Confucius Say

THE ART OF LIVING--Andre Maurois --Harper ($2.50).

This book may be recommended as of serious anthropological significance: these are the opinions of an educated man of the 20th Century who pleases, perhaps influences, a large and powerful if mentally undistinguished following on two continents. It is what passes, among them, for good literature, and for sound advice.

M. Maurois finds business to be fundamentally sound in the nine arts of: loving, marriage, family life, friendship, thinking, working, leadership, growing old, happiness. Like most busy but unoriginal literary minds he has an aptitude for quoting his superiors; Shaw, Valery and Stendhal say the best things in his book. Maurois's ability to make sentences bow from the waist, his flair for "gallic" phrasing of sincere platitudes transform the "golden mean" into gilt-edged mediocrity.

Some of his observations are unexceptionable ("information is not culture"); others (sound directions for doing uninspired work successfully; for licking an employer's boots profitably) may be widely useful. Occasionally, as in the essay on old age, genuine feeling transcends the overlying complacency. But on the whole, the level of art M. Maurois recommends for living and the level he achieves in this book are of a piece: cautious, servile, opportunistic, rationalized, smug.

Confucius-Maurois say:

"Make yourselves worthy of great books, for your enjoyment of them will depend largely upon what you bring to them." "The feeling which a mother has for her infant is absolutely pure and beautiful."

"Civilization is man's adoption of accepted conventions."

"The art of thinking is also the art of believing, because no human being at the present stage of civilization could safely call all his individual and social beliefs into question again or submit them to his conscience."

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