Grant M. Overton

“ It is religion, I think, that George Santayana represents—Santayana who contrasts for me with that rooted countryman of his, Miguel de Unamuno. I have a love for both, the one tenacious of his soil and its traditions, the other early detached, flung into the New England of Harvard and William James, now lodged in Paris, and always with his roots feeding orchid-like on the air. It is inevitable that one like Santayana should bear his blossom in poetry and criticism and his fruit in philosophy-religion, or religious philosophy. ”

“ Such is his habitual restraint, so strong is his inhibition, that when we hear the orchestral brasses, as we do once or twice in Justice and Loyalties, it shocks us, like a rowdy outburst in a refined assembly or a terse sentence in Henry James. But it is nothing, nothing. Mr. Galsworthy has momentarily achieved a more perfect than usual transparency; he has suddenly surrendered to the pounce of another of those multitudinous loyalties which give him no peace and the secret of which, except for its continual disclosure in his works, he would most certainly carry with him to the grave. ”

“ What she would once have so wanted to give, she now knew she never could give to the world, and her awakened consciousness strove for the fit expression of this discovery in terms of an art of which she knew something. Ethan Frome, whatever else it may be (and it is many things, some strange and all beautiful) is the Magnificat of a woman in the hour of profoundest personal disappointment. Such works of fiction are especially rare, but, given the genuinely capable writer, given the one hour of a lifetime, the masterpiece is quite possible, yes, almost certain. ”

“ Lincoln has never neglected the rapid shift of the reader’s mood. To insure it, he does not hesitate to sacrifice something of his more important scenes, making them if necessary less dramatic. The common-sensicality running through his stories is a solvent to drama and a feeder to the spirit of fun; if it makes it impossible for his story ever to leave the ground, it also kills to a large extent the language, or lingo, of sentimentality so-called, that terrible jargon in which so much popular fiction is sugared and preserved. ”

“ Seldom does one come upon a novel of adventure which is also so profoundly a novel of character or which has so direct and free an appeal to the emotions, or makes that appeal so successfully. The Winding Stair is the work of a masterly storyteller, and such scenes as those of Paul Ravenel’s discovery of who he is, his rescue of Marguerite Lambert, and Marguerite’s discovery of his self-betrayal sprung from his love for her are something more than exciting drama. ”

“ But there are not many ladies, nor men, either, who have taken rank in the essay with a single book. I understand that Katharine Fullerton Gerould would rather prefer to be known for her fiction—those short stories, masterly in form, with which she began and such a work as her most recent, the brief novel, Conquistador. And such a preference is easily understood. Conquistador, a jewel with many facets, would seduce any woman. And yet Mrs. Gerould’s collection of essays, Modes and Morals, published in 1920, had an extraordinary sale for a book of its character, and still steadily sells. ”

“ Tarkington’s—the most enviable of all, I think—must be knowledge of a certain occasion in which he was of the utmost possible service to another American writer. The course he took at that time, the energy he displayed, would have been very improbable in one whose natural vanity of himself as an artist was in the least like George Moore’s. If it was for too long a literary misfortune that Mr. Tarkington’s “self-conceit” lay in the direction of being a good fellow, at least he made of good fellowship, in this instance, the minted gold of personal greatness. ”

“ The New York of the Age of Innocence into which she was born, the literary Europe of the nineteenth century to which she so early attached herself—these were the ideal forcing-beds of a personality such as hers. You come upon her expressing in vigorous words her delighted enthusiasm for the first novel of William Gerhardi: “You not only make your people live, but move and grow—and that’s the very devil to achieve. ”

“ An American Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s at the present time may conceivably bring himself into a good deal of notice; it is not impossible to be done and the opportunities for doing it legitimately are not infrequent; but Mr. Page was never one for that sort of thing, and I doubt whether, even if the war had not hidden him in its drifting mists as he steered the ship, he would have come in all his lifetime to our not always intelligently directed attention. There are some men, and among them our greatest, whom death alone fully discloses. ”

“ Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his wife, at the time of their marriage, as a “ninety-pound bit of pink porcelain, pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge, having a big rope of bright brown hair, never ill a day in her life, and bearing the loveliest name ever given a woman—Mary. God fashioned her heart to be gracious, her body to be the mother of children, and as her especial gift of Grace, He put Flower Magic into her fingers.” ”

“ Time will not match for us a book like Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, nor will literature furnish us with a more strangely suggestive career than that related in Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic. It was C. Alphonso Smith’s O. Henry Biography that first gave the world the facts on which to base a true understanding of that extraordinary writer. The tale of unwearied courage in Edward Livingston Trudeau’s Autobiography cannot lose either its freshness nor its strength of inspiration. ”

“ Galsworthy shows the passing of a tradition and an age. He leaves Soames Forsyte in lonely age, but he does not leave him entirely without sympathy; for this muddleheaded man, unable to win or to keep affection on any but commercial terms, contrives in the end to win the pity and almost the love of the reader who has followed his varying fortunes through their stupid career. The frustrate love of Fleur and Jon is certainly one of the tenderest things in modern fiction. ”

“ IF you look at the poets as they move in their procession before your eyes, you will see that each is dressed after the manner of his age—the Elizabethans in starched ruffs; the men of the Eighteenth Century in knee-breeches; the men of today in Homburg hats. And if you listen to their verses you will hear that each composes, too, after the manner of his age. For there have been fashions in poetry as there have been fashions in dress, and you can tell the period of a poem not only by the name and date of the poet but by the style and flavour of the poetry. ”

“ For it is not a day of satisfactory map-making; too much is changing; but the great patches of green on the chart at the close of The New World of Islam do not change. The day is never past when some dark-skinned Mahdi, like that false one in Lytton Strachey’s portrait of “Chinese” Gordon, may sit his horse “letting the scene grow under his eyes,” watching the assembly of turbulent but vast and unanimous armies, looking down upon the thousands of upturned, fanatical faces, in a scene “dark and violent and beautiful” ... and of enormous import to the peoples of the earth. ”

“ Nothing in the world is so cheap as courage, so common. But look you!—if a man undertakes self-examination, his courage goes. The scale of values is hopelessly deranged and either the self rises to sublime heights of despair or sinks into a hopeless, sticky complacency. J. C. is not an unblemished exception to this general law, or deplorable result—whichever term you prefer. He had gone to revisit Poland and was there when the Great War unleashed itself. The story of how he got out of Europe has never been told and, in fact, I don’t see how it can be. ”

“ The rest of the time we must be industrious, but it is so much better if we are clear in our own minds about it.
TIME SPIRIT: But, you know, you are really an artist!
MRS. WHARTON: Retro me, Sathanas! I beg your pardon, though; you couldn’t tempt me. I know what I know. There are things I have had, and have, to do without; but I don’t live with them; I live with what I have. Of course, all kinds of aims, and quite possibly some forms of achievement will be conferred upon me by those who practise the craft of fiction under the guise of criticism. ”

“ Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure in the ranks of modern letters”; for of all modern writers the author of Loyalties and The Forsyte Saga is the most transparent. He is transparent without being in the smallest degree luminous; he refracts, but he does not magnify—a prism through which we may look at society. ”

“ Have we not also an atmosphere resulting from a multitude of impalpable small touches? Is not the effect in each case more exact than any impression to be derived from personal familiarity with either South America or Greece? Is not the same impersonal viewpoint present? the same astringent humour in evidence in its application to the incongruities of the life presented? In both cases the avoidance of any expression of emotion, the final austerity of the highest art, exercises an effect out of all predictable proportion on the emotions of the reader. ”

