Artzibasheff is an extremist. The suicidal "motif" in the "Breaking-point" is worked out with an appalling and devastating thoroughness.
Pessimism, in a superficial sense, could hardly go further; though compared with Dostoievsky's insight into the "infinite" in character, one is conscious of a certain closing of doors and narrowing of issues. "Sanine" himself is a sort of idealization of the sublimated common sense which seems to be this writer's selected virtue. Artzibasheff appears to advocate, as the wisest and sanest way of dealing with life, a certain robust and contemptuous self-assertion, kindly, genial, without baseness or malice; but free from any scruple and quite untroubled by remorse.
If regarded seriously—as he appears to be intended to be—as an approximate human ideal, one cannot help feeling that in spite of his humorous anarchism and subjective zest for life, Sanine has in him something sententious and tiresome. He is, so to speak, an immoral prig; nor do his vivacious spirits compensate us for the lack of delicacy and irony in him. On the other hand there is something direct, downright and "honest" about his clear-thinking, and his shameless eroticism which wins our liking and affection, if not our admiration. Artzibasheff is indeed one of the few writers who dare excite our sympathy not only for the seduced in this world but for the seducer.
53. STERNE—TRISTRAM SHANDY.
Sterne is a writer who less than any one else in the present list reveals the secrets of his manner and mind to the casual and hasty reader. "Tristram Shandy" and "The Sentimental Journey" are books to be enjoyed slowly and lingeringly, with many humorous after-thoughts and a certain Rabelaisian unction. A shrewd and ironical wisdom, gentle and light-fingered and redolent of evasive sentiment, is evoked from these digressive and wanton pages.
At his best Sterne is capable of an imaginative interpretation of character which for delicacy and subtlety has never been surpassed. For the Epicurean in literature, his unfailing charm will be found in his style—a style so baffling in the furtive beauty of its disarming simplicity that even the greatest of literary critics have been unable to analyze its peculiar flavour. There is a winnowed purity about it, and a kind of elfish grace; and with both these things there mixes, strangely enough, a certain homely, almost Dutch domesticity, quaint and mellow and a little wanton—like a picture by Jan Steen.
54. JONATHAN SWIFT. TALE OF A TUB.
Swift's mysterious and saturnine character, his outbursts of terrible rage; his exquisite moments of tenderness; his sledge-hammer blows; his diabolical irony; form a dramatic and tragic spectacle which no psychologist can afford to miss.
With the "saeva indignatio" alluded to in his own epitaph, he puts his back, as it were, to the "flamantia moenia mundi" and hits out, insanely and blindly, at the human crowd he loathes. His secretive and desperate passion for Stella, his little girl pupil; his barbarous treatment of Vanessa—his savage championship of the Irish people against the Government—make up the dominant "notes" of a character so formidable that the terror of his personality strikes us with the force of an engine of destruction.
His misanthropy is like the misanthropy of Shakespeare's Timon—his crushing sarcasms strike blow after blow at the poor flesh and blood he despises. The hatefulness of average humanity drives him to distraction and in his madness, like a wounded Titan, he spares nothing. To the whole human race he seems to utter the terrible words he puts into the mouth of God: