These miscellaneous thoughts on the fallibility of critics were
suggested to us by finding some old bound volumes of the _Edinburgh
Review_ on a bookstall, five cents each. In the issue for November,
1814, we read with relish what the _Review_ had to say about
Wordsworth's "Excursion." These are a few excerpts:
This will never do.... The case of Mr. Wordsworth, we perceive,
is now manifestly hopeless; and we give him up as altogether
incurable, and beyond the power of criticism ... making up our
minds, though with the most sincere pain and reluctance, to
consider him as finally lost to the good cause of poetry....
The volume before us, if we were to describe it very shortly,
we should characterize as a tissue of moral and devotional
ravings, in which innumerable changes are rung upon a few very
simple and familiar ideas.
The world of readers has not ratified Jeffrey's savage comments on
"The Excursion," for (to reckon only by the purse) any frequenter of
old bookshops can pick up that original issue of the _Edinburgh
Review_ for a few cents, while the other day we saw a first edition
of the maligned "Excursion" sold for thirty dollars. A hundred years
ago it was the critic's pleasure to drub authors with cruel and
unnecessary vigour. But we think that almost equal harm can be done
by the modern method of hailing a new "genius" every three weeks.
For example, there is something subtly troublesome to us in the
remark that Sinclair Lewis made about Evelyn Scott's novel, "The
Narrow House." The publishers have used it as an advertising slogan,
and the words have somehow buzzed their way into our head:
"Salute to Evelyn Scott: she belongs, she understands, she is
definitely an artist."
We have been going about our daily affairs, climbing subway stairs,
dodging motor trucks, ordering platters of stewed rhubarb, with that
refrain recurring and recurring. _Salute to Evelyn Scott!_ (we say
to ourself as we stand in line at the bank, waiting to cash a small
check). _She belongs, she understands._ And then, as we go away,
pensively counting the money (they've got some clean Ones down at
our bank, by the way; we don't know whether the larger denominations
are clean or not, we haven't seen any since Christmas), we find
ourself mumbling, _She is definitely an artist._
We wonder why that pronouncement annoys us so. We haven't read all
Mrs. Scott's book yet, and doubt our strength to do so. It is a riot
of morbid surgery by a fumbling scalpel: great powers of observation
are put to grotesque misuse. It is crammed with faithful particulars
neither relevant nor interesting. (Who sees so little as he who
looks through a microscope?) At first we thought, hopefully, that it
was a bit of excellent spoof; then, regretfully, we began to realize
that not only the publishers but even the author take it seriously.
It feels as though it had been written by one of the new school of
Chicago realists. It is disheartening that so influential a person
as Mr. Lewis should be fooled by this sort of thing.
So there is something intensely irritating to us (although we admire
Mr. Lewis) in that "_She belongs, she understands, she is definitely
an artist._" In the first place, that use of the word _artist_ as
referring to a writer always gives us qualms unless used with great
care. Then again, _She belongs_ somehow seems to intimate that there
is a registered clique of authors, preferably those who come down
pretty heavily upon the disagreeable facts of life and catalogue
them with gluttonous care, which group is the only one that counts.
Now we are strong for disagreeable facts. We know a great many. But
somehow we cannot shake ourself loose from the instinctive
conviction that imagination is the without-which-nothing of the art
of fiction. Miss Stella Benson is one who is not unobservant of
disagreeables, but when she writes she can convey her satire in
flashing, fantastic absurdity, in a heavenly chiding so delicate and
subtle that the victim hardly knows he is being chidden. The
photographic facsimile of life always seems to us the lesser art,
because it is so plainly the easier course.
We fear we are not acute enough to explain just why it is that Mr.
Lewis's salute to Mrs. Scott bothers us so. But it does bother us a
good deal. We have nourished ourself, in the main, upon the work of
two modern writers: Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad; we
like to apply as a test such theories as we have been able to glean
from those writers. Faulty and erring as we are, we always rise from
Mr. Conrad's books purged and, for the moment, strengthened.
Apparent in him are that manly and honourable virtue, that strict
saline truth and scrupulous regard for life, that liberation from
cant, which seem to be inbred in those who have suffered the
exacting discipline of the hostile sea. Certainly Conrad cannot be
called a writer who has neglected the tragic side of things. Yet in
his "Notes on Life and Letters," we find this:
What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is
just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many
men at various times that there is much evil in the world were
a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern
writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to
approach seriously the art of fiction.... To be hopeful in an
artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is
good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of
its being made so.... I would ask that in his dealings with
mankind he [the writer] should be capable of giving a tender
recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him
impatient with their small failings and scornful of their
errors.
We fear that our mild protest is rather mixed and muddled. But what
we darkly feel is this: that no author "belongs," or "understands,"
or is "definitely an artist" who merely makes the phantoms of his
imagination paltry or ridiculous. They may be paltry, but they must
also be pitiable; they may be ridiculous, but they must also be
tragic. Many authors have fallen from the sublime to the ridiculous;
but, as Mr. Chesterton magnificently said, in order to make that
descent they must first reach the sublime.
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