“I confess I never liked this continual talk of resistance and
revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the
constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society
dangerously valetudinary; it is taking periodical doses of mercury
sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to
our love of liberty.”
I say that is extravagant prose; prose too much suffered to indulge its
caprices; prose at too great a distance from the center of good taste;
prose, in short, with the note of provinciality. People may reply, it is
rich and imaginative; yes, that is just it, it is _Asiatic_ prose, as
the ancient critics would have said; prose somewhat barbarously rich and
overloaded. But the true prose is Attic prose.
Well, but Addison’s prose is Attic prose. Where, then, it may be asked,
is the note of provinciality in Addison? I answer, in the commonplace of
his ideas.[8] This is a matter worth remarking. Addison claims to take
leading rank as a moralist. To do that, you must have ideas of the first
order on your subject—the best ideas, at any rate, attainable in your
time—as well as to be able to express them in a perfectly sound and sure
style. Else you show your distance from the center of ideas by your
matter; you are provincial by your matter, though you may not be
provincial by your style. It is comparatively a small matter to express
oneself well, if one will be content with not expressing much, with
expressing only trite ideas; the problem is to express new and profound
ideas in a perfectly sound and classical style. He is the true classic,
in every age, who does that. Now Addison has not, on his subject of
morals, the force of ideas of the moralists of the first class—the
classical moralists; he has not the best ideas attainable in or about
his time, and which were, so to speak, in the air then, to be seized by
the finest spirits; he is not to be compared for power, searchingness,
or delicacy of thought to Pascal or La Bruyère or Vauvenargues; he is
rather on a level, in this respect, with a man like Marmontel.
Therefore, I say, he has the note of provinciality as a moralist; he is
provincial by his matter, though not by his style.
-----
Footnote 8:
A critic says this is paradoxical, and urges that many second-rate
French academicians have uttered the most commonplace ideas possible.
I agree that many second-rate French academicians have uttered the
most commonplace ideas possible; but Addison is not a second-rate man.
He is a man of the order, I will not say of Pascal, but at any rate of
La Bruyère and Vauve-nargues; why does he not equal them? I say
because of the medium in which he finds himself, the atmosphere in
which he lives and works; an atmosphere which tells unfavorably, or
rather _tends_ to tell unfavorably (for that is the truer way of
putting it) either upon style or else upon ideas; tends to make even a
man of great ability either a Mr. Carlyle or else a Lord Macaulay.
It is to be observed, however, that Lord Macaulay’s style has in its
turn suffered by his failure in ideas, and this cannot be said of
Addison’s.
-----
To illustrate what I mean by an example. Addison, writing as a moralist
on fixedness in religious faith, says:—
“Those who delight in reading books of controversy do very seldom arrive
at a fixed and settled habit of faith. The doubt which was laid revives
again, and shows itself in new difficulties; and that generally for this
reason,—because the mind, which is perpetually tossed in controversies
and disputes, is apt to forget the reasons which had once set it at
rest, and to be disquieted with any former perplexity when it appears in
a new shape, or is started by a different hand.”
It may be said, that is classical English, perfect in lucidity, measure,
and propriety. I make no objection; but, in my turn, I say that the idea
expressed is perfectly trite and barren, and that it is a note of
provinciality in Addison, in a man whom a nation puts forward as one of
its great moralists, to have no profounder and more striking idea to
produce on this great subject. Compare, on the same subject, these words
of a moralist really of the first order, really at the center by his
ideas,—Joubert:—
“L’expérience de beaucoup d’opinions donne à l’esprit beaucoup de
flexibilité et l’affermit dans celles qu’il croit les meilleures.”
With what a flash of light that touches the subject! how it sets us
thinking! What a genuine contribution to moral science it is!
In short, where there is no center like an academy, if you have genius
and powerful ideas, you are apt not to have the best style going; if you
have precision of style and not genius, you are apt not to have the best
ideas going.
