WRITERS, PAST AND PRESENT

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 91, 14 October 1922, Page 17

WRITERS, PAST AND PRESENT

"Books and Authors. ' By Robert kynd

E. Cobden-Sanderßon. .London

In one of his essays in this book Mr. Lynd defines criticism as "a magic mirror, in which the work of art is reflected with a new emphasis and in new relations." It is a very happy definition •and adequately describes the work under review. Mr, Lynd is \ literary editor of the "London Daily News," and a writer with a charming style quite his own. He divides his work into four parts, "More.or less Ancient," "dealing w^th Herrick, Victor Hugo, Moliere, Burke, Keats, Lamb, Byron, Plutarch, Hans Andersen, and some others; then comes an "Interlude," entitled "The Cult of Dullness;" next, "More or Less Modern,"' describing some living writers and their works, including Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Lord Rosebery, "Punch," Vachell, Lindsay, Nietzsche, and the Finale, entitled, "The Critic," from which the above quotation is' made.

Mi. Lynd, after lightly touching on Harrick's life and circumatances as Vicar of Dean Prior, shows that his heart was really in London, in "golden Cheapside;" not in the country for of Devonshire he wrote but little. Mr. Lynd holds it to be "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." Victor Hugo finds favour in the eyes of Mr. Lynd, especially in his verse, through which, says the critic, there is always coursing "a great natural- source like that of the wind or the waves that carries us along as we rend." He compares Hugo with Dickens in the following words : "Like Dickens, he (Victor Hugo) is a great Gothic writer, who demands the right to people the work of his hands with devil or imp or angel—with figures of pity or horror, of laughter or tears. He does not possess Dickena's comic imagination; the fantastic and the ironic take the plage of humour in his books. But his work, like that of. Dickens, is a gigantically grotesque pile built on the/ ancient Christian affirmation of love. Literature in our time may observe or ask questions ; it seldom affirms. , But I doubt whether it even' observes the essential heart, of thing's with as sure an eye as fbnt of Hiiro or Dickens. Ft does not penetrate with its pity, lo that underworld of paia in which Cos^tjo aud

Smikp grow up, starved and loveless. Hugo and Dickens were aHea*t rescuers. They ware not mere sentimentalists.' Of Moliere, Mr. Lynd remarks: "He has created for ua a world, delicious even in its insincerities and absurdities" ; and, in the opening of his brief and gracefully written essay on the great French actor, playwright, and manager, Mr. Lynd begins :■— -i'The way of entertainers is-hard.. It is a good enough world for those who entertain us no higher than the ribs., but to attempt to entertain the mind is another matter. 'Comedy shows men and women (among other things) what humbpga they are, and, as the greatest humbugs are often persons of influence, the comic writer is naturally hated and disparaged during his lifetime in some of the most powerful circles." In Mr. Lynd's opinion Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman were worthy of bracketting together as the two great poets of the United States. "Different though they were from each other, they resembled each other in a certain lack of the talent of order, of taste, of 'finish.-' They were both capable o£ lapses from genius into incompetence, from beauty into provincialism, to an unusual degree. A contemporary critic said of Poe that he had not talent equal to his genius. Neither had Whitman. In the greatest poets, genius and talent go hand iin hand."

Coming to living writers, Mr. Lynd holds that Joseph Conrad is nothing of a ■peacock- "You may stareat him as long as you like, but he will never respond with a sudden spread of gorgeous vani-. ties." Max Beerbohm's work is described as having "the perfection of a starched shirt-front, which. if it is not perfect is nothing. Mr. Beerbohm takes .what may be called an evening-dress view of life. One would not be surprised to learn that he writes in evening dress. He has that air of good conversation without intimacy, of deliberate charm, of cool and friendly brilliance, that always shows at its' best above a shining and expressionless shirt-front. He belongs to the world in which it is good form to forget' the passions, except for their funny side, and in which the persiflage is more indispensable than the port. . . ." Lord Eosebery's speeches on Mr. Lynd's judgment, partake of the character of "the port at the banquet, a little somnolent in its charm."

Of Mr. H. Q. Wells, the critic writes: "Mr. Wells has rendered an immense service to his time by compelling us to remember the common origin and the common interests of mankind. He has invented a wonderful telescope through | which we can look back and see man j struggling out of the mud and can look j forward and see him climbing a dim and distant pinnacle. I am not sure, however, if he has pointed out the most desirable route- to the pinnacle—* •whether he does not expect us to reach it as tlie crow flies instead of by winding roads and by bridges across the deep rivers and ravines. He may take the view that, as man has learned to fly mechanically, so he may learn to fly politically. One never knows! The glorious feature of his prophetic writing, meanwhile, is its driving force. He is one of the few writers who have given momentum to the idea of the world as one place." Finally, Mr. Arnold Bennett's "Things That Have Interested Me" is playfully dissected by Mr. Lynd. In that work, he writes, "Mr. Bennett gives us a jigsaw portrait of himself. We can' reconstruct it from the bits—a man, shy and omniscient,, simple and ostentatious, Beau Nash, Worn the Five Towns." There are many other delightful bits— mere playful taps rather—at the late W. H. Henley, Mr. Chitton-Brock, Mr. James Douglas, and "Punch," of which the concluding sentence in a note on that periodical, may be quoted:—"One would not, perhaps, mind what side 'Punch' was on if only it were a little more generous—if only it purveyed tpe human comedy as a comedy, and notj as in the case of workingmeh, Irishmen, and nonAllied foreigners, as a sinister crook melodrama."

"Books and Authors" is well worth striving to get. It is full of entertainment, and there is no trace of bitterness in any 'of the criticisms.