Chapter 3

For those who have been "fooled to the top of their bent" by the stupidities and brutalities of the crowd there is a savage satisfaction in reading of Foma's insane outbursts of misanthropy.

51. TCHEKOFF--SEAGULL. _Tchekoff's plays and short stories are published by Scribners in admirable translations_.

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.

The "Seagull" is a play full of delicate subtleties and dreamy glimpses of shy humane wisdom. The manner in which outward things--the mere background and scenery of the play--are used to deepen and enhance the dramatic interest is a thing peculiarly characteristic of this author. Tchekoff has that kind of imaginative sensibility which makes every material object one encounters significant with spiritual intimations.

The mere business of plot--whether in his plays or stories--is not the important matter. The important matter is a certain sudden and pathetic illumination thrown upon the essential truth by some casual grouping of persons or of things--some emphatic or symbolic gesture--some significant movement among the silent "listeners."

52. ARTZIBASHEFF. SANINE, _translation published by Huebsch_.

Artzibasheff is an extremist. The suicidal "motif" in the "Breaking-point" is worked out with an appalling and devastating thoroughness.

Pessimism, in a superficial sense, could hardly go further; though compared with Dostoievsky's insight into the "infinite" in character, one is conscious of a certain closing of doors and narrowing of issues. "Sanine" himself is a sort of idealization of the sublimated common sense which seems to be this writer's selected virtue. Artzibasheff appears to advocate, as the wisest and sanest way of dealing with life, a certain robust and contemptuous self-assertion, kindly, genial, without baseness or malice; but free from any scruple and quite untroubled by remorse.

If regarded seriously--as he appears to be intended to be--as an approximate human ideal, one cannot help feeling that in spite of his humorous anarchism and subjective zest for life, Sanine has in him something sententious and tiresome. He is, so to speak, an immoral prig; nor do his vivacious spirits compensate us for the lack of delicacy and irony in him. On the other hand there is something direct, downright and "honest" about his clear-thinking, and his shameless eroticism which wins our liking and affection, if not our admiration. Artzibasheff is indeed one of the few writers who dare excite our sympathy not only for the seduced in this world but for the seducer.

53. STERNE--TRISTRAM SHANDY.

Sterne is a writer who less than any one else in the present list reveals the secrets of his manner and mind to the casual and hasty reader. "Tristram Shandy" and "The Sentimental Journey" are books to be enjoyed slowly and lingeringly, with many humorous after-thoughts and a certain Rabelaisian unction. A shrewd and ironical wisdom, gentle and light-fingered and redolent of evasive sentiment, is evoked from these digressive and wanton pages.

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. There is a winnowed purity about it, and a kind of elfish grace; and with both these things there mixes, strangely enough, a certain homely, almost Dutch domesticity, quaint and mellow and a little wanton--like a picture by Jan Steen.

54. JONATHAN SWIFT. TALE OF A TUB.

Swift's mysterious and saturnine character, his outbursts of terrible rage; his exquisite moments of tenderness; his sledge-hammer blows; his diabolical irony; form a dramatic and tragic spectacle which no psychologist can afford to miss.

With the "saeva indignatio" alluded to in his own epitaph, he puts his back, as it were, to the "flamantia moenia mundi" and hits out, insanely and blindly, at the human crowd he loathes. His secretive and desperate passion for Stella, his little girl pupil; his barbarous treatment of Vanessa--his savage championship of the Irish people against the Government--make up the dominant "notes" of a character so formidable that the terror of his personality strikes us with the force of an engine of destruction.

His misanthropy is like the misanthropy of Shakespeare's Timon--his crushing sarcasms strike blow after blow at the poor flesh and blood he despises. The hatefulness of average humanity drives him to distraction and in his madness, like a wounded Titan, he spares nothing. To the whole human race he seems to utter the terrible words he puts into the mouth of God:

"I to such blockheads set my wit, And damn you all--Go, go, you're bit!"

