Essays In Little E-Book

Andrew Lang

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The book: It surely must be a delight to Mr. Andrew Lang to write off-hand essays like these. Suggestive rather than profound, dainty, and exhibiting subtle skill in the use of words, they seem more like the pastime than the serious employment of a literary man. There is a kind of joyousness and spontaneity about them that is not in accord with our ideas of work. It seems so easy a thing for Mr. Lang to have written them that we are ready to imagine them the result of spare-minute occupation, of " between whiles." Nothing could be more engaging than the pages about certain authors and subjects dear to the essayist. Conspicuous both for their charm and their ardent appreciation are the papers on Alexandre Dumas, Thackeray, Dickens, the poems of Sir Walter Scott, Homer and the study of Greek, and the Sagas. Whether Mr. Lang is a judicial critic of writers with whom he is not in sympathy may be questionable. Probably he would find it difficult to put himself in an attitude to do full justice to the kind of story not to his own personal taste. In the present volume he tries to be severe with Charles Kingsley, but relents, and takes off the edge of disapproval, ending with the generous admission, that " we should read Kingsley; we must not criticise him." So of Mr. Lang; we must enjoy his grace of expression, his almost boyish enthusiasm and freshness, his geniality, and the sweet and wholesome atmosphere we are always conscious of. He has a way with words that is alluring; and the personality of which we have so many glimpses adds the finishing charm. This book is annotated with a rare extensive biographical sketch of the author, Andrew Lang, written by Sir Edmund Gosse, CB, a contemporary poet and writer. Contents: Preface Alexandre Dumas Mr.

Leseprobe

Essays In Little

Andrew Lang

Contents:

Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

Essays In Little.

Preface

Alexandre Dumas

Mr. Stevenson’s Works

Thomas Haynes Bayly

Théodore De Banville

Homer And The Study Of Greek

The Last Fashionable Novel

Thackeray

Dickens

Adventures Of Buccaneers

The Sagas

Charles Kingsley

Charles Lever: His Books, Adventures And Misfortunes

The Poems Of Sir Walter Scott

John Bunyan

To A Young Journalist

Mr. Kipling’s Stories

Essays In Little., A. Lang

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

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ISBN: 9783849606749

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ANDREW LANG (1844-1912)

Biographical Sketch from "Portraits And Sketches" by Edmund Gosse

INVITED to note down some of my recollections of Andrew Lang, I find myself suspended between the sudden blow of his death and the slow development of memory, now extending in unbroken friendship over thirty-five years. The magnitude and multitude of Lang's performances, public and private, during that considerable length of time almost paralyse expression; it is difficult to know where to begin or where to stop. Just as his written works are so extremely numerous as to make a pathway through them a formidable task in bibliography, no one book standing out predominant, so his character, intellectual and moral, was full -of so many apparent inconsistencies, so many pitfalls for rash assertion, so many queer caprices of impulse, that in a whole volume of analysis, which would be tedious, one could scarcely do justice to them all. I will venture to put down, almost at haphazard, what I remember that seems to me to have been overlooked, or inexactly stated, by those who wrote, often very sympathetically, at the moment of his death, always premising that I speak rather of a Lang of from 1877 to 1890, when I saw him very frequently, than of a Lang whom younger people met chiefly in Scotland.

When he died, all the newspapers were loud in proclaiming his "versatility." But I am not sure that he was not the very opposite of versatile. I take "versatile" to mean changeable, fickle, constantly ready to alter direction with the weather-cock. The great instance of versatility in literature is Ruskin, who adopted diametrically different views of the same subject at different times of his life, and defended them with equal ardour. To be versatile seems to be unsteady, variable. But Lang was through his long career singularly unaltered; he never changed his point of view; what he liked and admired as a youth he liked and admired as an elderly man. It is true that his interests and knowledge were vividly drawn along a surprisingly large number of channels, but while there was abundance there does not seem to me to have been versatility. If a huge body of water boils up from a crater, it may pour down a dozen paths, but these will always be the same; unless there is an earthquake, new cascades will not form nor old rivulets run dry. In some authors earthquakes do take place as in Tolstoy, for instance, and in S. T. Coleridge but nothing of this kind was ever manifest in Lang, who was extraordinarily multiform, yet in his varieties strictly consistent from Oxford to the grave. As this is not generally perceived, I will take the liberty of expanding my view of his intellectual development.