Books: Literary Guide

THE GEORGIAN SCENE—Frank Swinnerton—Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

Literary guides are not elected either by popular vote or by a session of their peers for theirs is usually a self-appointed task. But few better-qualified men could have been chosen to write a literary history of his contemporaries than Critic-Editor Frank Swinnerton. His middle-of-the-road guidebook to the Georgians (Henry James to T. S. Eliot) will be a useful Baedeker for literary sightseers; it does not pretend to be the last word in a never-ending critical argument.

Of nature-loving W. H. Hudson he says: "The only living creatures he hated were full-feeders, publishers, stoats, weasels, and...