Part 6

There are as many styles as there are moods and tempers in men. Words may be used so as to give us a sense of vigor, a sense of freshness, a sense of the choice and scholarly, or of the dainty and exclusive, or of the polished and elaborate, or of heat or cold, or of any other quality known to life. Every work of genius has its own physiognomy--sad, cheerful, frowning, yearning, determined, meditative. This book has the face of a saint; that of a scholar or a seer. Here is the feminine, there the masculine face. One has the clerical face, one the judicial. Each appeals to us according to our temperaments and mental predilections. Who shall say which style is the best? What can be better than the style of Huxley for his purpose,--sentences level and straight like a hurled lance; or than Emerson’s for his purpose,--electric sparks, the sudden, unexpected epithet or tense, audacious phrase, that gives the mind a wholesome shock; or than Gibbon’s for his purpose,--a style like solid masonry, every sentence cut four square, and his work, as Carlyle said to Emerson, a splendid bridge, connecting the ancient world with the modern; or than De Quincey’s for his purpose,--a discursive, roundabout style, herding his thoughts as a collie dog herds sheep; or than Arnold’s for his academic spirit,--a style like cut glass; or than Whitman’s for his continental spirit,--the processional, panoramic style that gives the sense of mass and multitude? Certain things we may demand of every man’s style,--that it shall do its work, that it shall touch the quick. To be colorless like Arnold is good, and to have color like Ruskin is good; to be lofty and austere like the old Latin and Greek authors is good, and to be playful and discursive like Dr. Holmes is good; to be condensed and epigrammatic like Bacon pleases, and to be flowing and copious like Macaulay pleases. Within certain limits the manner that is native to the man, the style that is a part of himself, is what wears best. What we do not want in any style is hardness, glitter, tumidity, superfetation, unreality.

In treating of nature or outdoor themes, let the style have limpidness, sweetness, freshness; in criticism let it have dignity, lucidity, penetration; in history let it have mass, sweep, comprehension; in all things let it have vitality, sincerity, and genuineness.

IV

CRITICISM AND THE MAN

I

It looks as though we were never to get to the end of the discussion about criticism--its scope, aims, functions, any more than we are likely to get to the end of the discussion of any real question in philosophy, ethics, or religion.

Is the aim of literary criticism judgment, or interpretation, or analysis, or description? May it not have all these aims? For myself, I am disposed to answer in the affirmative.

I doubt if there will ever be a critical method which all may apply. Every man will have his own method, as truly as he has his own manners. The French critic Schérer inclines to “the method which sets to work to comprehend rather than to class, to explain rather than to judge,” or which asks as the first step to possess itself of the author’s point of view. This is substantially Pope’s dictum that a work is to be read in the spirit in which it was written, and it accords with Heine’s saying that the critic is to ask, “What does the artist intend?” This is a part of, but does it sum up, the critical function?

A man’s writing upon the works of another takes the form of description and analysis--like the report of a naturalist upon a new species, which Mr. Howells thinks is the main function of criticism; or it may aim chiefly at interpretation, which a recent essayist emphasizes as the latest and highest phase of criticism; or it may aim at a judicial estimate, an authoritative verdict from the rules and standards, which is the more classic and academic phase of criticism.

Each phase is legitimate and leads to valuable results.

Of any considerable artistic work we want a description and an analysis, we want an interpretation and an exposition, and we want an appraisement according to the standard of the best that has been thought and done in the world,--not a comparison with the externals of the accepted models, but with the originality, the spontaneity, the sanity, the inner necessity and consistency of them--the truth to nature and to the laws of the human mind. Is it liberating, vitalizing, cheering? Is it ethically sound? Does it favor large and manly ideals? Does it go along with evolution and progress?

What, for instance, will criticism do with the work of such a man as Whitman, or Ibsen, or Tolstoi? It will describe it and analyze it, and name it as lyric, epic, dramatic, etc.; it will interpret it, or draw out and expound the ideas that lie back of it and out of which it sprang; it will seek to understand it and to get at the writer’s point of view; then it will judge it, try it by its own standards, and seek to estimate the value of these standards as they stand related to the best aims and achievements of the human mind.

We demand of these men what we demand of Browning, Tennyson, Hugo, and every other poet and writer of high claims,--genuineness, sincerity, power, inspiration, and that they awaken in us fresh and vivid currents of ideas and emotions. We shall not quarrel with their methods, or materials, or their form, or formlessness, but they must go to the quick. All our pleasure and profit in great art--painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry--is at last one, a new experience of the beauty and significance of nature and life. We are made to feel these emotions afresh and as if for the first time.

