Part 3

Again, judging is often spoken of as the critic's business; and so in some sense it is. But the judgment which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge, is the valuable one; and, therefore, knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic's great concern for himself. And it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass along with it--as a sort of companion and clue--that he will generally do most good to his readers.

To get near the standard of the best that is known and thought in the world, every critic should possess one great literature at least beside his own; and the more unlike his own the better. For the criticism I am concerned with regards Europe as being for intellectual and spiritual purposes one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result.

I conclude with what I said at the beginning. To have the sense of creative activity is not denied to criticism; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity, a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to that he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible. Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true man of letters ever can forget it? It is no such common matter for a gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely to underrate it. The glorious epochs of Æschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their pre-eminence. In an epoch like those is the true life of literature; there is the promised land towards which criticism can only beckon.

_IV.--Should We Have an Academy?_

It is impossible to put down a book like the history of the French Academy by Pellisson and D'Olivet without being led to reflect upon the absence in our own country of any institution like the French Academy, upon the probable causes of this absence, and upon its results. Improvement of the language was the declared grand aim for the operations of that academy. Its statutes of foundation say expressly that "the Academy's principal function shall be to work with all the care and all the diligence possible at giving sure rules to our language, and rendering it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and sciences." It is said that Richelieu had it in his mind that French should succeed Latin in its general ascendancy, as Latin had succeeded Greek. If it were so, even this wish has to some extent been fulfilled. This was not all Richelieu had in his mind, however. The new academy was meant to be a literary tribunal, a high court of letters, and this is what it has really been.

Such an effort, to set up a recognised authority, imposing on us a high standard in matters of intellect and taste, has many enemies in human nature. We all of us like to go our own way, and not to be forced out of the atmosphere of commonplace habitual to most of us. We like to be suffered to lie comfortably on the old straw of our habits, especially of our intellectual habits, even though this straw may not be very fine and clean. But if this effort to limit the freedom of our lower nature finds enemies in human nature, it also finds auxiliaries in it. Man alone of living creatures, says Cicero, goes feeling after the discovery of an order, a law of good taste; other creatures submissively fulfil the law of their nature.

Now in France, says M. Sainte-Beuve, "the first consideration for us is not whether we are amused and pleased by a work of art or of mind, or is it whether we are touched by it. What we seek above all to learn is whether we were right in being amused with it, and in applauding it, and in being moved by it." A Frenchman has, to a considerable degree, what one may call a conscience in intellectual matters. Seeing this, we are on the road to see why the French have their Academy and we have nothing of the kind.

What are the essential characteristics of the spirit of our nation? Our greatest admirers would not claim for us an open and clear mind, a quick and flexible intelligence. Rather would they allege as our chief spiritual characteristics energy and honesty--most important and fruitful qualities in the intellectual and spiritual, as in the moral sphere, for, of what we call genius, energy is the most essential part. Now, what that energy, which is the life of genius, above everything demands and insists upon, is freedom--entire independence of authority, prescription and routine, the fullest power to extend as it will. Therefore, a nation whose chief spiritual characteristic is energy will not be very apt to set up in intellectual matters a fixed standard, an authority like an academy. By this it certainly escapes real inconveniences and dangers, and it can, at the same time, reach undeniably splendid heights in poetry and science. We have Shakespeare, and we have Newton. In the intellectual sphere there can be no higher names.

On the other hand, some of the requisites of intellectual work are specially the affair of quickness of mind and flexibility of intelligence. In prose literature they are of first-rate importance. These are elements that can, to a certain degree, be appropriated, while the free activity of genius cannot. Academies consecrate and maintain them, and therefore a nation with an eminent turn for them naturally establishes academies.

_V.--Our Loss Through Provinciality_

How much greater is our nation in poetry than prose! How much better do the productions of its spirit show in the qualities of genius than in the qualities of intelligence! But the question as to the utility of academies to the intellectual life of a nation is not settled when we say that we have never had an academy, yet we have, confessedly, a very great literature. It is by no means sure that either our literature or the general intellectual life of our nation has got already without academies all that academies can give. Our literature, in spite of the genius manifested in it, may fall short in form, method, precision, proportions, arrangement--all things where intelligence proper comes in. It may be weak in prose, full of haphazard, crudeness, provincialism, eccentricity, violence, blundering; and instead of always fixing our thoughts upon the points in which our literature is strong, we should, from time to time, fix them upon those in which it is weak. In France, the Academy serves as a sort of centre and rallying-point to educated opinion, and gives it a force which it has not got here. In the bulk of the intellectual work of a nation which has no centre, no intellectual metropolis like an academy, there is observable a note of provinciality. Great powers of mind will make a man think profoundly, but not even great powers of mind will keep his taste and style perfectly sound and sure if he is left too much to himself with no sovereign organ of opinion near him.

Even men like Jeremy Taylor and Burke suffer here. Theirs is too often extravagant prose; prose too much suffered to indulge its caprices; prose at too great a distance from the centre of good taste; prose with the note of provinciality; Asiatic prose, somewhat barbarously rich and overloaded. The note of provinciality in Addison is to be found in the commonplace of his ideas, though his style is classical. Where there is no centre like an academy, if you have genius and powerful ideas, you are apt not to have the best style going; if you have precision of style and not genius, you are apt not to have the best ideas going.

The provincial spirit exaggerates the value of its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which to try them; it is hurried away by fancies; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too exclusively; its admiration weeps hysterical tears, and its disapprobation foams at the mouth. So we get the eruptive and aggressive manner in literature. Not having the lucidity of a large and centrally-placed intelligence, the provincial spirit has not its graciousness; it does not persuade, it makes war; it has not urbanity, the tone of the city, of the centre, the tone that always aims at a spiritual and intellectual effect. It loves hard-hitting rather than persuading. The newspaper, with its party spirit, its resolute avoidance of shades and distinctions, is its true literature. In England there needs a miracle of genius like Shakespeare to produce balance of mind, and a miracle of intellectual delicacy like Dr. Newman's to produce urbanity of style.

The reader will ask for some practical conclusion about the establishment of an academy in this country, and perhaps I shall hardly give him the one he expects. Nations have their own modes of acting, and these modes are not easily changed; they are even consecrated when great things have been done in them. When a literature has produced a Shakespeare and a Milton, when it has even produced a Barrow and a Burke, it cannot well abandon its traditions; it can hardly begin at this late time of day with an institution like the French Academy. An academy quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest literary opinion, a recognised authority in matters of intellectual tone and taste, we shall hardly have, and perhaps ought not to wish to have. But then every one amongst us with any turn for literature at all will do well to remember to what shortcomings and excesses, which such an academy tends to correct, we are liable, and the more liable, of course, for not having it. He will do well constantly to try himself in respect of these, steadily to widen his culture, and severely to check in himself the provincial spirit.

_VI.--Some Illustrative Criticisms_

To try and approach Truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, not to persist in pressing forward on any one side with violence and self-will--it is only thus that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious goddess whom we shall never see except in outline.

The grand power of poetry is the power of dealing with things so as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new and intimate sense of them and of our relation with them, so that we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects, to have their secret, and be in harmony with them, and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can. Maurice de Guérin manifested this magical power of poetry in singular eminence. His passion for perfection disdained all poetical work that was not perfectly adequate and felicitous.

His sister Eugénie de Guérin has the same characteristic quality--distinction. Of this quality the world is impatient; it chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it, but ends by receiving its influence and by undergoing its law. This quality at last inexorably corrects the world's blunders, and fixes the world's ideals.

Heine claimed that he was "a brave soldier in the war of the liberation of humanity." That was his significance. He was, if not pre-eminently a brave, yet a brilliant soldier in the war of liberation of humanity. He was not an adequate interpreter of the modern world, but only a brilliant soldier.

Born in 1754, and dying in 1824, Joseph Joubert chose to hide his life; but he was a man of extraordinary ardour in the search for truth and of extraordinary fineness in the perception of it. He was one of those wonderful lovers of light who, when they have an idea to put forth, brood long over it first, and wait patiently till it shines.

GEORGE BRANDES

Main Currents of the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

George Brandes was born in Copenhagen on February 4, 1842, and was educated at the University of Copenhagen. The appearance of his "Æsthetic Studies" in 1868 established his reputation among men of letters of all lands. His criticism received a philosophic bent from his study of John Stuart Mill, Comte, and Renan. Complaint is often made of the bias exhibited by Brandes in his works, which is somewhat of a blemish on the breadth of his judgment. This bias finds its chief expression in his anti-clericalism. His publications number thirty-three volumes, and include works on history, literature, and criticism. He has written studies of Shakespeare, of Lord Beaconsfield, of Ibsen, and of Ferdinand Lassalle. His greatest work is the "Main Currents of the Literature of the Nineteenth Century." The field covered is so vast that any attempted synopsis of the volume is impossible here, so in this place we merely indicate the scope of Brandes's monumental work, and state his general conclusions.

