Robert Lynd

“ His poetry is a mirror of things rather than a window of the imagination. It belongs to a borderland where naturalism and literature meet. He brings things seen before our eyes: the record of his senses is more important than the record of his imagination or his thoughts. He was an observer whose consuming delight was to watch—to watch a grasshopper or a snail, a thistle or a yellow-hammer. The things that a Wordsworth or a Shelley sees or hears open the door, as it were, to still more wonderful things that the poet has not seen or heard. ”

“ Eliot is like a man dissecting—and dissecting with desperate earnestness—a corpse that isn’t there.
And his essays in praise have scarcely more of that vitality which is a prerequisite of good criticism than his essays in blame. He obviously admires Blake and Ben Jonson, but he leaves them as rigid and as cold as though he were measuring them for their coffins. The good critic communicates his delight in genius. His memorable sentences are the mirrors of memorable works of art. Like the poet, he is something of a philosopher, but his philosophy is for the most part implicit. ”

“ There is as much imagination—as much sympathy, even, perhaps—in the laughter of the great comic writers as in the tears of the sentimentalist. And Molière’s aim was laughter achieved through an exaggerated imitation of reality. He was the poet of good sense, and he felt that he had but to hold up the mirror of good sense in order that we might see how absurd is every form of egotism and pretentiousness. He took the side of the simple dignity of human nature against all the narrowing vices, the anti-social vices, whether of avarice, licentiousness, self-righteousness or preciosity. ”

“ He devoured politics, religion, the stage, poetry, fiction, nature, grand-children. If he was a giant who devoured, however, he was also a giant who created. He may not have the accurate gift of observation on which we set so much store nowadays, and he may depart so far from reality as to call an English sailor in L’Homme qui rit Tom-Jim-Jack. But, if he does not create for us a world as real as Clapham Junction, he does create for us a world as real as Æsop’s Fables. He is an inventor of myths and fables, indeed. ”

“ But if to have a conscience is to have standards, and if taste is conscience in the æsthetic world, who can deny that Anatole France has very fine literary standards indeed? It is obvious that he all the time measures an author by the excellence of all the authors he has loved, just as most of us get our standards of character from the love and veneration we have felt for good men. This love of excellence is indisputably the first of all the requisites of a critic—love of excellence and acquaintance with excellence. The critic’s first standard is his enthusiasm for the great writers. ”

“ In The Scarlet Letter, the egoism of the vengeful husband, not the adultery of the wife or the cowardice of the minister who sins with her, is the unpardonable sin of the story. That Hawthorne’s imaginative morality had the vehemence of genius is shown by the fact that The Scarlet Letter still holds us under its spell in days in which moral values have subtly and swiftly changed. People are no longer thrilled at the thought of a scarlet A on a woman’s breast; they would scarcely be thrilled by the spectacle of a whole scarlet alphabet hung round a woman’s neck like a collar. ”

“ It may help to preserve a detail which will give a later man of genius a clue to a character—the character of a man or the character of a book. The theory that we can criticise a poet more profoundly by leaving aside the ordinary facts of his life as though he had never existed in the flesh is an absurd piece of pedantry. The life of Shelley throws a flood of light on the poetry of Shelley. It contains in itself a profound criticism of the genius of Shelley—a genius that was of the air rather than of the earth—a genius at once noble and incongruous with the world in which men live. ”

“ The world at its most beautiful is for Keats a series of dissolving pictures—of “fair attitudes” that only the artist can make immortal. His indolence is the indolence of a man under the spell of beautiful shapes. His energy is the energy of a man who would drain the whole cup of worship in a beautiful phrase. His æsthetic attitude to life—as æsthetic in its way as the early Pater’s—appears in that letter in which he writes:
I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a field-mouse peeping out of the withered grass—the creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. ”

“ I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, and cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds. I have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. ”

“ He was a teller of fairy-tales. But he domesticated the fairy-tale and gave it a townsman’s home. In his hands it was no longer a courtier, as it had been in the time of Louis XIV, or a wanderer among cottages, as it has been at all times. There was never a teller of fairy-tales to whom kings and queens mattered less. He could make use of royal families in the most charming way, as in those little satires, “The Princess and the Pea” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But his imagination hankered after the lives of children such as he himself had been. ”

“ Pity, tenderness, love, or whatever you choose to call it, is an essential ingredient of the greatest genius, whether in reform or in art. It is the absence of pity that is the final condemnation of most of the literature, painting, and sculpture of our time. When pity is exhausted, the best part of genius is exhausted, and there is little but cleverness left. In Tchehov, more than in almost any other author of recent years, truth and tenderness are united. ”

“ Clutton-Brock’s gifts. He is the head of a table at which the virtues and the graces sit down side by side, and they are dressed so much alike that it is not always easy to tell which is which. He is always seeking, indeed, the point at which a virtue passes into a grace, and he knits his brows over those extreme differences that separate one from the other. The standard by which he measures things in literature and in life is an ideal world in which goodness and beauty answer one another in antiphonal music. ”

