Part 9

We might fitly contrast these two types of mind under the heads of Protestant and Catholic, the one personal, the other impersonal. With the Protestant type goes individualism, which, as I have said, is so marked a feature of the modern world. With the Catholic type goes institutionalism, which was so marked a feature of the ancient world. With the former goes the right of private judgment, innovation, progress, new forms of art; with the latter goes authority, obedience, the power of the past. The Protestant type is more capricious and willful; it is restless, venturesome, impatient of rules and precedents; the older type is more serene, composed, conservative, orderly. In criticism it is more objective; it upholds the standards, it lays down the law; it cherishes the academic spirit. The French mind is the more Catholic; the English the more Protestant. In literature the Protestant type is the more subjective and creative; it makes new discoveries, it founds new orders. Catholicism is exterior, formal, imposing; it takes little account of personal needs and peculiarities, while Protestantism is almost entirely concerned with the private, interior world. Individualism in religion begat Protestantism, and upon Protestantism it begat the numerous progeny of the sects, the thousand and one isms that now divide the religious world. To this spirit religion is something personal and private to every man, and in no sense a matter of forms and rituals. In fact, individualism fairly confronts institutionalism. This spirit carried into the region of æsthetics or literature gives rise to like results,--to a freer play of personal taste and preferences, to more intense individual utterances, to new and unique types of artistic genius, and to new lines of activity in the æsthetic field.

Another name for it is the democratic spirit. Its special dangers are the crude, the odd, the capricious, just as the danger of institutionalism is the coldly formal, the lifeless, the traditional. In English literature the former begat Shakespeare, as it did Tupper; the latter begat Milton, as it did Young and Pollock. With institutionalism goes the divine right of kings, the sacredness of priests, the authority of forms and ceremonies, and the slavery of the masses; with individualism goes the divinity of man, the sacredness of life, the right of private judgment, the decay of traditions and forms, and the birth of the modern spirit. With one goes stateliness, impressiveness, distinction, as well as the empty, the moribund, the despotic; with the other goes force, strenuousness, originality, as well as the loud, the amorphous, the fanatical.

V

Goethe said that a loving interest in the person and the works of an author, amounting to a certain one-sided enthusiasm, alone led to reality in criticism; all else was vanity. No doubt more will come of the contact of two minds under these circumstances than from what is called the judicial attitude; there will be more complete fusion and interpenetration; without a certain warmth and passion there is no fruitfulness, even in criticism. In the field of art and literature, to be disinterested does not mean to be cold and judicial; it means to be free from bias, free from theories and systems, with mind open to receive a clear impression of the work’s characteristic merits and qualities.

It is tradition that always stands in the way of the new man. In politics, it is the political tradition; in religion, the religious tradition; and in literature, the literary tradition. Professional criticism is the guardian of the literary tradition, and this is why any man who essays a new departure in literary art has reason to fear criticism or despise it, as the case may be.

It is when we take up any new work in the judicial spirit, bent upon judging and classifying, rather than upon enjoying and understanding, the conscious analytical intellect on duty and the sympathies and the intuitions under lock and key, that there is danger that judicial blindness will fall upon us. When we approach nature in the spirit of technical science, our minds already preoccupied with certain conclusions and systems, do we get as much of the joy and stimulus which she holds for us as do the children on the way to school of a spring morning with their hands full of wild flowers, or as does the gleesome saunterer over hills in summer with only love and appreciation uppermost in his mind?

Professional criticism often becomes mere pedagogical narrowness and hardness; it gets crushed over with rules and precedents, pinched and sterilized by routine and convention, so that a new work makes no impression upon it. The literary tradition, like the religious tradition, ceases to be vital and formative.

Is it not true that all first-class works have to be approached with a certain humility and free giving of one’s self? In a sense, “except ye become as little children” ye cannot enter the kingdom of the great books.

I suppose that to get at the true inwardness of any imaginative work, we must read it as far as possible in its own spirit, and that if it does not engraft and increase its own spirit upon us, then it is feeble and may easily be brushed aside.

Criticism which has for its object the discovery of new talent and, in Sainte-Beuve’s words, to “apportion to each kind of greatness its due influence and superiority,” is one thing; and criticism the object of which is to uphold and enforce the literary tradition, is quite another. Consciously or unconsciously, when the trained reader opens a new book he is under the influence of one or the other of these notions,--either he submits himself to it disinterestedly, intent only upon seizing and appreciating its characteristic quality, or he comes prepossessed with certain rules and standards upon which his taste has been formed. In other words, he comes to the new work simply as a man, a human being seeking edification, or he comes clothed in some professional authority, seeking judgment.

Our best reading is a search for the excellent; but what is the excellent? Is there any final standard of excellence in literature? Each may be excellent after its kind, but kinds differ. There is one excellence of Milton and Arnold and the classic school, and another excellence of Shakespeare and Pope and Burns and Wordsworth and Whitman, or of the romantic and democratic school. The critic is to hold a work up to its own ideal or standard. Of the perfect works, of the works that aim at perfection, at absolute symmetry and proportion, appealing to us through the cunning of their form, scheme, structure, details, ornamentation, we make a different demand from the one we make of a primitive, unique, individual utterance or expression of personality like “Leaves of Grass,” in which the end is not form, but life; not perfection, but suggestion; not intellect, but character; not beauty, but power; not carving, or sculpture, or architecture, but the building of a man.

It is no doubt a great loss to be compelled to read any work of literary art in a conscious critical mood, because the purely intellectual interest in such a work which criticism demands, is far less satisfying than our æsthetic interest. The mood in which we enjoy a poem is analogous to that in which it was conceived. We have here the reason why the professional reviewer is so apt to miss the characteristic quality of the new book, and why the readers of great publishing houses make so many mistakes. They call into play a conscious mental force that is inimical to the emotional mood in which the work had its rise; what was love in the poet becomes a pale intellectual reflection in the critic.

Love must come first, or there can be no true criticism; the intellectual process must follow and be begotten by an emotional process. Indeed, criticism is an afterthought; it is such an account as we can give of the experience we have had in private communion with the subject of it. The conscious analytical intellect takes up one by one, and examines the impression made upon our subconsciousness by the new poem or novel.

Where nothing has been sown, nothing can be reaped. The work that has yielded us no enjoyment will yield us no positive results in criticism. Dr. Louis Waldstein, in his suggestive work on “The Subconscious Self,” discovers that the critical or intellectual mood is foreign to art; that it destroys or decreases the spontaneity necessary to creation. This is why the critical and the creative faculty so rarely go together, or why one seems to work against the other. Probably in all normal, well-balanced minds the appreciation of a work of the imagination is a matter of feeling and intuition long before it is a matter of intellectual cognizance. Not all minds can give a reason for the faith that is in them, and it is not important that they should; the main matter is the faith. Every great work of art will be found upon examination to have an ample ground of critical principles to rest upon, though in the artist’s own mind not one of these principles may have been consciously defined.

Indeed, the artist who works from any theory is foredoomed to at least partial failure. And art that lends itself to any propaganda, or to any idea “outside its essential form, falls short of being a pure art creation.”

The critical spirit, when it has hardened into fixed standards, is always a bar to the enjoyment or understanding of a poet. One then has a poetical creed, as he has a political or religious creed, and this creed is likely to stand between him and the appreciation of a new poetic type. Macaulay thought Leigh Hunt was barred from appreciating his “Lays of Ancient Rome” by his poetical creed, which may have been the case. Jeffrey was no doubt barred from appreciating Wordsworth by his poetical creed. It was Byron’s poetical creed that led him to rank Pope so highly. A critic who holds to one of the conflicting creeds about fiction, either that it should be realistic or romantic, will not do justice to the other type. If Tolstoi is his ideal, he will set little value on Scott; or if he exalts Hawthorne, he will depreciate Howells. What the disinterested observer demands is the best possible work of each after its kind. Or, if he is to compare and appraise the two kinds, then I think that without doubt his conclusion will be that the realistic novel is the later, maturer growth, more in keeping with the modern demand for reality in all fields, and that the romantic belongs more to the world of childish things, which we are fast leaving behind us.

Our particular predilections in literature must, no doubt, be carefully watched. There is danger in personal absorption in an author,--danger to our intellectual freedom. One would not feel for a poet the absorbing and exclusive love that the lover feels for his mistress, because one would rather have the whole of literature for his domain. One would rather admire Rabelais with Sainte-Beuve, as a Homeric buffoon, than be a real “Pantagruelist devotee,” who finds a flavor even in “the dregs of Master François’s cask” that he prefers to all others. No doubt some of us, goaded on by the opposite vice in readers and critics, have been guilty of an intemperate enthusiasm toward Whitman and Browning. To make a cult of either of these authors, or of any other, is to shut one’s self up in a part when the whole is open to him. The opposite vice, that of violent personal antipathy, is equally to be avoided in criticism. Probably Sainte-Beuve was guilty of this vice in his attitude toward Balzac; Schérer in his criticism of Béranger, and Landor in his dislike of Dante. One might also cite Emerson’s distaste for Poe and Shelley, and Arnold’s antipathy to Victor Hugo’s poetry. Likes and dislikes in literature that are temperamental, that are like the attraction or repulsion of bodies in different electrical conditions, are hard to be avoided, but the trained reader may hope to overcome them. Taste is personal, but the intellect is, or should be, impersonal, and to be able to guide the former by the light of the latter is the signal triumph of criticism.

