Nearly all the discussions of criticism that I am acquainted with
start off with a false assumption, to wit, that the primary motive
of the critic, the impulse which makes a critic of him instead of,
say, a politician, or a stockbroker, is pedagogical—that he writes
because he is possessed by a passion to advance the enlightenment,
to put down error and wrong, to disseminate some specific doctrine:
psychological, epistemological, historical, or æsthetic. This is
true, it seems to me, only of bad critics, and its degree of truth
increases in direct ratio to their badness. The motive of the critic
who is really worth reading—the only critic of whom, indeed, it may
be said truthfully that it is at all possible to read him, save as an
act of mental discipline—is something quite different. That motive
is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist. It
is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and
beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble
inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to get rid of them
dramatically and make an articulate noise in the world. It was for
this reason that Plato wrote the “Republic,” and for this reason that
Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony, and it is for this reason, to
drop a million miles, that I am writing the present essay. Everything
else is afterthought, mock-modesty, messianic delusion—in brief,
affectation and folly. Is the contrary conception of criticism widely
cherished? Is it almost universally held that the thing is a brother
to jurisprudence, advertising, laparotomy, chautauqua lecturing and
the art of the schoolmarm? Then certainly the fact that it is so held
should be sufficient to set up an overwhelming probability of its lack
of truth and sense. If I speak with some heat, it is as one who has
suffered. When, years ago, I devoted myself diligently to critical
pieces upon the writings of Theodore Dreiser, I found that practically
every one who took any notice of my proceedings at all fell into either
one of two assumptions about my underlying purpose: _(a)_ that I had
a fanatical devotion for Mr. Dreiser’s ideas and desired to propagate
them, or _(b)_ that I was an ardent patriot, and yearned to lift up
American literature. Both assumptions were false. I had then, and I
have now, very little interest in many of Mr. Dreiser’s main ideas;
when we meet, in fact, we usually quarrel about them. And I am wholly
devoid of public spirit, and haven’t the least lust to improve American
literature; if it ever came to what I regard as perfection my job
would be gone. What, then, was my motive in writing about Mr. Dreiser
so copiously? My motive, well known to Mr. Dreiser himself and to every
one else who knew, me as intimately as he did, was simply and solely
to sort out and give coherence to the ideas of Mr. Mencken, and to put
them into suave and ingratiating terms, and to discharge them with a
flourish, and maybe with a phrase of pretty song, into the dense fog
that blanketed the Republic.
The critic’s choice of criticism rather than of what is called creative
writing is chiefly a matter of temperament—perhaps, more accurately
of hormones—with accidents of education and environment to help. The
feelings that happen to be dominant in him at the moment the scribbling
frenzy seizes him are feelings inspired, not directly by life itself,
but by books, pictures, music, sculpture, architecture, religion,
philosophy—in brief, by some other man’s feelings about life. They
are thus, in a sense, second-hand, and it is no wonder that creative
artists so easily fall into the theory that they are also second-rate.
Perhaps they usually are. If, indeed, the critic continues on this
plane—if he lacks the intellectual agility and enterprise needed to
make the leap from the work of art to the vast and mysterious complex
of phenomena behind it—then they _always_ are, and he remains no more
than a fugelman or policeman to his betters. But if a genuine artist
is conceded within him—if his feelings are in any sense profound and
original, and his capacity for self-expression is above the average of
educated men—then he moves inevitably from the work of art to life
itself, and begins to take on a dignity that he formerly lacked. It
is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality,
universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole
life appraising and describing the work of other men. Did Goethe, or
Carlyle, or Matthew Arnold, or Sainte-Beuve, or Macaulay, or even, to
come down a few pegs, Lewes, or Lowell, or Hazlitt? Certainly not. The
thing that becomes most obvious about the writings of all such men,
once they are examined carefully, is that the critic is always being
swallowed up by the creative artist—that what starts out as the review
of a book, or a play, or other work of art, usually develops very
quickly into an independent essay upon the theme of that work of art,
or upon some theme that it suggests—in a word, that it becomes a fresh
work of art, and only indirectly related to the one that suggested
it. This fact, indeed, is so plain that it scarcely needs statement.
