The Art of Letters

"True criticism is a search for beauty and truth and an announcement of them." "Among the many volumes of critical essays which have recently come to this country from England this is assuredly the best....In 'The Art of Letters' Robert Lynd has once more given us the fruits of that successful quest." -New York Evening Post "Mr. Lynd's book is an advent in literary criticism, for it has increased by one the small number of genuinely interpretative critical volumes. In a series of miniatures the author reveals an unusual insight into the characteristics of some of the diverse and complex personalities in English literature." -New York Herald "An excellent seriousness, an unaffected love of letters, and a personal relation to his subjects. Mr. Robert Lynd's new book, 'The Art of Letters' should be hailed with gratitude by all teachers of English literature, and promptly find its way into bibliographies and college libraries, taking its place beside standard works. Young minds like contemporary approaches, and they could seldom gain more intelligent access to an author than through such essays as those of Mr. Lynd of Pepys, Walpole, or Meredith. Mr. Lynd does not allow 'a monstrous and unhealthy plant of tolerance, ' to quote his own phrase in 'The Critic as Destroyer, ' to grow in his soul. He has a perfectly healthy power of disliking, which sometimes betrays him, as in a slightly unfair treatmet of Cowper. But as a rule he leads us to love lovely things worthily, and that is the best service a critic can render. The mature reader can profit even more than students from this keen, sensitive criticism." -The Yale Review "About twenty-five essays, long and short, presenting the author's keen and delightful mind on a variety of subjects." -The Independent "Mr. Lynd, whose 'Old and New Masters' made an excellent impression on the reading public, has given us here a series of critical essays in lighter vein. He reminds one of Augustine Birrell in his power to recreate a new interest in old writers...For doing this exceptionally well, he deserves the welcome which this volume is certain to receive." -New Catholic World "He is a foe to the sort of biography which conceals the weaknesses of the great, and there is an unsparing recital of the faults, great and small, and the eccentricities of all these men. It is an honest attempt to combat the old-style muffled biography - the 'reticent' kind of writing, which is all reticence and nothing else." -The Weekly Review CONTENTS: Mr. Pepys, John Bunyan, Thomas Campion, John Donne, Horace Walpole, William Cowper, A Note on Elizabethan Plays, The Office of the Poets. Edward Young as Critic, Gray and Collins, Aspects of Shelley The Character Half-Comic, The Experimentalist, The Poet of Hope, The Wisdom of Coleridge Coleridge as Critic, Coleridge as a Talker, Tennyson: A Temporary Criticism, The Politics of Swift and Shakespeare, The Personality of Morris, George Meredith, The Egoist, The Olympian Unbends, The Anglo-Irish Aspect, Oscar Wilde, Two English Critics, Mr. Saintsbury, Mr. Gosse, An American Critic: Professor Irving Babbitt, Georgians Mr. de la Mare, The Group, The Young Satirists. Labour of Authorship, The Theory of Poetry, The Critic as Destroyer, Book Reviewing.