Part 7

The third duty of the critic, after aiding the reader to choose the best and to understand it, is to help him to enjoy it. This is possible only when the critic's own enjoyment is acute enough to be contagious. However well informed a critic may be, and however keen he may be, if he be not capable of the cordial admiration which warms the heart, his criticism is wanting. A critic whose enthusiasm is not catching lacks the power of disseminating his opinions. His judgment may be excellent, but his influence remains negative. One torch may light many a fire; and how far a little candle throws its beams! Perhaps the ability to take an intense delight in another man's work, and the willingness to express this delight frankly and fully, are two of the characteristics of the true critic; of a certainty they are the characteristics most frequently absent in the criticaster. Consider how Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold and Lowell have sung the praises of those whose poems delighted them. Note how Mr. Henry James and M. Jules Lemaitre are affected by the talents of M. Alphonse Daudet and of M. Guy de Maupassant.

Having done his duty to the reader, the critic has done his full duty to the author also. It is to the people at large that the critic is under obligations, not to any individual. As he cannot take cognizance of a work of art, literary or dramatic, plastic or pictorial, until after it is wholly complete, his opinion can be of little benefit to the author. A work of art is finally finished when it comes before the public, and the instances are very few indeed when an author has ever thought it worth while to modify the form in which it was first presented to the world. A work of science, on the other hand, depending partly on the exactness of the facts which it sets forth and on which it is founded, may gain from the suggested emendations of a critic. Many a history, many a law book, many a scientific treatise has been bettered in successive editions by hints gleaned here and there from the reviews of experts.

But the work of art stands on a wholly different footing from the work of science; and the critics have no further duty towards the author, except, of course, to treat him fairly, and to present him to the public if they deem him worthy of this honor. The novel or the poem being done once for all, it is hardly possible for critics to be of any use to the novelist or to the poet personally. The artist of experience makes up his mind to this, and accepts criticism as something which has little or nothing to do with his work, but which may materially affect his position before the public. Thackeray, who understood the feelings and the failings of the literary man as no one else, has shown us Mr. Arthur Pendennis reading the newspaper notices of his novel, _Walter Lorraine_, and sending them home to his mother. "Their censure did not much affect him; for the good-natured young man was disposed to accept with considerable humility the dispraise of others. Nor did their praise elate him overmuch; for, like most honest persons, he had his own opinion about his own performance, and when a critic praised him in the wrong place he was hurt rather than pleased by the compliment."

Mr. James tells us that the author of _Smoke_ and _Fathers and Sons_, a far greater novelist than the author of _Walter Lorraine_, had a serene indifference towards criticism. Turgenef gave Mr. James "the impression of thinking of criticism as most serious workers think of it--that it is the amusement, the exercise, the subsistence of the critic (and, so far as this goes, of immense use), but that, though it may often concern other readers, it does not much concern the artist himself." Though criticism is of little use to the author directly, it can be of immense service to him indirectly, if it be exposition rather than comment; not a bald and barren attempt at classification, but a sympathetic interpretation. At bottom, sympathy is the prime requisite of the critic; and with sympathy come appreciation, penetration, revelation--such, for example, as the American novelist has shown in his criticisms of the Russian.

There is one kind of review of no benefit either to the author or to the public. This is the careless, perfunctory book-notice, penned hastily by a tired writer, who does not take the trouble to formulate his opinion, and perhaps not even to form one. Towards the end of 1889 there appeared in a British weekly the following notice of a volume of American short stories:

"A littery gent in one of Mr. [----]'s short stories says: 'A good idea for a short story is a shy bird, and doesn't come for the calling.' Alas! alas! it is true. The French can call a great deal better than we can; but the Americans, it would seem, cannot. The best of Mr. [----]'s stories is the first, about a tree which grew out of the bosom of a buried suicide, and behaved accordingly to his descendants; but, so far from being a short story, it is a long one, extending over some hundreds of years, and it suffers from the compression which Mr. [----] puts upon it. It deserves to have a volume to itself."

Refraining from all remark upon the style in which this paragraph is written or upon the taste of the writer, I desire to call attention to the fact that it is not what it purports to be. It is not a criticism within the accepted meaning of the word. It indicates no intellectual effort on the part of its writer to understand the author of the book. An author would need to be superlatively sensitive who could take offence at this paragraph, and an author who could find pleasure in it would have to be unspeakably vain. To me this notice seems the absolute negation of criticism--mere words with no suggestion of a thought behind them. The man who dashed this off robbed the author of a criticism to which he was entitled if the book was worth reviewing at all; and in thus shirking his bounden duty he also cheated the proprietor of the paper who paid him. Empty paragraphing of this offensive character is commoner now than it was a few years ago, commoner in Great Britain than in the United States, and commoner in anonymous articles than in those warranted by the signature of the writer. Probably the man who was guilty of this innocuous notice would have been ashamed to put his name to it.