What the pedagogues always object to in, for example, the _Quarterly_
reviewers is that they forgot the books they were supposed to review,
and wrote long papers—often, in fact, small books—expounding
ideas suggested (or not suggested) by the books under review. Every
critic who is worth reading falls inevitably into the same habit. He
cannot stick to his task: what is before him is always infinitely
less interesting to him than what is within him. If he is genuinely
first-rate—if what is within him stands the test of type, and wins an
audience, and produces the reactions that every artist craves—then
he usually ends by abandoning the criticism of specific works of art
altogether, and setting up shop as a general merchant in general ideas,
_i. e._, as an artist working in the materials of life itself.
Mere reviewing, however conscientiously and competently it is done, is
plainly a much inferior business. Like writing poetry, it is chiefly
a function of intellectual immaturity. The young literatus just out
of the university, having as yet no capacity for grappling with the
fundamental mysteries of existence, is put to writing reviews of books,
or plays, or music, or painting. Very often he does it extremely well;
it is, in fact, not hard to do well, for even decayed pedagogues often
do it, as such graves of the intellect as the New York _Times_ bear
witness. But if he continues to do it, whether well or ill, it is a
sign to all the world that his growth ceased when they made him _Artium
Baccalaureus._ Gradually he becomes, whether in or out of the academic
grove, a professor, which is to say, a man devoted to diluting and
retailing the ideas of his superiors—not an artist, not even a bad
artist, but almost the antithesis of an artist. He is learned, he is
sober, he is painstaking and accurate—but he is as hollow as a jug.
Nothing is in him save the ghostly echoes of other men’s thoughts
and feelings. If he were a genuine artist he would have thoughts and
feelings of his own, and the impulse to give them objective form would
be irresistible. An artist can no more withstand that impulse than a
politician can withstand the temptations of a job. There are no mute,
inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound
test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton. His difference
from other men lies precisely in the superior vigor of his impulse to
self-expression, not in the superior beauty and loftiness of his ideas.
Other men, in point of fact, often have the same ideas, or perhaps
even loftier ones, but they are able to suppress them, usually on
grounds of decorum, and so they escape being artists, and are respected
by right-thinking persons, and die with money in the bank, and are
forgotten in two weeks.
Obviously, the critic whose performance we are commonly called upon to
investigate is a man standing somewhere along the path leading from the
beginning that I have described to the goal. He has got beyond being a
mere cataloguer and valuer of other men’s ideas, but he has not yet
become an autonomous artist—he is not yet ready to challenge attention
with his own ideas alone. But it is plain that his motion, in so far as
he is moving at all, must be in the direction of that autonomy—that
is, unless one imagines him sliding backward into senile infantilism:
a spectacle not unknown to literary pathology, but too pathetic to be
discussed here. Bear this motion in mind, and the true nature of his
aims and purposes becomes clear; more, the incurable falsity of the
aims and purposes usually credited to him becomes equally clear. He
is not actually trying to perform an impossible act of arctic justice
upon the artist whose work gives him a text. He is not trying with
mathematical passion to find out exactly what was in that artist’s
mind at the moment of creation, and to display it precisely and in an
ecstasy of appreciation. He is not trying to bring the work discussed
into accord with some transient theory of æsthetics, or ethics, or
truth, or to determine its degree of departure from that theory. He is
not trying to lift up the fine arts, or to defend democracy against
sense, or to promote happiness at the domestic hearth, or to convert
sophomores into right-thinkers, or to serve God. He is not trying to
fit a group of novel phenomena into the orderly process of history. He
is not even trying to discharge the catalytic office that I myself, in
a romantic moment, once sought to force upon him. He is, first and
last, simply trying to express himself. He is trying to arrest and
challenge a sufficient body of readers, to make them pay attention
to him, to impress them with the charm and novelty of his ideas, to
provoke them into an agreeable (or shocked) awareness of him, and he is
trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of
a function performed, a tension relieved, a _katharsis_ attained which
Wagner achieved when he wrote “Die Walküre,” and a hen achieves every
time she lays an egg.