55. CHARLES LAMB. THE ESSAYS OF ELIA.

Charles Lamb remains, of all English prose-writers, the one whose manner is the most beautiful. 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. He indicates in his delicate evasive way--not directly, but as it were, in little fragments and morsels and broken snatches--a deep and subtle reconciliation between the wisdom of Epicurus and the wisdom of Christ. And through and beyond all this, there may be felt, as with the great poets, an indescribable sense of something withdrawn, withheld, reserved, inscrutable--a sense of a secret, rather to be intimated to the initiated, than revealed to the vulgar--a sense of a clue to a sort of Pantagruelian serenity; a serenity produced by no crude optimism but by some happy inward knowledge of a neglected hope. The great Rabelaisian motto, "bon espoir y gist au fond!" seems to emanate from the most wistful and poignant of his pages. He pities the unpitied, he redeems the commonplace, he makes the ordinary as if it were not ordinary, and by the sheer genius of his imagination he throws an indescribable glamour over the "little things" of the darkest of our days.

Moving among old books, old houses, old streets, old acquaintances, old wines, old pictures, old memories, he is yet possessed of so original and personal a touch that his own wit seems as though it were the very soul and body of the qualities he so caressingly interprets.

56. SIR WALTER SCOTT. GUY MANNERING. BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR. HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN.

The large, easy, leisurely manner of Scott's writing, its digressiveness, its nonchalant carelessness, its indifference to artistic quality, has in some sort of way numbed and atrophied the interest in his work of those who have been caught up and waylaid by the modern spirit. 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.

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. Without the passion of Balzac, or the insight of Dostoievsky, or the art of Turgeniev, there is yet, in the sweetness of Scott's own personality, and in the biblical grandeur of certain of the scenes he evokes, a quality and a charm which it would be at once foolish and arbitrary to neglect.

59. THACKERAY. THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND.

Thackeray is a writer who occupies a curious and very interesting position. Devoid of the noble and romantic sympathies of Scott, and corrupted to the basic fibres of his being by Early Victorian snobbishness, he is yet--none can deny it--a powerful creator of living people and an accomplished and graceful stylist.

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.

The most winning and attractive thing about him is his devotion to the eighteenth century; a century whose manners he is able to depict in his large and gracious way without being disturbed by the pressure of that contemporary vulgarity which finds a too lively response in something bourgeois and snobbish in his own nature.

Dealing with the eighteenth century he escapes not only from his age but from himself.

60. CHARLES DICKENS. GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

The compiler has placed in this list only one of Dickens' books for a somewhat different reason from that which has influenced him in other cases. All Dickens' novels have a unique value, and such an equal value, that almost any one of them, chosen at random, can serve as an example of the rest.

Those who still are not prohibited, by temperamental difficulty or by some modern fashion, from enjoying the peculiar atmosphere of this astonishing person's work, will be found reverting to him constantly and indiscriminately. "Great Expectations" is perhaps, as a more "artistic" book than the rest, the most fitted of them all to entice towards a more sympathetic understanding of his mood, those who are held from reading him by some more or less accidental reason. The most characteristic thing about this great genius is the power he possesses of breathing palpable life into what is often called the inanimate. 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.

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.

61. JANE AUSTEN. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

Jane Austen's delicate and ironic art will remain unassailable through all changes of taste and varieties of opinion. What she really possesses--what might be called the clue to her inimitable secret--is nothing less than the power of giving expression to that undying ironic detachment, touched with a fine malice but full of tender understanding, which all women, to some degree or other, share, and which all men, to some degree or other, suffer from; in other words, the terrible and beautiful insight of the maternal instinct. The clear charm of her unequalled style--a style quite classical in its economy of material and its dignified reserve--is a charm frequently caught in the wit and fine malice of one's unmarried aunts; but it is, none the less, the very epitome of maternal humor. As a creative realist, giving to her characters the very body and pressure of actual life, no writer, living or dead, has surpassed her. Without romance, without philosophy, without social theories, without pathological curiosity, without the remotest interest in "Nature," she has yet managed to achieve a triumphant artistic success; and to leave an impression of serene wisdom such as no other woman writer has equaled or approached.

