"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.
Walter Pater's writings are more capable than any in our list of
offering, if approached at the suitable hour and moment, new vistas
and possibilities both intellectual and emotional. That wise and
massive egoism taught by Goethe, that impassioned "living to oneself"
indicated by Stendhal, find in Walter Pater a new qualification and a
new sanction.
Himself a supreme master of the rare and exquisite in style, he
becomes, for those who really understand him, something more
penetrating and insidious than a mere personality. He becomes an
atmosphere, an attitude, a tone, a temper--and one too which may serve
us to most rich and recondite purpose, as we wander through the world
seeking the excitement and consecration of impassioned cults and
organized discriminations.
For this austere and elaborately constructed style of his is nothing
less than the palpable expression of his own discriminating days; the
wayfaring, so self-consciously and scrupulously guarded, of his own
fastidious "hedonism," seeking its elaborate satisfactions among the
chance-offered occasions of hour, or person or of place.
Walter Pater remains, for those who are permitted to feel these
things, the one who above all others has the subtlest and most
stimulating method of approach with regard to all the great arts, and
most especially with regard to the art of literature.
No one, after reading him, can remain gross, academic, vulgar, or
indiscriminate. And, with the rest, we seem to be aware of a secret
attitude not only towards art but towards life also, to miss the key
to which would be to fail in that architecture of the soul and senses
which is the object of the discipline not merely of the æsthetic but
of the religious cult.
For the supreme initiation into which we are led by these elaborate
and patient essays, is the initiation into the world of inner
austerity, which makes its clear-cut and passionate distinctions in
our emotional as well as in our intellectual life.
Everything, without exception, as we read Pater becomes "a matter of
taste"; but the high and exclusive nature of this taste, to which no
sensations but those which are vulgar and common are forbidden, is
itself a guarantee of the gentleness and delicacy of the passions
evoked. His ultimate philosophy seems to be that--as he himself has
described it in "Marius,"--of Aristippus of Cyrene; but this
"undermining of metaphysic by means of metaphysic" lands him in no
mere arid agnosticism or weary emptiness of suspended judgment; but in
a rich and imaginative region of infinite possibilities, from the
shores of which he is able to launch forth at will; or to gather up at
his pleasure the delicate shells strewn upon the sand.