_The Man and the Book_

This remarkable essay in literary criticism is limited to the first half of the nineteenth century; it concludes with the historical turning-point of 1848. Within this period the author discovers, first, a reaction against the literature of the eighteenth century; and then, the vanquishment of that reaction. Or, in other words, there is first a fading away and disappearance of the ideas and feelings of the preceding century, and then a return of the ideas of progress in new and higher waves.

"Literary history is, in its profoundest significance, psychology, the study, the history of the soul"; and literary criticism is, with our author, nothing less than the interior history of peoples. Whether we happen to agree or to disagree with his personal sympathies, which lie altogether with liberalism and whether his interpretation of these complex movements be accepted or rejected by future criticism, it is at least unquestionable that his estimate of his science is the right one, and that his method is the right one, and that no one stands beside Brandes as an exponent.

The historical movement of the years 1800 to 1848 is here likened to a drama, of which six different literary groups represent the six acts. The first three acts incorporate the reaction against progress and liberty. They are, first, the French Emigrant Literature, inspired by Rousseau; secondly, the semi-Catholic Romantic school of Germany, wherein the reaction has separated itself more thoroughly from the contemporary struggle for liberty, and has gained considerably in depth and vigour; and, thirdly, the militant and triumphant reaction as shown in Joseph de Maistre, Lamennais, Lamartine and Victor Hugo, standing out for pope and monarch. The drama of reaction has here come to its climax; and the last three acts are to witness its fall, and the revival, in its place, of the ideas of liberty and of progress.

"It is one man, Byron, who produces the revulsion in the great drama." And Byron and his English contemporaries, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Keats and Shelley, hold the stage in the fourth act, "Naturalism in England." The fifth act belongs to the Liberal movement in France, the "French Romantic School," including the names of Lamennais, Lamartine and Hugo in their second phase; and also those of De Musset and George Sand. The movement passes from France into "Young Germany," where the sixth act is played by Heine, Ruge, Feuerbach and others; and the ardent revolutionary writers of France and of Germany together prepare for the great political transformation of 1848.

_I.--The Emigrant Literature_

At the beginning of our period, France was subjected to two successive tyrannies: those, namely, of the Convention and of the Empire, both of which suppressed all independent thought and literature. Writers were, perforce, emigrants beyond the frontiers of French power, and were, one and all, in opposition to the Reign of Terror, or to the Napoleonic tyranny, or to both; one and all they were looking forward to the new age which should come.

There was, therefore, a note of expectancy in this emigrant literature, which had also the advantage of real knowledge, gained in long exile, of foreign lands and peoples. Although it reacts against the dry and narrow rationalism of the eighteenth century, it is not as yet a complete reaction against the Liberalism of that period; the writers of the emigrant group are still ardent in the cause of Liberty. They are contrary to the spirit of Voltaire; but they are all profoundly influenced by Rousseau.

Chateaubriand's romances, "Atala" and "René," Rousseau's "The New Héloïse" and Goethe's "Werther" are the subjects of studies which lead our critic to a consideration of that new spiritual condition of which they are the indications. "All the spiritual maladies," he says, "which make their appearance at this time may be regarded as the products of two great events--the emancipation of the individual and the emancipation of thought."

Every career now lies open, potentially, to the individual. His opportunities, and therefore his desires, but not his powers, have become boundless; and "inordinate desire is always accompanied by inordinate melancholy." His release from the old order, which limited his importance, has set him free for self-idolatry; the old laws have broken down, and everything now seems permissible. He no longer feels himself part of a whole; he feels himself to be a little world which reflects the great world. The belief in the saving power of enlightenment had been rudely shaken, and the minds of men were confused like an army which receives contradictory orders in the midst of a battle. Sénancour, Nodier and Benjamin Constant have left us striking romances picturing the human spirit in this dilemma; they show also a new feeling for Nature, new revelations of subjectivity, and new ideas of womanhood and of passion.

But of the emigrant literature Madame de Staël is the chief and central figure. The lawless savagery of the Revolution did not weaken her fidelity to personal and political freedom. "She wages war with absolutism in the state and hypocrisy in society. She teaches her countrymen to appreciate the characteristics and literature of the neighbouring nations; she breaks down with her own hands the wall of self-sufficiency with which victorious France had surrounded itself. Barante, with his perspective view of eighteenth-century France, only continues and completes her work."

