Tree by Tolkien by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

embarrassing as in the 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn' chapter of The Wind in the Willows. I suppose what comes over most clearly from all this is that Tolkien is enjoying creating the scene, revelling in it; it has an air of play, like baby seals chasing one another in a stream of bubbles. This is certainly the basic strength and charm of the book. And it may—this is only a guess—explain why Tolkien is taking so long to produce the huge epic on the dwarves that he promised ten years ago; this kind of spontaneity seldom comes twice.
    I find it interesting to recall those comments on Tolkien, made by friends in the early fifties—precisely because they couldn't explain why they thought him 'important'. They certainly felt him important, something more than a writer of fantasy or fairy tales. It is also significant that there has been so little written about him, in spite of his appeal to 'intellectuals'; I known only the essay by Beagle (already mentioned) and Edmund Wilson's attack in The Bit Between My Teeth. This makes it an interesting challenge—to define the exact nature and extent of Tolkien's importance.
    One might begin by considering that Wilson essay, for Wilson is a good critic, who leans over backwards to try to understand why anyone should admire The Lord of the Rings. What Wilson says, basically, is that the book is 'essentially a children's book—a children's book which has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the juvenile market, the author has indulged himself in developing fantasy for its own sake'.
    He ends by accounting for the popularity of the book by remarking that many people, especially in Britain, have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash.
    Fortunately, Tolkien's output has not been immense—fortunately for the critic, I mean. So it is not quite as difficult as it might be to trace the development of his characteristic ideas.
    Tolkien was born in 1892—an interesting fact in itself. It means that by the time he was ten years old—the age at which children begin to find their own way in literature—he was living in the middle of a literary era of great vitality and complexity. The best-sellers of the day were Kipling, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Maurice Hewlett and Anthony Hope—all romantics, all influenced by Stevenson. But new figures were emerging, equally romantic, but also intellectuals—Wells, Shaw, Chesterton and Belloc. We now tend to be dismissive about this era, thinking of it as a kind of inferior Victorian twilight, bearing the same relation to the real thing that Richard Strauss's music bears to Wagner. This is unfair and inaccurate. We are now living in an age of literary exhaustion; we get used to the bleak landscape. Cyril Connolly said that the writer's business is to produce masterpieces; but what masterpieces have been produced in the past fifty years? Ulysses, The Waste Land , Musil's Man Without Qualities ; a few people would include Kafka, perhaps E. M. Forster, Hermann Broch's Sleepwalkers , Mann's Magic Mountain. And what more recently? We have to look back over several decades to find writers of this level of 'significance'. As to contemporaries: Amis, Osborne, Gunter Grass, Philip Roth, Robbe-Grillet ... no one among these shows any sign of developing the stature of a Shaw or Joyce. We simply take it for granted that nothing much has happened for decades. In 1902, things had been happening for decades, and they showed no sign of slackening; the age of Dickens and Carlyle gave way to the age of Stevenson, Hardy, Meredith, Kipling. The English were discovering Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Strindberg, Ibsen, Zola, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck. Things seemed to be happening everywhere; it was a great melting pot, shooting off sparks of literary talent. It was still a romantic era, as lively as the Sturm und drang period of a hundred years earlier—except that the romanticism now had a distinctly optimistic flavour. By the time this era came to an end—in