Joseph Conrad is moved by that necessity to write romances; Bach was
moved to write music; poets are moved to write poetry; critics are
moved to write criticism. The form is nothing; the only important
thing is the motive power, and it is the same in all cases. It is
the pressing yearning of every man who has ideas in him to empty
them upon the world, to hammer them into plausible and ingratiating
shapes, to compel the attention and respect of his equals, to lord
it over his inferiors. So seen, the critic becomes a far more
transparent and agreeable fellow than ever he was in the discourses
of the psychologists who sought to make him a mere appraiser in an
intellectual customs house, a gauger in a distillery of the spirit,
a just and infallible judge upon the cosmic bench. Such offices, in
point of fact, never fit him. He always bulges over their confines.
So labelled and estimated, it inevitably turns out that the specific
critic under examination is a very bad one, or no critic at all.
But when he is thought of, not as pedagogue, but as artist, then he
begins to take on reality, and, what is more, dignity. Carlyle was
surely no just and infallible judge; on the contrary, he was full
of prejudices, biles, naïvetés, humors. Yet he is read, consulted,
attended to. Macaulay was unfair, inaccurate, fanciful, lyrical—yet
his essays live. Arnold had his faults too, and so did Sainte-Beuve,
and so did Goethe, and so did many another of that line—and yet they
are remembered to-day, and all the learned and conscientious critics
of their time, laboriously concerned with the precise intent of the
artists under review, and passionately determined to set it forth with
god-like care and to relate it exactly to this or that great stream of
ideas—all these pedants are forgotten. What saved Carlyle, Macaulay
and company is as plain as day. They were first-rate artists. They
could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more
important than making it true.
Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by
persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastnesses
and grab it by the tail. It is the adoration of second-rate men—men
who always receive it at second-hand. Pedagogues believe in immutable
truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate
them; the intellectual progress of man consists largely of a concerted
effort to block and destroy their enterprise. Nine times out of ten,
in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered;
there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human
inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever _will_ be
discovered. Nevertheless, the rubber-stamp thinking of the world
always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical
with the discovery of the truth—that error and truth are simple
opposites. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to,
when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error,
and maybe one worse than the first one. This is the whole history of
the intellect in brief. The average man of to-day does not believe in
precisely the same imbecilities that the Greek of the fourth century
before Christ believed in, but the things that he _does_ believe in are
often quite as idiotic. Perhaps this statement is a bit too sweeping.
There is, year by year, a gradual accumulation of what may be called,
provisionally, truths—there is a slow accretion of ideas that somehow
manage to meet all practicable human tests, and so survive. But even
so, it is risky to call them absolute truths. All that one may safely
say of them is that no one, as yet, has demonstrated that they are
errors. Soon or late, if experience teaches us anything, they are
likely to succumb too. The profoundest truths of the Middle Ages are
now laughed at by schoolboys. The profoundest truths of democracy will
be laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school teachers.
In the department of æsthetics, wherein critics mainly disport
themselves, it is almost impossible to think of a so-called truth
that shows any sign of being permanently true. The most profound of
principles begins to fade and quiver almost as soon as it is stated.
But the work of art, as opposed to the theory behind it, has a longer
life, particularly if that theory be obscure and questionable, and so
cannot be determined accurately. “Hamlet,” the Mona Lisa, “Faust,”
“Dixie,” “Parsifal,” “Mother Goose,” “Annabel Lee,” “Huckleberry
Finn”—these things, so baffling to pedagogy, so contumacious to the
categories, so mysterious in purpose and utility—these things live.