62. EMILY BRONTË. WÜTHERING HEIGHTS.

Of all the books of all the Brontës, this one is the supreme masterpiece. Charlotte has genius and imagination. She has passion too. But there is a certain demonic violence about Emily which carries her work into a region of high and desperate beauty forbidden to the gentler spirit of her sister. The love of Heathcliff and Catherine breaks the bonds of ordinary sensual or sentimental relationship and hurls itself into that darker, stranger, more unearthly air, wherein one hears the voices of the great lovers; and where Sappho and Michaelangelo and Swift and Shelley and Nietzsche gasp forth their imprecations and their terrible ecstasies. Crude and rough and jagged and pitiless, the style of this astounding book seems to rend and tear, like a broken saw, at the very roots of existence. In some curious way, as in Balzac and Dostoievsky, emotions and situations which have the tone and mood of quite gross melodrama are so driven inwards by sheer diabolical intensity, that they touch the granite substratum of what is eternal in human passion. The smell of rain-drenched moors, the crying of the wind in the Scotch firs, the long lines of black rooks drifting across the twilight,--these things become, in the savage style of this extraordinary girl, the very symbols and tokens of the power that rends her spirit.

63. GEORGE MEREDITH. HARRY RICHMOND.

"Harry Richmond" is at once the least Meredithian and the best of all Meredith's books. Meredith, though to a much less degree than George Eliot, is one of those pseudo-philosophic, pseudo-ethical writers, who influence a generation or two and then stem to become antiquated and faded.

It is when he is least philosophical and least moralistic--as in the superbly imaginative figure of Richmond Roy--that he is at his greatest. 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. The same fault may be remarked in the rounding off of the Meredithian plots where one is so seldom conscious of the presence of the "inevitable" and so teased by the "obstinate questionings" of purely mental problems.

Reading Henry James one feels like a wisp of straw floating down a wide smooth river; reading Meredith one is flicked and flapped and beaten, as if beneath a hand with a flail.

64. HENRY JAMES. THE AMBASSADORS. THE TRAGIC MUSE. THE SOFT SIDE. THE BETTER SORT. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE. THE GOLDEN BOWL.

Henry James is the most purely "artistic" as he is the most profoundly "intellectual" of all the European writers of our age. 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. That tender and gracious "penchant" of his for pure-souled and modest-minded young men, for their high resolves, their noble renunciations, their touching faith, is an indication of how much he has exploited--in the completest aesthetic sense--the naive puritanism of his great nation.

In regard to his style one may remark three main divergent epochs; the first closing with the opening of the "nineties," and the third beginning about the year 1903. Of these the second seems to the present compiler the best; being, indeed, more intellectualized and subtle than the first and less mannered and obscure than the final one. The finest works he produced would thus be found to be those on one side or the other of the year 1900.

The subtlety of Henry James is a subtlety which is caused not by philosophical but by psychological distinctions and it is a subtlety which enlarges our sympathy for the average human nature of middle class people to a degree that must, in the very deepest sense of the word, be called moral.

The wisdom to be derived from him is all of a piece with the pleasure--both being the result of a fuller, richer, and more discriminating consciousness of the tragic complexity of quite little and unimportant characters. To a real lover of Henry James the greyest and least promising aspects of ordinary life seem to hold up to us infinite possibilities of delicate excitement. It is indeed out of excitement--partly intellectual and partly aesthetic,--that his great effects are produced. And yet the final effect is always one of resignation and calm--as with all the supreme masters.

70. THOMAS HARDY. TESS OF THE D'URBEVILLES. THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE. THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE. FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. WESSEX POEMS.

Thomas Hardy remains the greatest poet and novelist of the England of our age. His poetry, Wessex Poems, Poems of Past and Present, Time's Laughing-Stock, Satires of Circumstance, make up the most powerful and original contribution to modern verse, produced recently, either in England or America. Not to value Hardy's poetry as highly as all but his very greatest prose is to betray oneself as having missed the full pregnancy of his bitter and lovely wisdom.