Here are the old eternal elements,--life, nature, the soul, man and woman, all in danger of becoming dull, commonplace, uninteresting to us. But the man with the creative touch gives us a new and lively sense of them, by presenting them to us in new combinations and under new lights. The only new thing added is himself,--the quality or flavor of his own genius.

A complete criticism will not limit itself to description or to interpretation; it will seek to estimate, to bring out the relative or absolute value of the thing. Mr. Howells in his trenchant little volume on “Criticism and Fiction,” says the critic has no more business to trample on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him, than the botanist has to grind a plant under his heel because he does not find it pretty. His business “is to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or blame them.”

To classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind is certainly one of the functions of criticism, and only one. The analogy Mr. Howells employs is misleading. We do not sit in judgment on natural specimens and products except as they stand related to human wants and utilities. We compare climates, seasons, soils, landscapes, with reference to racial and individual needs and well-being. If you bring me trees from the woods or stone from the quarry to build my house with, I am bound to sit in judgment upon them. And when my house is built, my neighbors will sit in judgment upon it. Of all artificial things, of all man’s works, we are bound to ask, are they well done? are they what they should be? are they the best of their kind? Shall we not ask these questions of the poem also, of the novel, the essay, the history?

Art has relations to life, and the critic is bound to consider what these relations are in any given work,--how true, how important; he is examining a human product, not a natural specimen, and is as competent to reject as to accept; he must compare, weigh, appraise, to the best of his ability.

The specimens of natural history are perfect after their kind; the main question with them is, to which kind or species does a given specimen belong? But the poem or the history or the novel is not always perfect after its kind. Their kind is usually obvious at a glance, but their merits or demerits, their relation to the best that has been thought and done in the world, are not so obvious. Hence we praise or blame according as they come up to or fall short of their own ideal. The critic is not so much a botanist naming a new flower, as he is a brother gardener criticising your horticulture, or a brother lawyer criticising your brief. We are all critics in this sense one way or another every day of our lives; we try to get at the real value of whatever is offered us, whether it be lands, houses, goods, friends, stocks, bonds, news, pictures, or books; we criticise the men we deal with and employ in order to find out whom to trust; we must have our wits about us when we go to market or go shopping. The critical habit--sifting, testing, comparing, to get at the true value of things--goes with us through life, or else we come often to grief. The finer the product, or the higher the purpose it serves, the more careful is our investigation.

When we come to literature and art our worldly practical wisdom does not carry very far. It is not now a question of fact or of material values, but of ideal and æsthetic values; it is a question of truth to nature and to life, and of the largest, most vital truth. The mass of readers have little power of divining the good from the bad, the true from the false, in this field. Not the first best, but the second or third best will draw the multitude.

The literary value of a work is more intangible and elusive, harder to define and bring out, than its scientific or moral or other values. It resides in a certain vitality and genuineness of expression; we have a sense of having come face to face with something real and alive in the man, and not, as is so often the case; with something assumed or put on. There is always an original inherent quality and flavor, as in natural products. The language is not the mere garment of the thought, it is the very texture and substance. In all true literature something more than mind and erudition speak,--a man speaks; a vital personality is imminent,--a Charles Lamb, a Wordsworth, a Carlyle, a Huxley, an Emerson, a Thoreau, a Lowell,--all distinct types of intelligence speaking through character.

Self-expression within certain limits is as important in criticism as in any other form of literature.

The French critic Ferdinand Brunetière says that the truly personal way of seeing and feeling, which is a merit of the poet and the novelist, is a fault in the critic, because the critical function is mainly a judicial one.

In every man there is the common humanity, a measure of the pure reason which he shares with all; then there are the race traits, the family traits, the bias of his times, the bent given by his training and surroundings, and his own special stamp and make-up,--what we call his idiosyncrasy. All these things will play a part in his view of any matter. His success as a critic is when his humanity, his pure intelligence, furnishes the light which is only colored or refracted by its passage through these elements. But colored and refracted it will be, and it is this coloring and refraction or stamp of the personal equation that gives value and charm to the man’s work as literature. Reduce criticism to a science, or eliminate the element of impressionism, and the result is no longer literature. The reason may be convinced, but the emotions are untouched.