The provincial spirit, again, exaggerates the value of its ideas for
want of a high standard at hand by which to try them. Or rather, for
want of such a standard, it gives one idea too much prominence at the
expense of others; it orders its ideas amiss; it is hurried away by
fancies; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too exclusively. Its
admiration weeps hysterical tears, and its disapprobation foams at the
mouth. So we get the _eruptive_ and the _aggressive_ manner in
literature; the former prevails most in our criticism, the latter in our
newspapers. For, not having the lucidity of a large and centrally placed
intelligence, the provincial spirit has not its graciousness; it does
not persuade, it makes war; it has not urbanity, the tone of the city,
of the center, the tone which always aims at a spiritual and
intellectual effect, and not excluding the use of banter, never disjoins
banter itself from politeness, from felicity. But the provincial tone is
more violent, and seems to aim rather at an effect upon the blood and
senses than upon the spirit and intellect; it loves hard-hitting rather
than persuading. The newspaper, with its party spirit, its
thorough-goingness, its resolute avoidance of shades and distinctions,
its short, highly-charged, heavy-shotted articles, its style so unlike
that style _lenis minimèque pertinax_—easy and not too violently
insisting,—which the ancients so much admired, is its true literature;
the provincial spirit likes in the newspaper just what makes the
newspaper such bad food for it,—just what made Goethe say, when he was
pressed hard about the immorality of Byron’s poems, that, after all,
they were not so immoral as the newspapers. The French talk of the
_brutalité des journaux anglais_. What strikes them comes from the
necessary inherent tendencies of newspaper-writing not being checked in
England by any center of intelligent and urbane spirit, but rather
stimulated by coming in contact with a provincial spirit. Even a
newspaper like the _Saturday Review_, that old friend of all of us, a
newspaper expressly aiming at an immunity from the common
newspaper-spirit, aiming at being a sort of organ of reason,—and, by
thus aiming, it merits great gratitude and has done great good,—even the
_Saturday Review_, replying to some foreign criticism on our precautions
against invasion, falls into a strain of this kind:—
“To do this” (to take these precautions) “seems to us eminently worthy
of a great nation, and to talk of it as unworthy of a great nation,
seems to us eminently worthy of a great fool.”
There is what the French mean when they talk of the _brutalité des
journaux anglais_; there is a style certainly as far removed from
urbanity as possible,—a style with what I call the note of
provinciality. And the same note may not unfrequently be observed even
in the ideas of this newspaper, full as it is of thought and cleverness:
certain ideas allowed to become fixed ideas, to prevail too absolutely.
I will not speak of the immediate present, but, to go a little while
back, it had the critic who so disliked the Emperor of the French; it
had the critic who so disliked the subject of my present
remarks—academies; it had the critic who was so fond of the German
element in our nation, and, indeed, everywhere; who ground his teeth if
one said _Charlemagne_ instead of _Charles the Great_, and, in short,
saw all things in Teutonism, as Malebranche saw all things in God.
Certainly any one may fairly find faults in the Emperor Napoleon or in
academies, and merit in the German element; but it is a note of the
provincial spirit not to hold ideas of this kind a little more easily,
to be so devoured by them, to suffer them to become crotchets.
In England there needs a miracle of genius like Shakspeare’s to produce
balance of mind, and a miracle of intellectual delicacy like Dr.
Newman’s to produce urbanity of style. How prevalent all round us is the
want of balance of mind and urbanity of style! How much, doubtless, it
is to be found in ourselves,—in each of us! but, as human nature is
constituted, every one can see it clearest in his contemporaries. There,
above all, we should consider it, because they and we are exposed to the
same influences; and it is in the best of one’s contemporaries that it
is most worth considering, because one then most feels the harm it does,
when one sees what they would be without it. Think of the difference
between Mr. Ruskin exercising his genius, and Mr. Ruskin exercising his
intelligence; consider the truth and beauty of this:—
“Go out, in the spring-time, among the meadows that slope from the
shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains. There,
mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass
grows deep and free; and as you follow the winding mountain paths,
beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom,—paths that
forever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping down in
scented undulation, steep to the blue water studded here and there with
new-mown heaps, filling all the air with fainter sweetness,—look up
towards the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll
silently into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines....”
