He often thought: “This is a dog’s life! I must give it up, and strike
out for myself. If I can’t write better than most of these fellows,
it’ll be very queer.” But he had not yet done so. He had in his extreme
youth published fiction, but it had never been the best work of which
he was capable--it was not likely that it could be, seeing that even
then he was constantly diverted from the ham-bone of his inspiration by
the duty of perusing and passing judgment on the work of other men.
If pressed to say exactly why he did not strike out for himself, he
found it difficult to answer, and what he answered was hardly as true
as he could have wished; for, though truthful, he was not devoid of the
instinct of self-preservation. He could hardly, for example, admit that
he preferred to think what much better books he could have written if
only he had not been handicapped, to actually striking out and writing
them. To believe this was an inward comfort not readily to be put to
the rude test of actual experience. Nor would it have been human of him
to acknowledge a satisfaction in feeling that he could put in their
proper places those who had to an extent, as one might say, retarded
his creative genius by compelling him to read their books. But these,
after all, were but minor factors in his long hesitation, for he was
not a conceited or malicious person. Fundamentally, no doubt, he lived
what he called “a dog’s life” with pleasure, partly because he was
used to it--and what a man is used to he is loath to part with; partly
because he really had a liking for books; and partly because to be a
judge is better than to be judged. And no one could deny that he had a
distinctly high conception of his functions. He had long laid down for
himself certain leading principles of professional conduct, from which
he never departed, such as that a critic must not have any personal
feelings, or be influenced by any private considerations whatever.
This, no doubt, was why he often went a little out of his way to be
more severe than usual with writers whom he suspected of a secret hope
that personal acquaintanceship might incline him to favour them. He
would, indeed, carry that principle further, and, where he had, out of
an impersonal enthusiasm at some time or another, written in terms of
striking praise, he would make an opportunity later on of deliberately
taking that writer down a peg or two lower than he deserved, lest
his praise might be suspected of having been the outcome of personal
motives, or of gush--for which he had a great abhorrence. In this way
he preserved a remarkably pure sense of independence; a feeling that
he was master in his own house, to be dictated to only by a proper
conviction of his own importance. It is true that there were certain
writers whom, for one reason or another, he could not very well stand;
some having written to him to point out inaccuracies, or counter one of
his critical conclusions, or, still worse, thanked him for having seen
exactly what they had meant--a very unwise and even undignified thing
to do, as he could not help thinking; others, again, having excited
in him a natural dislike by their appearance, conduct, or manner of
thought, or by having, perhaps, acquired too rapid or too swollen a
reputation to be, in his opinion, good for them. In such cases, of
course, he was not so unhuman as to disguise his convictions. For he
was, before all things, an Englishman with a very strong belief in the
freest play for individual taste. But of almost any first book by an
unknown author he wrote with an impersonality which it would have been
difficult to surpass.
Then there was his principle that one must never be influenced in
judging a book by anything one has said of a previous book by the same
writer--each work standing entirely on its own basis. He found this
important and made a point of never rereading his own criticisms; so
that the rhythm of his judgment, which, if it had risen to a work in
1920, would fall over the author’s next in 1921, was entirely unbiassed
by recollection, and followed merely those immutable laws of change and
the moon so potent in regard to tides and human affairs.
For sameness and consistency he had a natural contempt. It was the
unexpected both in art and criticism that he particularly looked for;
anything being, as he said, preferable to dulness--a sentiment in
which he was supported by the public; not that, to do him justice,
this weighed with him, for he had a genuine distrust of the public, as
was proper for one sitting in a seat of judgment. He knew that there
were so-called critics who had a kind of formula for each writer, as
divines have sermons suitable to certain occasions. For example: “We
have in ‘The Mazy Swim’ another of Mr. Hyphen Dash’s virile stories....
We can thoroughly recommend this pulsating tale, with its true and
beautiful character study of Little Katie, to every healthy reader
as one of the best that Mr. Hyphen Dash has yet given us.” Or: “We
cannot say that ‘The Mazy Swim’ is likely to increase Mr. Hyphen Dash’s
reputation. It is sheer melodrama, such as we are beginning to expect
from this writer.... The whole is artificial to a degree.... No sane
reader will, for a moment, believe in Little Katie.” Toward this sort
of thing he showed small patience, having noticed with some acumen a
relationship between the name of the writer, the politics of the paper,
and the temper of the criticism. No! For him, if criticism did not
embody the individual mood and temper of the critic, it was not worthy
of the name.
But the canon which of all he regarded as most sacred was this: A
critic must surrender himself to the mood and temper of the work he is
criticising, take the thing as it is with his own special method and
technique, its own point of view, and, only when all that is admitted,
let his critical faculty off the chain. He was never tired of insisting
on this, both to himself and others, and never sat down to a book
without having it firmly in his mind. Not infrequently, however, he
found that the author was, as it were, wilfully employing a technique
or writing in a mood with which he had no sympathy, or had chosen a
subject obviously distasteful, or a set of premises that did not lead
to the conclusion which he would have preferred. In such cases his
scrupulous honesty warned him not to compromise with his conscience,
but to say outright that it would have been better if the technique of
the story had been objective instead of subjective; that the morbidity
of the work prevented serious consideration of a subject which should
never have been chosen; or that he would ever maintain that the hero
was too weak a character to be a hero, and the book, therefore, of
little interest. If any one pointed out to him that had the hero been
a strong character there would have been no book, it being, in point
of fact, the study of a weak character, he would answer: “That may be
so, but it does not affect what I say--the book would have been better
and more important if it had been the study of a strong character.”
