The Contemporary Men of Letters Series
THE editor of the Contemporary Men Letters Series1 announces that its purpose is to provide brief but comprehensive sketches, biographical and critical, of living writers and of those who,though dead, may still properly be regarded as belonging to our time. European as well as English and American men of letters are to be included, so as to give a survey of the intellectual and artistic life of a cosmopolitan age. It is too soon to hazard a guess whether this new venture will seriously dispute the territory now occupied by the well-known English and American Men of Letters Series. Externally, as compared with them, the new volumes are evidently to be much more brief, containing scarcely more than twenty to twenty-five thousand words. Their typography is unusually attractive.
The critical work of the authors of the first two volumes issued is already familiar to readers of the Atlantic. Mr. Boynton’s easy command of the resources of sound objective criticism is seen to good advantage in his study of Bret Harte. Independence of attitude, clarity and precision of treatment characterize it throughout. The skillful, if somewhat over-generous use of illustrative quotations supports his position, and as an assessment of the value of Bret Harte’s stories, Mr. Boynton’s book leaves little for the Judgment Day to complete. For it is doubtless true, as Mr. Boynton remarks, that Bret Harte’s talent was not quite of the first kind, and that “ he had one brilliant vision and spent the rest of his life in reminding himself of it.” One cannot quarrel with the essential justice of this estimate. But in sketching Bret Harte’s personality, Mr. Boynton’s righteous and almost petulant resentment of the elder author’s idleness, extravagance, and irregularity seems to blind him, momentarily, to other traits that also belong in the picture. Less truth would have been somehow more true. Hazlitt had a friend who bound Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution and Paine’s Rights of Man into one volume, claiming that together they made a very good book. If by some lucky accident Mr. Howells’s delightful reminiscences of Bret Harte in the December Harper’s could be bound up with Mr. Boynton’s study, we should have an excellent composite portrait of the author of Dickens in Camp and the Outcasts of Poker Flat.
Compared with Mr. Boynton’s cool expertness in walking around his object and making swift sketches of it, Mr. Greenslet’s book on Walter Pater represents criticism of the “ laborious orient ivory ” order of workmanship. It is wrought with true inwardness, consummate refinement, a happy ingenuity, and the merest touch, here and there, of preciosity. Like Pater’s own writing, it is intended for the judicious and attentive reader, for “ modern young men of an uncommercial turn.” The little book invites and rewards the very closest scrutiny. If in certain passages there are traces of a preference for the “ humanistic ” rather than the human, and for the superfine rather than the fine, these are faults which in our day of dictated composition and of blurred sense for literary values may almost pass for virtues. The third and fifth chapters, devoted to Criticism of Art and Letters and The New Cyrenaicism, contain especially valuable contributions to the intelligent study of Pater. Mr. Greenslet does not lack audacity, as witness his clever defense of his paradox that Pater is essentially a humorous writer. Of his many felicitous passages this description of the “ African ” quality of Pater’s prose must serve as a single example : —
“ Pater’s prose is obviously not Attic prose. Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman, among the Victorians, came nearer to that, and how different they are from Pater ! Nor is it Asiatic ; it has little of De Qnincey’s florid luxuriance, his Ciceronian rhythms, and Persian pomp. To keep to the figure for suggestion rather than definition, Pater’s style is African in its flavour. It is a characteristic product of an Alexandrine society, too urbane ever to be grandiloquent, yet too curious in its scholarship, too profuse of its sympathies to be quite content with simple, Addisonian clarity.”
In pages like these Mr. Greenslet not only betrays the secret of Pater’s charm for the Paterian, but brings his author into such clearly apprehended relations to the great world of letters that the very infirmities of Pater’s style and the defects in his scheme of things are discreetly manifested. It may be possible, after a score or two of years, to write more positively than Mr. Greenslet has done concerning Pater’s influence upon his generation, but Pater will be fortunate if he finds another critic of such catholic scholarship and such affectionate intimacy of interpretation.
B. P.