and intellect, this deep antinomy of pedant and dilettante? The
“fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease” which affected the professors
of the Colleges of Unreason in “Erewhon” is mildly endemic in every
University in the world, and to a certain degree in every profession;
but nowhere else does it give the tone to the intellectual life of
a whole people. If I were a sociologist, confident that the proper
search would unearth an external cause for every spiritual defect, I
might point to any one of a dozen or more damning facts as the origin
and source of all our trouble,--to the materialism of a national
life directed solely toward practical ends, to the levelling and
standardizing influences of democracy, to Anglo-Saxon “Colonialism,”
to the influence of German erudition, or to the inadequate economic
rewards of the academic life. I should probably make much of that
favourite theme of critical fantasy, the habits derived from the “age
of the pioneers,” a period in which life, with its mere physical
discomforts and its mere demands on physical energy and endurance, was
really so easy and simple that Americans attempt to reproduce it on all
their holidays.
But in so far as they have any reality, all these are merely symptoms
of the same disease of the soul. The modern sanatorium may be likened
to the mediæval monastery without its spiritual faith; the American
University to a University without its inner illumination. It is an
intellectual refuge without the integration of a central soul,--crassly
material because it has no inner standards to redeem it from the idols
of the market-place, or timid and anæmic because it lacks that quixotic
fire which inheres in every act of faith. It is at one and the same
time our greatest practical achievement and our greatest spiritual
failure. To call it a compound of sanatorium and machine-shop may seem
grossly unfair to an institution which has more than its share of
earnest and high-minded men; but though the phrase may not describe the
reality, it does indicate the danger. When we find that in such a place
education does not educate, we cry for help to the only gods we know,
the restless gods of Administration and Organization; but scholarship
cannot be organized or administered into existence, even by Americans.
What can we say (though it seem to evade the question) save that
America has no scholarship because as yet it has a body but no soul?
The scholar goes through all the proper motions,--collects facts,
organizes research, delivers lectures, writes articles and sometimes
books,--but under this outer seeming there is no inner reality. Under
all the great works of culture there broods the quivering soul of
tradition, a burden sometimes disturbing and heavy to bear, but more
often helping the soul to soar on wings not of its own making. We think
hungrily that the freshness of outlook of a young people should be more
than compensation; but the freshness is not there. Bad habits long
persisted in, or new vices painfully acquired, may pass for traditions
among some spokesmen of “Americanism,” but will not breathe the breath
of life into a national culture. All is shell, mask, and a deep inner
emptiness. We have scholars without scholarship, as there are churches
without religion.
Until there comes a change of heart or a new faith or a deep inner
searching, scholarship must continue to live this thwarted and
frustrated life. Only a profound realization of its high purpose and
special function, and the pride that comes from this realization,
can give the scholar his true place in an American world. For this
special function is none other than to act as the devoted servant
of thought and imagination and to champion their claims as the twin
pillars that support all the spiritual activities of human life,--art,
philosophy, religion, science; and these it must champion against all
the materialists under whatever name they disguise their purpose.
What matter whether they be scientists who decry “dialectics,” or
sociologists who sneer at “mere belles-lettres,” or practical men who
have no use for the “higher life”? Whether they be called bourgeois
or radical, conservative or intellectual,--all who would reduce life
to a problem of practical activity and physical satisfaction, all who
would reduce intellect and imagination to mere instruments of practical
usefulness, all who worship dead idols instead of living gods, all who
grasp at every flitting will-o’-the-wisp of theory or sensation,--all
these alike scholarship must forever recognize as its enemies, and its
chief tempters.
II
Scholarship, so conceived, is the basis of criticism. When a few years
ago I published a volume which bore the subtitle of “Essays on the
Unity of Genius and Taste,” the pedants and the professors were in the
ascendant, and it seemed necessary to emphasize the side of criticism
which was then in danger, the side that is closest to the art of
the creator. But the professors have been temporarily routed by the
dilettanti, the amateurs, and the journalists, who treat a work of the
imagination as if they were describing fireworks or a bull-fight (to
use a phrase of Zola’s about Gautier); and so it is necessary now to
insist on the discipline and illumination of scholarship,--in other
Words, to write an “Essay on the Divergence of Criticism and Creation.”
American criticism, like that of England, but to an even greater
extent, suffers from a want of philosophic insight and precision. It
has neither inherited nor created a tradition of æsthetic thought.