The one thing that distinguishes all modern literatures from the works of the ancient or classic period is their more permanent subjectivity, and the piercing lyrical note in them.

Self-expression has been the aim of the modern artist in a much fuller sense than it was with the artists of the pagan world. Our religion is a personal and subjective religion,--the kingdom of heaven is within. Christianity turned the thoughts of men upon themselves. Self-examination, self-criticism began. Man became conscious of himself, of his sins, and of his shortcomings, and learned to be more interested in the elements of his own character.

There is probably no greater delusion than that under which the critic labors when he thinks he is trying the new work by the standard of the best that has been thought and achieved in the world. He is trying it by his own conception of that standard; so much of it as is vital in his own mind he can apply, and no more. His own individual taste and judgment are, after all, his tests. The standard of the best is not some rule of thumb or of yardstick that every one can apply; only the best can apply the best.

Impressionism, therefore, is at the bottom of all criticism, in whatever field. The impression which the work makes upon your intelligence, your taste, your judgment, is all that you can finally give.

Criticism in France, where the art has been more assiduously cultivated than in any other country, seems divided between judicial critics like Brunetière and impressionist critics like Lemaître. The latter states in terms of his own likes and dislikes what the other aims to state in terms of the impersonal reason. But their conclusions are likely to differ only as their temperaments and innate affinities differ. Brunetière has the more dogmatic mind and the more violent antipathies. He could call Sainte-Beuve a rat,--a verdict that savors more of political and religious intolerance than of the impartial reason.

Are we not coming more and more to demand that in all literary and artistic productions, the producer be present in his work, not merely as mind, as pure intelligence, but also as a distinct personality, giving a flavor of his own to the principles he utters? Every vital creative work is the revelation of a man as well as of a mind, and this is true in criticism no less than in other forms of literature.

Suppose Brunetière’s criticism lacked that which makes it Brunetière’s, or Arnold’s lacked that which makes it Arnold’s, should we long care for it? Eliminate from the works of these men all that is individual, all that in each makes the impression of a new literary force, the accent of personality, and you take from the salt its savor. Dare we say that the most precious thing in literature is the individual and the specific? Is not a platitude a platitude because it lacks just these things? The vague and the general may be had in any quantity, at any time. The distinct and the characteristic are always rare. How many featureless novels, featureless poems, featureless discourses, how much savorless criticism of one kind and another, every community produces! Now and then we catch a distinct personal note, a new, penetrating voice, and this we remember and follow in criticism as readily as in poetry or fiction. Have we not here the secret of the greater interest we take in signed criticism over unsigned?

The pure, disinterested, impersonal reason is a fine thing to contemplate. Who would flout it or deny it? One might as well throw stones at the sun. But as the pure white light of the sun is broken up into a thousand hues and shades as it comes back to us from the living world, so the light of reason comes to us from literature in a thousand blended tints and colors, or as modified by the varying moods and temperaments of the individual writers. Whether or not we want or have a right to expect this pure white light in criticism, what we get is the light as it is reduced or colored by the critic’s personality,--the media of his time, his race, his personal equation. It must render accurately the objects, form and feature; but the hue, the atmosphere, the sentiment of it all, the highest value of it all, will be the contribution of the critic’s most private and radical self.

Every eminent writer has his way of looking at things, gives his own coloring to general truths, and it is this that endears him to us. Is the word he speaks _his_ word,--is it inevitable, the verdict of his character, the outcome of that which is most vital and characteristic in him? Or is it something he has learned, or the result of fashion, convention, imitation?

See how the old elements of the air, soil, water, forever recombine under the touch of that mysterious something we call life, and produce new herbage, new flowers, new fruit, new men, new women,--forever and yet never the same. So do the forces of man’s spirit recombine with the old facts and truisms, and produce new art and new literature.

II

Is it not equally true that the value of criticism as a guide to the judgment or the taste, teaching us what to admire and what to condemn, is less than its value as an intellectual pleasure and stimulus, its power to awaken ideas? Judgment is good, but inspiration is better. How rarely we make the judgments of the greatest critics our own! We are pleased when they confirm our own, but is not our main interest and profit in what the critic gives us out of himself? We do not, for instance, care very much for Carlyle’s literary judgments, but for Carlyle’s quality of mind, his flashes of poetic insight, his burden of conscience, his power of portraiture, his heroic moral fibre, we care a great deal. Arnold thought Carlyle’s criticism less sound than Johnson’s,--more tainted with _engouement_, with passion and appetite, as it probably is; but how much more incentive, how much more quickening power, how much more of the stuff of which life is made, do we get from Carlyle than from Johnson or from Arnold himself!

