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as a companion to a first fairly extensive reading" in the "important
literary landmarks." This begins to sound like neither criticism nor
history, but a Hymarx Outline, perhaps elevated to the level of Hiermarx.
Indeed, as we read
Eight Modern Writers,
we do not find Mr. Stewart's
self-depreciation unjustified. Which does, however, raise the question of
whether such a "companion" belongs in the twelve-volume
Oxford
History,
even granted George Watson's remark (in
The Literary Critics)
that the series, though begun as recently as 1945, has "on the whole, an
exhausted air."
If
I insist on the distinction between criticism and literary history,
it is because Professor Stewart's idiosyncrasies would have harmonized
better with the former. Still, his choice of the major writers between
1880 and 1940 is correct by his standards, and no one would quarrel
with the inclusion of Hardy, James, Shaw, Conrad, Yeats, Joyce, and
Lawrence. But one could raise doubts about Kipling, particularly when
allotted 71 pages, whereas Joyce and Shaw get 62 each, Hardy 52,
James 51, and Conrad must make do with 39. (One almost suspects
xenophobia, for the Polishness of Conrad is repeatedly, and not always
relevantly, insisted upon.) Kipling, whom Wilde pronounced "our
greatest authority on the second-rate," is, in Robert Graves's ironic
phrase, "no more to be argued away than the design on the postage
stamp," but neither is he to be argued into being a major artist as easily
as Mr. Stewart thinks.
But Stewart is a great asserter. Yeats he declares "the first among
the European poets of his age," which hoists him a bit too glibly above
Rilke and Valery. "Lawrence," we are told, "saw things very clearly.
It is this more than anything else that gives him his preeminence
among the writers discussed," which, in tum, places
him
above all
three of the aforementioned. The remark is all the more questionable
as Stewart clearly traces Lawrence's uncertainties, ambivalences, con–
tradictions, and tergiversations, which would suggest that whatever the
source of Lawrence's greatness may
be,
seeing clearly is not it. Again,
we are informed that when his literary agent assigned to Kipling the
mantle of Milton, "there was not too much hyperbole in the claim."
Not too much, just enough. Stewart even provides us with a useful
yardstick: "A preserved admiration for
[Saint Joan]
amid the changed
literary fashions of the mid-twentieth century may fairly be set, along
with a similarly preserved admiration for the poetry and prose of
Hardy and the short stories of Kipling, among the touchstones ·of a
good and catholic literary taste."
In more specific matters, -we get equally quaint judgements. Thus