I
It looks as though we were never to get to the end of the discussion
about criticism--its scope, aims, functions, any more than we are
likely to get to the end of the discussion of any real question in
philosophy, ethics, or religion.
Is the aim of literary criticism judgment, or interpretation, or
analysis, or description? May it not have all these aims? For myself, I
am disposed to answer in the affirmative.
I doubt if there will ever be a critical method which all may apply.
Every man will have his own method, as truly as he has his own manners.
The French critic Schérer inclines to “the method which sets to work to
comprehend rather than to class, to explain rather than to judge,” or
which asks as the first step to possess itself of the author’s point of
view. This is substantially Pope’s dictum that a work is to be read in
the spirit in which it was written, and it accords with Heine’s saying
that the critic is to ask, “What does the artist intend?” This is a
part of, but does it sum up, the critical function?
A man’s writing upon the works of another takes the form of
description and analysis--like the report of a naturalist upon a new
species, which Mr. Howells thinks is the main function of criticism;
or it may aim chiefly at interpretation, which a recent essayist
emphasizes as the latest and highest phase of criticism; or it may aim
at a judicial estimate, an authoritative verdict from the rules and
standards, which is the more classic and academic phase of criticism.
Each phase is legitimate and leads to valuable results.
Of any considerable artistic work we want a description and an
analysis, we want an interpretation and an exposition, and we want
an appraisement according to the standard of the best that has been
thought and done in the world,--not a comparison with the externals
of the accepted models, but with the originality, the spontaneity,
the sanity, the inner necessity and consistency of them--the truth to
nature and to the laws of the human mind. Is it liberating, vitalizing,
cheering? Is it ethically sound? Does it favor large and manly ideals?
Does it go along with evolution and progress?
What, for instance, will criticism do with the work of such a man as
Whitman, or Ibsen, or Tolstoi? It will describe it and analyze it,
and name it as lyric, epic, dramatic, etc.; it will interpret it, or
draw out and expound the ideas that lie back of it and out of which it
sprang; it will seek to understand it and to get at the writer’s point
of view; then it will judge it, try it by its own standards, and seek
to estimate the value of these standards as they stand related to the
best aims and achievements of the human mind.
We demand of these men what we demand of Browning, Tennyson, Hugo, and
every other poet and writer of high claims,--genuineness, sincerity,
power, inspiration, and that they awaken in us fresh and vivid currents
of ideas and emotions. We shall not quarrel with their methods, or
materials, or their form, or formlessness, but they must go to the
quick. All our pleasure and profit in great art--painting, sculpture,
architecture, poetry--is at last one, a new experience of the beauty
and significance of nature and life. We are made to feel these emotions
afresh and as if for the first time.
Here are the old eternal elements,--life, nature, the soul, man and
woman, all in danger of becoming dull, commonplace, uninteresting to
us. But the man with the creative touch gives us a new and lively sense
of them, by presenting them to us in new combinations and under new
lights. The only new thing added is himself,--the quality or flavor of
his own genius.
A complete criticism will not limit itself to description or to
interpretation; it will seek to estimate, to bring out the relative or
absolute value of the thing. Mr. Howells in his trenchant little volume
on “Criticism and Fiction,” says the critic has no more business to
trample on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him, than
the botanist has to grind a plant under his heel because he does not
find it pretty. His business “is to classify and analyze the fruits of
the human mind as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study,
rather than to praise or blame them.”
To classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind is certainly one
of the functions of criticism, and only one. The analogy Mr. Howells
employs is misleading. We do not sit in judgment on natural specimens
and products except as they stand related to human wants and utilities.
We compare climates, seasons, soils, landscapes, with reference to
racial and individual needs and well-being. If you bring me trees from
the woods or stone from the quarry to build my house with, I am bound
to sit in judgment upon them. And when my house is built, my neighbors
will sit in judgment upon it. Of all artificial things, of all man’s
works, we are bound to ask, are they well done? are they what they
should be? are they the best of their kind? Shall we not ask these
questions of the poem also, of the novel, the essay, the history?
Art has relations to life, and the critic is bound to consider what
these relations are in any given work,--how true, how important; he is
examining a human product, not a natural specimen, and is as competent
to reject as to accept; he must compare, weigh, appraise, to the best
of his ability.
The specimens of natural history are perfect after their kind; the
main question with them is, to which kind or species does a given
specimen belong? But the poem or the history or the novel is not
always perfect after its kind. