OLD AND NEW MASTERS
BY ROBERT LYND
1919
TO SYLVIA LYND
CONTENTS
I. DOSTOEVSKY THE SENSATIONALIST II. JANE AUSTEN: NATURAL HISTORIAN III. MR. G.K. CHESTERTON AND MR. HILAIRE BELLOC (1) THE HEAVENLY TWINS (2) THE COPIOUSNESS OF MR. BELLOC (3) THE TWO MR. CHESTERTONS IV. WORDSWORTH (1) HIS PERSONALITY AND GENIUS (2) HIS POLITICS V. KEATS (1) THE BIOGRAPHY (2) THE MATTHEW ARNOLD VIEW VI. HENRY JAMES (1) THE NOVELIST OF GRAINS AND SCRUPLES (2) THE ARTIST AT WORK (3) HOW HE WAS BORN AGAIN VII. BROWNING: THE POET OF LOVE VIII. THE FAME OF J.M. SYNGE IX. VILLON: THE GENIUS OF THE TAVERN X. POPE XI. JAMES ELROY FLECKER XII. TURGENEV XIII. THE MADNESS OF STRINDBERG XIV. "THE PRINCE OF FRENCH POETS" XV. ROSSETTI AND RITUAL XVI. MR. BERNARD SHAW XVII. MR. MASEFIELD'S SECRET XVIII. MR. W.B. YEATS (1) HIS OWN ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF (2) HIS POETRY XIX. TCHEHOV: THE PERFECT STORY-TELLER XX. LADY GREGORY XXI. MR. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM XXII. SWINBURNE (1) THE EXOTIC BIRD (2) GENIUS WITHOUT EYES XXIII. THE WORK OF T.M. KETTLE XXIV. MR. J.C. SQUIRE XXV. MR. JOSEPH CONRAD (1) THE MAKING OF AN AUTHOR (2) TALES OF MYSTERY XXVI. MR. RUDYARD KIPLING (1) THE GOOD STORY-TELLER (2) THE POET OF LIFE WITH A CAPITAL HELL XXVII. MR. THOMAS HARDY (1) HIS GENIUS AS A POET (2) A POET IN WINTER
OLD AND NEW MASTERS
I
DOSTOEVSKY THE SENSATIONALIST
Mr. George Moore once summed up _Crime and Punishment_ as "Gaboriau with psychological sauce." He afterwards apologized for the epigram, but he insisted that all the same there is a certain amount of truth in it. And so there is.
Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news. There are more murders and attempted murders in his books than in those of any other great novelist. His people more nearly resemble madmen and wild beasts than normal human beings.
He releases them from most of the ordinary inhibitions. He is fascinated by the loss of self-control--by the disturbance and excitement which this produces, often in the most respectable circles. He is beyond all his rivals the novelist of "scenes." His characters get drunk, or go mad with jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits, or rave hysterically. If Dostoevsky had had less vision he would have been Strindberg. If his vision had been aesthetic and sensual, he might have been D'Annunzio.
Like them, he is a novelist of torture. Turgenev found in his work something Sadistic, because of the intensity with which he dwells on cruelty and pain. Certainly the lust of cruelty--the lust of destruction for destruction's sake--is the most conspicuous of the deadly sins in Dostoevsky's men and women. He may not be a "cruel author." Mr. J. Middleton Murry, in his very able "critical study," _Dostoevsky_, denies the charge indignantly. But it is the sensational drama of a cruel world that most persistently haunts his imagination.