VI

“THOU SHALT NOT PREACH ”

_After Reading Tolstoi on “What is Art?”_

There is one respect in which pure art and pure science agree: both are disinterested, and seek the truth, each of its kind, for its own sake; neither has any axe to grind. Both would live in the whole,--one through reason and investigation, the other through imagination and contemplation. Science seeks to understand the universe, art to enjoy it. A man of pure science like Darwin is as disinterested as a great artist like Shakespeare. He has no practical or secondary ends; the truth alone is his quest. He is tracing the footsteps of creative energy through organic nature. He is like a detective working up a case. His theory about it is only provisional, for the moment. Every fact is welcome to him, and the more it seems to tell against his theory of the case, the more eagerly he weighs it and studies it. Indeed, the man of science follows an ideal as truly as does the poet, and will pass by fortune, honors, and all worldly success, to cleave to it. Tolstoi thinks that science for science’ sake is as bad as art for art’s sake; but is not knowledge a reward in itself, and is there any higher good than that mastery of the intellect over the problems of the universe which science gives? By bending science to particular and secondary ends we lay the basis of our material civilization, but it is still true that the final end of science is, not our material benefit, but our mental enlightenment; nor is the highest end of art the good which the preacher and the moralist seek to give us. A poem of Milton’s or Tennyson’s carries its own proof, its own justification. When we demand a message of the poet, or of any artist, outside of himself, outside of the truth which he unconsciously conveys through his own personality and point of view, we degrade his art, or destroy that disinterestedness which is its crown. Art exists for ideal ends; it looks askance at devotees, at doctrinaires, at all men engaged in the dissemination of particular ideas. I am not now thinking of art as mere craft, but as the province of man’s freest, most spontaneous, most joyous, most complete soul activity,--the kind of activity that has no other end, seeks no other reward, than it finds in or of itself, the joy of being and beholding, the free play of creative energy. Art does not rebuke vice, it depicts it; it does not urge reform, it shows us the reformers. Its work is play, its lesson is an allegory. The preacher works by selection and exclusion, the artist by inclusion and contrast.

When the resources of literary art are enlisted in any propaganda, in the dissemination of particular ideas or doctrines, or when the end is moral or scientific or political or philosophical, and not æsthetic, the result is a mixed product, a cross between literature and something else, which may be very vigorous and serviceable, but which cannot give the kind of satisfaction that is imparted by a pure artistic creation. A great poem or work of art does not speak to any special and passing condition, mental or spiritual; its ministrations are neither those of meat nor those of medicine; it does not subserve any private or secondary ends, even the saving of our souls. The books that seem written for us are quite certain to lose in interest to the next generation. A great poem heals, not as the doctor heals, but as nature does, by bringing the conditions of health. It consoles, not as the priest consoles, but as love and life themselves do. It does not offer a special good, but a general benefaction.

I once heard Emerson quote with approval Shakespeare’s saying, “Read what you most affect;” but no doubt a broad culture demands wide reading, and that we be on our guard against our particular predilections, because such predilections may lead us into narrow channels. Do the devotees of Browning, those who cry Browning, Browning, and Browning only, do him the highest honor? Do the disciples of Whitman, who would make a cult of him, live in the spirit of the whole, as Whitman himself tried to live?--Whitman, who said that there may be any number of Supremes, and that the chief lesson to be learned under the master is how to destroy him? Our love for an author must not suggest the fondness of the epicure for a special dish, or partake of the lover’s infatuation for his mistress. Infatuation is not permissible in literature. If art does not make us free of the whole, it fails of its purpose. Only the religious bigot builds upon specific texts, and only the one-sided, half-formed mind sees life through the eyes of a single author. In the æsthetic sphere one may serve many masters; he may give himself to none. One of the latest and most mature perceptions that comes to us is the perception of relativity, in art as well as in all other matters.

With respect to this question, both readers and writers may be divided into two classes, the interested and the disinterested,--those who are seeking special and personal ends, and those who are seeking general, universal ends.

The poet is best pleased with the disinterested readers and admirers of his work; that is, with those who take to it on the broadest human grounds, and not upon grounds merely personal to themselves. Thus Longfellow will find a wider and more disinterested audience than Whittier, because his Muse is less in the service of special ideas; he looks at life less as a Quaker and a Puritan, and more as a man.