And why? Because there is in them the flavor of salient, novel and
attractive personality, because the quality that shines from them is
not that of correct demeanor but that of creative passion, because they
pulse and breathe and speak, because they are genuine works of art. So
with criticism. Let us forget all the heavy effort to make a science of
it; it is a fine art, or nothing. If the critic, retiring to his cell
to concoct his treatise upon a book or play or what-not, produces a
piece of writing that shows sound structure, and brilliant color, and
the flash of new and persuasive ideas, and civilized manners, and the
charm of an uncommon personality in free function, then he has given
something to the world that is worth having, and sufficiently justified
his existence. Is Carlyle’s “Frederick” true? Who cares? As well ask
if the Parthenon is true, or the C Minor Symphony, or “Wiener Blur.”
Let the critic who is an artist leave such necropsies to professors of
æsthetics, who can no more determine the truth than he can, and will
infallibly make it unpleasant and a bore.
It is, of course, not easy to practice this abstention. Two forces,
one within and one without, tend to bring even a Hazlitt or a Huneker
under the campus pump. One is the almost universal human susceptibility
to messianic delusions—the irresistible tendency of practically every
man, once he finds a crowd in front of him, to strut and roll his
eyes. The other is the public demand, born of such long familiarity
with pedagogical criticism that no other kind is readily conceivable,
that the critic teach something as well as say something—in the
popular phrase, that he be constructive. Both operate powerfully
against his free functioning, and especially the former. He finds
it hard to resist the flattery of his customers, however little he
may actually esteem it. If he knows anything at all, he knows that
his following, like that of every other artist in ideas, is chiefly
made up of the congenitally subaltern type of man and woman—natural
converts, lodge joiners, me-toos, stragglers after circus parades.
It is precious seldom that he ever gets a positive idea out of them;
what he usually gets is mere unintelligent ratification. But this
troop, despite its obvious failings, corrupts him in various ways.
For one thing, it enormously reënforces his belief in his own ideas,
and so tends to make him stiff and dogmatic—in brief, precisely
everything that he ought not to be. And for another thing, it tends
to make him (by a curious contradiction) a bit pliant and politic: he
begins to estimate new ideas, not in proportion as they are amusing
or beautiful, but in proportion as they are likely to please. So
beset, front and rear, he sometimes sinks supinely to the level of a
professor, and his subsequent proceedings are interesting no more.
The true aim of a critic is certainly not to make converts. He must
know that very few of the persons who are susceptible to conversion
are worth converting. Their minds are intrinsically flabby and
parasitical, and it is certainly not sound sport to agitate minds
of that sort. Moreover, the critic must always harbor a grave doubt
about most of the ideas that they lap up so greedily—it must occur
to him not infrequently, in the silent watches of the night, that
much that he writes is sheer buncombe. As I have said, I can’t imagine
any idea—that is, in the domain of æsthetics—that is palpably and
incontrovertibly sound. All that I am familiar with, and in particular
all that I announce most vociferously, seem to me to contain a core
of quite obvious nonsense. I thus try to avoid cherishing them too
lovingly, and it always gives me a shiver to see any one else gobble
them at one gulp. Criticism, at bottom, is indistinguishable from
skepticism. Both launch themselves, the one by æsthetic presentations
and the other by logical presentations, at the common human tendency
to accept whatever is approved, to take in ideas ready-made, to be
responsive to mere rhetoric and gesticulation. A critic who believes in
anything absolutely is bound to that something quite as helplessly as a
Christian is bound to the Freudian garbage in the Book of Revelation.
To that extent, at all events, he is unfree and unintelligent, and
hence a bad critic.
