Part 1
Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
Books and Authors
Books and Authors
By Robert Lynd
Delight, the parent of so many virtues.
_Coleridge._
Let us enjoy, whenever we have an opportunity, the delight of admiration, and perform the duties of reverence.
_Landor._
G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York & London The Knickerbocker Press 1923
Copyright, 1923 by Robert Lynd
[Illustration]
Made in the United States of America
To H. M. TOMLINSON
PREFACE
TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
To write books about books has been spoken of as though it were a parasitic industry. Undoubtedly, books about books are among the least necessary of books. 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; the most that he can claim is that no collection of the thousand best books would be complete without him. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine a well-chosen library of a thousand books without a volume or two of literary criticism.
This may be because a thousand supremely good books have not yet been written--a melancholy reflection when we think of all the ink and paper that have been used since authorship began. I think, however, it is also partly due to the fact that as human society becomes civilised, books become more and more a necessary part of the environment of men and women, so that we may say that on the whole it is more natural for a civilised man to write a book about books than a book about birds or butterflies. In a highly-developed civilisation, literature inevitably takes literature as part of its subject-matter as it takes every other great human interest. Even the historian ends by admitting authors among his characters along with statesmen and soldiers, and in general literature we have poems on poets, essays on essayists, biographies of biographers, criticisms of critics, and novels about novelists. Writing about writers, indeed, has become in our day an all but universal practice, and it seems to me to stand in no more need of defence than writing about tramps or travellers, about business-men or burglars.
There is, I admit, always a danger that a writer about writers may become excessively professional. He may discuss writing as a cotton-manufacturer would discuss the manufacture of cotton, telling us a great deal about the mechanism of production and nothing about the energies, sacrifices, and personal qualities that are the secret of genius in business as in the arts. Criticism of this kind is important, but its place is in a technical or professional treatise. 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. They do not see that the critic’s analysis is of value only if it leads to a synthesis. There is no use in his taking to pieces what he sees as the genius of Shakespeare if he cannot put it together again in such a way that it is mirrored in the minds and imaginations of his readers as well as in his own. It seems to me to be the positive task of criticism to create in one’s own mind an image of a writer’s genius and then to try to clear the minds of one’s readers so that the same image will be reflected in theirs. We may fail; but that, at least, is what we are attempting to do, or what we ought to be attempting to do.
ROBERT LYND.
LONDON, November, 1922.
CONTENTS
MORE OR LESS ANCIENT
PAGE I.--HERRICK 3
II.--VICTOR HUGO 12
III.--MOLIÈRE 22
IV.--EDMUND BURKE 30
V.--KEATS 41
VI.--CHARLES LAMB 61
VII.--BYRON ONCE MORE 68
VIII.--SHELLEY 76
IX.--PLUTARCH’S ANECDOTES 84
X.--HANS ANDERSEN 93
XI.--JOHN CLARE 104
XII.--HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS 114
XIII.--A WORDSWORTH DISCOVERY 122
XIV.--THE POETRY OF POE 131
XV.--HAWTHORNE 140
XVI.--JONAH IN LANCASHIRE 149
INTERLUDE
THE CULT OF DULLNESS 159
MORE OR LESS MODERN
I.--MR. MAX BEERBOHM 171
II.--MR. ARNOLD BENNETT CONFESSES 188
III.--MR. CONRAD AT HOME 196
IV.--MR. WELLS AND THE WORLD 206
V.--MR. CLUTTON-BROCK 214
VI.--HENLEY THE VAINGLORIOUS 222
VII.--LORD ROSEBERY 230
VIII.--MR. VACHEL LINDSAY 237
IX.--MR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING 244
X.--MR. H. M. TOMLINSON 252
XI.--THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV 260
XII.--NIETZSCHE: A NOTE 268
XIII.--MR. T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC 277
XIV.--MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS’S DISLIKES 285
XV.--M. ANDRE GIDE MAKES A JOKE 293
FINALE
THE CRITIC 305
MORE OR LESS ANCIENT
I
HERRICK
Herrick was a gross and good-natured clergyman who had a double chin. He kept a pet pig, which drank beer out of a tankard, and he and the pig had probably a good many of the same characteristics. It would be a libel on him to say that he was a pig, but it would not be a libel to say that he was a pet pig.