There is what the genius, the feeling, the temperament in Mr. Ruskin,
the original and incommunicable part, has to do with; and how exquisite
it is! All the critic could possibly suggest, in the way of objection,
would be, perhaps, that Mr. Ruskin is there trying to make prose do more
than it can perfectly do; that what he is there attempting he will
never, except in poetry, be able to accomplish to his own entire
satisfaction: but he accomplishes so much that the critic may well
hesitate to suggest even this. Place beside this charming passage
another,—a passage about Shakspeare’s names, where the intelligence and
judgment of Mr. Ruskin, the acquired, trained, communicable part in him,
are brought into play,—and see the difference:—
“Of Shakspeare’s names I will afterwards speak at more length; they are
curiously—often barbarously—mixed out of various traditions and
languages. Three of the clearest in meaning have been already noticed.
Desdemona—‘δυσδαιμονία,’ _miserable fortune_—is also plain enough.
Othello is, I believe, ‘the careful;’ all the calamity of the tragedy
arising from the single flaw and error in his magnificently collected
strength. Ophelia, ‘serviceableness,’ the true, lost wife of Hamlet, is
marked as having a Greek name by that of her brother, Laertes; and its
signification is once exquisitely alluded to in that brother’s last word
of her, where her gentle preciousness is opposed to the uselessness of
the churlish clergy:—‘A _ministering_ angel shall my sister be, when
thou liest howling.’ Hamlet is, I believe, connected in some way with
‘homely,’ the entire event of the tragedy turning on betrayal of home
duty. Hermione (ἕρμο), ‘pillar-like’ (ἥ εἶδος ἕχε χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης);
Titania (τιτήνη), ‘the queen;’ Benedick and Beatrice, ‘blessed and
blessing;’ Valentine and Proteus, ‘enduring or strong’ (_valens_), and
‘changeful.’ Iago and Iachimo have evidently the same root—probably the
Spanish Iago, Jacob, ‘the supplanter.’”
Now, really, what a piece of extravagance all that is! I will not say
that the meaning of Shakspeare’s names (I put aside the question as to
the correctness of Mr. Ruskin’s etymologies) has no effect at all, may
be entirely lost sight of; but to give it that degree of prominence is
to throw the reins to one’s whim, to forget all moderation and
proportion, to lose the balance of one’s mind altogether. It is to show
in one’s criticism, to the highest excess, the note of provinciality.
Again there is Mr. Palgrave, certainly endowed with a very fine critical
tact: his _Golden Treasury_ abundantly proves it. The plan of
arrangement which he devised for that work, the mode in which he
followed his plan out, nay, one might even say, merely the
juxtaposition, in pursuance of it, of two such pieces as those of
Wordsworth and Shelley which form the 285th and 286th in his collection,
show a delicacy of feeling in these matters which is quite indisputable
and very rare. And his notes are full of remarks which show it too. All
the more striking, conjoined with so much justness of perception, are
certain freaks and violences in Mr. Palgrave’s criticism, mainly
imputable, I think, to the critic’s isolated position in this country,
to his feeling himself too much left to take his own way, too much
without any central authority representing high culture and sound
judgment, by which he may be, on the one hand, confirmed as against the
ignorant, on the other, held in respect when he himself is inclined to
the liberties. I mean such things as this note on Milton’s line,—
“The great Emathian conqueror bade spare”....
“When Thebes was destroyed, Alexander ordered the house of Pindar to be
spared. _He was as incapable of appreciating the poet as Louis XIV. of
appreciating Racine; but even the narrow and barbarian mind of Alexander
could understand the advantage of a showy act of homage to poetry._” A
note like that I call a freak or a violence; if this disparaging view of
Alexander and Louis XIV., so unlike the current view, is wrong,—if the
current view is, after all, the truer one of them,—the note is a freak.
But, even if its disparaging view is right, the note is a violence; for,
abandoning the true mode of intellectual action—persuasion, the
instilment of conviction,—it simply astounds and irritates the hearer by
contradicting without a word of proof or preparation, his fixed and
familiar notions; and this is mere violence. In either case, the
fitness, the measure, the centrality, which is the soul of all good
criticism, is lost, and the note of provinciality shows itself.
Thus, in the famous _Handbook_, marks of a fine power of perception are
everywhere discernible, but so, too, are marks of the want of sure
balance, of the check and support afforded by knowing one speaks before
good and severe judges. When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing, he feels no
pressure constraining him either to try his dislike closely or to
express it moderately; he does not mince matters, he gives his dislike
all its own way; both his judgments and his style would gain if he were
under more restraint. “The style which has filled London with the dead
monotony of Gower or Harley Streets, or the pale commonplace of
Belgravia, Tyburnia, and Kensington; which has pierced Paris and Madrid
with the feeble frivolities of the Rue Rivoli and the Strada de Toledo.”