“ Shelley, indeed, was a man always hastening towards an ideal world which at the touch of experience turned into a mirage. His political, like his ethical, theories had something mirage-like about them. He was a prophet who was so absorbed in the vision of the Promised Land that he had little thought to spare for the human nature that he was trying to incite to make the journey. His own imagination travelled fast as a ray of light, but he could not take human beings with him on so swift a journey. Hence, if he has been effectual, he has been so as an inspiration to the few. ”

“ Criticism is a magic mirror, in which a work of art is reflected with a new emphasis and in new relations. The critic must bathe his subject in the light of his own mind—his taste, his enthusiasm, his moral ideas, his knowledge. Hence criticism is an extremely personal thing. It relates, if one may adapt Anatole France’s famous phrase, the adventures of masterpieces in the soul of the critic, or—to put it a little more precisely—in the intellectual and imaginative world of the critic.
It is said that, if we adopt this view, we are denying the existence of any standards in criticism. ”

“ He has not yet touched her into life. He almost prefers to remain a spectator, not an awakener. He loves the picture itself more than the reality, though he guesses all the while at the reality behind. That, perhaps, is why men do not go to Keats for healing, as they go to Wordsworth, or for hope, as they go to Shelley. Keats enriches life rather with a sense of a loveliness for ever vanishing, and with a dream of what life might be if the loveliness remained. Regret means more to him than hope ”

“ He is more like a child’s Dickens than a successor of the ladies and gentlemen who wrote fairy-tales in the age of Louis XIV and Louis XV. He is like Dickens, indeed, not only in his genius for compassion, but in his abounding inventiveness, his grotesque detail, and his humour. He is never so recklessly cheerful as Dickens with the cheerfulness that suggests eating and drinking. He makes us smile rather than laugh aloud with his comedy. ”

“ They had either to abuse Keats or to trample on their standards—which would have been like trampling on themselves. Keats himself, by the vehemence of his attack on Pope and his followers, had provoked the controversial spirit. He was to them a blasphemer in the temple, who had to be punished at all costs. There is much the same reason, no doubt, for the virulence with which the dull have assailed the wits in all ages. Wit by its very nature is a declaration of war not only on dullness, but on the dull orthodoxies, and the dull and the orthodox return bite for blow. ”

“ And so on till we come to the discovery of a corn-chandler’s ledger lying in the mud of the roadway. Only an artist could have made a tradesman’s ledger a symbol of hope and resurrection on a shattered planet as Mr. Tomlinson has done. He picks out from the disordered procession of things treasures that most of us would pass with hardly a glance. His clues to the meaning of the world are all of his own finding. It is this that gives his work the savour and freshness of literature. ”

“ The sense of sin is of infinite value to an artist, if only because it enables him to see how striking are the contrasts that exist in every human being. He sees the great man as a miserable sinner, and he sees him all the more truthfully for this. He sees the beautiful woman as a miserable sinner, and he sees her all the more truthfully for this. Aristotle, indeed, thought that it was impossible to write great tragic literature except about a noble character who was seen to be a sinner. ”

“ Eliot, however, clings to the idea that Shakespeare failed in Hamlet because he was divided in interest between the theme of the guilty mother and other intractable stuff “that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.” Now, every great work of art is like the visible part of an iceberg; it reveals less than it leaves hidden. The greatest poem in the world is no more than a page from that inspired volume that exists in the secret places of the poet’s soul. ”

“ The world delighted in songs and epics and histories for centuries before it paused to attend to a literary critic. Even to-day, when men engage in the eternal discussion of the books with which they would like to be left on a desert island, I do not think a vote is ever given to a volume of criticism. The poet, the essayist, the novelist, the biographer, the philosopher, are all safe among the world’s best authors: the critic must be content if he is given a place among the second-best. He is not a contributor to the hundred best books ”

“ Clutton-Brock is a critic with an unusual equality of interests. He seems to be the centre of an almost perfect circle, and literature, painting, religion, philosophy, ethics, and education are the all but equal radii that connect him with the circumference. Many writers have been as versatile, but few have been as symmetrical. He has all his gifts in due proportion. He is not more æsthetic than moral, or more moral than æsthetic. His idealism and his intellect balance each other exactly. ”

“ HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS Herodotus is one of the oldest illustrations of the fact that a test of good literature is its capacity to entertain us. There are two sorts of writing—the entertaining and the dull—and the dull is outside literature. This is a fact which, though it is perfectly obvious, tends to be forgotten by many writers, even by many able writers, in every century. Authors fall in love with their own ponderosity, forgetting that a huge tome is too often a huge tomb. ”

“ Criticism, in order to justify itself as a branch of literature, must subordinate all such technical matter to philosophy or biography, or both,—must associate ideas about literature with ideas about life, as Schopenhauer did, or like Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold, must portray in an author, not only an author, but a man.
Those critics who write about literature as though it were a cult for the few instead of a normal human interest, confine themselves largely to analysis—some of them to pretended analysis. ”