The Strange Necessity is almost as tedious as Das Kapital, and with much less justification. It is so intrinsically unreadable that the printer's reader will surely be the last and only man who will ever be able to claim that he has read all through the sixty or seventy thousand words of it. In the first place, in so far as it contains any fresh or useful idea on the problem of aesthetics—and we are not sure that it does—the adequate expression of that idea need certainly not have occupied more than a quarter of the space it does. A very great deal of the essay seems to be just incoherent rambling, and the amount of sheer self-repetition in it is, to say the least, irritating. Page after page upon which Miss West seeks to trace the connection and sequence of her own thoughts and feelings, reads more like an exercise in elementary Pelmanism than anything else we know of, and since the whole is clothed in the jargon of psychoanalysis imperfectly comprehended, the result is inevitably most depressing….
The title of the essay refers to the "strange necessity" of art in life. Art, in Miss West's view, is the force which enables the "will to live" to triumph over the "will to die"; but it is difficult to disentangle from her torrent of long words what her ideas of art really are, and therefore it is difficult to discuss them. If they seem to us a little naive, that may be because we have not grasped her intended meaning. When she asserts, for example, that "it is no use saying that what we call beauty in life is that which is most useful to man in life" or "that what we call beauty in art is that which is most useful to man in art," there seems to be no comment to make save the question, "Who ever has said any such things?" On another page, discussing the difficulty of defining what we mean by the difference between good art and bad art Miss West writes:
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