And he would take the earliest opportunity of enforcing his recorded
criticism that the hero was no hero, and the book no book to speak of.
For, though not obstinate, he was a man who stood to his guns. He took
his duty to the public very seriously, and felt it, as it were, a point
of honour never to admit himself in the wrong. It was so easy to do
that and so fatal; and the fact of being anonymous, as on the whole he
preferred to be, made it all the harder to abstain (on principle and
for the dignity of criticism) from noticing printed contradictions to
his conclusions.
In spite of all the heart he put into his work, there were times when,
like other men, he suffered from dejection, feeling that the moment had
really come when he must either strike out for himself into creative
work, or compile a volume of synthetic criticism. And he would say:
“None of us fellows are doing any constructive critical work; no one
nowadays seems to have any conception of the first principles of
criticism.” Having talked that theory out thoroughly he would feel
better, and next day would take an opportunity of writing: “We are not
like the academic French, to whom the principles of criticism are so
terribly important; our genius lies rather in individual judgments,
pliant and changing as the works they judge.”
There was that in him which, like the land from which he sprang, could
ill brook control. He approved of discipline, but knew exactly where
it was deleterious to apply it to himself; and no one, perhaps, had
a finer and larger conception of individual liberty. In this way he
maintained the best traditions of a calling whose very essence was
superiority. In course of conversation he would frequently admit, being
a man of generous calibre, that the artist, by reason of long years of
devoted craftsmanship, had possibly the most intimate knowledge of his
art, but he would not fail to point out, and very wisely, that there
was no such unreliable testimony as that of experts, who had an axe to
grind, each of his own way of doing things; for comprehensive views of
literature seen in due perspective there was nothing--he thought--like
the trained critic, rising superior, as it were professionally, to
myopia and individual prejudice.
Of the new school who maintained that true criticism was but
reproduction in terms of sympathy, and just as creative as the creative
work it reproduced, he was a little impatient, not so much on the
ground that to make a model of a mountain was not quite the same thing
as to make the mountain; but because he felt in his bones that the
true creativeness of criticism (in which he had a high belief) was
its destructive and satiric quality; its power of reducing things to
rubbish and clearing them away, ready for the next lot. Instinct,
fortified by his own experience, had guided him to that conclusion.
Possibly, too, the conviction, always lurking deep within him, that the
time was coming when he would strike out for himself and show the world
how a work of art really should be built, was in some sort responsible
for the necessity he felt to keep the ground well cleared.
He was nearly fifty when his clock chimed, and he began seriously to
work at the creation of that masterpiece which was to free him from
“a dog’s life,” and, perhaps, fill its little niche in the gallery of
immortality. He worked at it happily enough till one day, at the end
of the fifth month, he had the misfortune to read through what he had
written. With his critical faculty he was able to perceive that which
gave him no little pain--every chapter, most pages, and many sentences
destroyed the one immediately preceding. He searched with intense care
for that coherent thread which he had suspected of running through the
whole. Here and there he seemed to come on its track, then it would
vanish. This gave him great anxiety.
Abandoning thought for the moment, he wrote on. He paused again
toward the end of the seventh month, and once more patiently reviewed
the whole. This time he found four distinct threads that did not
seem to meet; but still more puzzling was the apparent absence of
any individual flavour. He was staggered. Before all he prized that
quality, and throughout his career had fostered it in himself. To be
unsapped in whim or fancy, to be independent, had been the very salt
of his existence as a critic. And now, and now--when his hour had
struck, and he was in the very throes of that long-deferred creation,
to find----! He put thought away again, and doggedly wrote on.
At the end of the ninth month, in a certain exaltation, he finished;
and slowly, with intense concentration, looked at what he had produced
from beginning to end. And as he looked something clutched at him
within and he felt frozen. The thing did not move, it had no pulse, no
breath, no colour--it was dead.
And sitting there before that shapeless masterpiece, still-born,
without a spirit or the impress of a personality, a horrid thought
crept and rattled in his brain. Had he, in his independence, in his
love of being a law unto himself, _become so individual that he had no
individuality left_? Was it possible that he had judged, and judged,
and--not been judged, too long? It was not true--not true! Locking the
soft and flavourless thing away, he took up the latest novel sent him,
and sat down to read it. But, as he read, the pages of his own work
would implant themselves above those that he turned and turned. At last
he put the book down, and took up pen to review it. “This novel,” he
wrote, “is that most pathetic thing, the work of a man who has burned
the lamp till the lamp has burned him; who has nourished and cultured
his savour, and fed his idiosyncrasies, till he has dried and withered,
without savour left.” And, having written that damnation of the book
that was not his own, the blood began once more flowing in his veins,
and he felt warm.