There are certain writers--men, too, of ability, humour, perspicacity,
with wide knowledge, lucidity of expression, firm intellectual grip,
genuine admirations, who really live among the things of the
mind--whose writings are almost wholly distressing to me, and affect me
exactly as the cry of an itinerant vendor in a quiet and picturesque
town affects me. It is an honest trade enough; he saves people a great
deal of trouble; he sells, no doubt, perfectly wholesome and
inexpensive things; but I am glad when he has turned the corner, and
when his raucous clamour is heard more faintly--glad when he is out of
sight, and still more when he is out of hearing. So with these authors;
if I take up one of their books, however brilliant and even true the
statements may be, I am sorry that the writer has laid hands upon a
thing I admire and value. He seems like a damp-handed auctioneer,
bawling in public, and pointing out the beauties of a mute and pathetic
statue.
I am thinking now of one writer in particular, a well-known man of
letters, a critic, essayist, and biographer; a man of great acuteness
and with strong and vehement preferences in literature. When I have
been forced by circumstances, as I sometimes have, to read one of his
books, I find myself at once in a condition of irritable opposition. He
writes sensibly, acutely, epigrammatically; but there is a vile
complacency about it all, an underlying assumption that every one who
does not agree with him in the smallest particular is necessarily a
fool--a sense that he feels that he has gone into the merits of a book,
and that there is exactly as much and as little in it as he tells you.
He is very often right; that is the misery of it. But this lack of
urbanity, this unnecessary insolence, is a very grave fault in a
writer--fatal, indeed, to his permanence. He turns a book or a person
inside out, dissects it in a deft and masterly way; but one feels at
the end as one might feel about an anatomist who has dissected every
fibre of an animal's body, classified every organ, traced every muscle
and nerve, and bids you at the end take it on his authority that there
is no such thing as the vital principle or the informing soul, because
he has shown you everything that there is to see. Yet the finest
essence of all, the living and breathing spirit, has escaped him.
But what is a still worse fault in the writer of whom I speak is that
he is the victim of a certain intellectual snobbishness. By which I
mean that when he has once conceived an admiration for a historical
personage or a writer he becomes unable to criticise him; he can only
justify and praise him, sling mud at his opponents, and, so to speak,
clear a space round his hero by knocking over in opprobrious terms any
one who may threaten his supremacy. He condones and even praises any
fault in his idol; and what would be in his eyes a damning fault in one
whom he happened to dislike, becomes a salient virtue in the person
whom he praises. He condemns Swift for his coarseness and praises
Johnson for his outspokenness. He condemns Robert Browning for his
obscurity and praises George Meredith for his rich complexity. He would
never see that the victory lies with the appreciator of any
personality, because, if you happen to appreciate a figure whom he
himself dislikes, you are proclaimed to be guilty of perversity and bad
taste. Thus I not only feel sore when he abuses a character whom I
love, but I feel ashamed when he decries one whom I hate, for I am
tempted to feel that I must have grossly misunderstood him; and even
when he rapturously and unctuously belauds some figure that I admire, I
feel my admiration to be smirched and tarnished.
The one quality which I think he always misses in a character is a
high, pure, delicate sense of beauty, the subtlest fibre of poetry.
This my swashbuckler misnames sentimentality--and thus I feel that he
always tends to admire the wrong qualities, because he condones even
what he calls sentimentality in one whom he chooses to admire.
It is this attitude of disdain and scorn, based upon the intellect
rather than upon the soul, that I think is one of the most terrible and
satanical things in life. Such a quality may be valuable in scientific
research, it may be successful in politics, because there are still
among us many elementary people who really like to see a man
belaboured; it may be successful in business, it may being a man
wealth, position, and a certain kind of influence. But it never
inspires confidence or affection; and though such a man may be feared
and respected on the stage of life, there is an invariable and general
sense of relief when he quits it.
"The fruit of the Spirit," wrote the wise apostle--who knew, too, the
bitter pleasures of a vehement controversy, and was no milk-and-water
saint--"the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, meekness,
long-suffering, kindness." None of these fruits hang upon the vigorous
boughs of our friend's tree. He is rather like that detestable and
spidery thing the araucaria, which has a wound for every tender hand,
and invites no bright-eyed feathered songsters to perch or build among
its sinister branches.
The only critic who helps me is the critic whose humility keeps pace
with his acuteness, who leads me gently where he has himself trodden
patiently and observantly, and does not attempt to disfigure and ravage
the regions which he has not been able to desire to explore. The man
who will show me unsuspected connections, secret paths of thought, who
will teach me how to extend my view, how I may pass quietly from the
known to the unknown; who will show me that stars and flowers have
voices, and that running water has a quiet spirit of its own; and who
in the strange world of human life will unveil for me the hopes and
fears, the deep and varied passions, that bind men together and part
them, and that seem to me such unreasonable and inexplicable things if
they are bounded by the narrow fences of life--emotions that travel so
long and intricate a path, that are born with such an amazing
suddenness and attain so large a volume, so fierce a velocity--this is
the interpreter and guide whom I would welcome, even if he know but a
little more than myself; while if my guide is infallible and
disdainful, if he denies what he cannot see and derides what he has
never felt, then I feel that I have but one enemy the more, in a place
where I am beset with foes.