Books: All for Art

A THING OF BEAUTY (440 pp.)—A. J. Cronin—Little, Brown ($4).

With this novel, Dr. A. J. Cronin proves himself the greatest living practitioner of the Victorian novel. The hero is that Mauve Decade martyr, the unconventional artist struggling hopelessly for recognition from a conventional world. Its "bohemian" artists and its fusty gentry are furnished forth with stock-company props and costumes dragged from literature's dustiest attic, and Physician Cronin uses every cliche of this oft-told tale with the almost touching innocence of new discovery, right down to the mustiest of them all—the notion that a man cannot possibly be a genuine genius unless...