SOURCE: "Poetry and Pessimism," in The Westminster Review, Vol. CXXXVIII, July-December, 1892, pp. 366-76.

In the following assessment of Levy's career. Chambers places Levy in the context of late nineteenth-century literary pessimism.

In the mind of a student of humanity, if he be also a reader of books, intellectual problems are apt to crystallise around individual personalities. A single poet, a single novelist, comes to stand to him for a whole complex of thought, a web of vague ideas and tendencies which are elsewhere, as we say, in the air, but which first become palpable when compelled by an artist's hand into the rigidity of the written word. This is especially the case with poets, for poetry, by its very nature, strikes to the heart of things and sets them before us in their naked essence, stripping away the vesture of irrelevant detail that, in the novel no less...