If a book is so empty that there is nothing to say about it, then there is no need to say anything. It is related that when a dramatist, who was reading a play before the Committee of the Comedie Francaise, rebuked M. Got for slumbering peacefully during this ceremony, the eminent comedian answered promptly, "Sleep, Monsieur, is also an opinion." If a book puts the critic to sleep, or so benumbs his faculties that he finds himself speechless, he has no call to proceed further in the matter. Perhaps the author may take heart of grace when he remembers that of all Shakespeare's characters, it was the one with the ass's head who had an exposition of sleep come upon him, as it was the one with the blackest heart who said he was nothing if not critical.

If I were to attempt to draw up Twelve Good Rules for Reviewers, I should begin with:

I. Form an honest opinion.

II. Express it honestly.

III. Don't review a book which you cannot take seriously.

IV. Don't review a book with which you are out of sympathy. That is to say, put yourself in the author's place, and try to see his work from his point, of view, which is sure to be a coign of vantage.

V. Stick to the text. Review the book before you, and not the book some other author might have written; _obiter dicta_ are as valueless from the critic as from the judge. Don't go off on a tangent. And also don't go round in a circle. Say what you have to say, and stop. Don't go on writing about and about the subject, and merely weaving garlands of flowers of rhetoric.

VI. Beware of the Sham Sample, as Charles Reade called it. Make sure that the specimen bricks you select for quotation do not give a false impression of the _facade_, and not only of the elevation merely, but of the perspective also, and of the ground-plan.

VII. In reviewing a biography or a history, criticise the book before you, and don't write a parallel essay, for which the volume you have in hand serves only as a peg.

VIII. In reviewing a work of fiction, don't give away the plot. In the eyes of the novelist this is the unpardonable sin. And, as it discounts the pleasure of the reader also, it is almost equally unkind to him.

IX. Don't try to prove every successful author a plagiarist. It may be that many a successful author has been a plagiarist, but no author ever succeeded because of his plagiary.

X. Don't break a butterfly on a wheel. If a book is not worth much, it is not worth reviewing.

XI. Don't review a book as an east wind would review an apple-tree--so it was once said Douglas Jerrold was wont to do. Of what profit to any one is mere bitterness and vexation of spirit?

XII. Remember that the critic's duty is to the reader mainly, and that it is to guide him not only to what is good, but to what is best. Three parts of what is contemporary must be temporary only.

Having in the past now and again fallen from grace myself and written criticism, I know that on such occasions these Twelve Good Rules would have been exceedingly helpful to me had I then possessed them; therefore I offer them now hopefully to my fellow-critics. But I find myself in a state of humility (to which few critics are accustomed), and I doubt how far my good advice will be heeded. I remember that, after reporting the speech in which Poor Richard's maxims were all massed together, Franklin tells us that "thus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The people heard it and approved the doctrine; and immediately practised the contrary, just as if it had been a common sermon."

1890

THREE AMERICAN ESSAYISTS

"Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison," said Doctor Johnson a many years ago; and Doctor Johnson's own style, elaborate if not artificial, and orotund if not polysyllabic, might no doubt have been improved if the writer of the _Rambler_ had given more of his days and nights to the study of the chief writer of the _Spectator_. Doctor Johnson's advice is still quoted often, perhaps it is still followed sometimes. Yet it is outworn and not for to-day. We have nowadays better weapons than the Brown Bess Johnson appreciated so highly--breech-loading rifles incomparably superior to the smooth-bore he praises. Owing in part, no doubt, to the influence of Addison and to the advice of Johnson, we have had writers of late whose style is easier than Addison's, more graceful, more varied, more precise. Set a page of one of Addison's little apologues beside a page of one of Hawthorne's tales, and note how much more pellucid Hawthorne's style is, how much more beautiful, how much more distinguished. Contrast one of Addison's criticisms with one of Matthew Arnold's, and observe not only how much more complete is the terminology of the art now than it was when the _Spectator_ was appearing twice a week, but also how much more acute and how much more flexible the mind of the later critic than the mind of the earlier.