_II.--The Romantic School in Germany_

German Romanticism continues the growing reaction against the eighteenth century; yet, though it is essentially reaction, it is not mere reaction, but contains the seeds of a new development. It is intellectual, poetical, philosophical and full of real life.

This literary period, marked by the names of Hölderlin, A. W. Schlegel, Tieck, Jean Paul Richter, Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, Novalis, Arnim, Brentano, resulted in little that has endured. It produced no typical forms; the character of its literature is musical rather than plastic; its impulse is not a clear perception or creation, but an infinite and ineffable aspiration.

An intenser spiritual life was at once the impulse and the goal of the Romanticists, in whom wonder and infinite desire are born again. A sympathetic interest in the fairy tale and the legend, in the face of Nature and in her creatures, in history, institutions and law, and a keener emotional sensitiveness in poetry, were the result of this refreshed interior life. In religion, the movement was towards the richly-coloured mystery and child-like faith of Catholicism; and in respect of human love it was towards freedom, spontaneity, intensity, and against the hard bonds of social conventions.

But its emotions became increasingly morbid, abnormal and ineffectual. Romanticism tended really, not to the spiritual emancipation that was its avowed aim, but to a refinement of sensuality; an indolent and passive enjoyment is its actual goal; and it repudiates industry and utility as the philistine barriers which exclude us from Paradise. Retrogression, the going back to a fancied Paradise or Golden Age, is the central idea of Romanticism, and is the secret of the practical ineffectiveness of the movement.

Friedrich Schlegel's romance, "Lucinde," is a very typical work of this period. It is based on the Romantic idea that life and poetry are identical, and its aim is to counsel the transformation of our actual life into a poem or work of art. It is a manifesto of self-absorption and of subjectivity; the reasoned defence of idleness, of enjoyment, of lawlessness, of the arbitrary expression of the Self, supreme above all.

The mysticism of Novalis, who preferred sickness to health, night to day, and invested death itself with sensual delights, is described by himself as voluptuousness. It is full of a feverish, morbid desire, which becomes at last the desire for nothingness. The "blue flower," in his story "Heinrich von Ofterdingen," is the ideal, personal happiness, sought for in all Romanticism, but by its very nature never attainable.

_III.--The Reaction in France_

Herein we have the culmination of the reactionary movement. Certain authors are grouped together as labouring for the re-establishment of the fallen power of authority; and by the principle of authority is to be understood "the principle which assumes the life of the individual and of the nation to be based upon reverence for inherited tradition." Further, "the principle of authority in general stood or fell with the authority of the Church. When that was undermined, it drew all other authorities with it in its fall."

After a study of the Revolution in its quality as a religious movement, and the story of the Concordat, our author traces the genesis of this extreme phase of the reaction. Its promoters were all of noble birth and bound by close ties to the old royal families; their aim was political rather than religious; "they craved for religion as a panacea for lawlessness." Their ruling idea was the principle of externality, as opposed to that of inward, personal feeling and private investigation; it was the principle of theocracy, as opposed to the sovereignty of the people; it was the principle of power, as opposed to the principles of human rights and liberties.

Chateaubriand's famous book, "Le Génie du Christianisme," devoid of real feeling, attempts to vindicate authority by means of an appeal to sentiment, as if taking for granted that a reasoned faith was now impossible. His point of view is romantic, and therefore, religiously, false; his reasoning is of the "how beautiful!" style.

But the principle was enthroned by Count Joseph de Maistre, a very different man. The minister of the King of Sardinia at the court of Russia, he gained the emperor's confidence by his strong and pure character, his royalist principles, and his talents. His more important works, "Du Pape," "De l'Eglise Gallicane," and "Soirées de St. Pétersbourg," are the most uncompromising defence of political and religious autocracy. The fundamental idea of his works is that "there is no human society without government, no government without sovereignty, and no sovereignty without infallibility." Beside De Maistre stands Bonald, a man of the same views, but without the other's daring and versatile wit. Chateaubriand's prose epic "Les Martyrs," the mystically sensual writings of Madame Krüdener, and the lyric poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo further popularised the reaction, which reached its breaking point in Lamennais.

It was at this moment, April, 1824, that the news came of Byron's death in Greece. The illusion dissolved; the reaction came to an end. The principle of authority fell, never to rise again; and the Immanuelistic school was succeeded by the Satanic.

_IV.--Naturalism in England_