John Cowper Powys

“ Like Hans Andersen, the writer of fairy-stories, and, in a measure, like all children, Dickens endows with fantastic spirituality the most apparently dead things in our ordinary environment.
His imagination plays superb tricks with such objects and things, touching the most dilapidated of them with a magic such as the genius of a great poet uses, when dealing with nature—only the "nature" of Dickens is made of less lovely matters than leaves and flowers. ”

“ Without philosophy, without faith, without moral courage, the uneasy slave of conventional morality, and with a hopeless vein of sheer worldly philistinism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost devastating in its sneering and sentimental accuracy. ”

“ That wise and massive egoism taught by Goethe, that impassioned "living to oneself" indicated by Stendhal, find in Walter Pater a new qualification and a new sanction.
Himself a supreme master of the rare and exquisite in style, he becomes, for those who really understand him, something more penetrating and insidious than a mere personality. He becomes an atmosphere, an attitude, a tone, a temper—and one too which may serve us to most rich and recondite purpose, as we wander through the world seeking the excitement and consecration of impassioned cults and organized discriminations. ”

“ The absurd idea that one gets wise by reading books is probably at the bottom of the abominable pedantry that thrusts so many tiresome pieces of antiquity down the throats of youth. There is no talisman for getting wise—some of the wisest in the world never open a book, and yet their native wit, so heavenly-free from "culture," would serve to challenge Voltaire. Lovers of books, like other infatuated lovers, best know the account they find in their exquisite obsessions. ”

“ Something between a prophet, a charlatan, a rhetorician, and a spoiled child, he believes in God, in democracy, in innocence, in justice, and he has a noble and unqualified devotion to human heroism and the depths of the dangerous sea. He has that arbitrary, maniacal inventive imagination which is very rare except in children—and in spite of his theatrical gestures he has the power of conjuring up scenes of incredible beauty and terror. ”

“ There is, throughout his work, an unpleasing strain, like the vibration of a rope drawn out too tight,—a strain and a tug of intellectual intensity, that is not fulfilled by any corresponding intellectual wisdom. His descriptions of nature, in his poems, as well as in his prose works, have an original vigor and a pungent tang of their own; but the twisted violence of their introduction, full of queer jolts and jerks, prevents their impressing one with any sense of calm or finality. They are too aphoristic, these passages. They are too clever. They smell too much of the lamp. ”

“ At his best Hardy is a novelist second to none. His style has a grandeur, a distinction, a concentration, which we find neither in Balzac nor Dostoievsky. Not to appreciate the power and beauty of his manner, when his real inspiration holds him, is to confess that the genuinely classical in style and the genuinely pagan in feeling has no meaning for you. No English writer, whether in prose or poetry, has ever caught so completely the magic of the earth and the quaint humors, tragical and laughable, of those who live inured to her moods ”

“ The wild exaggerations of Dickens—his reckless contempt for realistic possibility—need not hinder us from enjoying, apart from his revelling humor and his too facile sentiment, those inspired outbursts of inevitable truth, wherein the inmost identity of his queer people stands revealed to us. His world may be a world of goblins and fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting appeal and human voices of divine imagination. ”

“ This admirable work of art is not known as well as it deserves either in England or America. It is a work of genius in every sense of that word, and it produces on the mind that curious sense of completeness and finality which only such works produce.
Mr. L.U. Wilkinson—himself a writer of powerful achievement—says of "The Good Girl": "It does what I have always desired should be done; it reduces 'atmosphere' and 'nature' to their proper subordinate place. It wastes no energy. It focuses one's intellect and one's emotion. It creates characters who resemble none others in fiction. ”

“ Below the wit and provocative persiflage of "Intentions" there is a deep and true conception of the nature of art—a conception which might well serve as the "philosophy" of much of the most interesting and arresting of modern work.
Wilde's extraordinary charm largely depends upon something invincibly boyish and youthful in him. His personality, as he himself says, has become almost symbolic—symbolic, that is, of a certain shameless and beautiful defiance of the world, expressed in an unconquerable insolence worthy of the very spirit of hard, brave, flagrant youth. ”

“ And yet Scott's novels have ample and admirable excellencies. In his expansive and digressive fashion he can give his characters—especially the older and the more idiosyncratic among them—a surprising and convincing verisimilitude.
He can create a plot which, though not dramatically flawless, has movement and energy and stir. The sweetness and modesty of his disposition lends itself to his portrayal of the more gracious aspects of human life, especially as seen in the humours and oddities of very simple and naïve persons. ”

“ His fame will steadily grow, and his extraordinary genius will more and more create that finer taste by which alone he can be appreciated.
No novelist who has ever lived has "taken art" so seriously. But it is art, and not life, he takes seriously; and, therefore, along with his methods of elaborate patience, one is conscious of a most delicate and whimsical playfulness—sparing literally nothing. In spite of his beautiful cosmopolitanism it must never be forgotten that at bottom Henry James is richly and wonderfully American. ”

“ We are conscious all the while in reading him of the wise, tender, pitiful detachment of a true scholar of the classics, contemplating the mad pell-mell of human life from a certain epicurean remoteness, and loving and mocking the sons and daughters of men, as if they were little children or comical small animals. ”

“ It will be found, as a matter of fact, that this latter element in the motives of our choice works as a rule negatively rather than positively, while the positive and active force in our appreciations remains, as it ought to remain, our own inviolable and quite personal bias. The winnowed taste of the ages, acquired by us as a sort of second nature, warns us what to avoid, while our own nerves and palate, stimulated to an ever deepening subtlety, as our choice narrows itself down, tells us what passionately and spontaneously we must snatch up and enjoy. ”

