Robert Lynd

“ Henry James, indeed, is himself the outstanding character in his books. That fine and humorous collector of European ladies and gentlemen, that savourer of the little lives of the Old World and the little adventures of those who have escaped from the New, that artist who brooded over his fellows in the spirit less of a poet than a man of science, that sober and fastidious trifler—this is the image which presides over his books, and which gives them their special character, and will attract tiny but enthusiastic companies of readers to them for many years to come. ”

“ One is never done hearing about his demand for "fundamental brainwork" in art. But his own poetry is poor enough in brainwork. It is the poetry, of one who, like Keats, hungered for a "life of sensations rather than of thoughts." It is the poetry of grief, of regret—the grief and regret of one who was a master of sensuous beauty, and who reveals sensuous beauty rather than any deeper secret even in touching spiritual themes. Poetry with him is a dyed and embroidered garment which weighs the spirit down rather than winged sandals like Shelley's, which set the spirit free. ”

“ Hardy's The Phantom Horsewoman, and you will see a vast energy and beauty issuing from loss in the one, while in the other there is little but a sad shadow. To have loved even for an hour is with Browning to live for ever after in the inheritance of a mighty achievement. To have loved for an hour is, in Mr. Hardy's imagination, to have deepened the sadness even more than the beauty of one's memories.
Not that Mr. Hardy's is quite so miserable a genius as is commonly supposed. It is false to picture him as always on his knees before the grave-worm. ”

“ No writer of his day was so shudderingly conscious of every gesture, movement, and intonation with which the spider-woman sets out to lure the mate she is going to devour. It may be that he prophesies against the sins of women rather than subtly analyses and describes them as a better artist would have done. The Confessions of a Fool is less a revelation of the soul of his first wife than an attack on her. But we must, in fairness to Strindberg, remember that in his violences against women he merely gives us a new rendering of an indictment that goes back to the beginning of history. ”

“ For, though his work is not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginative expression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, the poet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days; with Browning it was a soaring eagle. In some ways Mr. Conrad's is the most heroic imagination in contemporary literature. But he does not take this round globe of light and darkness into his purview as Browning did. The whole earth is to him shadowed with futility. Browning was too lyrical to resign himself to the shadows. ”

“ Sir Sidney sees clearly enough the double nature of Keats—his fiery courage, shown in his love of fighting as a schoolboy, his generosity, his virtue of the heart, on the one hand, and his luxurious love of beauty, his tremulous and swooning sensitiveness in the presence of nature and women, his morbidness, his mawkishness, his fascination as by serpents, on the other. But in the resultant portrait, it is a too respectable and virile Keats that emerges. Keats was more virile as a man than is generally understood. He does not owe his immortality to his virility, however. ”

“ But while Henry James's birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens, Mr. Conrad's call from the heart of natural thickets—often from the depths of the jungle. The progress of the steamer up the jungle river in Heart of Darkness is symbolic of his method as a writer. He goes on and on, with the ogres of romance always lying in wait round the next bend. He can describe things seen as well as any man, but it is his especial genius to use things seen in such a way as to suggest the unseen things that are waiting round the corner. ”

“ He is a dark man who carries the shadows and the mysteries of the pit about with him. He initiates us in his stories into the romance of Erebus. He leads us through a haunted world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the darkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who exalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, a very spendthrift of treasure—treasure of recollection, observation, imagery, tenderness, and humour. ”

“ Conrad is more than most. He has a lure like some lost shore in the tropics. He compels to adventure. There is no other living writer who is sensitive in anything like the same degree to the sheer mysteriousness of the earth. Every man who breathes, every woman who crosses the street, every wind that blows, every ship that sails, every tide that fills, every wave that breaks, is for him alive with mystery as a lantern is alive with light—a little light in an immense darkness. ”

“ So much may be said in definition of Keats's genius. It was essentially an aesthetic genius. It anticipated both William Morris and Oscar Wilde. There is in Keats a passion for the luxury of the world such as we do not find in Wordsworth or Shelley. He had not that bird-like quality of song which they had—that happiness to be alive and singing between the sky and the green earth. He looked on beautiful things with the intense devotion of the temple-worshipper rather than with the winged pleasure of the great poets. ”

“ Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevenson when he addressed him in a paradoxical line as:
Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn,
and spoke of his "poor, perfect voice,"
That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers,
Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears.
No man who has ever written has so cunningly mingled joy-bells and death-bells in his music. Here is a realism of damned souls—damned in their merry sins—at which the writer of Ecclesiastes merely seems to hint like a detached philosopher. ”

“ Chesterton's defence of despots is not the result of any real taste for them or acquaintance with their history: it is due simply to his passion for extremes. He likes a man, as the vulgar say, to be either one thing or the other. You must be either a Pope or a revolutionist to please him. He loves the visible rhetoric of things, and the sober suits of comfortable citizens seem dull and neutral in comparison with the red of cardinals on the one hand, and of caps of liberty on the other. ”

“ Keats's imagination lived in castles, and he loved the properties, and the men and women were among the properties. We may forget the names of Porphyro and Madeline, but we do not forget the background of casement and arras and golden dishes and beautiful sensual things against which we see them, charming figures of love-sickness. Similarly, in Lamia, we may remember the name of the serpent-woman's lover with difficulty; but who can forget the colours of her serpent-skin or the furnishing of her couch and of her palace in Corinth:—
That purple-lined palace of sweet sin? ”

