ROBERT LYND: A TRIBUTE
C. L. R. SASTRI
“I
do not hold up Joubert as a very astonishing and powerful
genius, but rather as a delightful and edifying genius.....He is the most
prepossessing and convincing of witnesses to the good of loving light. Because he
sincerely loved light, and did not prefer to it any little private darkness of
his own, he found light.....And because he was full of light, he was also full
of happiness....His life was as charming as his thoughts. For certainly it is
natural that the love of light, which is already in some measure the possession
of light, should irradiate and beatify the whole life of him who has it.”
–Matthew Arnold on Joubert:
Essays in Criticism
The
news of Robert Lynd’s demise has come as a great
shock to all genuine lovers of English literature. That he died at the ripe old
age of 70, and not in his early ’Twenties or ’Thirties or ’Forties, does not minimise the sense of our loss to even the slightest extent.
The mere matter of years is not a vital consideration. Nor did any of his
innumerable admirers ever think of him as old or ageing. Mr. Lynd seemed to us the very incarnation of eternal youth.
Neither in his views, nor in his expression of them, did he show any visible
signs of ossification. There are writers who “die from the neck up”, as the
saying is, with increasing years. It is as though, in this nerve-racking
business of “moving with the times”, as it is currently called, they found
their inadequacy rather early in the proceedings and threw up the sponge accordingly.
And, to be fair to them, it must be acknowledged that “moving with the times”
in these hectic days when the half-a-dozen or so of existing “cold wars” may
develop any moment into regular “shooting wars”, when the East-West tension,
steadily mounting, may suddenly, as it were, take the bit between its teeth and
gallop to its tragic culmination, is not as easy as feasible, as it may sound at first sight.
Sweetness
and Light
But
Robert Lynd did not, apparently, feel the strain of
this striving to keep pace with the “Time-spirit” in the same degree as some
others. So there was no risk of his “dying from the neck up” that I have
referred to above. He was one of those who could always be trusted to keep his
head even in a maelstrom. The passage from Matthew Arnold that I have
appended as a sort of motto for this article fits him almost as much as it was
intended to fit Joubert, the renowned French author,
on whom
His Irish
Extraction
Lynd’s mental and emotional poise, indeed, were eminently
characteristic of him: all the more so when we remember that he was Irish and
on that ground alone, could well have been excused Some effervescence of soul.
Strangely enough, barring, of course, his innate radicalism and the exceptional
beauty of his English prose style, his Irishness
rarely came to the surface. There was no trace of any strident parochialism in
his intellectual make-up. Sometimes, indeed, it almost looked as though he
fought shy of the fact of his being Irish. Irish writers do generally contrive
to let it be known far and wide that they are Irish first and everything else
afterwards: Irish writers from George Bernard Shaw downwards. Nor is there
anything inherently wrong in this highly amiable trait: we are made thus, and
nature must have its way. Lynd, however, was an
exception: he kept his Irishness to himself as much
as he could.
But
he was Irish nonetheless; and one learned to love him all the more for that.
The contribution of Irishmen and Irishwomen to English literature is not a
matter to be lightly brushed aside. All other things being equal, the Irish
have a flair for English prose and poetry–more particularly for English prose–that the Englishman himself rarely has. Most literary
critics agree on this point; and, as though to buttress it, we have Lynd’s own fine example. In this he is in the best Irish
tradition: the tradition of Steele, Goldsmith, Swift, Burke, Sheridan, Wilde,
Moore, Shaw. Else, listen to what the late C. E.
Montague, himself Irish as the sea is salt, has to say
on the subject in his memorable Dramatic Values:
“In
some ways the best English spoken is spoken in rural Ireland now; the Wicklow peasant’s toothsome, idiomatic use of short words
is nearer to the English tongue’s clean youth than anything you hear in England–even
in Northamptonshire–today; and in Synge’s
plays the English of Elizabeth comes back to us from Ireland as fresh as the
Elizabethan settlers left it there. Moment by moment as you hear his “Shadow of
the Glen,” your ear is caught by some such turn of speech as modern English
gives you mere smudged copies of.”
Eminent in
Both “Genre”
Lynd was both an essayist and a literary critic and
attained an enviable eminence in the two genre of essay-writing and literary
criticism. But it is safe to say that for everyone who bestows him as a
literary critic nearly ten know him only as an essayist. One reason undoubtedly
is that, whereas he ceased to dabble in sustained literary criticism several
years ago, he continued to turn out essays every week till almost the last
moment of his strenuous life. Another reason is that for some time past the
essay has taken a back place in English literature, more gifted persons
flocking to the well-trodden fields of literary criticism and biography than to
the essay proper. When Lynd began essay-writing there
were others also in the line; and by the time he was in his middle-period some
younger men (foremost among them being none other than the now famous J. B.