The demand for “constructive” criticism is based upon the same false
assumption that immutable truths exist in the arts, and that the artist
will be improved by being made aware of them. This notion, whatever the
form it takes, is always absurd—as much so, indeed, as its brother
delusion that the critic, to be competent, must be a practitioner of
the specific art he ventures to deal with, _i. e._, that a doctor, to
cure a belly-ache, must have a belly-ache. As practically encountered,
it is disingenuous as well as absurd, for it comes chiefly from bad
artists who tire of serving as performing monkeys, and crave the
greater ease and safety of sophomores in class. They demand to be
taught in order to avoid being knocked about. In their demand is the
theory that instruction, if they could get it, would profit them—that
they are capable of doing better work than they do. As a practical
matter, I doubt that this is ever true. Bad poets never actually grow
any better; they invariably grow worse and worse. In all history there
has never been, to my knowledge, a single practitioner of any art
who, as a result of “constructive” criticism, improved his work. The
curse of all the arts, indeed, is the fact that they are constantly
invaded by persons who are not artists at all—persons whose yearning
to express their ideas and feelings is unaccompanied by the slightest
capacity for charming expression—in brief, persons with absolutely
nothing to say. This is particularly true of the art of letters, which
interposes very few technical obstacles to the vanity and garrulity of
such invaders. Any effort to teach them to write better is an effort
wasted, as every editor discovers for himself; they are as incapable
of it as they are of jumping over the moon. The only sort of criticism
that can deal with them to any profit is the sort that employs them
frankly as laboratory animals. It cannot cure them, but it can at least
make an amusing and perhaps edifying show of them. It is idle to argue
that the good in them is thus destroyed with the bad. The simple answer
is that there _is_ no good in them. Suppose Poe had wasted his time
trying to dredge good work out of Rufus Dawes, author of “Geraldine.”
He would have failed miserably—and spoiled a capital essay, still
diverting after three-quarters of a century. Suppose Beethoven, dealing
with Gottfried Weber, had tried laboriously to make an intelligent
music critic of him. How much more apt, useful and durable the simple
note: “Arch-ass! Double-barrelled ass!” Here was absolutely sound
criticism. Here was a judgment wholly beyond challenge. Moreover, here
was a small but perfect work of art.
Upon the low practical value of so-called constructive criticism I
can offer testimony out of my own experience. My books are commonly
reviewed at great length, and many critics devote themselves to
pointing out what they conceive to be my errors, both of fact and of
taste. Well, I cannot recall a case in which any suggestion offered
by a constructive critic has helped me in the slightest, or even
actively interested me. Every such wet-nurse of letters has sought
fatuously to make me write in a way differing from that in which the
Lord God Almighty, in His infinite wisdom, impels me to write—that
is, to make me write stuff which, coming from me, would be as false
as an appearance of decency in a Congressman. All the benefits I have
ever got from the critics of my work have come from the destructive
variety. A hearty slating always does me good, particularly if it be
well written. It begins by enlisting my professional respect; it ends
by making me examine my ideas coldly in the privacy of my chamber.
Not, of course, that I usually revise them, but I at least examine
them. If I decide to hold fast to them, they are all the dearer to me
thereafter, and I expound them with a new passion and plausibility.
If, on the contrary, I discern holes in them, I shelve them in a
_pianissimo_ manner, and set about hatching new ones to take their
place. But constructive criticism irritates me. I do not object to
being denounced, but I can’t abide being school-mastered, especially by
men I regard as imbeciles.
I find, as a practicing critic, that very few men who write books
are even as tolerant as I am—that most of them, soon or late, show
signs of extreme discomfort under criticism, however polite its terms.
