Shorter Notices
Books and Writers. A selection of essays by Robert Lynd. With a foreword by Richard Church. (Dent. I6s.) THE writings of Robert Lynd are a phenom- enon we are not likely to see repeated, for the world that made them possible is pass- ing and will hardly return in our lifetime—a world in which periodicals could give a whole page and more weekly, and news- papers as much space as they wished, to the discursive essay on letters and life. It was to this journalism that Robert Lynd devoted almost all his energies for nearly fifty years, in hundreds of essays of which only a frac- tion have been reprinted in book-form. The present selection is representative of his last years, and is concerned with literature only. (A selection in the Everyman Library offel s a range of general essays.) The first impression created by these essays is perhaps of a certain facility : " Lamb said," " Dr. Johnson maintained," " in Macaulay's opinion ...." But this first impression is quickly dissipated. Lynd has not got his quotations from a dictionary, we discover. He knows equally well the parts he leaves unquoted. We also begin to notice that these are not the familiar tags that everyone quotes, but are strictly pertinent and illumin- ating. For Lynd's appreciation of literature is his own, and so are the illustrations he employs in conveying it. Perhaps the second impression given by these essays is that they are too catholic, too acquiescent : are their subjects uniformly great, we ask—and uniformly readable? This doubt, too, dis- appears. For Lynd's appreciation is decep- tive and essentially critical. In general he believes that if a writer is not worth praising he isn't worth writing about but his praise discriminates and is not blind. A sober examination of Kipling in which that writer's peculiar genius is fully recognised ends with the observation that it is in the great comic stories that the reader may find the most reward at a second reading. And where Lynd sees growing a reputation based, as he thinks, on grounds inherently insecure, he writes such an article as that in the present collection on Mr. T. S. Eliot. Not much " appreciation " there. K. H.
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