For it every critical problem is a separate problem, a problem in
a philosophic vacuum, and so open for discussion to any astute
mind with a taste for letters. Realism, classicism, romanticism,
imagism, impressionism, expressionism, and other terms or movements
as they spring up, seem ultimate realities instead of matters of
very subordinate concern to any philosophy of art,--mere practical
programmes which bear somewhat the same relation to æsthetic truth that
the platform of the Republican Party bears to Aristotle’s “Politics”
or Marx’s “Capital.” As a result, critics are constantly carrying
on a guerilla warfare of their own in favour of some vague literary
shibboleth or sociological abstraction, and discovering anew the
virtues or vices of individuality, modernity, Puritanism, the romantic
spirit or the spirit of the Middle West, the traditions of the pioneer,
and so on ad infinitum. This holds true of every school of American
criticism, “conservative” or “radical”; for all of them a disconnected
body of literary theories takes the place of a real philosophy of art.
“Find an idea and then write about it” sums up the American conception
of criticism. Now, while the critic must approach a work of literature
without preconceived notion of what that individual work should
attempt, he cannot criticize it without some understanding of what
all literature attempts. The critic without an æsthetic is a mariner
without chart, compass, or knowledge of navigation; for the question is
not where the ship should go or what cargo it should carry, but whether
it is going to arrive at any port at all without sinking.
Criticism is essentially an expression of taste, or that faculty of
imaginative sympathy by which the reader or spectator is able to
re-live the vision created by the artist. This is the soil without
which it cannot flourish; but it attains its end and becomes criticism
in the highest sense only when taste is guided by knowledge and
thought. Of these three elements, implicit in all real criticism, the
professors have made light of taste, and have made thought itself
subservient to knowledge, while the dilettanti have considered it
possible to dispense with both knowledge and thought. But even
dilettante criticism is preferable to the dogmatic and intellectualist
criticism of the professors, on the same grounds that Sainte-Beuve
is superior to Brunetière, or Hazlitt to Francis Jeffrey; for the
dilettante at least meets the mind of the artist on the plane of
imagination and taste, while the intellectualist or moralist is
precluded by his temperament and his theories from ever understanding
the primal thrill and purpose of the creative act.
Back of any philosophy of art there must be a philosophy of life, and
all æsthetic formulæ seem empty unless there is richness of content
behind them. The critic, like the poet or the philosopher, has the
whole world to range in, and the farther he ranges in it, the better
his work will be. Yet this does not mean that criticism should focus
its attention on morals, history, life, instead of on the forms into
which the artist transforms them. Art has something else to give us;
and to seek morals, or economic theories, or the national spirit in
it is to seek morals, economic theories, the national spirit, but not
art. Indeed, the United States is the only civilized country where
morals are still in controversy so far as creative literature is
concerned; France, Germany, and Italy liberated themselves from this
faded obsession long ago; even in England critics of authority hesitate
to judge a work of art by moral standards. Yet this is precisely what
divides the two chief schools of American criticism, the moralists and
the anti-moralists, though even among the latter masquerade some whose
only quarrel with the moralists is the nature of the moral standards
employed.
Disregarding the Coleridgean tradition, which seems to have come to
an end with Mr. Woodberry, and the influence of the “new psychology,”
which has not yet taken a definite form, the main forces that have
influenced the present clashes in the American attitude toward
literature seem to be three. There is first of all the conception of
literature as a moral influence, a conception which goes back to the
Græco-Roman rhetoricians and moralists, and after pervading English
thought from Sidney to Matthew Arnold, finds its last stronghold to-day
among the American descendants of the Puritans. There is, secondly,
the Shavian conception of literature as the most effective vehicle for
a new _Weltanschauung_, to be judged by the novelty and freshness of
its ideas, a conception particularly attractive to the school of young
reformers, radicals, and intellectuals whose interest in the creative
imagination is secondary, and whose training in æsthetic thought has
been negligible; this is merely an obverse of the Puritan moralism, and
is tainted by the same fundamental misconception of the meaning of the
creative imagination. And there is finally the conception of literature
as an external thing, a complex of rhythms, charm, beauty without
inner content, or mere theatrical effectiveness, which goes back
through the English ’nineties to the French ’seventies, when the idea
of the independence of art from moral and intellectual standards was
distorted into the merely mechanical theory of “art for art’s sake”;
the French have a special talent for narrowing æsthetic truths into
hard-and-fast formulæ, devoid of their original nucleus of philosophic
reality, but all the more effective on this account for universal
conquest as practical programmes.
