Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/356

 340 The New South He did not sift and arrange and clarify with a dominant impression in mind. He sauntered along the broad highway, frequently wandering off into the leafy woods and lingering there intent on the strange foliage. Consequently his critical writings are an amazing collection of individual vagaries and intuitive insights. Shakespeare and his Forerunners contains such surprising pronouncements as that Drummond of Haw- thornden is "one of the chief glories of the English tongue." Yet he could often divine an essential quality, as in his remark on Chaucer's works as "full of cunning hints and twinkle-eyed suggestions which peep between the lines like the comely faces of country children between the fence-bars as one rides by." The same want of the perspective and balance that come from broad and profound knowledge characterizes his lectures on The English Novel. His effort to trace the conception of personality from the time of the Greeks was a perilous under- taking for one who knew so little of Greek life and was so Uttle acquainted with the sociological implications of any such in- vestigation. The limitations of his upbringing also miUtated against success. The strict Presbyterian training of his cluld- hobd as well as an inherent moral bias conspired to give him a strongly ethical view of literature: Indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who is therefore not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty; that he, in short, who has not come to that state of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light within him, he is not the great artist. Consequently he fervently wished that the novels of Fielding and Richardson might be "blotted from the face of the earth. " Consequently, too; "in some particulars Silas Marner is the most remarkable novel in our language," and its author the greatest of English novelists. The preachments in which he again reminds one of Ruskin are the most interesting portions, because in them the man Lanier shines out and his cherished and innate convictions lie bare. The most valuable critical work of Lanier is undoubtedly