Priestley himself, his intimate friend and fervent admirer) were also tempted,
encouraged by the master’s illustrious example, to try their hand at this, by
no means despicable, branch of literature. But later on these literary “fellow-travellers”,
if I may venture to call them so, left essay-writing severely alone and thereby
enabled Lynd to reign in lone splendour
in this delectable form of entertainment.
Priestley
and Lynd
Having
mentioned the name of Priestley, whom also I admire, I should like to go on
record as saying that he was to the old Saturday Review what Lynd, throughout his literary career, had been to the New
Statesman. This was in the ’Twenties, and the Saturday was edited by
Sir Gerald Barry, later the editor-founder of the (now defunct) Week-end
Review, and the editor of the News
Chronicle. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young
was very heaven. In those days I was an assiduous reader of the English
weeklies, and I used to compare and contrast the efforts of both these literary
giants, Lynd and Priestley. Priestley, of course, was
the younger writer of the two; but, nothing daunted, he ran a neck-to-neck race
with his senior and, at whiles, even succeeded in far outstripping him. I do
not say this in any disparagement of Lynd, whom I
have always worshipped “this side idolatry.” But Priestley, when he decided to
take up literature as his life’s career, decided also to reach the topmost rung
of the ladder and that, too, within the shortest possible time and it is only
fair to admit that he has touched nothing that he has not adorned. Starting as
a literary critic, with his universally acclaimed The English Comic
Character and Figures in Modem English Literature, he flirted with
novel-writing with his Adam in Moonshine and Benighted, and then
went all out to tackle the essay-form, making his debut, so to speak, in the
columns of the old Saturday under a genial editorship. His books of
essays, Open House, and Apes and Men, and The Balconinny are every whit as good as the best
collections of Lynd himself.
But
Priestley, having won laurels in this field also, abandoned it for the novel
and the drama (with occasional experiments in autobiography), with the result
that the only serious rival that Lynd has ever had in
the essay-form left him in entire possession of this “realm of gold”, in the
beautiful phrase of Keats. And thus I come back to Lynd.
Journalist
First and Author Afterwards
Lynd, besides being the “middles-writer” of the New
Statesman, ever since that famous
journal’s inception in 1913 under the general inspiration of the Webbs and with the late Mr. Clifford Sharp as its first
editor, had been the Literary Editor, first of the Dairy News, and
then of its successor, the News Chronicle. In addition, he used to
contribute, fairly frequently, to Sir John Squire’s London Mercury (alas,
no more!) and to other periodicals as well. It will be seen that in this sense
he had never been a professional author, an author sui
generis, an author “to
the manner born.” It was journalism (that stem mistress) that claimed him all
along; and it was only by sheer accident that he blossomed forth into an author
also. As a Literary Editor he must have helped many a lame dog over many a
stile; there must be quite a number of people the world over who,
but for his initial word of encouragement, would not have been either
journalists or authors today. Lynd was a literary man
to his finger-tips and, during the last two or three decades, exerted a
considerable influence over the writers of the day, an influence that cannot be
fully assessed at the moment because of his nearness to us.
Lynd as Critic
I
have written that Lynd was both a literary critic and
an essayist and that he attained an enviable eminence in both the genre of
literary criticism and essay-writing. I have written also that he is more
widely known as an essayist than as a literary critic. As one who has read not
only his essays but his not less important criticism as well, I feel it is my
duty to devote a few lines to the latter in order to forestall, as far as
within me lies, any hasty appraisal of him as only an essayist by the rank and
file of obituarists. He has written two books, The
Art of Letters and Books
and Authors, both gems, “of purest
ray serene”, in their own chosen field. A diligent perusal of these will not
fail to convince the reader that what he did not know of English literature is
simply not worth knowing. He is as erudite on Samuel Pepys
and Horace Walpole as on Norman Douglas (the author of that classic, South
Wind) and H. M. Tomlinson
(of The Sea and the Jungle fame), in certain circles known as the
English Conrad. I am, by nature, “allergic to” writers of Diaries and Note-books
and anyway, until I read Lynd on the subject, I
had not thought it possible that any one could make Pepys,
“that Puritan north-north-west”, even moderately interesting. But Lynd has the rare gift, possessed only by the elect, of
investing even the dullest theme with the interest that never was on sea or
land. Thus it happens that both Pepys and Edward
Young and T. S. Eliot of our own day, come refreshingly alive and vivid from
his pages. Lynd, indeed, could never be dull even if
he “tried with both his hands”, as Humpty-Dumpty
would have put it: if anyone doubts my words, I suggest that he read his essay
on “The Cult of Dullness”, which is worth its weight in gold–or in uranium, as,
I suppose, we should learn to say now.
“There
is a league of dullness constantly making war on wit and beauty,” he says. “Its
malice is not deliberate: it is scarcely intelligent enough to be deliberate.
It is founded not on reason, but on the instinct of self-defence.”
