English character since Shakespeare; and much of _The Dynasts_
(except its historical fidelity) might be Shakespeare. But I value
his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into
the comprehensiveness of his novels and _The Dynasts_) as truly, and
with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in
his novels. His lyrics have not the spontaneity of Shakespeare's or
Shelley's; they are rough-hewn and jagged: but I like them and they
stick.'
A little later, having finished _The Egoist_,--
'I see now that Meredith belongs to that class of novelists with
whom I do not usually get on so well (_e.g._ Dickens), who create
and people worlds of their own so that one approaches the characters
with amusement, admiration, or contempt, not with liking or pity, as
with Hardy's people, into whom the author does not inject his own
exaggerated characteristics.'
The great Russians were unknown to Sorley when he died. What would he
not have found in those mighty seekers, with whom Hardy alone stands
equal? But whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strange
company, we feel that Hardy could never have been dethroned in his
heart, for other reasons than that the love of the Wessex hills had
crept into his blood. He was killed on October 13, 1915, shot in the
head by a sniper as he led his company at the 'hair-pin' trench near
Hulluch.
[JANUARY, 1920.
_The Cry in the Wilderness_
We have in Mr Irving Babbitt's _Rousseau and Romanticism_ to deal with a
closely argued and copiously documented indictment of the modern mind.
We gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which the
author has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly that
the preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatever
may be our final attitude towards the author's conclusions, we cannot
but regard _Rousseau and Romanticism_ as masterly. Its style is, we
admit, at times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought which
animates it is of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declare
that it is the only book of modern criticism which can be compared for
clarity and depth of thought with Mr Santayana's _Three Philosophical
Poets_.
By endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall more
easily give an indication of the nature and scope of Professor Babbitt's
achievement. We think that it would be easy to show that in the last
generation--we will go no further back for the moment, though our
author's arraignment reaches at least a century earlier--criticism has
imperceptibly given way to a different activity which we may call
appreciation. The emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of the
individual, and the unconscious or avowed aim of the modern 'critic' has
been to persuade us to understand, to sympathise with and in the last
resort to enter into the whole psychological process which culminated
in the artistic creation of the author examined. And there modern
criticism has stopped. There has been no indication that it was aware of
the necessity of going further. Many influences went to shape the
general conviction that mere presentation was the final function of
criticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious contagion of a
scientific terminology. The word 'objectivity' had a great vogue; it was
felt that the spiritual world was analogous to the physical; the critic
was faced, like the man of science, with a mass of hard, irreducible
facts, and his function was, like the scientist's, that of recording
them as compendiously as possible and without prejudice. The unconscious
programme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment. All facts may be of
equal interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literary
critic. He chose those which interested him most for the exercise of his
talent for demonstration. But that choice was, as a general rule, the
only specifically critical act which he performed, and, since it was
usually unmotived, it was difficult to attach even to that more than a
'scientific' importance. Reasoned judgments of value were rigorously
eschewed, and even though we may presume that the modern critic is at
times vexed by the problem why (or whether) one work of art is better
than another, when each seems perfectly expressive of the artist's
intention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language of his
appreciation. Tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at which
all works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive. What
every artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness. As
between things unique there is no possibility of subordination or
comparison.
That does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism,
although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that the
impulse towards the penetration of an artist's consciousness is in
itself salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism,
provided that it is definitely subordinated to the final critical
judgment, before which uniqueness is an impossible plea. Such a
diagnosis will no doubt be welcomed by those who belong to an older
generation than that to which it is applied. But they should not rejoice
prematurely. We require of them an answer to the question whether they
were really in better case--whether they were not the fathers whose sins
are visited upon the children. Professor Babbitt, at least, has no doubt
of their responsibility. From his angle of approach we might rake their
ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these: When you invoked the
sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? When you
riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget
that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical
facts or a cosmogony? When you questioned everything in the name of
truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those
creations of men's minds were _capax imperii_ in man's universe? What
right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger
for his nakedness? Why did you not examine in the name of that same
truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit to
bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? Why did
you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the
most romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the
greatest good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for one
moment pursued? What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe
your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the
world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who
guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why
did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's
responsibility for himself from his shoulders? Do you, because you
clothed yourselves in the shreds of a moral respectability which you had
not the time (or was it the courage?) to analyse, dare to denounce us
because our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes which you enjoyed?
But this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals with
morals, and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection is
conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital
centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism
inevitably involves an æsthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only
temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a
supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an
adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is
no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two.
The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised,
and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last
resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than morality
affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. Literature
should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty
prevails--where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of
the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a
deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as
he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends. Never, we suppose, was an
age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than
this. Its philosophy has played it false. It has passed from the
nebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would
have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of
Aristotle's _Poetics_, the mere title, _The Philosophy of History_ would
have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of
instinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man _is_ a beast'; from the
other, 'Trust your instincts.' The sole manifest employment of reason is
to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the
imagination, the vital principle of control.
Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our
senses, which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certain
that in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a
remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the
world. It is the confusion between existence and value. That strange
malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress
was supposed to create, _ipso facto_, a concomitant moral progress, and
which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a
literature of objective realism. One of the most admired of
contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's memory of a
mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of
almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such
reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled
her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writers
who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when
they refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older
generation. What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical
outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously
cherished? They may not like the bastard progeny of the various
mistresses they adored--of a Science which they enthroned above instead
of subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the
so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane
devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which
appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute
indolence--but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it.
Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the æsthetic and
moral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt's indictment
of themselves and decide whether they have no sin:--
'"If I am to judge by myself," said an eighteenth-century Frenchman,
"man is a stupid animal." Man is not only a stupid animal, in spite
of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here at the source
of his stupidity. The source is the moral indolence that Buddha,
with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago. In spite of
the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material
success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this
effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance.
An energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the
failure to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid. Just
this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the
ages--the Great War. No more delirious spectacle has ever been
witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a
vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for
one another. It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a
world which has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in
spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be
caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap. The dissolution
of civilisation with which we are threatened is likely to be worse
in some respects than that of Greece or Rome, in view of the success
that has been obtained in 'perfecting the mystery of murder.'
Various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up
the beast in man. Of these the chief is no doubt the Church. But the
leadership of the Occident is no longer here. The leaders have
succumbed in greater or less degree to naturalism, and so have been
tampering with the moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks
no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this
law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with
brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own
soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way,
for the very reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with
the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding
of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a
necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of
wisdom. The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he
wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the
facts. But the veto power is itself a fact--the weightiest with
which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off
traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. Yet
without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both
Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority
that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the
veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on
hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be
proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their
wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation.'
We find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of this
indictment. The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the
universe in which man has to live. That universe is at once smaller and
larger than the universe of science: smaller in material extent, larger
in spiritual possibility. Therefore to allow the perspective of science
seriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is an
invitation to disaster. Humanism must reassert itself, for even we can
see that Shakespeares are better than Hamlets. The reassertion of
humanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life and
conduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individual
to this ideal. There must now be a period of critical and humanistic
positivism in regard to ethics and to art. We may say frankly that it is
not to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments. We regard
them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, It
is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our new
traditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are more
keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are
trembling.
[FEBRUARY, 1920.
_Poetry and Criticism_
Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways
peculiar to ourselves. Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browning
was a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparently
more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. We are in a
curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled
by a sense that, although we have been living at a time of
extraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has come
out of it. Having thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetry
is an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds
for some fuller justification of the poetic activity. A presentiment
that our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortable
with it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standard
should be once more created and applied.
What shall we require of poetry? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a
world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a
glimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom? All these things--all
different, yet not all contradictory--have been required of poetry. What
shall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as
vague as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demanded
of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must be
adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a
culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete
universality.
Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand
these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'This is a
lyrical age.' To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that
poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always
been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all
experience. In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there
have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately
made the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searching
experience. Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great
lyrical poetry. Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental
achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have always
been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel
of the highest argument of which the soul of man is capable.
Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and
not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the
condition of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_ or Milton's
_Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the
colloquial prose of Tchehov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good a claim to be
called poetry as _The Essay on Man_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ as _The
Ring and the Book_, _The Possessed_ as _Phèdre_? Where are we to call a
halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art merge
into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in
danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon
what will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference.
The difference we seek must be substantial and essential.
The very striking merit of Sir Henry Newbolt's _New Study of English
Poetry_ is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage,
sincerity, and an obvious and passionate devotion to the highest
spiritual activity of man. It has seldom been our good fortune to read a
book of criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only call
a purity of intention; we feel throughout that the author's aim is
single, to set before us the results of his own sincere thinking on a
matter of infinite moment. Perhaps better, because subtler, books of
literary criticism have appeared in England during the last ten
years--if so, we have not read them; but there has been none more truly
tolerant, more evidently free from malice, more certainly the product of
a soul in which no lie remains. Whether it is that Sir Henry has like
Plato's Cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not know,
but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of Cephalus's
peaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the gods and
left the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate.
Now it seems to us of importance that a writer like Sir Henry Newbolt
should declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong to
the same kind. It is important not because there is anything very novel
in the contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportune
because at the present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vital
element that is common both to creative poetry and creative prose. The
general mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it
loves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact
that the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are
legion. An age of fiddlesticks! Whatever the present age is--and it is
an age of many interesting characteristics--it is not an age of poetry.
It would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead of
five hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all the
impresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose. The differentia
of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, or
literature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension. Where you
have the evidence of that act, the sovereign æsthetic process, there you
have poetry. What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or
both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which
those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. It does not
suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be
content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each
single act of comprehension made vocal. That contentment is the
comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It is not
sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare's _Arabia_ or Mr
Davies's _Lovely Dames_ or Miss Katherine Mansfield's _Prelude_ or Mr
Eliot's _Portrait of a Lady_, in each of which the vital act of
intuitive comprehension is made manifest. One must establish a
hierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more truly
comprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. One must be
prepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of its
kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has been
created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind.
That, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and one
which is in peril of death from desuetude. The other important type of
criticism which is analysis of poetic method, an investigation and
appreciation of the means by which the poet communicates his intuitive
comprehension to an audience, is in a less perilous condition. Where
there are real poets--and only a bigot will deny that there are real
poets among us now: we have just named four--there will always be true
criticism of poetic method, though it may seldom find utterance in the
printed word. But criticism of poetic method has, by hypothesis, no
perspective and no horizons; it is concerned with a unique thing under
the aspect, of its uniqueness. It may, and happily most often does,
assume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual life of
man; but it makes no endeavour to assess it according to the standards
that are implicit in such an assumption. That is the function of
philosophical criticism. If philosophical criticism can be combined with
criticism of method--and there is no reason why they should not coexist
in a single person; the only two English critics of the nineteenth
century, Coleridge and Arnold, were of this kind--so much the better;
but it is philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate need
at this moment.