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

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

The very titles of many of his poems seem to have come straight from the toy-shop. How charming some of them are:

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.