Compare Addison's essays with those which Mr. George William Curtis has recently collected into a volume, _From the Easy Chair_, and you will see no reason to adopt any theory of literary degeneracy in our day. We are all of us the heirs of the ages, no doubt, but it is in an unusual degree that Mr. Curtis is the inheritor of the best traditions of the English essay. He is the direct descendant of Addison, whose style is overrated; of Steele, whose morality is humorous; of Goldsmith, whose writing was angelic, and of Irving, whose taste was pretty. Mr. Curtis recalls all of these, yet he is like none of them. Humorous as they are and charming, he is somewhat sturdier, of a more robust fibre, with a stronger respect for plain living and high thinking, with a firmer grasp on the duties of life.

For the most part these essays of Mr. Curtis's are pleasant papers of reminiscence, of gentle moralizing, and of kindly satire; but he is a swift and a careless reader who does not detect the underlying preachment which is at the core of most of them. Mr. Curtis is not content to scourge lightly the snobbery and the vulgarity which cling to the fringe of fashion, and sometimes get nearer to the centre of society; he also sets up a high standard of morality in public life. The divorce between Politics and Society--in the narrower meaning of the words--is not wholesome for either party. Mr. Curtis reminds us that "good government is one of the best things in the world," and that the wise man "knows that good things of that kind are not cheap." This is a quotation from the highly instructive and permanently pertinent paper on "Honestus at the Caucus," which begins with the assertion that "a man who is easily discouraged, who is not willing to put the good seed out of sight and wait for results, who desponds if he cannot obtain everything at once, and who thinks the human race lost if he is disappointed, will be very unhappy if he persists in taking part in politics. There is no sphere in which self-deception is easier."

There are but few essays with a political intention in this delightful little book. The rest are papers mainly about people, about "Edward Everett in 1862," and about "Emerson Lecturing," and about "Dickens Reading," and about "Robert Browning in Florence," and about "Wendell Phillips at Harvard," and about "A Little Dinner with Thackeray," and about Thoreau, who had "a staccato style of speech, every word coming separately and distinctly as if preserving the same cool isolation in the sentence that the speaker did in society." Not a few of them have to do with the players of the past, with the vocalists who are now but memories of dead and gone delight, with the performers on musical instruments--"Thalberg and other Pianists," "At the Opera in 1864," "Jenny Lind." Was the gentle Jenny Lind really a vocalist, or was she only a singer of songs, unforgetable now because she sang them? As we read these reminders of past delights we find ourselves wondering how Jenny Lind would please the denizens of certain Unmusical Boxes at the Metropolitan Opera-house, "who have an insatiable desire to proceed with their intellectual cultivation by audible conversation during the performance."

In the thick of the tussle of life here in this huge city of ours, where strident voices fill the market-place, the mellow note of the essayist is heard distinctly as he leans back in his Easy Chair, modulating every syllable with exquisite felicity. And perhaps the author of the _Potiphar Papers_ is in his way quite as characteristic of New York as any of the more self-seeking notorieties who din into our ears the catalogue of their merits. In a great city there is room for all, for the boss and the heeler and the tough, as well as for the _Tatler_, the _Spectator_, the _Idler_, the _Rambler_, and the _Citizen of the World_.

A citizen of the world, Mr. Curtis is, beyond all question, really cosmopolitan; and, as Colonel Higginson told us a dozen years ago, "to be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country." When Colonel Higginson came to New York last year to deliver before the Nineteenth Century Club the lecture on _The New World and the New Book_, which gives its title to a recent collection of his essays, this epigram was quoted by the president of the club in introducing the speaker of the evening. It is perhaps now the best known of Colonel Higginson's many sharp sayings; it is better known probably than his assertion that the American has "a drop more of nervous fluid" than the Englishman--an assertion which Matthew Arnold failed to understand but did not fail to denounce. No doubt it is hard for a writer as witty as Colonel Higginson to find one or two of his acute sentences quivering in the public memory, while others as well aimed fall off idly. But it is with the epigram as with the lyric; we shoot an arrow in the air, it falls to earth we know not where; and we can rarely foretell which shaft is going to split the willow wand.

Colonel Higginson need not be ashamed to go down to posterity as the author of one phrase, for many a writer is saved from oblivion by a single apothegm; nor need he be afraid of this fate, for there are "good things" a-plenty in this new volume, and some of them are certain to do good service in international combat, and to go hustling across the Atlantic again and again. There is an arsenal of epigram in the little essay called "Weapons of Precision," and it is pleasant to see that their effective range is more than 3000 miles. At that distance they have already wounded Mr. Andrew Lang, and forced from him a cry of pain. So sensitive did Mr. Lang show himself to these transatlantic darts that he allowed himself to reveal his ignorance of Colonel Higginson's work, of the Peabody Museum, and of various other men and things in America--a knowledge of which was a condition precedent to debate on the question.

