good for _this_ but not good for _that;_ may be praised for its plot,
but certainly has not character enough to get long life. But when the
difficulty of adjusting standards is increased by the irresponsible
hullabaloo of commercial appreciation, no wonder that sensible people
estimate foolishly, and critics of standing are induced to write for
publication remarks that some day will (or should) make them sick. For
the publishers' "blurb" confuses all standards. Every book is
superlative in everything. And the hack reviewer, when he likes a
book, likes everything and applies Shakespearian adjectives and
Tolstoyan attributes to creatures of dust and tinsel, or blunders
helplessly into dispraise of scholarship, restraint, subtlety, taste,
originality--anything that he does not understand.
There is no help except to set books upon their planes and assort
them into their categories--which is merely to define them before
beginning to criticize. This is elementary work as I have said,
which may lead the critic only so far as the threshold, and cannot
always give the reader that complete and sympathetic comprehension
of what he has read which is the final object of literary
criticism. However, in an age when overemphasis has been
commercialized, and where the powerful forces of print can be
mobilized and sent charging everywhere to bowl down contrary
opinions, it is indispensable.
Scholarly books have been dispraised because they were not
exciting; fine novels have been sneered at because they were hard
to read; cheap stories have been proclaimed great because they
wore a pretense of seriousness; sentimentality has been welcomed
because it was warm hearted; indecency has been condemned for
immorality; immorality has slipped through as romance; daring has
been mistaken for novelty; painstaking dulness, for careful art;
self-revelation, for world knowledge; pretty writing, for
literature; violence, for strength; and warped and unhealthy
egoism for the wise sincerity which is the soul of literature. In
all such instances definition is the prophylactic, and often the
cure.
Writers, most of all, need to define their tasks. I do not mean
their technical problems merely, although I cannot conceive that a
dramatist or playwright, who has his subject well in mind, can
possibly be hurt by thinking out his methods with the most
scrupulous care. Lubbock's recent book on "The Craft of Fiction"
has emphasized an art of approach and point of view in the great
novelists which was thoroughly conscious, even though they may
never have tried to formulate it in words. I mean particularly the
defining of their themes, their objectives. Many modern novels of
the better class, and a great many modern poems, seem to me awash
and wallowing like derelicts on the high seas. They are successful
enough in this, excellent in that, but they get nowhere, because
the writers had felt the emotion that made them, or suffered the
experience, but never defined it in terms of all emotion, all
experience, never considered its end. The three dots...of modern
literature are significant. We break off our efforts, partly no
doubt because we seek effects of impressionism, more often because
imagination went no further. Near things are sharp and expressed
with remarkable vividness, ultimate objectives are blurred, which
is to say, they lack definition.
May the shades of Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Emerson, and all
great individualists protect us from bad definitions, and
especially from rigid or formal ones! Bad definitions destroy
themselves, for if they are thoroughly bad no one believes them,
and if they contain those pleasing half truths which a generation
loves to suckle upon, why then after their vogue they will wither
into nothingness. Such definitions are of the letter, and die by
it, but stiff, clumsy definitions kill the spirit. To define a
great man by a rigid formula is to sink to the lowest practice of
the worst class rooms. To define a tendency so sharply that it
cannot flow without breaking the definition, is a lecturer's trick
for which audiences should stone him. Solemn generalizations which
squat upon a book like an ostrich on a goose egg and hatch out
vast moral philosophies are to be dreaded like the devil, as are,
equally, the critics with pet theories, who, having defined them,
make everything from a squib to an epic fit their definition.
Definitions which classify without margins are a special evil: the
division into literature and journalism for example, with no
allowance for interlocking; or the confident separation of all
books into categories of good or bad. Wholesale definitions are
also objectionable, where having defined a poem as magazine verse,
or a collection of articles as a magazine, or a book as a sex
story, or a man as a journalist, or a tendency as erratic or
erotic, you think you have said something. May the muse of clear
thinking, and the little humorous gods who keep the sense of
proportion balancing, protect us from these also.
It occurs to me that I have made but a lame attempt to define
definition. This, however, is as it should be. For definition, in
the sense in which I am using it, like literature, has much of the
indefinable. It is a tool merely, or better still, because
broader, a device by which the things we enjoy and that profit us
may be placed in perspective, ranged, compared, sorted, and
distinguished. It is what Arnold meant by seeing steadily and
seeing whole. It is the scientist's microscope that defines
relationship, and equally the painter's brush that by a touch
reveals the hidden shapes of nature and the blend of colors. It
is, like these instruments, a _means_ and not an _end._ May pedants,
scholiasters, formalists, and dilettantes take to heart this final
description of literary definition!
Quite unconsciously for the most part, but occasionally with
purpose aforethought, the essays in this book have been written as
literary definitions. Its unity lies in the attempt, which at
least has been sincere, to grasp, turn, study in a serious,
humorous, ironical, anything but a flippant mood, the living forms
of literature as they have risen into consciousness and challenged
definition.
THE END.