He dislikes the architecture of the Rue Rivoli, and he puts it on a
level with the architecture of Belgravia and Gower Street; he lumps them
all together in one condemnation, he loses sight of the shade, the
distinction, which is everything here; the distinction, namely, that the
architecture of the Rue Rivoli expresses show, splendor,
pleasure,—unworthy things, perhaps, to express alone and for their own
sakes, but it expresses them; whereas the architecture of Gower Street
and Belgravia merely expresses the impotence of the architect to express
anything. Then, as to style: “sculpture which stands in a contrast with
Woolner hardly more shameful than diverting.” ... “passing from Davy or
Faraday to the art of the mountebank or the science of the
spirit-rapper.” ... “it is the old, old story with Marochetti, the frog
trying to blow himself out to bull dimensions. He may puff and he
puffed, but he will never do it.” We all remember that shower of
amenities on poor M. Marochetti. Now, here Mr. Palgrave himself enables
us to form a contrast which lets us see just what the presence of an
academy does for style; for he quotes a criticism by M. Gustave Planche
on this very M. Marochetti. M. Gustave Planche was a critic of the very
first order, a man of strong opinions, which he expressed with severity;
he, too, condemns M. Marochetti’s work, and Mr. Palgrave calls him as a
witness to back what he has himself said; certainly Mr. Palgrave’s
translation will not exaggerate M. Planche’s urbanity in dealing with M.
Marochetti, but, even in this translation, see the difference in
sobriety, in measure, between the critic writing in Paris and the critic
writing in London:—
“These conditions are so elementary, that I am at a perfect loss to
comprehend how M. Marochetti has neglected them. There are soldiers here
like the leaden playthings of the nursery: it is almost impossible to
guess whether there is a body beneath the dress. We have here no
question of style, not even of grammar; it is nothing beyond mere matter
of the alphabet of art. To break these conditions is the same as to be
ignorant of spelling.”
That is really more formidable criticism than Mr. Palgrave’s, and yet in
how perfectly temperate a style! M. Planche’s advantage is, that he
feels himself to be speaking before competent judges, that there is a
force of cultivated opinion for him to appeal to. Therefore, he must not
be extravagant, and he need not storm; he must satisfy the reason and
taste,—that is his business. Mr. Palgrave, on the other hand, feels
himself to be speaking before a promiscuous multitude, with the few good
judges so scattered through it as to be powerless; therefore, he has no
calm confidence and no self-control; he relies on the strength of his
lungs; he knows that big words impose on the mob, and that, even if he
is outrageous, most of his audience are apt to be a great deal more
so.[9]
Again, the first two volumes of Mr. Kinglake’s _Invasion of the Crimea_
were certainly among the most successful and renowned English books of
our time. Their style was one of the most renowned things about them,
and yet how conspicuous a fault in Mr. Kinglake’s style is this
over-charge of which I have been speaking! Mr. James Gordon Bennett, of
the _New York Herald_, says, I believe, that the highest achievement of
the human intellect is what he calls “a good editorial.” This is not
quite so; but, if it were so, on what a height would these two volumes
by Mr. Kinglake stand! I have already spoken of the Attic and the
Asiatic styles; besides these, there is the Corinthian style. That is
the style for “a good editorial,” and Mr. Kinglake has really reached
perfection in it. It has not the warm glow, blithe movement, and soft
pliancy of life, as the Attic style has; it has not the over-heavy
richness and encumbered gait of the Asiatic style; it has glitter
without warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness without charm. Its
characteristic is, that it has no _soul_; all it exists for, is to get
its ends, to make its points, to damage its adversaries, to be admired,
to triumph. A style so bent on effect at the expense of soul,
simplicity, and delicacy; a style so little studious of the charm of the
great models; so far from classic truth and grace, must surely be said
to have the note of provinciality. Yet Mr. Kinglake’s talent is a really
eminent one, and so in harmony with our intellectual habits and
tendencies, that to the great bulk of English people, the faults of his
style seem its merits; all the more needful that criticism should not be
dazzled by them.