The apparent paradox which none of these critics face is that the
_Weltanschauung_ of the creative artist, his moral convictions, his
views on intellectual, economic, and other subjects, furnish the
content of his work and are at the same time the chief obstacles to his
artistic achievement. Out of morals or philosophy he has to make, not
morals or philosophy, but poetry; for morals and philosophy are only
a part, and a small part, of the whole reality which his imagination
has to encompass. The man who is overwhelmed with moral theories and
convictions would naturally find it easiest to become a moralist,
and moralists are prosaic, not poetic. A man who has strong economic
convictions would find it easiest to become an economist or economic
reformer, and economics too is the prose of life, not the poetry. A
man with a strong philosophic bias would find it easiest to become a
pure thinker, and the poet’s visionary world topples when laid open
to the cold scrutiny of logic. A poet is a human being, and therefore
likely to have convictions, prejudices, preconceptions, like other men;
but the deeper his interest in them is, the easier it is for him to
become a moralist, economist, philosopher, or what not, and the harder
for him to transcend them and to become a poet. But if the genius of
the poet (and by poet I mean any writer of imaginative literature) is
strong enough, it will transcend them, pass over them by the power of
the imagination, which leaves them behind without knowing it. It has
been well said that morals are one reality, a poem is another reality,
and the illusion consists in thinking them one and the same. The poet’s
conscience as a man may be satisfied by the illusion, but woe to him
if it is not an illusion, for that is what we tell him when we say,
“He is a moralist, not a poet.” Such a man has really expressed his
moral convictions, instead of leaping over and beyond them into that
world of the imagination where moral ideas must be interpreted from
the standpoint of poetry, or the artistic needs of the characters
portrayed, and not by the logical or reality value of morals.
This “leaping over” is the test of all art; it is inherent in the very
nature of the creative imagination. It explains, for example, how
Milton the moralist started out to make Satan a demon and how Milton
the poet ended by making him a hero. It explains the blindness of the
American critic who recently objected to the “loose thinking” of a
poem of Carl Sandburg in which steel is conceived of as made of smoke
and blood, and who propounded this question to the Walrus and the
Carpenter: “How can smoke, the lighter refuse of steel, be one of its
constituents, and how can the smoke which drifts away from the chimney
and the blood which flows in the steelmaker’s veins be correlates in
their relation to steel?” Where shall we match this precious gem? Over
two centuries ago, Othello’s cry after the death of Desdemona,
“O heavy hour,
Methinks it should now be a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon!”
provoked another intellectualist critic to enquire whether “the sun
and moon can both together be so hugely eclipsed in any one heavy hour
whatsoever;” but Rymer has been called “the worst critic that ever
lived” for applying tests like these to the poetry of Shakespeare.
Over a century ago a certain Abbé Morellet, unmoved by the music of
Chateaubriand’s description of the moon,--
“She pours forth in the woods this great secret of melancholy
which she loves to recount to the old oaks and the ancient
shores of the sea,”--
asked his readers: “How can the melancholy of night be called a secret;
and if the moon recounts it, how is it still a secret; and how does she
manage to recount it to the old oaks and the ancient shores of the sea
rather than to the deep valleys, the mountains, and the rivers?”
These are simply exaggerations of the inevitable consequence of
carrying over the mood of actual life into the world of the
imagination. “Sense, sense, nothing but sense!” cried a great Austrian
poet, “as if poetry in contrast with prose were not always a kind of
divine nonsense. Every poetic image bears within itself its own certain
demonstration that logic is not the arbitress of art.” And Alfieri
spoke for every poet in the world when he said of himself, “Reasoning
and judging are for me only pure and generous forms of feeling.” The
trained economist, philosopher, or moralist, examining the ideas of a
poet, is always likely to say: “These are not clearly thought out or
logical ideas; they are just a poet’s fancy or inspiration;” and that
is the final praise of the poet. If the expert finds a closely reasoned
treatise we may be sure that we shall find no poetry. It is a vision of
reality, and not reality, imagination and not thought or morals, that
the artist gives us; and his spiritual world, with all that it means
for the soaring life of man, fades and disappears when we bring to it
no other test than the test of reality.
These are some of the elementary reasons why those who demand of the
poet a definite code of morals or manners--“American ideals,” or
“Puritanism,” or on the other side, “radical ideas”--seem to me to
show their incompetence as critics. How can we expect illumination
from those who share the “typical American business man’s” inherent
inability to live in the world of fantasy which the poets have created,
without the business man’s ability to face the external facts of life
and mould them to his will? These men are schoolmasters, pedants,
moralists, policemen, but neither critics nor true lovers of the
spiritual food that art provides. To the creative writers of America
I should give a wholly different message from theirs. I should say to
them: “Express what is in you, all that serene or turbulent vision of
multitudinous life which is yours by right of imagination, trusting
in your own power to achieve discipline and mastery, and leave
the discussion of ‘American ideals’ to statesmen, historians, and
philosophers, with the certainty that if you truly express the vision
that is in you, the statesmen, historians, and philosophers of the
future will point to your work as a fine expression of the ‘American
ideals’ you have helped to create.”
But it is no part of the critic’s duty to lay down laws for the
guidance of the creator, though he may have insight enough to foresee
some of the directions which literature is likely to take. He may even
point out new material for the imagination of poets to feed on,--the
beautiful folklore of our native Indians, the unplumbed depths of the
Negro’s soul, the poetry and wisdom of Asia (which it may be our chief
destiny to interpret for the nations of Europe), the myth and story
of the hundred races that are to make up the new America, and all the
undiscovered coigns and crannies of our national life. I shall not say
that these services are extraneous and unimportant, like furnishing
the fountain-pen with which a great poem is written; but incursions
into the geography of the imagination are incidental to the critic’s
main duty of interpreting literature and making its meaning and purpose
clear to all who wish to love and understand it.