He has, like Henry James, three "manners" or styles--the first containing such lighter, friendlier work, as "Life's Little Ironies," "Under a Greenwood Tree," and "The Trumpet Major"--the second being the period of the great tragedies which assume the place, in his work, of "Hamlet," "Lear," "Macbeth" and "Othello," in the work of Shakespeare--the third, of curious and imaginative interest, expresses in quite a particular way, Mr. Hardy's own peculiar point of view. The Well-Beloved, Jude the Obscure, and the later poems would belong to this epoch.

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; who live with her moroseness, her whimsicality, her vindictiveness, her austerity, her evasive grace.

Mr. Hardy's clairvoyant feeling for Nature is, however, only the background of his work. He is no idyllic posture-monger. The march of events as they drive forward the primitive earth-born men and women of Wessex, thrills one with the same weight of accumulated fatality, as--the comparison is tedious and pedantic--the fortunes of the ill-starred houses of Argos and Thebes. One peculiarity of Mr. Hardy's method must finally be mentioned, as giving their most characteristic quality to these formidable scenes--I mean his preference for form over color. Who can forget those desolately emphatic human protagonists silhouetted so austerely along the tops of hills and against the perspectives of long white roads?

75. JOSEPH CONRAD. CHANCE. LORD JIM. VICTORY. YOUTH. ALMAYER'S FOLLY. _Published by Doubleday Page & Co. with a critical monograph, so admirably written (it is given gratis) by Wilson Follet that one longs to see more criticism from such an accomplished hand_.

Conrad's work--and, considering his foreign origin and his late choice of English as a medium of expression, it is no less than an astounding achievement--is work of the very highest literary and psychological value. It is, indeed, as Mr. Follet says, only such criticism as is passionately anxious to prove for itself the true "romance of the intellect" that can hope to deal adequately with such an output. The background of Conrad's books is primarily the sea itself; and after the sea, ships. No one has indicated the extraordinary romance of ships in the way he has done--of ships in the open sea, in the harbour, at the wharf, or driven far up some perilous tropical river.

But it is neither the sea nor the tropical recesses nor the sun-scorched river-edges of his backgrounds that make up the essence of romance in the Conrad books. This is found in nothing less than the mysterious potencies for courage and for fear, for good and for evil, of human beings themselves--of human beings isolated by some external "diablerie" which throws every feature of them into terrible and baffling relief.

The finest and deepest effects of Conrad's art are always found when, in the process of the story, some solitary man and woman encounter each other, far from civilization, and tearing off, as it were, the mask of one another's souls, are confronted by a deeper and more inveterate mystery--the eternal mystery of difference, which separates all men born into the world and keeps us perpetually alone. In the case of Heyst and Lena--of Flora de Barral and her Captain Anthony--of Charles and Mrs. Gould--of Aissa and Willems--of Almayer's daughter and her Malay lover, Mr. Conrad takes up the ancient planetary theme of the loves of men and women and throws upon it a sudden, original, and singularly stimulating light; a light, that like a lantern carried down into the very Cave of the "Mothers," throws its flickering and ambiguous rays over the large, dumb, formless shapes--the primordial motives of human hearts--which grope and fumble in that thick darkness.

The style of Conrad, simpler than that of James, less monumental than that of Hardy, has nevertheless a certain forward-driving impetus hardly less effective than these more famous mediums of expression. "Lord Jim" is perhaps his masterpiece and may be regarded as the most interesting book written recently in our language with the exception of Henry James' "Golden Bowl." For sheer excitement and the thrilling sensation of delayed dénouement it must be conceded that not one of our classical novelists can touch Conrad. "Victory" remains an absorbing evidence of his power of concentrating at one and the same moment our dramatic and our psychological interest.

80. WALTER PATER. MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. STUDIES IN THE RENAISSANCE. IMAGINARY PORTRAITS. PLATO AND PLATONISM. GASTON DE LATOUR.