The special ideas of an age, its moral enthusiasms and revolts, give place to other ideas and enthusiasms, which in their turn give place to others; but there are certain currents of thought and emotion that are perennial, certain experiences common to all men and peoples. Such a poem as Gray’s Elegy, for instance, is filled with the breadth of universal human life. On the other hand, such a work as Schiller’s “Robbers,” or Goethe’s “Werther,” seems to us like an empty shell picked up on the shore, the life entirely gone out of it. One can see why Poe is looked upon by foreign critics as outranking any of our more popular New England poets. It is because his work has more of the ubiquitous character of true art, is less pledged to moral and special ends, less the result of personal tastes and attractions, and more the pure flame of the unpledged æsthetic nature. The “Raven” and “The Bells” have that play, that scorn of personal ends, that potential spiritual energy, of great art. Poe does not increase our stock of ideas or widen the sphere of our sympathies. He was a conjurer with words. As a poet he used language for the music he could evoke from it. What is the mental content of his “Annabel Lee”? It is as vague and shadowy as its angels and demons, its sepulchres and seraphim, and its kingdom by the sea.

Is it Coleridge who tells of an artist who always copied his wife’s legs in his pictures, and thereby won great fame? The creative touch it is that marks the artist. He smites the rocks, and a fountain gushes forth. Tennyson has the artist nature in greater measure than Wordsworth, a more flexible receptive spirit, though he never attains to the homely pathos or the moral grandeur of the latter. Yet individual convictions and attractions played a less part in his poetry. Wordsworth gathered the harvest of his own feelings and experiences, Tennyson that of other men as well. One reaped only where he had sown, the other where all men had sown. One is colored by Westmoreland, the other by the whole of England. Wordsworth wrote more from character and natural bias than Tennyson. What nature does with a man,--that is no credit to him; but what he does with nature. If his character inspired the poem, is it not less than if his imagination had inspired it? What a man does out of and independent of himself, or the degree in which he transcends his own experience and partialities and rises into universal relations,--is not that the measure of him as an artist? If I tell only what I know, what I have felt, what I have seen, no matter how well I do it, that is not to come into the sphere the artist dwells in. What Wordsworth writes is more personal to himself, more out of his own life, than what Tennyson writes. He is more limited by his temperament and natural bias than Tennyson is by his. His word is more inevitable, more the word of fate, but is it not therefore less the word of art? Be sincere, be sincere; be not too sincere, lest you substitute a moral rigidity for the flexibility demanded by art. The artist is never the slave of his sincerity.

Graphic power is only a minor part of artistic power. One can say what one has felt, and tell what one has experienced; but the artist can tell what he has not experienced, and say what he has not felt. He can make the assumed, the imaginary, real to himself and to his reader. He can depict the passion of love, of anger, of remorse, though he may never have felt them. Many persons have written one good novel, but not a second, because in the first they exhausted their experience; to transcend that is denied them. True art will have many messages and many morals, as life and nature have, but we must draw them out for ourselves. They do not lead, they follow; they do not make the argument, they are made by it. Let us repeat and re-repeat. Art makes us free of the whole,--not art for craft’s sake, but art as implying the entire sphere of man’s spontaneous æsthetic activity. Beauty is indeed its own excuse for being. Literature is an end in and of itself, as much as music is or religion is. Or are we religious only upon pay? What message has a bird, a flower, a summer day, frost, rain, wind, snow? There are sermons in stones--when we put them there. What message has Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Virgil, or any true poet? The message we have the power to draw from him, and no two of us will draw the same. Art is a circle; it is complete within itself; it returns forever upon itself. There is no great poetry without great ideas, and yet the ideas must exist as impulse, will, emotion, and not lie upon the surface as formulas. The enemies of art are reflection, special ideas, conscious intellectual processes, because these things isolate us and shut us off from the life of the whole,--from that which we reach through our sentiments and emotions. The æsthetic mood, says the author of “The Subconscious Self,” “is, in its essence, receptive, contemplative, distinctly personal, and therefore free from purpose and conscious selection.” “Whenever a work of art is the vehicle for an idea or purpose outside of its essential form, it falls short of being a pure art creation, and fails in its appeal to the æsthetic mood, whilst, be it conceded, it may serve some other but secondary purpose, which belongs to the province of the archæologist, the art historian, and the collector,” and, we may add, the moralist and preacher. Wordsworth’s poet was content if he “might enjoy the things that others understood,” and this is always characteristic of the poetic mood. Absorption, contemplation, enjoyment, and not criticism and reflection, are as the air it breathes. Byron was a great poet, but, said Goethe, “the moment he reflects, he is a child.” It is better that the poet should not be a child when he reflects, but it is much more important that he be a child when he feels. His power as a poet does not lie in the reflective faculties, but in the direct, joyous, solvent power of his spirit.