The first need of American criticism to-day is education in æsthetic
thinking. It needs above all the cleansing and stimulating power of
an intellectual bath. Only the drenching discipline that comes from
intellectual mastery of the problems of æsthetic thought can train us
for the duty of interpreting the American literature of the future. The
anarchy of impressionism is a natural reaction against the mechanical
theories and jejune text-books of the professors, but it is a temporary
haven and not a home. The haphazard empiricism of English criticism and
the faded moralism of our own will serve us no more. We must desert
these muddy waters, and seek purer and deeper streams. In a country
where philosophers urge men to cease thinking, it may be the task of
the critic to revivify and reorganize thought. Only in this way can we
gain what America lacks, the brain-illumined soul.
The second need of American criticism can be summed up in the word
scholarship--that discipline of knowledge which will give us at one
and the same time a wider international outlook and a deeper national
insight. One will spring from the other, for the timid Colonial
spirit finds no place in the heart of the citizen of the world; and
respect for native talent, born of a surer knowledge, will prevent
us alike from overrating its merits and from holding it too cheap.
Half-knowledge is either too timid or too cocksure; and only out of
this spiritual discipline can come a true independence of judgment and
taste.
For taste is after all both the point of departure and the goal;
and the third and greatest need of American criticism is a deeper
sensibility, a more complete submission to the imaginative will of the
artist, before attempting to rise above it into the realm of judgment.
If there is anything that American life can be said to give least of
all, it is training in taste. There is a deadness of artistic feeling,
which is sometimes replaced or disguised by a fervour of sociological
obsession, but this is no substitute for the faculty of imaginative
sympathy which is at the heart of all criticism. When the social
historian is born, the critic dies; for taste, or æsthetic enjoyment,
is the only gateway to the critic’s judgment, and over it is a flaming
signpost, “Critic, abandon all hope when this gate is shut.”
“To ravish Beauty with dividing powers
Is to let exquisite essences escape.”
Only out of the fusion of these three elements of taste, intellect, and
knowledge can American criticism gain what in one of its manifestations
is called “personality” and in another “style.” Only in this way can
it win in the battle against the benumbing chaos and the benumbing
monotony of American art and life.
We are all cocksure but bewildered children in a world we cannot
understand. We are all parvenus--parvenus on a new continent, on the
fringes of which some have lived a little longer than others, but the
whole of which has been encompassed by none of us for more than two or
three generations; parvenus in a new world of steam and electricity,
wireless and aeroplane, machinery and industry, which none of us has
yet been able to subdue to a mould that satisfies our deepest cravings;
parvenus in our culture, which still seems like a borrowed garment
instead of flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. What is the good of
all the instruments that our hands have moulded if we have neither the
will nor the imagination to wield them for the uses of the soul? Not
in this fashion shall we justify our old dream of an America that is
the hope of the world. Here are hundreds of colleges and universities;
why not fill these empty barracks with scholars and thinkers? Here are
a hundred races; why not say to them: “America can give you generous
opportunity and the most superb instruments that the undisciplined
energy of practical life has ever created, but in the spiritual fields
of art, poetry, religion, culture, it has little or nothing to give
you; let us all work together, learning and creating these high things
side by side”? Here are more hearts empty and unfulfilled and more
restless minds than the world has ever before gathered together; why
not lead them out of their corrals, and find a fitting pasture for
their brains and souls?
J. E. SPINGARN
_GLOSSARY_
The English language, extraordinarily rich and expressive in everything
that concerns the practical or the imaginative life, suffers from the
poverty and lack of precision of English æsthetic thought. It may
therefore be useful to indicate briefly the special sense in which
certain terms are used in this essay.
“_Spectator_: I should say that you have advanced a subtlety
that is little more than a play on words.
“_Friend_: And I maintain that when we are speaking of the
operations of the soul, no words can be delicate and subtle
enough.”--GOETHE.
_Art_--Any creation of the imagination, whether in the form of
imaginative literature or of painting, sculpture, music,
etc.
_Artist_--The creator of a work of art in any of its forms;
not used in this essay in the narrower sense of painter or
sculptor.
_Taste_--The faculty of imaginative sympathy by which the
reader or spectator is able to re-live the vision of the
artist, and therefore the essential pre-requisite to all
criticism.
_Criticism_--Any expression of taste guided by knowledge
and thought. (The critic’s training in knowledge is
scholarship, and his special field of thought æsthetics.)
_Æsthetics_--An ordered and reasoned conception of the meaning
and purpose of art, intended for the guidance of the critic
and not of the artist.