He ends in this wise:
“But,
alas, intolerance and dullness are immortal, and we shall always have a war
between them, on the one hand, and the Keatses and
the Molieres on the other. And the Keatses and the Molieres will go
on writing, and it may be that they would not be so firmly rooted if it were
not for the fierce wind that so constantly assails them. All may be for the
best. Without dullness to contend against, beauty and wit might succumb to
First
Principles
Plato,
in his last dialogue, “The Laws”, makes Cleinias, the
Cretan, exclaim to his Athenian companion (these two, with Megillus,
the Lacedaemonian, it will be remembered, were on a pilgrimage
to the cave and shrine of Zeus in Crete): “O Athenian stranger, inhabitant of
Attica I will not call you, for you seem to deserve rather the name of Athene herself, because you go back to first principles.”
In his literary criticism Lynd always goes back to
first principles; which is another way of saying that he furnishes his literary
skyscrapers with the most enduring of foundations. We shall do well to remember
that, in this domain as in others, many are called but few chosen; and that
just as everyone who says “Lord, Lord!” is not assured of a place in heaven, so
also everyone who dabbles in literary criticism is not a literary critic,
properly so called. About Lynd’s position, however,
there can be no dispute: he was among the elect. One of his principles, as we
have already seen, is that he enjoins us to shun dullness as one shuns the
plague: he has no use for the merely pompous. Augustine Birrell
says somewhere that no one is obliged to read another’s books, and, by the same
token, we may lay it down that a literary critic who
is merely erudite, lacking that saving salt of humour
and gusto, is not destined to become an Immortal.
Emphasis
on Appreciation, not Depreciation
Lynd has one infallible recipe for really worthwhile
criticism: or, rather, he has two recipes. One is that one must take a
perceptible delight in it, coming to it, that is, not from what I may call an
oppressive sense of duty, but from an inner urge that cannot be mistaken: in
other words, one must write in con amore. His second recipe is that, as
far as possible, one must take care to write only on those authors who appeal
to one in some way or other: one must not come to bury Caesar but to praise
him. What he suggests is that no one should write on an author with whom, for
one reason or another, he does not happen to find himself in sympathy.
Destructive criticism is the easiest thing on earth, and anybody can perpetrate
it. Indeed, it is quite possible, on this hypothesis, to write a damaging
estimate even of Shakespeare that shall show him to be no better than an
amateur in literature. This, however, is not to suggest that criticism should
flow in one uninterrupted stream of applause: it would, obviously, be to err at
the opposite extreme. No author–not even the greatest that ever was–is
immaculate. Homer himself has been said to nod–occasionally. Taking the example
of Shakespeare again, an excellent article could be written proving what a
woefully inadequate craftsman he was. There never, perhaps, was a more careless
and haphazard writer. Everyone remembers the famous retort of Ben Jonson when someone was praising Shakespeare for not
blotting out a single line of his manuscript: “Would to God he had blotted out
a thousand!” The art of writing is full of perils, and who so essays to practise it must first cultivate a thick epidermis, an
impenetrable carapace. To write is, ipso facto, to court detraction.
All
this, however, does not invalidate argument. Some sympathy is demanded of him who sets
out to appraise the works of an author. Moreover, if one examines critical
writings closely; one will find that the best criticisms have, invariably, been
laudatory. That is why Pater, as Lynd
has noted, called his book of criticism, Appreciations. That is why the
late G. K. Chesterton’s book on Dickens is the best book that has yet been
written about that celebrated novelist.
Lynd on Eliot
Lynd’s approach to T. S. Eliot, for instance, is
illuminating. It points a moral and adorns a tale: the point and the moral being
his own. It is evident that Eliot, for certain obvious reasons, queers our
critic’s pitch. Eliot is pompous, and Eliot is pretentious; and, as I have
already indicated, Lynd is allergic to these traits in
a critic. Here is what he has to say on the matter: “The god critic
communicates his delight in genius. His memorable sentences are the mirrors of
memorable works of art.” He continues:
“His
(Eliot’s) failure at present is partly a failure of generosity. If a critic is
lacking in generous responsiveness it is in vain for him to write about the
poets. The critic has duties as a destroyer, but chiefly in the same sense as a
gold-washer. His aim is the discovery of gold. Mr. Eliot is less of a
discoverer in this kind than any critic of distinction who is now writing....Let
Mr. Eliot for the next ten years take as his patron saint the woman in the New
Testament who found the piece of silver, instead of Johannes Agricola in joyless meditation. He will find her not only
better company, but a wise counsellor. He may even
find his sentences infected with her cheerful excitement, for want of which as
yet they can break neither into a phrase nor into a smile.”
This
had wanted saying very much, and it has now been said. As a piece of beautiful
criticism is not the following passage on Shelley a veritable masterpiece, “the
“For
Shelley has not failed. He is one of those who have brought down to earth the
creative spirit of freedom. And that spirit has never ceased to brood, with
however disappointing results, over the chaos of
“Singing
hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought
To
sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”
(The Art of Letters)
This,
I feel, best describes Lynd himself. Like his own
hero Lynd also “did not humiliate beauty into a
lesson. He scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as a spirit.”