Judged by the contents of ["I'm A Stranger Here Myself"], Mr. Nash is about halfway on his journey [from Park Avenue to Main Street]. He is getting closer and closer to the fundamental stuff of middle-class American life, and farther away from the artificialities which prompted his first work. He will never be in the same league with Edgar Guest, but he has definitely taken up with the suburbanite who catches the 5:15, and will no more be seen among those folks, who, as he himself testifies, eat opium for breakfast.
The category into which Mr. Nash fits as a writer becomes more clear with each collection of his work. Between the pages of a book, piled one on the other, his verses reveal him as a modern counterpart of the eighteenth century essayist, regarding the elemental traits of human personality as the important and enduring things of life, and dedicating himself to a study and analysis of them. Mr. Nash is alone in his field these days, for the other spirits who were born into our century with the souls of eighteenth century essayists seem to have lost their sense of humor and become psychologists and psychoanalysts. Mr. Nash, thank heaven, was spared to give us his comments on such important problems as the perennial imminence of Monday, the false economic utopia of the middle of the month, fish on Fridays, gadgets at cocktail parties, rich men who complain of hard times and let their poor friends pick up the check, people from New York who take up life and an accent in Virginia, and all the other things which daily annoy and aggravate the average human, and which at the same time hold him in the strong, silken web which human industry and genius have spun for mankind.
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