This question is very simple: Is there such a man as an American? Has he ever done anything justifying his existence? Or is he simply a second-rate, expatriated Englishman, a colonist who is to say ditto forever and a day? If we are only debased duplicates of the Poor Islanders, then our experiment here is a failure, and our continued existence is not worth while. If we are something other than English, then it may be as well to understand ourselves, and to throw off any lingering bond of colonialism. This is what Colonel Higginson's book was intended to help us to do. "Nothing is further," he has said in his preface, from his "wish than to pander to any petty national vanity," his sole desire being to assist in creating a modest and reasonable self-respect. "The Civil War bequeathed to us Americans, twenty-five years ago, a great revival of national feeling; but this has been followed in some quarters, during the last few years, by a curious relapse into something of the old colonial and apologetic attitude." No doubt this attitude is not characteristic of the best; it is to be seen only in the East--chiefly in New York and in Boston--chiefly among the half-educated, for the man of wide culture looks for light rather to Paris and Berlin than to London.

Colonel Higginson proves abundantly, with a cloud of witnesses, that one of the differences between the American and the Englishman is the former's greater quickness. We are lighter and swifter in our appreciation of humor, for example. Indeed, it is amusing to observe that we speak of the English as obtuse in humor, just as they speak of the Scotch. I think that Colonel Higginson succeeds also in showing that there is greater fineness of taste in literature and in art in America; at least we do not take our dime novels seriously, while in England the leading weekly reviews really consider the stories of Miss Marryat and of Mr. Farjeon.

Of course "the added drop of nervous fluid" must be paid for somehow; in all international comparisons the great law of compensations holds good. Recently a leading American scientist told me that he thought there was, in American scientific work, a lack of the energy he had observed in the English. It was of pure science he was speaking; as far as applied science is concerned, there seems to be no lack of energy visible in the United States. That this criticism is just I cannot deny, having no wish to fall into the pitfall of discussing a subject of which I have no knowledge whatever. But if there is a possible loss of energy, there is an indisputable gain in mental flexibility, in openness of mind. There are Philistines in the United States, as there are in Great Britain, a many of them on both sides of the Atlantic; but between the British Philistine and the American there is an essential difference. The British Philistine knows not the light, and he hates it and he refuses to receive it. The American Philistine knows not the light, but he is not hostile, and he is not only ready to receive it, but eager. This is a difference which goes to the root of the matter.

I have delayed so long over the subject of Colonel Higginson's book that I have now no space to speak of its style or of its separate chapters. "Weapons of Precision" I have already praised; it is a protest against vulgarity of style--against the bludgeon and the boomerang as arms of debate; it is a series of swift, rapier-like thrusts, to be considered by all who think that our language is inferior to the French in point and in brilliancy. Indeed, the whole book may be commended to those who can enjoy style and wit and learning and a knowledge of the world and a wisdom derived from men as well as from books. Especially may the essays on the "Shadow of Europe," on the "Perils of American Humor," on the "Evolution of an American," and on the "Trick of Self-Depreciation" be recommended to all who are downcast about the position of literature and of the arts in these United States, or about the United States as a nation. These essays are tonic and stimulant; and if their Americanism may seem to some aggressive, this is a failing which might become more common than it is without becoming dangerous--if always it were characterized by knowledge as wide as Colonel Higginson's and by wit as keen.

To no one may I venture to recommend Colonel Higginson's book more urgently than to Miss Agnes Repplier, who has sent forth a second volume of her entertaining magazine articles grouped under the excellent title of _Points of View_. Miss Repplier is very clever and very colonial. Although a Philadelphian, she has apparently never heard of the Declaration of Independence. From the company she keeps it is perhaps not an unfair inference to suggest that she seems to be sorry that she is not herself a Poor Islander. She is a well-read woman, with all literature open before her, yet she quotes almost altogether from the contributors to the contemporary British magazines; and we feel that if birds of a feather flock together we have here in the eagle's nest by some mischance hatched a British sparrow.

Miss Repplier's subjects are excellent--"A Plea for Humor," "Books that Have Hindered Me," "Literary Shibboleths," "Fiction in the Pulpit," and the like; and she discusses them with ready humor and feminine individuality. She quotes abundantly and often aptly--and apt quotation is a difficult art. But the writers from whom she quotes are not always of that compliment. Bagehot had the gift of the winged phrase, and a quotation from his masculine prose is always welcome. But a glance down the list of the others from whom Miss Repplier quotes will show that she mischooses often. She seems to lack the sense of literary perspective; and for her one writer is apparently as good as another--so long as he is a contemporary Englishman.