Perhaps this is why enduring friendships between authors and critics
are so rare. All artists, of course, dislike one another more or less,
but that dislike seldom rises to implacable enmity, save between opera
singer and opera singer, and creative author and critic. Even when
the latter two keep up an outward show of good-will, there is always
bitter antagonism under the surface. Part of it, I daresay, arises out
of the impossible demands of the critic, particularly if he be tinged
with the constructive madness. Having favored an author with his good
opinion, he expects the poor fellow to live up to that good opinion
without the slightest compromise or faltering, and this is commonly
beyond human power. He feels that any let-down compromises _him_—that
his hero is stabbing him in the back, and making him ridiculous—and
this feeling rasps his vanity. The most bitter of all literary quarrels
are those between critics and creative artists, and most of them arise
in just this way. As for the creative artist, he on his part naturally
resents the critic’s air of pedagogical superiority and he resents it
especially when he has an uneasy feeling that he has fallen short of
his best work, and that the discontent of the critic is thus justified.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. Under it
all, of course, lurks the fact that I began with: the fact that the
critic is himself an artist, and that his creative impulse, soon or
late, is bound to make him neglect the punctilio. When he sits down to
compose his criticism, his artist ceases to be a friend, and becomes
mere raw material for his work of art. It is my experience that artists
invariably resent this cavalier use of them. They are pleased so long
as the critic confines himself to the modest business of interpreting
them—preferably in terms of their own estimate of themselves—but the
moment he proceeds to adorn their theme with variations of his own, the
moment he brings new ideas to the enterprise and begins contrasting
them with their ideas, that moment they grow restive. It is precisely
at this point, of course, that criticism becomes genuine criticism;
before that it was mere reviewing. When a critic passes it he loses his
friends. By becoming an artist, he becomes the foe of all other artists.
But the transformation, I believe, has good effects upon him: it makes
him a better critic. Too much _Gemütlichkeit_ is as fatal to criticism
as it would be to surgery or politics. When it rages unimpeded it leads
inevitably either to a dull professorial sticking on of meaningless
labels or to log-rolling, and often it leads to both. One of the most
hopeful symptoms of the new _Aufklärung_ in the Republic is the revival
of acrimony in criticism—the renaissance of the doctrine that æsthetic
matters are important, and that it is worth the while of a healthy male
to take them seriously, as he takes business, sport and amour. In the
days when American literature was showing its first vigorous growth,
the native criticism was extraordinarily violent and even vicious; in
the days when American literature swooned upon the tomb of the Puritan
_Kultur_ it became flaccid and childish. The typical critic of the
first era was Poe, as the typical critic of the second was Howells. Poe
carried on his critical jehads with such ferocity that he often got
into law-suits, and sometimes ran no little risk of having his head
cracked. He regarded literary questions as exigent and momentous. The
lofty aloofness of the don was simply not in him. When he encountered
a book that seemed to him to be bad, he attacked it almost as sharply
as a Chamber of Commerce would attack a fanatic preaching free speech,
or the corporation of Trinity Church would attack Christ. His opponents
replied in the same Berserker manner. Much of Poe’s surviving ill-fame,
as a drunkard and dead-beat, is due to their inordinate denunciations
of him. They were not content to refute him; they constantly tried to
dispose of him altogether. The very ferocity of that ancient row shows
that the native literature, in those days, was in a healthy state.
Books of genuine value were produced. Literature always thrives best,
in fact, in an atmosphere of hearty strife. Poe, surrounded by admiring
professors, never challenged, never aroused to the emotions of revolt,
would probably have written poetry indistinguishable from the hollow
stuff of, say, Prof. Dr. George E. Woodberry. It took the persistent
(and often grossly unfair and dishonorable) opposition of Griswold _et
al_ to stimulate him to his highest endeavors. He needed friends, true
enough, but he also needed enemies.
To-day, for the first time in years, there is strife in American
criticism, and the Paul Elmer Mores and Hamilton Wright Mabies are
no longer able to purr in peace. The instant they fall into stiff
professorial attitudes they are challenged, and often with anything but
urbanity. The _ex cathedra_ manner thus passes out, and free discussion
comes in. Heretics lay on boldly, and the professors are forced to
make some defense. Often, going further, they attempt counter-attacks.
Ears are bitten off. Noses are bloodied. There are wallops both above
and below the belt. I am, I need not say, no believer in any magical
merit in debate, no matter how free it may be. It certainly does not
necessarily establish the truth; both sides, in fact, may be wrong, and
they often are. But it at least accomplishes two important effects.
On the one hand, it exposes all the cruder fallacies to hostile
examination, and so disposes of many of them. And on the other hand, it
melodramatizes the business of the critic, and so convinces thousands
of bystanders, otherwise quite inert, that criticism is an amusing and
instructive art, and that the problems it deals with are important.
What men will fight for seems to be worth looking into.