Part 7

It would seem that the nearer we are, in point of time, to an event, a man, a book, a work of art, the less likely we are to estimate them rightly, especially if they are out of the usual and involve great questions and points. Such a poet as Dante or Victor Hugo or Whitman, or such a character as Napoleon or Cromwell or John Brown, or such an artist as Angelo or Turner or Millet, will require time to settle his claim. In literature, the men of the highest order, to be understood, must undoubtedly, in a measure, wait for the growth of the taste of themselves, or until their own ideals have become at home in men’s minds. With every great innovation, in whatever field, every year that passes finds our minds better adjusted to it and more keenly alive to its merits. Contemporary criticism is bound to be contradictory. Men take opposite views of current questions; they are too near them to see all their bearings. How different the aspect the slavery question wears at this distance, and the civil war that grew out of it, from the face they wore a generation or two ago! It is only the few great minds that see to-day what the masses will see to-morrow. They occupy a vantage ground of character and principle that is like an eminence in a landscape, commanding a wide view. Sainte-Beuve certainly did injustice to Balzac, and Schérer to Béranger. Theirs were contemporary judgments, and personal antipathy played a large part in them. Sainte-Beuve says that when two good intellects pass totally different judgments on the same author, it is because they are not fixing their thoughts, for the moment, on the same object; they have not the whole of him before their eyes; their view does not take him in entirely. That is just it: we each look for different values; we are more keenly alive to some merits than to others; what one critic misses another sees. We are more or less like chemical elements, that unite eagerly with some of their fellows, and not with others. The elective affinities are at work everywhere,--where is the critical genius that is a universal solvent? Probably Sainte-Beuve himself comes as near it as anybody who has lived.

IV

It is not truth alone that makes literature; it is truth plus a man. Readers fancy they are interested in the birds and flowers they find in the pages of the poets; but no, it is the poets themselves that they are interested in. There are the same birds and flowers in the fields and woods,--do they care for them? In many of the authors of whom Sainte-Beuve writes I have no interest, but I am always interested in Sainte-Beuve’s view of them, in the play of his intelligence and imagination over and around them. After reading his discussion of Cowper, or Fénelon, or Massillon, or Pascal, it is not the flavor of these writers that remains in my mind, but the flavor of the critic himself. I am under his spell, and not that of his subject. Is not this equally true of the criticism of Goethe, or Carlyle, or Macaulay, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Coleridge, or any other? The pages of these writers are no more a transparent medium, through which we see the subject as in itself it is, than are those of any other creative artist. Science shows us, or aims to show us, the thing as it is; but art shows it to us tinged by the prismatic rays of the human spirit. Criticism that warms and interests is perpetual creation, as Sainte-Beuve suggested. It is a constant combination of the subject with the thought of the critic. When Mr. James writes upon Sainte-Beuve we are under his spell; it is Mr. James that absorbs and delights us now. We get the truth about his subject, of course, but it is always in combination with the truth about Mr. James. The same is true when Macaulay writes about Milton, and Carlyle about Burns or Johnson, and Emerson about Montaigne or Plato, and Lowell about Thoreau or Wordsworth,--the critic reveals himself in and through his subject.

We do not demand that Arnold get the real Arnold out of the way and merge himself into general humanity (this he cannot do in any case), but only that he put aside the conscious exterior Arnold, so to speak,--Arnold the supercilious, the contemptuous, the hater of dissent, the teaser of the Philistine. The critic must escape from the local and accidental. We would have Macaulay cease to be a Whig, Johnson cease to be a Tory, Schérer forget his theological training, and Brunetière escape from his Catholic bias.

V

No matter how much truth the critic tells us, if his work does not itself rise to the dignity of good literature, if he does not use language in a vital and imaginative way, we shall not care for him. Literary and artistic truth is not something that can be seized and repeated indifferently by this man and by that, like the truths of science: it must be reproduced or recreated by the critic; it must be as vital in his page as in that of his author. The truths of science are static; the truths of art are dynamic. If a mediocre mind writes about Shakespeare, the result is mediocre, no matter how much bare truth he tells us.

What, then, do we mean by a great critic? We mean a great mind that finds complete self-expression in and through the works of other men. Arnold found more complete self-expression through literary criticism than through any other channel: hence he is greatest here; his theological and religious criticism shows him to less advantage. Sainte-Beuve tried poetry and fiction, but did not find a complete outlet for his talent till he tried criticism. Not a profound or original mind, but a wonderfully flexible, tolerant, sympathetic, engaging one; a climbing plant, one might say, that needed some support to display itself to the best advantage. We say of the French mind generally that it is more truly a critical mind than the English; it finds in criticism a better field for the display of its special gifts--taste, clearness, brevity, flexibility, judgment--than does the more original and profoundly emotional English. French criticism is rarely profound, but it is always light, apt, graceful, delicate, lucid, felicitous,--clear sense and good taste marvelously blended.

