THE VALUE OF TASTE
127
lenge to Wilson's critical powers than Dorothy Parker or William Saroyan.
Some of the essays in
Classics and Commercials
are marred by an
occasional slip from nostalgia into sentimentality, though this is not
true of the best single thing in the book, "Thoughts on Being Biblio–
graphed," or of the moving memoir of Paul Rosenfeld. Wilson is, how–
ever, excessively tender at times toward old memories and old cronies:
to call Alexander Woollcott a "folk-hero" is rather to overdo it a bit
and to praise Max Eastman as an intellectual iconoclast without so much
as mentioning his recent phase as Marx-baiter for the
Readers' Digest
carries generosity beyond the point friendship might require.
Classics and Commercials
contains another kind of essay which
raises, for me at least, an interesting problem in taste. I am quite unable
to share Wilson's fondness for the English gentleman-aesthete, the
arbiter elegantiarum
in books and vintages. The point is not that I feel
any special antipathy toward this sort of writer but that he is essen–
tially beyond the bound of my reach and cannot rouse in me strong
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