Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/193

 He has one two-year-old child who tells him that "Goliath loves you," and out of this wealth of parental experience he offers counsel to expectant motherhood. He has one touch of radicalism: in the rare intervals when he is not thinking of himself as the first parent, he informs his readers that Dr. Holt is a better guide to the upbringing of children than their grandmothers! He has courage: he doesn't hesitate to stuff all this into one container with dialogue, fables, and parodies, and call it a book.

Young Robert Benchley, as I have already intimated, is the most overt and unashamed humorist in our parade. I don't know why I should try to gild the refined gold of Professor Leacock's careful tribute, except to add that Gluyas Williams's illustrations are up to the text and are, in my opinion, altogether unequaled since Raphael produced his Sistine Madonna. If Hogarth could see how Mr. Williams has penetrated the soul of his author and doubled the force of his expression, he would blush to acknowledge his own crude sketches. Mr. Benchley's twenty-two masterpieces show a more constructive and impersonal imagination than we found in the scrapbook of Heywood Broun; and he discloses less of that studious, fostered and affectionate provincialism which distinguishes the true New Yorker. With feasting eye and wide-swooping wing he dives only for "nation-wide" interests, passes from letterwriting to amateur gardening and stoking one's own furnace, from bridge (the best thing since "Mrs.