Criticism in its scientific aspects or as a purely intellectual effort--a search for the exact truth, a sifting of evidence, weighing and comparing data, disentangling testimony, separating the false from the true, as with the lawyer, the doctor, the man of science, the critic of old texts and documents--is one thing. Criticism of literature and art, involving questions of taste, style, poetic and artistic values, is quite another, and demands quite other powers. In the former case it is mainly judicial, dispassionate, impersonal; in the latter case the sympathies and special predilections are more involved. We seek more or less to interpret the imaginative writer, to draw out and emphasize his special quality and stimulus, to fuse him and restate him in other terms; and in doing this we give ourselves more freely. We cannot fully interpret what we do not love, and love has eyes the judgment knows not of. What a man was born to say, what he speaks out of his most radical selfhood,--that the same fate and power in you can alone fully estimate and interpret.

VI

One’s search after the truth in subjective matters is more or less a search after one’s self, after what is agreeable to one’s constitutional bias or innate partialities. We do not see the thing as it is in itself so much as we see it as it stands related to our individual fragment of existence. The lesson we are slowest to learn and to act upon is the relativity of truth in all these matters, or that it is what we make it. It is a product of the mind, as the apple is of the tree. We get one kind of truth from Renan, another from Taine, still another from Ruskin or Carlyle or Arnold. The quality differs according as the minds or spirits differ whence the truth proceeds. Do we expect all the apples in the orchard to be alike? In general qualities, but not in particular flavors; and in literature it is the particular flavor that is most precious. It is the quality imparted to the truth by the conceiving mind that we prize.

It is a long while before we rise to the perception that opposites are true, that contrary types equally serve. “One supreme does not contradict another supreme,” says Whitman, “any more than one eyesight contravenes another eyesight, or one hearing contravenes another hearing.” Great men have been radical and great men have been conservative; great men have been orthodox and they have been heterodox; they have been forces of expansion and they have been forces of contraction. In literature, it is good to be a realist, and it is good to be a romanticist; it is good to be a Dumas, and it is good to be a Zola; it is good to be a Carlyle, and it is good to be a Mazzini,--always provided that one is so from the inside and not from without, from original conviction and not from hearsay or conformity.

A man makes his way in the world amid opposing forces; he becomes something only by overcoming something; there is always a struggle for survival, and always merit in that which survives. Let each be perfect after its kind. We do not object to the Gothic type of mind because it is not the classic, nor to the Englishman because he is not the Frenchman. We look for the measure of nature or natural force and authority in these types. Nature is of all types; she is of to-day as well as of yesterday; she is of this century as well as of the first; she was with Burns as well as with Pindar. Because the Greek was natural, shall we say therefore nature is Greek? She is Asiatic, Icelandic, Saxon, Celtic, American, as well. She is all things to all men; and without her nothing is that is.

VII

Truth is both subjective and objective. The former is what is agreeable to one’s constitution and point of view, or mental and spiritual make-up. Objective truth is verifiable truth, or what agrees with outward facts and conditions.

Criticism deals with both aspects. It is objective when it is directed upon objective or verifiable facts; it is subjective when it is directed upon subjective facts. It is an objective fact, for instance, that such a man as Shakespeare lived in such a country in such a time, that he wrote various plays of such and such a character, and that these plays were founded upon other plays or legends or histories. But the poetic truth, the poetic beauty of these plays, their covert meanings, the philosophy that lies back of them, are not in the same sense objective facts. In these respects no two persons read them just alike. Hamlet has been interpreted in many ways. Which Hamlet is the true one, Goethe’s, or Coleridge’s, or Hazlitt’s, or Kean’s, or Booth’s? Each is true, so far as it expresses a real and vital conception begotten by the poet upon the critic’s or the actor’s mind. The beauty of a poem or any work of art is not an objective something patent to all; it is an experience of the mind which we each have in different degrees. In fact, the field of our æsthetic perceptions and enjoyments is no more fixed and definite than is the field of our religious perceptions and enjoyments, and we diverge from one another in the one case as much as in the other. This divergence is of course, in both cases, mainly superficial; it is in form and not in essence. Religions perish, but religion remains. Styles of art pass, but art abides. Go deep enough and we all agree, because human nature is fundamentally the same everywhere. All that I mean to say is that the outward expressions of art differ in different ages and among different races as much as do the outward expressions of religion. In all these matters the subjective element plays an important part. Is Browning a greater poet than Tennyson? Is Thackeray a greater novelist than Dickens? Has Newman a better style than Arnold? Is Poe our greatest poet, as many British critics think? These and all similar questions involve the personal equation of the critic, and his answer to them will be given more by his unconscious than by his conscious self. The appeal is not so much to his rational faculties as to his secret affinities or his æsthetic perceptions. You can move a man’s reason, but you cannot by any similar process change his taste or his faith. If we are not by nature committed to certain views, we are committed to a certain habit of mind, to a certain moral and spiritual attitude, which makes these views almost inevitable to us. “It is not given to all minds,” says Sainte-Beuve, “to feel and to relish equally the peculiar beauties and excellences of Massillon,” or, it may be added, of any other author, especially if he be of marked individuality.