-----
Footnote 9:
When I wrote this I had before me the first edition of Mr. Palgrave’s
_Handbook_. I am bound to say that in the second edition much strong
language has been expunged, and what remains, softened.
-----
We must not compare a man of Mr. Kinglake’s literary talent with French
writers like M. de Bazancourt. We must compare him with M. Thiers. And
what a superiority in style has M. Thiers from being formed in a good
school, with severe traditions, wholesome restraining influences! Even
in this age of Mr. James Gordon Bennett, his style has nothing
Corinthian about it, its lightness and brightness make it almost Attic.
It is not quite Attic, however; it has not the infallible sureness of
Attic taste. Sometimes his head gets a little hot with the fumes of
patriotism, and then he crosses the line, he loses perfect measure, he
declaims, he raises a momentary smile. France condemned ‘à être l’effroi
du monde _dont elle pourrait être l’amour_,’—Cæsar, whose exquisite
simplicity M. Thiers so much admires, would not have written like that.
There is, if I may be allowed to say so, the slightest possible touch of
fatuity in such language,—of that failure in good sense which comes from
too warm a self-satisfaction. But compare this language with Mr.
Kinglake’s Marshal St. Arnaud—“dismissed from the presence” of Lord
Raglan or Lord Stratford, “cowed and pressed down” under their “stern
reproofs,” or under “the majesty of the great Elchi’s Canning brow and
tight, merciless lips!” The failure in good sense and good taste there
reaches far beyond what the French mean by _fatuity_; they would call it
by another word, a word expressing blank defect of intelligence, a word
for which we have no exact equivalent in English,—_bête_. It is the
difference between a venial, momentary, good-tempered excess, in a man
of the world, of an amiable and social weakness,—vanity; and a serious,
settled, fierce, narrow, provincial misconception of the whole relative
value of one’s own things and the things of others. So baneful to the
style of even the cleverest man may be the total want of checks.
In all I have said, I do not pretend that the examples given prove my
rule as to the influence of academies; they only illustrate it. Examples
in plenty might very likely be found to set against them; the truth of
the rule depends, no doubt, on whether the balance of all the examples
is in its favor or not; but actually to strike this balance is always
out of the question. Here, as everywhere else, the rule, the idea, if
true, commends itself to the judicious, and then the examples make it
clearer still to them. This is the real use of examples, and this alone
is the purpose which I have meant mine to serve. There is also another
side to the whole question,—as to the limiting and prejudicial operation
which academies may have; but this side of the question it rather
behoves the French, not us, to study.
The reader will ask for some practical conclusion about the
establishment of an Academy in this country, and perhaps I shall hardly
give him the one he expects. But nations have their own modes of acting,
and these modes are not easily changed; they are even consecrated, when
great things have been done in them. When a literature has produced
Shakspeare and Milton, when it has even produced Barrow and Burke, it
cannot well abandon its traditions; it can hardly begin, at this late
time of day, with an institution like the French Academy. I think
academies with a limited, special, scientific scope, in the various
lines of intellectual work,—academies like that of Berlin, for
instance,—we with time may, and probably shall, establish. And no doubt
they will do good; no doubt the presence of such influential centers of
correct information will tend to raise the standard amongst us for what
I have called the _journeyman-work_ of literature, and to free us from
the scandal of such biographical dictionaries as Chalmers’s, or such
translations as a recent one of Spinoza, or perhaps, such philological
freaks as Mr. Forster’s about the one primeval language. But an academy
quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest literary
opinion, a recognized authority in matters of intellectual tone and
taste, we shall hardly have, and perhaps we ought not to wish to have
it. But then every one amongst us with any turn for literature will do
well to remember to what shortcomings and excesses, which such an
academy tends to correct, we are liable; and the more liable, of course,
for not having it. He will do well constantly to try himself in respect
of these, steadily to widen his culture, severely to check in himself
the provincial spirit; and he will do this the better the more he keeps
in mind that all mere glorification by ourselves of ourselves or our
literature, in the strain of what, at the beginning of these remarks I
quoted from Lord Macaulay, is both vulgar, and, besides being vulgar
retarding.