“ His mastery of language, his knowledge of human impulses, his interpretation of the forces of nature and of the power of inanimate objects over human beings, all pronounce him a writer of no mean rank.... He can express philosophy in terms of narrative without prostituting his art; he can suggest an answer without drawing a moral; with a clearer vision he could stand among the masters in literary achievement. ”

“ The compiler holds the view that in expressing his own predilection, he is also supplying the need of kindred minds; minds that read purely for the pleasure of reading, and have no sinister wish to transform themselves by that process into what are called "cultivated persons." The compiler feels that any one who succeeds in reading, with reasonable receptivity, the books in this list, must become, at the end, a person with whom it would be a delight to share that most classic of all pleasurable arts—the art of intelligent conversation. ”

“ Under the stress of occasional emotion he can rise to quite noble heights of feeling and he is able to throw a startling glamour of romance over certain familiar and recurrent human situations. At his best there is a grandeur and simplicity of utterance about what his characters say and an ease and largeness of sympathy about his own commentaries upon them, which must win admiration even from those most avid of modern pathology. ”

“ Tchekoff is one of the gentlest and sweetest tempered of Russian writers. There is in him a genuine graciousness, a politeness of soul, an innate delicacy, which is not touched—as such qualities often are in the work of Turgeniev—with any kind of self-conscious Olympianism. A doctor, a consumptive, and a passionate lover of children, there is a whimsical humanity about all that Tchekoff writes which has a singular and quite special appeal. ”

“ How many luckless innocents have teased and fretted their minds into a forced appreciation of that artistic ogre Flaubert, and his laborious pursuit of his precious "exact word," when they might have been pleasantly sailing down Rabelais' rich stream of immortal nectar, or sweetly hugging themselves over the lovely mischievousness of Tristram Shandy! But one must be tolerant; one must make allowances. The world of books is no puritanical bourgeois-ridden democracy; it is a large free country, a great Pantagruelian Utopia, ruled by noble kings. ”

“ Nowhere in literature, except in Dostoievsky, has the ferocious struggle of two women over a man been so savagely and truly portrayed as in the great scene in "Louie" between that young woman and Evie when the latter visits her in her rooms.
Oliver Onions' humor has that large and vigorous expansiveness, touched with something almost sardonic, which we associate with some of the very greatest writers. There is always present in his work a certain free sweep of imagination which deals masterfully and suggestively with all manner of sordid material. ”

“ So rich, so delicate, so imaginative, so full of surprises, is the style of this seductive writer, that, for sheer magic and inspiration, his equals can only be found among the very greatest poets.
It is impossible to over-estimate the value of Charles Lamb's philosophy. ”

“ Now and again—and what praise could go further?—there are little touches of clear-cut realism, of that kind which has a mystical background, which actually suggest some of the lighter and more idyllic work of Goethe himself. The book has genuine wisdom in it, of a sort superior to any philosophical system, and one feels at the close the tonic and soothing effect of a powerful moral influence, sweetening and refining one's general reaction towards life. ”

“ He is an interesting example of a writer with a definite "milieu" out of whose happy security he is always ill-advised to stray.
But within his own region he is a powerful master. No one in modern English fiction has treated so creatively and illuminatingly the least interesting and least romantic strata of human society which is perhaps to be found in the whole world.
And yet he endows this paralyzing bourgeoisie with astonishing life. One turns back from much more exciting literature to these ignorant, conceited, restricted and undistinguished people. ”

“ What imagination does, and what the personal vision of the individual artist does, is to deal successfully and masterfully with this "given," this basic element. And this basic element, this permanent common ground, this universal human assumption, is just precisely what, in popular language, we call "Nature"; that substratum of objective reality in the appearances of things, which makes it possible for diversely constructed temperaments to make their differences effective and intelligible. ”

“ The figures of these animals are quite Biblical in their emphatic picturesqueness, and never has the romance of these spotted and striped aboriginals, in their primordial struggles for food and water, been more thrillingly conveyed. Every scene, every situation, brands itself upon the memory as perhaps nothing else in literature does except the stories in the Old Testament. The best of all children's books—"Grimm's Fairy Tales" itself—takes no deeper hold upon the youthful mind. ”

“ One teases oneself too much, and one's infants, too, poor darlings, with what might be called the "scholastic-veneration-cult"; the cult, namely, of becoming a superior person by reading the best authors. It comes back, after all, to what your young person emphatically is, in himself, independent of all this acquiring. If he has the responsive chord, the answering vibration, he may well get more imaginative stimulus from reading "Alice in Wonderland," than from all the Upanishads and Niebelungenlieds in the world. It is a matter of the imagination, and to the question "What is one to read?" ”

“ At his best Sterne is capable of an imaginative interpretation of character which for delicacy and subtlety has never been surpassed. For the Epicurean in literature, his unfailing charm will be found in his style—a style so baffling in the furtive beauty of its disarming simplicity that even the greatest of literary critics have been unable to analyze its peculiar flavour. ”

“ Absolute self-reliance is the note he constantly strikes. He is obsessed by the psychology of moral problems; but for him there are no universal ethical laws—"the golden rule is that there is no golden rule"—thus while in the Pillars of Society he advocates candid confession and honest revelation of the truth of things; in the "Wild Duck" he attacks the pig-headed meddler, who comes "dunning us with claims of the Ideal." Ultimately, though absorbed in "matters of conscience," it is as an artist rather than as a philosopher that he visualizes the world. ”

“ Masters has the massive ironical observation and the shrewd humane wit of the great English novelists of the eighteenth century. His dead people reveal "the true truth" of their sordid and troubled lives. The little chances, the unguessed-at accidents, the undeserved blows of a capricious destiny, which batter so many of us into helpless inertness, are the aspects of life which interest him most. ”