We do not and cannot all have the same measure of appreciation of Emerson, or Wordsworth, or Ruskin, or Whitman, or Browning. To enjoy these men “sincerely and without weariness is a quality and almost a peculiarity of certain minds, which may serve to define them.” Sainte-Beuve himself was chiefly interested in an author’s character,--“in what was most individual in his personality.” He had no arbitrary rules, touchstones, or systems, but pressed each new work gently, almost caressingly, till it gave up its characteristic quality and flavor.

But the objective consideration of the merits of a man’s work does not and cannot preclude or measure the subjective attraction or repulsion or indifference which we do or do not feel toward that work. Something deeper and more potent than reason is at work here. Back of the most impartial literary judgment lies the fact that the critic is a person; that he is of a certain race, family, temperament, environment; that he is naturally cold or sympathetic, liberal or reactionary, tolerant or intolerant, and therefore has his individual likes and dislikes; that certain types attract him more than others; that, of two poets of equal power, the voice of one moves him more than that of the other. Something as subtle and vital and hard to analyze as the flavor of a fruit, and analogous to it, makes him prefer this poet to that. One may see clearly the superiority of Milton over Wordsworth, and yet cleave to the latter. How beautiful is “Lycidas,” yet it left Dr. Johnson cold and critical. There is much more of a cry--a real cry of the heart--in Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” One feels that the passion is real in one, and assumed in the other. Is “Lycidas” therefore less a creative work? The affirmative side of the question is not without support. Johnson undervalued some of Gray’s best work; the touch of sympathy was lacking. This touch of sympathy does not wait upon the critical judgment, but often underruns and outruns it. It is said that Miss Martineau found “Tom Jones” dull reading, that Charlotte Brontë cared not for Jane Austen, and that Thackeray placed Cooper above Scott,--all, no doubt, from a lack of the quickening touch of sympathy.

As a rule, we have more sympathy with the authors of our own country than with those of another. Few Englishmen can do justice to Victor Hugo, and even to some Frenchmen he is a “gigantic blusterer.” It is equally hard for a Frenchman to appreciate Carlyle, and how absurd seems Voltaire’s verdict upon Shakespeare,--“a drunken savage”!

The French mind is preëminently a critical mind, yet in France there are and have been as many schools of criticism as of poetry or philosophy or romance. Different types of mind, individual idiosyncrasy, opposing theories and methods, stand out just as clearly in this branch as in any other branch of mental activity. From Madame de Staël down through Barante, Villemain, Nisard, Sainte-Beuve, to Brunetière and the critics of our own day, criticism has been individualistic, and has reflected as many types of mind and points of view as there have been critics. Where shall we look for the final criticism? First it is classicism that rules, then it is romanticism, then naturalism, and next, we are told, it is to be idealism. Whichever it is, it is true enough when uttered by vital and earnest minds, and serves its purpose. There are many excellences, but where is the supreme excellence? The naturalism of Sainte-Beuve is excellent, the positivism of Nisard is excellent, the classicism of Brunetière is excellent, and the determinism of Taine yields interesting results; but all are relative, all are experimental, all are subject to revision. It is given to no man to have a monopoly of truth. It is given to no poet to have a monopoly of beauty. There is one beauty of Milton, another of Wordsworth, another of Burns, another of Tennyson. To seize upon and draw out the characteristic beauty of each, and give his reader a lively sense of it, is the business of the critic.