His life, like the pet pig’s, was not real, and it certainly was not earnest. He spent the best part of his youth mourning over the brevity of life, and he lived till he was comfortably over eighty. He was an Epicurean, indeed, in the vulgar sense of the word, whose dominant theme was the mortality of pretty things. For Herrick gives us the feeling that for him the world was a world of pretty things rather than of beautiful things. He was the son of a goldsmith in Cheapside, and himself served an apprenticeship to the trade. The effect of this may, I think, be seen in his verse. His spiritual home always remained in Cheapside rather than in the Church which he afterwards entered. He enjoyed the world as though it were a street of shops. To read him is to call at the florist’s and the perfumer’s and the milliner’s and the jeweller’s and the confectioner’s and the vintner’s and the fruiterer’s and the toy-seller’s. If he writes, as he proclaims, of bridegrooms and brides, he does not forget the bride’s dress or the bride’s cake. His very vision of Nature belittles it to the measure of “golden Cheapside.” He begins _Fair Days_ with the lines:
Fair was the dawn; and but e’en now the skies Show’d like rich cream, enspir’d with strawberries.
If he invites Phyllis to love him and live with him in the country, he reduces the hills for her to the size of bric-à-brac:
Thy feasting-tables shall be hills With daisies spread, and daffodils.
He was one of those happily constituted men who can get pleasure from most things, and it is obvious that he got a great deal of pleasure from his life in Devonshire, where he was Vicar of Dean Prior, till he was ejected after the triumph of Cromwell in the Civil War. But his heart was never in Devonshire. There is no mirror of Devonshire in his verse. He was a censorious exile amid beauty of that sort, and could have had all the flowers and country scenes he cared for within an hour’s walk of the shop in Cheapside. He speaks in one of his poems of “this loathed country-life,” and in the verses called _Dean-bourn, a rude River in Devon, by which he sometimes dwelt_, he bids the river farewell, and expresses the hope that he will never set eyes on its “warty incivility” again:
To my content, I never should behold, Were thy streams silver, or thy rocks all gold. Rocky thou art, and rocky we discover Thy men, and rocky are thy ways all over. O men, O manners, now and ever known To be a rocky generation! A people currish, churlish as the seas, And rude almost as rudest savages.
There is no missing the sincere unappreciativeness of these lines. The best that he can say of Devon is not that it is beautiful but that he wrote some good verses in it:
More discontents I never had Since I was born than here, Where I have been and still am sad, In this dull Devonshire. Yet justly too I must confess; I ne’er invented such Ennobled numbers for the Press Than where I loathed so much.
It has been remarked that, even when he writes of fairies, he has in mind, not the fairies of the West Country, but the fairies he brought with him from Ben Jonson’s London. He is rich in the fancies of the town-poet. For him Oberon walks through a grove “tinselled with twilight,” and is led by the shine of snails. As for the cave in which the Fairy King seeks Queen Mab:
To pave The excellency of this cave, Squirrels’ and children’s teeth late shed Are neatly here enchequered.
_Oberon’s Feast_ again is a revel of fantastical dishes not from nature, but from that part of the imagination that is a toy-shop:
A little moth Late fattened in a piece of cloth: With withered cherries; mandrake’s ears; Moles’ eyes; to these, the slain stag’s tears; The unctuous dewlaps of a snail; The broke heart of a nightingale O’ercome in music.
The very titles of many of his poems seem to have come straight from the toy-shop. How charming some of them are:
_A ternary of Littles upon a pipkin of Jelly sent to a lady; Upon a Cherrystone sent to the tip of the Lady Jemonia Walgrave’s ear; Upon a black Twist, rounding the Arm of the Countess of Carlisle; Upon Julia’s Hair, bundled up in a golden net; To the Fever, not to trouble Julia; Upon Lucia, dabbled in the Dew; The Funeral Rites of the Rose!_
Most beautiful of all, perhaps, is the title of his most famous poem, “Gather ye rosebuds,” which runs, _To the Virgins, to make much of time_. Herrick’s small and delightful genius is as manifest in the titles of his poems as in the poems themselves. All the perfume of his verse is in such titles as _To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses_; _To Mistress Katherine Bradshaw the lovely, that crowned him with Laurel_; _To the most virtuous Mistress Pot, who many times entertained him_; and, especially, _To Daisies, not to shut so soon_.
Herrick appears in his poetry, if we leave out of consideration the inferior religious verse in _Noble Numbers_, mainly in three characters. He is the cheerful countryman, the praiser of his mistresses, and the philosopher of the mortality of pretty things. As for the first, he was too good a disciple of Horace not to be able to play the part cheerfully and to smile among his animals and his beans:
A hen I keep, which, creaking day by day, Tells when She goes her long white egg to lay. A lamb I keep (tame) with my morsels fed, Whose dam An orphan left him (lately dead) ... A cat I keep, that plays about my house, Grown fat With eating many a miching mouse.
