A. M.
An Unacademic Literary Survey
Modern English Literature: From Chaucer to the Present Day, by G. H. Mair. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
Good histories of English literature are rare, and Mr. Mair’s book should accordingly be given a warm welcome, for it combines brevity with comprehensiveness of treatment in a very unusual manner. Mr. Mair not only writes well and knows his subject, but he seems instinctively to know what his readers will want—and he supplies it.
For instance, we do not remember that popular histories of English literature bother to tell such a detail as how the chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays is determined, but Mr. Mair’s telling of that will show the layman just what literary scholarship means, and in conjunction with his other remarks on our knowledge of Shakespeare it will rescue the uninformed from the chance of falling into such errors as the Baconian theory.
The book, however, is not one of higher and textual criticism and chronology. It is a work of appreciation, and the appreciation is that of a modern man. It is obvious that Chaucer might be treated in a manner quite alien to the interests of the man of today who is not a scholar, but the treatment of his work which ends in joining his hands to those of Charles Dickens as workers in a kindred quest is one that is well calculated to persuade even the philistine that Chaucer is a figure of passable interest to him.
It is the mark of the live man to recognize genius, and the manner in which Mr. Mair treats the genius of that great poet, John Donne, is in vivid contrast to the way in which it is usually treated in histories of English literature. For example:
Very different ... is the closely packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning’s, is more difficult to understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both, as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare’s later plays, obscurity arises not because the poet says too little, but because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyzes emotions so swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehension of his readers; he is for analyzing things far deeper than the ordinary mind commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is modeled on the average of our intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, and the comparison could be pushed farther still. Both draw the knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the bypaths of mediævalism. Browning’s Sordello is obscure because he knows too much about mediæval Italian history: Donne’s Anniversary because he is too deeply read in mediæval scholasticism and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of view. Seventeenth-century love poetry was idyllic and idealist; Donne’s is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism. To read him after reading Browne and Johnson is to have the same shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in thought and melodious facility in writing. They are corrective of lazy thinking and lazy composition.
Another feature in which this book differs from others of its kind is that the author is not afraid to bring the record down to the work of his contemporaries, and the struggles of Mr. Shaw with the bourgeois world, and the era opened by M. J. Synge and the Irish literary renascence, are here sympathetically dealt with.
L. J.