Table of contents (by pages)
- 1: Old and New Masters by Robert Lynd
- 2: It is always lust with a knife
- 3: As for the Karamazovs themselves
- 4: Dostoevsky still sees the light of Christian compassion
- 5: That men are purified by suffering
- 6: She mocks them Darcy especially no less than she admires
- 7: Miss Austen makes Emma ashamed of her witticism
- 8: The diversions of Jane Austen were
- 9: And Belloc is Pollux transmuted into French
- 10: Chesterton is jovial and democratic
- 11: When he has graduated to be a pragmatist
- 12: Belloc stand in modern politics
- 13: Belloc from the genius of his great and uproarious comrade
- 14: Hilaire Belloc the Man and his Work
- 15: Chesterton could be divided in two
- 16: History is a tale of exploitation
- 17: Chesterton is of the crimes of history
- 18: After receiving a visit from Wordsworth in 1815
- 19: One is tempted to say that Wordsworth
- 20: Who naturally regarded Wordsworth
- 21: Wordsworth may almost be called the first of the democrats
- 22: The Statesmanship of Wordsworth
- 23: Dicey admits much of the case against the later Wordsworth
- 24: Dicey to look like a kind of Nationalist
- 25: All this means merely that the older Wordsworth grew
- 26: John Keats His Life and Poetry
- 27: When he met Fanny Brawne for the first time
- 28: The thought of leaving Miss Brawne
- 29: It is a too respectable and virile Keats that emerges
- 30: We may forget the names of Porphyro and Madeline
- 31: Keats if that be his real name
- 32: But can one call Daisy Miller pitiless
- 33: Henry James himself had that kind of piety
- 34: Duly recorded by the typewriter
- 35: As Pendrel found the things in the house he inherited
- 36: Especially interesting is the scenario
- 37: I am thinking of Moyra Grabham
- 38: Because every face was a documentary scrap
- 39: James was disappointed in Tennyson
- 40: The other great optimist of the century
- 41: Into the setting of his dramatic studies
- 42: Who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about
- 43: The dauntlessness of a knight of the Holy Ghost
- 44: Synge was an extraordinary man of genius
- 45: The Playboy is a marvellous confection
- 46: And dice playing with loaded dice
- 47: Was the Rommant du Pet au Diable
- 48: Translation of Villon is difficult
- 49: And that of the pickpocket or the forger
- 50: In the Wycherley correspondence
- 51: Thus began the maniacal suspicion of Addison
- 52: And of Lord Hervey as Sporus Sporus
- 53: He wrote oftener of amorousness than of love
- 54: Flecker is the most successful
- 55: Plenty of suggestions for a portrait of Turgenev
- 56: And if Turgenev was remorseless in nothing else
- 57: To pretend to sum up Dostoevsky as a contortionist
- 58: In her popular biography of Strindberg
- 59: For those who like cabbage to me it is repulsive
- 60: He denied to the end that he was a woman hater
- 61: Strindberg may have been possessed of a devil
- 62: Discusses Ronsard as a linguist
- 63: Who had adopted Protestantism and married
- 64: Nine years after Cassandre came Marie
- 65: Rossetti belongs to the ornamental school of poetry
- 66: But his own poetry is poor enough in brainwork
- 67: And market night in the Haymarket
- 68: Dubedat would not have thought these things
- 69: Shaw and the genius of Moliere is extraordinarily detailed
- 70: Sometimes with all the bitterness of a satirist
- 71: And he questions the Bosun about it
- 72: The Dauber felt promoted to a man
- 73: The rags of yells And clang
- 74: There are many who see in his poetry only the mask
- 75: Yeats is a mere vague day dreamer among poets
- 76: It is the little world of Sligo
- 77: He aims barbed epigrams at his adversaries
- 78: But it is the vanity and gesticulation of a man of genius
- 79: Yeats is certainly a little remote
- 80: The trees in autumn are leopard coloured
- 81: Rather than in the vehement beauty of life
- 82: And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon
- 83: Tchehov sets down the judgment
- 84: Egoism seems to be the quality which offends Tchehov most
- 85: But Tchehov brings light into it
- 86: Birmingham has given us farce with a salt of reality
- 87: To whom Grania had been betrothed
- 88: The Canavans is really a farce of the days of Elizabeth
- 89: Cunninghame Graham is a grandee of contemporary literature
- 90: He has a taste for uncivil scenes
- 91: Swinburne was an absurd character
- 92: He loved insurrectionism for its own sake
- 93: And contended that Falstaff was not really a coward
- 94: That Swinburne's phrasing is far from subtle
- 95: The snowdrop image in the first verse is
- 96: Between Paganism and Puritanism
- 97: Share Anatole France's gaiety of unbelief
- 98: The bud is renegade to the tree
- 99: The murder of Sheehy Skeffington
- 100: We see him as a fisherman of strange imagery
- 101: Been suggested so expressively in any other poem
- 102: When nine years old or thereabouts
- 103: Conrad has never been in a hurry
- 104: He has been compared to Dostoevsky
- 105: Conrad is not entirely original
- 106: And the Conrad zest for courage
- 107: In three of his volumes of short stories in Typhoon
- 108: Kipling because he told us true stories
- 109: Rudyard Kipling was once a modern
- 110: What rigging the winches aft meant
- 111: Kipling brought a new violence and wonder
- 112: Kipling is a good judge of yelping
- 113: Sought Their catering care
- 114: If some one said on Christmas Eve
- 115: Hardy is the world of ancient human things
- 116: Hardy meditates on his own immortality
- 117: Like an eyelid's soundless blink
- 118: However Like little crossbows animate
- 119: That goldfinch has surely escaped from a Max Beerbohm parody