IN HIS latest book, Mr. George Jean Nathan indulges himself once again in his favorite past time of flaying a large and select gathering of public idols. In the very beginning he states quite definitely the basis for his critical idiosyncrasy. "To me, pleasure and my own personal happiness . . . only infrequently collaborating with that of others . . . are all that I deem worth a hoot." More in the tone of a personal philosophy rather than criticism he goes on to say that to have money in one's pockets, easily available gastronomic delicacies, and freedom of expression are all that one can reasonably expect from life. As a part of this life of ease he has busied himself with giving forth critical estimates of the artistic life about him.

The heading of this first chapter of the book is "Revelation," and it continues to be a self explanation of the fact that criticism is a matter of cultivation and discrimination among the more civilized aspects of life, all of which Mr. Nathan purports to do with some considerable skill.

The next chapter is devoted to "Proverbs" which are the "eternal truths of the theatre" as Mr. Nathan sees them. Here he advances the every sound idea that one reason for the weakness of present day dramatic criticism is in the weakness of the dramatists themselves. Another landing place for Mr. Nathan's frequently applied critical foot is humanism. For him, the cries of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmore More are the result of a too copiously imbibing of the sour grape. "And, as Lewis Mumford has so aptly put it, their strength, as with a Chinese Army, consists largely in their war cries and their dreadful faces."

While Mr. Babbitt is occupied in Sever 11 on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, Sinclair Lewis is seated before a large Seidel of Schnapps. Mr. Nathan points out that the difference in these two fates obviously shows that the humanists are very much mistaken.

The present state of dramatic criticism he finds to be rather lamentable, censorship stupid and audiences daily growing duller. Yet there is O'Neill who will save the theatre from complete disintegration because he has "size." As for Barry, Kelley, Green, and Howard, Mr. Nathan disposes of them as a "dramatic barbershop quartette." In Vincent Lawrence, on the other hand, he finds the most gifted of present day comic-dramatists. From the rest," . . . we get the current liberal smear of pseudo-profound poppycock dealing with burnt-cork Spinozas, flapper Margaret Sangers, Strindbergian street-walkers and doughboy Bismarcks."

By a perfectly logical process of reason, the next and last division of the book is entitled, "Lamentations." The chief lament is the talking picture. Like many of the modern critics of the legitimate stage, Mr. Nathan chooses to turn up his nose and snort rather than pay any attention to the potentialities peculiar to the screen. He writes, "What the phonograph is to the opera, the lithograph to painting, the plaster of paris cast to sculpture and a doll's house to architecture, the talkie will ever continue to be to the drama." The chief, and only explicable objection he has to the passion flowers of Hollywood is that he prophesied a dozen years ago that they would wither.

In the "Testament of a Critic" Mr. Nathan is the same devastating gentleman that has paraded himself in dramatic columns for the past quarter century. He has been accused of being a columnist with false pretensions to wit and of being a dramatic critic with an utter lack of dramatic appreciation. Such attacks, however, have very little effect on Mr. Nathan whose self complacence seems to grow the harder it is buffetted. On the surface his criticism is clever and thin, but after a more careful consideration of his longer works the cleverness becomes keenness and what seemed superficiality is really cogency without the worm eaten prop of dry scholarship.