“ But it is because it is eternally true as such a dramatization that it is—let us not shrink from praise—one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories in literature. It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than of an unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angels and demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her and time and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters. ”

“ Consciousness in artistry can seldom have descended to minuter details with a larger gesture. One would not have missed these games of genius with syllables and consonants for worlds. Is it all an exquisite farce or is it splendidly heroic? Are we here spectators of the incongruous heroism of an artist who puts a hero's earnestness into getting the last perfection of shine on to a boot or the last fine shade of meaning into the manner in which he says, "No, thank you, no sugar"? ”

“ Conrad's work, I have already suggested, belongs to the literature of confidence. It is the literature of great hearts braving the perils of the darkness. He is imaginatively never so much at home as in the night, but he is aware not only of the night, but of the stars. Like a cheer out of the dark comes that wonderful scene in The Secret Sharer in which, at infinite risk, the ship is sailed in close under the looming land in order that the captain may give the hidden manslayer a chance of escaping unnoticed to the land. ”

“ His world may be full of unswept rooms and unwashed men and women, but the presiding genius in it is the genius of gentleness and love and laughter. It is a dark world, but Tchehov brings light into it. There is no other author who gives so little offence as he shows us offensive things and people. He is a writer who desires above all things to see what men and women are really like—to extenuate nothing and to set down naught in malice. As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is black without being bitter. ”

“ And, having once got us in the mood of belief, he proceeded to spin a yarn that as often as not was as unlike life as A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. His characters are inventions, not portraits. Even the dialects they speak—dialects which used to be enthusiastically spoken of as masterly achievements of realism—are ludicrously false to life, as a page of Mulvaney's or Ortheris's talk will quickly make clear to any one who knows the real thing. But with what humour the stories are told! Mr. Kipling does undoubtedly possess the genius of humour and energy. ”

“ It seems to me that Dostoevsky believes that men are purified, if not by their own sufferings, at least by the sufferings of others. Or even by the compassion of others, like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. But the truth is, it is by no means easy to systematize the creed of a creature at war with life, as Dostoevsky was—a man tortured by the eternal conflict of the devilish and the divine in his own breast.
His work, like his face, bears the mark of this terrible conflict. The novels are the perfect image of the man. ”

“ I have said that woman is—what she is, but I have always loved some woman, and been a father. Whoever, therefore, calls me a woman-hater is a blockhead, a liar, or a noodle. Or all three together.
Sex, of course, was the greatest cross Strindberg had to bear. But there were hundreds of other little changing crosses, from persecution mania to poverty, which supplanted each other from day to day on his back. He suffered continually both from the way he was made and from the way the world was made. His novels and plays are a literature of suffering. ”

“ Conrad's genius, his consciousness of his destiny, may be said to have come to birth in that hour. What but the second sight of genius could have told this inland child that he would one day escape from the torturing round of rebellion in which the soul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secret rivers of Africa, where he would find an imperishable booty of wonder and monstrous fear? Many people regard Heart of Darkness as his greatest story. ”

“ These stories are so great that while we read them we almost forget the word "psychology." We are swept off our feet by a tide of heroic literature. Each of the stories, complex though Mr. Conrad's interest in the central situation may be, is radically as heroic and simple as the story of Jack's fight with the giants or of the defence of the round-house in Kidnapped. In each of them the soul of man challenges fate with its terrors: it dares all, it risks all, it invades and defeats the darkness. ”

“ As a poet, Wordsworth may almost be called the first of the democrats. He brought into literature a fresh vision—a vision bathing the world and its inhabitants in a strange and revolutionary light. He was the first great poet of equality and fraternity in the sense that he portrayed the lives of common country, people in their daily surroundings as faithfully as though they had been kings. ”

“ Here, during his three months' imprisonment in the pit, he experienced all that bitterness of life which makes his Grand Testament a "De Profundis" without parallel in scapegrace literature. Here, we may imagine with Mr. Stacpoole, his soul grew in the grace of suffering, and the death-bells began to bring a solemn music among the joy-bells of his earlier follies. He is henceforth the companion of lost souls. He is the most melancholy of cynics in the kingdom of death. He has ever before him the vision of men hanging on gibbets. He has all the hatreds of a man tortured and haunted and old. ”

“ He prefers it to seas of bloodshed. One may quarrel with it, if one demands that art shall be as violent as war and shall not subdue itself to the level of a game. But those who enjoy the spectacle of a game played with perfect skill will always find reading Henry James an exciting experience.
It would be unfair, however, to suggest that the literature of Henry James can be finally summed up as a game. He is unquestionably a virtuoso: he uses his genius as an instrument upon which he loves to reveal his dexterity, even when he is shy of revealing his immortal soul. ”

“ He grew more and more to believe that it was not possible to tell the simple truth except in an involved way. He would define a gesture with as much labour as Shakespeare would devote to the entire portrait of a woman. He was a realist of civilized society in which both speech and action have to be sifted with scientific care before they will yield their grain of motive. The humorous patience with which Henry James seeks for that grain is one of the distinctive features of his genius. ”

“ Tom Jones, on the other hand, is a portrait of a common man of the size of which few people complain. But then Tom Jones is a comedy, and we enjoy the continual relief of laughter. It is the tragic realists for whom the common man is a theme so perilous in its temptations to dullness. At the same time he is a theme that they were bound to treat. He is himself, indeed, the sole source and subject of tragic realism in literature. ”