“ Joseph Lincoln is not only a novelist of wide reputation, he is a public benefactor. His success has in it something heartening and corrective. In the midst of work which appeals to the base and cynical in human life (American city life) his clean, wholesome, humorous stories of Cape Cod sea captains and their neighbours give evidence of the fact that there is a huge public for decent and homely fiction, just as the success of his play, ‘Shavings,’ is evidence that there is a paying audience for a decent and homely drama. ”

“ A saying has it that it is always the innocent bystander who gets hurt; but the fate of the sympathetic bystander—and such a one John Galsworthy has always been—is more ironic. That peculiar sprite, George Meredith’s Comic Spirit, reading all that has been written about Galsworthy would possibly find some adequate comment; but Meredith is dead and the only penetrating characterisation that occurs to me is: “Galsworthy’s the kind of man who, if he were in some other station of life, would be a splendid subject for Joseph Conrad.” ”

“ How many others who had the self-confidence when they started have had to acquire the self-sufficiency, the power of self-sustention? How many have failed to do that? Self-confidence, indeed, is the most perfect of traitors. But there is a reservoir in the Self....
Like every other prize, this one has its penalty. What will carry one to the top of a high rock will also, unimpeded, carry one over the rock’s edge. The balance in egoism always trembles; when it comes to rest, one dies. ”

“ I realise,—no one can help realising—the fine literary craftsmanship in a book like Lord Jim. It is a wonderful piece of character mosaic, and yet in reading it I am always conscious of the literary work. I say to myself, ‘This is marvellous; see how the writer is picking his hero to pieces, thought by thought, motive by motive.’ And being so conscious of the writer, I do not lose myself in the story. This is not offered as a criticism ”

“ Such are some bits in The Little Warrior, and such are the more tragic moments for Sally in Mostly Sally; and yet Mr. Wodehouse brings his story up again quickly like a diver clutching a pearl and rising up through clear water to sparkling and sunlit air. It is the prettiest talent imaginable, and I can think of no other contemporary writer of light fiction who has the same dexterity.
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There is no formula for achieving breathlessness. ”

“ Very sensibly has it been pointed out that the two strains are manifest side by side in a number of his novels, such as The Conquest of Canaan, where the realism of character is sadly impaled on the rocks of plot. But, if I may advance the idea with due diffidence, such as Tarkington always shows in any discussion of his work, the much more instructive comparison lies deeper in the man and is the result of an unrelenting pressure of environment on a personality endowed with most exceptional talent and even unmistakable genius. ”

“ I would no more absolve the artist from the urgence of making a living than I would absolve him from the necessity of drawing breath to live. After all, isn’t it the same thing? So surely as you breathe, you must suffer; and what is the wage problem but a visitation, like sickness, or misfortune, or mental anguish inseparable from the [Pg 76] act of living? If art cannot triumph over these things, if a novelist could not continue to write novels in spite of the awful pangs of rheumatism, the element of struggle would be lost and all our values would exist in a vacuum. ”

“ This is a great virtue; for in book travels, as perhaps in other travel, it is much more desirable to make one’s own appraisal than [Pg 40] to accept another’s description of the beauties of a place. And I really have known a novelist to reject every particular travel book dealing with a certain town or region in which his scene was laid, because he felt hampered by their emotionality and their impressionism and a quality of vagueness, and turn with joy and relief to his Baedeker’s Mediterranean or Northern Italy or Spain and Portugal. ”

“ One has the feeling of construction and the sense of ornamentation springing from fine tastes; his tales are like beautiful pieces of cabinet work in which, at first sight, the effects of form, of shapeliness and of beauty and power are felt; on a closer examination you fall to admiring the sure hand and the cunning art ”

“ What wonder that she revolted?—but the rebellion of Picciola, though ending in personal triumph, was not the end of school; and the rebellion of the novelist, though rewarded with a tremendous personal triumph, did not end her ordeal of novel-writing. What people like Mrs. Porter never achieve is a successful rebellion from, within, themselves. Something more powerful than they quells their self-insurrections; they go on; money seems worth while for what can be done with it to give happiness and widen opportunity for others ”