That the criticism is sound is not enough,--it must also warm and stimulate the mind; and if it do this we shall not trouble ourselves very much about its conclusions. Even M. Brunetière says that there are masterpieces in the history of literature and art whose authors were downright fools, as there are, on the other hand, mediocre works from the hands of men of vast intelligence. Very many readers, I fancy, will not rest in the main conclusions at which Tolstoi arrives in his recent discussion of the question “What is art?” but who can fail to feel that here is a large, sincere, helpful soul, whose conception of life and of art is of great value? If we were to estimate Ruskin by the soundness of his judgments alone, we should miss the most important part of him. It is as a prophet of life as well as a critic of art that we value him. Would he be a better critic were he less a prophet?

Or take a more purely critical mind, such as Matthew Arnold’s. Do we care very much even for his literary judgments? Do we not care much more for his qualities as a writer,--his lucidity, his centrality, his style, his continuity of thought, his turns of expression, his particular interpretation of literature and life? His opinions may be sound, but this is not the secret of his power; it resides in something more intimate and personal to himself. The late Principal Shairp was probably as sound a critic as was Arnold, but his work is of much less interest, because it does not contain the same vital expression of a new and distinct type of mind. Arnold was a better critic of literature than of life and history. There were other values than literary ones that were not so clearly within his range. In 1870 he thought the Germans would stand a poor chance in the war with France. How could the German _Gemeinheit_, or commonness, stand up before the French _esprit_? In our civil war, he expected the South to win. Did not the South have distinction? But distinction counts for more in style than in war. Arnold’s criticism has the great merit of being a clear and forcible expression of a fine-bred, high-toned, particular type of man, and that type a pure and noble one. There was no bungling, no crudeness, no straining, no confusion, no snap judgment, and apparently no bias. He was as steady as a clock. His ideas were continuous and homogeneous; they run like living currents all through his works, and give them unity and definitiveness. He is not to be effaced or overthrown; he is only to be matched and appraised. His word is not final, but it is fit and challenges your common sense. His contribution flows into the current of English criticism like a clear stream into a turbid one; it is not deep, but pellucid,--a tributary that improves the quality of the whole. It gives us that refreshment and satisfaction that we always get from the words of a man who speaks in his own right and from ample grounds of personal conviction.

Positive judgments in literature or in art, or in any matters of taste, are dangerous things. The crying want always is for new, fresh power to break up the old verdicts and opinions, and set all afloat again. “We must learn under the master how to destroy him.” The great critic gives us courage to reverse his judgments. Dr. Johnson said that Dryden was the writer who first taught us to determine the merit of composition upon principle; but criticism has been just as much at variance with itself since Dryden’s time as it was before. It is an art, and not a science,--one of the forms of literary art, wherein, as in all other forms of art, the man, and not the principle, is the chief factor.

III

When one thinks of it, how diverse and contradictory have been the judgments of even the best critics! Behold how Macaulay’s verdicts differ from Carlyle’s, Carlyle’s from Arnold’s, Arnold’s from Frederic Harrison’s or Morley’s or Stephen’s or Swinburne’s; how Taine and Sainte-Beuve diverge upon Balzac; how Renan and Arnold diverge upon Hugo; how Lowell and Emerson diverge upon Whitman; and how wide apart are contemporary critics about the merits of Browning, Ibsen, Tolstoi. Landor could not tolerate Dante, and even the great Goethe told Eckermann that Dante was one of the authors he was forbidden to read. In Byron’s judgment, Griffiths and Rogers were greater poets than Wordsworth and Coleridge. The German Professor Grimm sees in Goethe “the greatest poet of all times and all people,” which makes Matthew Arnold smile. Chateaubriand considered Racine as much superior to Shakespeare as the Apollo Belvidere is superior to an uncouth Egyptian statue. Every nation, says a French critic, has its chords of sensibility that are utterly incomprehensible to another. “Many and diverse,” says Arnold, “must be the judgments passed upon every great poet, upon every considerable writer.” And it seems that the greater the writer or poet, the more diverse and contradictory will be the judgments upon him. The small men are easily disposed of,--there is no dispute about them; but the great ones baffle and try us. It is around their names, as Sainte-Beuve somewhere remarks, that there goes on a perpetual critical tournament.