collection of labeled specimens, but a living thing, bounteous as nature. In an address of 1919, he truly said (and in certain precious circles it would require some courage to say it),-"No really good literature was ever born of merely æsthetic impulse." Some literary critics yield to another temptation-the temptation of running off into paradoxes and whimsies because the highroad of judgment seems so tame and welltrodden. One wasted part of genius so valuable to mankind in proving that the Odyssey was written by a girl, as though that mattered; another that Dante's Beatrice was a species of theology; another that Shakespeare wrote the Sonnets for fun or hire. A good many have wasted time (which, certainly, can have been of little value) in demonstrating that Bacon was Shakespeare, and a large number have set out to prove that one great writer is greater than another great writer, as though they could weigh genius by Apothecaries' Weight. From all these vagaries and mare's-nesting excursions Winchester was mercifully preserved by a certain "horse sense." Even Matthew Arnold was hardly a saner critic. He had no shrinking fear of sanity, no pernickety hesitation in permitting his judgment to coincide with the judgment of the "Orbis Terrarum." There are points in which I do not agree with him. I think he is inclined to insist too much upon the definitely moral teaching of great literature. In speaking of Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, I should not myself describe their relation as "sin." Their passion was too superb, their tragedy too overwhelming for the pulpit word. Again, I think Winchester too easily forgives Henry V for his callous betrayal of Falstaff, to me the greatest of all Shakespeare's creations. I do not agree that. As You Like It is the best of the comedies. I doubt if it is a good acting comedy at all, though the charm of its language and of the characters enthralls us. Still less do I agree that Sterne is "sentimentalism incarnate." But these are small and possibly private objections. Almost without exception, Winchester keeps the broad highway of judgment. "Securus judicat." It is proverbially difficult to give a personal and individual touch to widely accepted themes. "Difficile est proprie communia dicere." Let us take two examples of his criticism to illustrate both his common sense and his individuality. It is obvious from all his work that he felt the keenest delight in the Elizabethan and nineteenth century poets. In them he found the emotion and the beauty of expression that he most required in literature. Yet, when we are confronted with the modern school which regards imagery alone as constituting poetry, and in reading a poet takes no account of the intention, design, or "architecture" of the poem, but marks only the lines of images, similes, metaphors, or picturesque words, how encouraging it is for us who believe that these beautiful things should be but the ornaments and decorations of a great structure to come upon such a passage as this: For my part, I should certainly prefer the poetry of the early nineteenth century to the poetry of the early eighteenth century; and yet, in these days when so much stress is laid upon the picturesque, the suggestive, or even the mere musical functions of poetry,-when Mr. Addington Symonds thinks Shelley has realized the miracle of "making words altogether detached from any meaning the substance of a new ethereal music,"-I say it is not altogether unpleasant to take up this old-fashioned verse whose first charm is clear and pithy meaning. And the matter of which this poetry is made up, if it be neither novel nor moving, has at least that first mark of classic literature, universality. And when critics plague us with ecstasy over the beauties of "poetic prose," or try to carry us away upon the glory of rolling periods and sounding rhetoric, what a city of refuge from them we may find in this passage about prose style in the essay upon my own favorite writer, Jonathan Swift: Language to Swift was simply the vehicle of thought. No English writing better combines the three virtues of clearness, simplicity, vigor. "Proper words in proper places" is his curt definition of style. Admiration for style apart from the meaning beneath it he would have considered the mark of mere literary preciosity,—as it usually is. It is true indeed that the greatest masters of modern prose have at their command felicities of arrangement and cadence, and a subtle use of the suggestive power of words, by means of which they can convey their thought not only with all its flexures of meaning but with all its delicate nimbus of emotion. But Swift needed no such niceties, for there was no subtlety or delicacy in his nature. Literary elaboration always seemed to him to imply artifice or pedantry. This quiet good sense, as solid and assured as Johnson's own, lies at the foundation of Winchester's excellence as a critic. But, above that, rose his fine sympathy with noble emotion, and that incommunicable sense of beauty of which we spoke. He possessed by birth, and he retained, a passionate love of the best literature; and I think it must be hard to retain such a passion for the subject that a man teaches. Literature to him was part of life, or rather it was life itself as viewed in human thought. It was the description and interpretation, often the inspiration, of life. As he said in his speech at the dinner given in his honor less than a year before he died: Literature is the best thought that has been touched and vitalized with emotion and uttered in a manner of lasting charm. Thus defined, literature is obviously the best interpreter of life-the life of the individual man and the life of historical periods. For the temper of a man depends not merely nor principally upon what he thinks, but upon what he feels; the character of an age depends not merely upon its permanent intellectual qualities, but upon its dominant tone of feeling. It is not too much to say that if we wish to know any life outside the little circle of our own personal acquaintance, we must know it largely through books. For literature under this definition his love, as I said, remained unshaken, in spite of all the weariness and repetition implied in a Professor's labor. His appreciation was inspired by an innate sense of beauty, and guided by an imperturbable sanity. By his historic imagination, as seen in An Old Castle, he was able to connect the literature of any age with its contemporary world, and by his wide. tolerance, in matters of ordinary behavior as well as in questions of literary taste (as seen in his essays upon Swift and Burns), he escaped the snares of seclusiveness and preciosity. But, above all, it was his insistance upon the unity of life with literature that gave his writing and his teaching their finest value. For these reasons I can well understand what a radiant experience it must have been for the young to come under his influence; and I can well understand what a mature scholar meant by calling him the most interesting man he had met in America. London, Oct. 1, 1921. HENRY W. NEVINSON. |