As he writes down the list, he himself realises to what an extent his life in the country is a life of make-believe among toys:
Which are But toys to give my heart some ease: Where care Ne’er is, slight things do lightly please.
His mistresses are, however, a thing apart from this happy farmyard. When he goes to the farmyard for a simile in praise of Julia, the effect is amusing, but it is a little lower than love-poetry:
Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg, Which is as white and hairless as an egg.
Some critics have doubted whether Herrick ever was actually in love. They regard his Julias and Antheas and Lucias as but an array of Delf shepherdesses that every poet of the day was expected to keep on his table. This may be true of most of the ladies, but Julia seems real enough. Herrick was obviously incapable of the passion of Keats or Shelley or Browning, but we may take it that he had been enchained and enchanted by the lady with the black eyes and the replica of his own double chin:
Black and rolling is her eye, Double-chinn’d, and forehead high; Lips she has, all ruby red, Cheeks like cream enclareted; And a nose that is the grace And proscenium of her face.
It is not a very attractive picture, and it is characteristic of Herrick that he can paint Julia’s clothes better than he can paint her face. It was an enchained and enchanted man who wrote those lines that are far too well known to quote and far too charming to refrain from quoting:
Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes. Next, when I cast mine eyes and see That brave vibration each way free, O how that glittering taketh me.
This is no figmentary picture. The songs to Julia--most of all, the glorious _Night Piece_--are songs of experience. Herrick may not have loved Julia well enough to marry her, even if she had been willing, but he loved her well enough to write good verses. He could probably have said farewell to any woman as philosophically as he said farewell to sack. He was a cautious man, and a predestined bachelor. He was, indeed, a man of no very profound feeling. There is no deep tide of emotion making his verse musical. He knew love and he knew regret, but not tragically. If he wept to see the daffodils haste away so soon, we may be sure that he brushed away his tears at the sound of the dinner-bell and forgot the premature death of the flowers in cheerful conversation with his housekeeper, Prue. This does not mean that his mood was insincere; it does not mean that in _To Daffodils_ he did not give immortal and touching expression to one of the universal sorrows of men. He comes nearer the grave music of poetry here than in any of his other poems. But the _Memento mori_ that runs through his verses is the _Memento mori_ of a banqueter, not of a sufferer. It is the mournfulness of a heart that has no intention of breaking.
Herrick proved a true prophet in regard to the immortality of his verse, though _Hesperides_ made no great stir when it was published in 1648 and seems to have made no friends among critics till the end of the eighteenth century. But he never gave a wiser estimate of the quality of his work than those lines, in _When he would have his verses read_, where he bids us:
In sober mornings do not thou rehearse The holy incantation of a verse; But when that men have both well drank and fed, Let my enchantments then be sung or read.... When the rose reigns, and locks with ointment shine, Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.
This is the muse at play. It is absurd to speak of Herrick as though he were a great lyric poet. He is not with Shakespeare. He is not with Campion. But he is a master of light poetry--of poetry under the rose.
II
VICTOR HUGO
It is easy to disparage Victor Hugo, but, in order to disparage him, it is necessary to abstain from reading him. Take down his books and begin to read, and, even if you do not agree with the verdict, you will understand before long how it was that a generation or so ago people used to regard Victor Hugo as one of the great names in literature. It was only Swinburne, perhaps, who could describe him as “the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare,” but this did not seem an absurd exaggeration to the majority of readers at the time it was written, and even a crabbed critic like Henley accepted him as “plainly ... the greatest man of letters of his day.” His influence as well as his reputation was enormous and extended far beyond France. He was a great author for the great Russians. He was one of Dostoevsky’s favourite writers, and _Notre Dame_ was one of the books that influenced Tolstoy; even in his censorious old age Tolstoy admitted _Les Misérables_ through the strait gate of the best literature in _What is Art?_ and it seems likely, as Madame Duclaux suggests, that it was at the back of his mind when he wrote _Resurrection_.
His greatest contemporaries, however, realised that Hugo was a charlatan as well as a man of genius. Madame Duclaux quotes Baudelaire’s comment, “Victor Hugo--an inspired donkey!” and his assertion that the Almighty, “in a mood of impenetrable mystification,” had taken genius and silliness in equal parts in order to compound the brain of Victor Hugo. She also quotes Balzac’s criticism of the first night of _Les Burgraves_:
The story simply does not exist, the invention is beneath contempt. But the poetry--ah, the poetry goes to your head. It’s Titian painting his fresco on a wall of mud. Yet there is in Victor Hugo’s plays an absence of _heart_, which was never so conspicuous. Victor Hugo is not _true_.
