Robert Lynd's Old and New Masters (1919) collects essays that move between authors as varied as Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, and Ronsard. Lynd's critical method often centers on how a writer constructs scenes and moves between them. He notes, for example, that Dostoevsky's visible world is one of sensationalism, with characters who behave like figures in police news, and that his novels are crowded with murders and attempted murders. This attention to the arrangement of dramatic moments recurs throughout the collection.

Dostoevsky's Sensational Stage

Lynd opens his essay on Dostoevsky by comparing Crime and Punishment to 'Gaboriau with psychological sauce,' a remark he attributes to George Moore. He then develops a sustained argument about the novelist's reliance on extreme behavior: his people 'more nearly resemble madmen and wild beasts than normal human beings.' Lynd emphasizes that Dostoevsky releases characters from ordinary inhibitions, producing scenes of drunkenness, jealousy, epileptic fits, and hysterical raving. The essay identifies a 'lust of cruelty' as the most conspicuous deadly sin in these characters. Lynd contrasts this with Turgenev's view that the work contains something Sadistic, though he notes that J. Middleton Murry denies the charge. The structure of Lynd's own essay mirrors its subject: it moves from a provocative epigram to a series of increasingly intense observations about cruelty and loss of control, building a portrait of a novelist obsessed with disturbance.

Ronsard's Rise and Fall

In the essay on Ronsard, Lynd traces the poet's reputation from European preeminence to near oblivion. He notes that between 1629 and 1857 no new edition of Ronsard's works appeared, and that Voltaire claimed he 'spoiled the language.' The romantic revival of the nineteenth century restored him, with Sainte-Beuve's 1828 anthology presenting Ronsard as an 'ideal ancestor.' Lynd quotes Flaubert's exclamation: 'What a poet! What a poet! What wings!' Yet Lynd resists full endorsement, arguing that Ronsard's range was more comparable to English cavalier poets than to Shelley. He observes that Ronsard's best poetry often varies the theme of carpe diem, and that his regret for lost youth is perhaps his most sincere emotion. The essay moves between historical reception and literary judgment, using the contrast between Flaubert's enthusiasm and Lynd's own measured assessment to create a critical tension.

Movement Between Essays

The collection's structure itself enacts a kind of critical movement. Lynd groups authors in pairs or clusters: Chesterton and Belloc appear together, as do Wordsworth, Keats, and Browning. The essays on Henry James are subdivided into three parts, tracing his development from 'novelist of grains and scruples' to his later style. Lynd often uses a single image or phrase to pivot between authors. For instance, the Dostoevsky essay ends by linking him to Strindberg and D'Annunzio, suggesting a continuum of 'novelists of torture.' This technique of comparison and contrast creates a web of connections across the volume. The reader moves from Russian sensationalism to English natural history (Jane Austen) to French poetry, with Lynd's recurring interest in how writers handle extreme emotion or reputation serving as a unifying thread.

Recurring Images of Excess

Throughout the excerpts, Lynd returns to images of excess and loss of control. Dostoevsky's characters 'get drunk, or go mad with jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits.' Ronsard's early life is described in terms of physical prowess: he 'excelled at football as in lute-playing' and 'danced, fenced, and rode better than the best.' Lynd's language often emphasizes intensity: he speaks of 'the lust of cruelty' and 'the loss of self-control.' Even in the essay on Jane Austen, whom he calls a 'natural historian,' the focus is on her method of observing human nature rather than on dramatic scenes. The contrast between Austen's restraint and Dostoevsky's excess is implicit in the collection's arrangement. Lynd does not explicitly compare them, but the juxtaposition of essays invites the reader to consider different modes of representing human behavior.

Lynd's criticism rewards readers who attend to the way he builds an argument through accumulation of detail and contrast. His essays do not offer final judgments so much as a series of observations that circle around a central insight. Reading Old and New Masters sequentially reveals how Lynd uses the structure of each essay—moving from a provocative opening to a more nuanced conclusion—to mirror the works he discusses. The collection is best approached as a set of interconnected meditations rather than a systematic survey.