VIII

Our reading is a search for the excellent, for the vital and characteristic, which may assume as many and diverse forms in art and literature as it does in life and nature. The savant, the scientist, the moralist, the philosopher, may have pleasure in a work that gives little or no pleasure to the literary artist. Criticism may be looked upon as a search for these various values or various phases of truth, which the critic expresses in terms of his own taste, knowledge, insight, etc., for scientific values, philosophical values, literary and poetic values, or moral and religious values, according to the subject upon which the critical mind is directed. No two men look for exactly the same values, nor have the same measure of appreciation of them. Emerson and Lowell, for instance, make quite different demands and form different estimates of the poets they read. Lowell lays the emphasis upon the conventional literary values, Emerson more upon spiritual and religious values. An Englishman will find values in the poets of his own country that a Frenchman does not find, and a Frenchman, values in his poets that an Englishman does not find. See how Schérer and Taine handled Milton. Milton’s great epic has poetic and literary value, often of a high order, but ad philosophy or religion it is grotesque.

IX

Yet let me not seem to underrate the value of what is called judicial criticism. Criticism as an act of judgment, as a disinterested endeavor to see the thing as it is in itself and as it stands related to other things, is justly jealous of our personal tastes and preferences. These tastes and preferences may blind us to the truth. Can we admire above them, or even against them? To cherish no writers but those of our own stripe or mental complexion is the way of the half cultured. Can we rise to a disinterested view? The danger of individualism in letters is caprice, bias, partial views; the danger of intellectualism is the cold, the colorless, the formal.

The ideal critic will blend the two; he will be disinterested and yet sympathetic, individual and yet escape caprice and bias, warm with interest and yet cool with judgment; surrendering himself to his subject and yet not losing himself in it, upholding tradition and yet welcoming new talent, giving the personal equation free play without blurring the light of the impersonal intelligence. From the point of view of intellectualism, criticism seeks to eliminate the personal equation, that which is private and peculiar to us as individuals, and to base criticism upon something like universal principles. What we crave, what our minds literally feed upon, may blind us to the truly excellent. Our _wants_ are personal; what we should aim at is an excellence that is impersonal. When we rise to the sphere of the disinterested, we lose sight of our individual tastes and predilections. The question then is, not what we want, not what we have a taste for, but what we are capable of appreciating. Can we appreciate the best? Can we share the universal mind to the extent of delighting in the best that has been known and thought in the world? Emerson said he was always glad to meet people who saw the superiority of Shakespeare to all other poets. If we prefer Pope to Shakespeare, as we are apt to at a certain age, we may know by that that there is an excellence beyond our reach. It is certain that the mass of readers will not appreciate the best literature, but only the second or third best. A man’s æsthetic perceptions may be broadened and educated as well as his intellectual. An unread man feels little interest beyond his own neighborhood,--the personal doings of the men and women he sees and knows. Educate him a little, give him his county paper, and the sphere of his interests is widened; a little more, and he takes an interest in his State; more still, and he broadens out to his whole country; still more, and the whole world is within his sympathy and ken. So in the aesthetic sphere; he gets beyond his personal tastes and wants into the great world currents of literature and art. He can appreciate works written in other ages and lands, and that are quite foreign to his own temperament and outlook. This is to be disinterested. To emancipate the taste is as much as to emancipate the intellect; to rise above one’s personal affinities is as much as to rise above one’s personal prejudices and superstitions. The boy of a certain stamp has an affinity for the dime novel; if we can lift him to an appreciation of Scott, or Thackeray, or Hawthorne, how have we emancipated his taste! So that Brunetière was right in saying that, in art and literature, the beginning of wisdom is to distrust what we like. _Distrust_, not repudiate. Let us examine first and see upon what grounds we like it,--see if we _ought_ to like it; see if it is akin to that which is of permanent value in the world’s best thought. A French critic tells a story of a man who sat cool and unmoved under a sermon that made the people about him shed torrents of tears, and who excused himself by saying, “I do not belong to this parish.” One’s tastes must be broader than one’s parish. I suppose any of our religious brethren would feel a little shy of weeping in the church of a religious denomination not his own. Our religion is no more emancipated than are our tastes. Lowell says there are born Popists and born Wordsworthians; but the more these types can get out of their limitations and appreciate one another, the more they are emancipated.

V

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM

I

The criticism of criticism is one of the marked literary characteristics of the last ten or fifteen years, both in this country and in Europe. It is seen in France in Brunetière’s essays and in Hennequin’s “Scientific Criticism;” in England in the recent work of Wm. B. Wordsfold on the “Principles of Criticism” and in Mr. John M. Robertson’s two volumes of “Essays toward a Critical Method;” in this country in Mr. Howells’s “Criticism and Fiction,” in Prof. Johnson’s “Elements of Criticism” and in the still more recent work of Professor Sears on “Methods and Principles of Criticism,” besides the numerous discussions of the subject in the magazines and literary journals.