New Men of Letters

...It was fortunate that a man like Mr...

...but before and since, the speculations concerning the utterances of this erratic, though significant and arresting, seer have been many and varied...

...Harold Nicholson faced a difficult task of analysis when he undertook his study of Swinburne, but carried it through manfully and carefully...

...Through the London Mercury he has organized the nearest thing to a literary guild now functioning in English-speaking countries...

...Squire's chosen biographers are very properly "Mercury men" for the most part...

...The theme is, essentially, one for an Elizabethan play, in which every emotion is exalted and the large movement of blank verse is ready to sustain vast incredibilities...

...The four or five volumes now issued (all of them, it may be said in passing, can be obtained from the Macmillan Company) are diverse enough in character but nevertheless clearly reveal a common tendency...

...Osbert Burdett's William Blake sets the house in order with a clarity almost positivistic in its reliance on intelligent discretion...

...Does the critical acumen of today compare favorably with the more pontifical estimates of yesteryear...

...At all events, the sane comments which Mr...

...That exception is Mr...

...This may be described, I believe, as a desire to base an estimate upon facts rather than upon intuition or speculation...

...But he adds the no less pertinent remark: "I have contented myself with such perfect things as Morning, for a long study of the interpretations of the difficult lyrics has left me convinced that no intellectual interpretation is satisfactory and that all attempts are much duller than the poems themselves...

...They really know how to think for themselves while heeding the creditable opinions of others...

...Osbert Burdett...

...He elevated his limitations into intellectual dogmas...

...But it is best to commend, here at the conclusion, the bravery and openness of mind with which the American biographies have been written...

...If this does not succeed in drying up the sources from which future muddled interpretations will proceed (and nothing could dry them up) it nevertheless seems to furnish the normal man with an authentic verdict...

...On the other hand, these new "Lives" display some marked differences from their precursors...

...Notice this lucid paragraph about Melville's 659 Pierre: "Granting the subject, his aim could only be achieved in verse...

...Accordingly, Mr...

...The Freudian definition of the unconscious may, ultimately, mean "that which cannot be realized in consciousness...

...but they can claim a distinguished ancestry of both critics and subjects, and they have a right to be considered representative of the British literary present...

...In dealing with Walt Whitman, Mr...

...J. C. Squire could be found to supervise a collective undertaking having to do with important and complex figures like William Blake and Herman Melville...

...Symons' diligent gathering of facts about Blake...

...Perhaps they are...

...Burdett demonstrates by excellent reflection his right to say of them: "Blake made an idol of idiosyncrasy...

...Our time is less romantic and much more philosophical in its attitude toward literature than its immediate forbears were...

...Readers generally do not seem to have realized as yet how very fine a critic this student of Coventry Patmore and the Beardsley period has proved to be...

...He says of Poetical Sketches: "Perhaps only a poet who had read no fine literature but as a child reads could have written such things: there is in them an innocence of heart that is not to be found in Shakespeare...

...Leon Daudet paused recently to declare that letters and philosophy are "meme chose...

...Freeman's Melville may not be the final book about Melville, but it provides a discriminating discussion of this great, irregular man, and it carries on without a trace of that British stuffiness so many have deplored in the past...

...In that journal, intelligence has been applied to achievements of thought and art, without detriment to a fine catholicity of taste and urbanity of speech...

...One feels that something important remains to be said about the man—something that is, in a sense, the inner key to his transmutation from criticism to vision...

...The newer English Men of Letters volumes do not, of course, provide a complete answer to these queries...

...No less valuable, though more debatable, is the conclusion arrived at concerning the Prophetical Books...

...So complete an absence of fantastic theorizing, of psychoanalysis in particular, is notable and not a little satisfying...

...Freeman's book also reveals that sharper vision which may be termed a characteristic of our present generation—a generation not more tolerant or learned, perhaps, than others, but certainly emancipated from many limitations by cosmopolitan experience...

...but it grips the subject in hand firmly, with a lucid reasonableness that is almost always convincing...

...Some years have now elapsed since Andre Gide appealed to Blake, the mighty "romantic prophet...

...One may earnestly cherish the hope that the remaining volumes will be equally distinguished, and at the same time derive from what has already been done the comforting reflection that contemporary criticism is neither decadent nor dull, but alert and impressively aggressive...

...his desperate imagination, hanging above and apart from a creeping reality, might have taken on another reality, that of the poetry which is as real, as remote, and as necessary as the sun...

...But Mr...

...But with one exception, this new appeal to philosophy does not seem to have improved style...

...Four American books on the same subjects would undoubtedly spin round some alluring Freudian central point without really getting anywhere...

...Bailey's explanation of Whitmanism, for instance, suffers from a refusal to consider the "good grey poet's" concept of Eros...

...The younger writers have caught something of the contemporary novelist's interest in definiteness of outline...

...Such verdicts are, obviously, the goals toward which the various volumes proceed...

...Not that this area of investigation is unfruitful ; but it needs tilling by experts, not surveying by speculative amateurs...

...Thus, I think, a distinction is gained for criticism, quite as valuable in its own way as Mr...

...In a verse-drama Melville would have achieved what he needs but cannot achieve—remoteness...

...It is a reasonable assumption that if one of them were to write the story of Pater we should get, perhaps, a less well written book than Benson's, but a clearer vision of the man and a more vivid impression of his work...

...All have honorable and refreshing qualities...

...John Bailey supplies a succinct but remarkably complete account of how contemporary critics really felt about Leaves of Grass...

...Bailey might well reply that nobody else has said the thing either, despite laborious attempts...

...Gone is the leisurely personal estimate, the academic calm of mood, the relatively Victorian but whimsical stateliness, of certain older English Men of Letters...

...His William Blake is rich with fine speculative paragraphs, one dealing with the perennial problem of romantic and classical art being particularly notable...

...John Freeman, in his Herman Melville, devotes to Professor Weaver's earlier biography of that eminent novelist, seem to point toward some such definition with good effect...

...But the faculty was denied to him—and he failed as clearly as his hero failed, and as greatly...

...Priestley's George Meredith, for instance, sets out resolutely to get at the difficult truth about Meredith's life and proves reasonably successful...