It would be easy, if need were, to devise a theory of coherence for the
Essays here selected for re-publication, but the truth is that they are
fortuitous. The only claim that I can consistently make, is that I have
always chosen, for biographical and critical study, figures whose
personality or writings have seemed to me to possess some subtle,
evasive charm, or delicate originality of purpose or view. Mystery,
inexplicable reticence, haughty austerity, have a fascination in life
and literature, that is sometimes denied to sanguine strength and easy
volubility. I am well aware that vitality and majesty are the primary
qualities to demand both in life and literature. I have nothing but
rebellious horror for the view that languor, if only it be subtle and
serpentine, is in itself admirable. But there are two kinds of languor.
Just as the poverty of a man born needy, and incapable of acquiring
wealth, is different in kind from the poverty of one who has sacrificed
wealth in some noble cause, so the deliberate, the self-conscious
languor "about three degrees on this side of faintness," of which Keats
wrote in his most voluptuous mood, is a very different thing from the
languor of Hamlet, the fastidious despair of ever realising some lofty
conception, the prostrate indifference of one who has found the world
too strong. I do not say that the note of failure is a characteristic of
all the figures in my narrow gallery of portraits. But I will say that
they were most of them persons about whom hung an undefined promise of
greater strength than ever issued in performance. The causes of their
comparative failure are difficult to disentangle. With one perhaps it
was the want of a sympathetic _entourage_; with another a dreamy or
mystical habit of thought; with this one, the immersion in uncongenial
pursuits; with that a certain failure in physical vitality; with
another, the work, accomplished in dignified serenity, has fallen too
swiftly into neglect, and we must endeavour to divine the cause: and yet
in no case can we trace any inherent weakness, any moral obliquity, any
degrading or enervating concession.
Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes we make in literature and art is
the passionate individualism into which we are betrayed. We cannot bring
ourselves to speak or think very highly of the level of a man's work,
unless the positive and tangible results of that work are in themselves
very weighty and pure. We forget all about the inspirers and teachers of
poets and artists. How often does the poet, and the artist too, in
autobiographical allusion, speak with absorbing gratitude and devotion
of some humble name of which we take no note, as the "fons et origo" to
himself of enthusiasm and proficiency.
It is with no affectation of fastidious superiority, but with a frank
confession of conscious pettiness, that I say that this book will only
appeal to a few. The critic is no hero: he is at best but a skipping
peltast, engaged as often as not in inglorious flight. To flounder in
images, criticism is nothing but a species of mistletoe, sprouting in a
sleek bunch in the chink of a lofty forest tree. I had rather have been
Lovelace than Sainte-Beuve, and write one immortal lyric than
thirty-five volumes of the acutest discrimination. But a minority has a
right to its opinions, and may claim to be amused: a man who thinks the
Rhine vulgar, and the Jungfrau exaggerated, may be foolishly delighted
with a backwater on the Thames, and a view of the Berkshire downs. In
fact, the only kind of criticism of which one may be impatient is the
criticism which abuses an author for not writing something else. What
critics can do, what I have attempted to do, is to strengthen and define
the impression that a casual reader may derive from a book, a reader who
wishes to see what is good, but has not the knack described by the poet,
who says "what is best he firmly lights upon, as birds on sprays."
On the other hand we may reasonably doubt what is the exact worth of the
cultivation, of the point of view which we meekly accept at the hands
of a convincing critic. Does it not require a special insight to
understand even criticism? After all, we agree with, we do not accept
criticism: we select from it some preference, strongly and convincingly
stated, which jumps with our own preconceived ideas. If we merely
swallow it down, like the camel, to be reproduced in fetid stagnation,
whenever a necessity for it arises, are we so much higher after all? The
delicate psychologist who has accepted my dedication, speaks in one of
his latest stories of the expression on the face of a Royal Princess,
who had been _told_ everything in the world, and had never _perceived_
anything. Culture, criticism, in certain sterile natures, are like
Sheridan's famous apophthegm: they lie "like lumps of marl on a barren
moor, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilise."
In art, in literature, it is the periods of republicanism that have left
their mark on the world: the periods that have been very conscious of,
and very deferential to authority, have been invariably retrograde.
What a dreary period in English literature was the reign of Dr. Johnson.
The chief legacies of that era to literature are the letters of Gray and
Horace Walpole, and the life of the Dictator himself. But these are not
creative literature at all. Gray, as a poet, was comparatively sterile.
Imagination, the jewel of the soul, had fallen from its elaborate
setting. But the more that literature declined, the more sententious
grew the critics. Nowadays, when literature is very active, and not very
profound--impressionist, journalistic, supremely content if it can
produce lively and superficial sensations--the bludgeoning of the early
part of the century has gone out: no longer does the critic feel it a
duty, as the oracle said to Oenomaus, to "draw the bow and slaughter the
innumerable geese that graze upon the green." Indeed would not some have
us believe that criticism of contemporaries is all a matter of private
interest, apart from any just or earnest conviction?
But there is still a class of readers, not very large or important
perhaps, haunted by a native instinct for literature, a relish for fine
phrases, a hankering for style--to whom the manner of saying a thing is
as important, or more important than the matter, readers, who are not
satisfied with fiction, unless it be combined, as by Robert Louis
Stevenson, with a wealth, a curiousness, a preciosity of phrase, to
which in criticism only Walter Pater can lay claim, and which may secure
for these two a station in literature to which the majority of our busy,
voluble, graphic writers must aspire in vain.