“Victor Hugo is not _true_.” That is the suspicion that constantly trips one up whether one reads his books or his life. In literature, in public life, in private life, he was not only amazing but an amazing humbug. We see evidence of this in the story of his relations with his wife and Juliette Drouet, his mistress, which Madame Duclaux tells again so fairly and so well. Even while he was pursuing the mistress across France, he would write fervently home to the wife: “Je t’aime! Tu es la joie et l’honneur de ma vie!” Hugo possibly meant this when he wrote it. He may have been lying to himself rather than to his wife. His falseness lay in his readiness to whisper at each shrine at which he worshipped that this was his only shrine. At the same time, no sooner do we admit that Hugo was an impostor in love and in literature than we begin to compare him with other impostors and to note certain differences in him. His early idealism was not merely an idealism of words. He was, until his marriage, as chaste as his nature was passionate. He was after marriage a faithful husband till his wife told him that she could no longer live with him as his wife. After he fell in love with Juliette Drouet in 1833, we might describe him as a high-minded bigamist, though he did not remain perfectly faithful even in his bigamy. One thing, at least, is certain: both women loved him till the end of their long lives. His dying wife wrote to him in 1868: “The end of my dream is to die in your arms.” And, when Juliette Drouet was slowly dying of cancer, and both she and Hugo were between seventy and eighty, she still insisted on nursing him at the hint of the slightest cough or headache. “Did he but stir, she was there with a warm drink or an extra covering. Every morning it was she who drew the curtains from Victor Hugo’s window, roused the old man with a kiss on the forehead, lit his fire, prepared the two fresh eggs that formed his breakfast, read him the papers.” Had he been all false, he could hardly have preserved the affection of these two rival and devoted women through years of danger and exile till the ultimate triumph of his fame. Madame Duclaux suggests, however, that he was a humbug even on that early occasion on which, seeing that Sainte-Beuve was in love with his wife, and that she in turn was attracted by Sainte-Beuve he offered with romantic generosity to let his wife choose between them and to abide by the result. Again, the fact that he insisted on remaining friends with Sainte-Beuve through the affair is regarded as evidence of his cunning determination to keep in with the reviewers at all costs. Victor Hugo would probably be suspected of having been a humbug, whatever he had done.
His self-importance is a continual challenge to our belief in him. Madame Duclaux quotes Heine’s sneer: “Hugo is worse than an egoist, he is a Hugoist,” and his device was the arrogant _Ego Hugo_. But at least he had the courage of his self-importance. In 1851, at the time of the _coup d’état_ of Louis Napoleon, when there was a price on his head, Hugo was driving across Paris to a meeting of the Insurrectionary Committee, and passed a group of officers on horseback:
The blood rushed to his head. He flung down the window of the cab, tore his deputy’s scarf out of his pocket, and waving it wildly, began to harangue the General:
“You, who are there, dressed in the uniform of a General, it is to you that I speak, sir. You know who I am; I am a representative of the nation: and I know who you are; you are a malefactor! And now do you wish to know my name! My name is Victor Hugo!”
This was no doubt theatrical, and both his deeds and his words during the reign of Napoleon the Little were those of a man consciously playing the leading part. But the fact remains that at this crisis he did risk everything and face twenty years’ exile for the sake of his convictions. The last stanza of “Ultima Verba” in _Les Châtiments_ may be rhetoric, but it is not empty rhetoric:
Si l’on n’est plus que mille, eh bien, j’en suis! Si même Ils ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla: S’il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième; Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là.
There is an energy of fury in Hugo’s political verse that keeps it alive even to-day, when Louis Napoleon, a charlatan without this redeeming fury, has receded into such littleness that the eye scarcely any longer perceives him. Hugo at times seems a painfully vocative poet--the poet, not merely of the vocative singular, but of the vocative plural. But there is always coursing through his verse a great natural force, like that of the wind or the waves, that carries us along as we read.
Hugo’s work, like his life, indeed, was the expression of what Madame Duclaux calls “a powerful and a sensual nature, a prodigious temperament.”
His barber complained that Hugo’s beard took the edge off any razor. At forty he cracked the kernels of peaches with his teeth; even in his old age ... he ate his oranges with the peel on and his lobsters in their shell, “because he found them more digestible.” His appetite (which was hungry, not greedy) alarmed the good Théo. “You should see the fabulous medley he makes on his plate of all sorts and conditions of viands: cutlets, a salad of white beans, stewed beef and tomato sauce, and watch him devour them, very fast, and during a long time.”
“Hugo is one of the forces of Nature!” cried Flaubert, “and there circulates in his veins the sap of trees.”