopes for an intelligent personal culture which the commercial world and modern Suburbia can so easily blast. It is a book for the man who still has a talent for what Graham Wallas called the "art of thought."

Department of Comparative Literature.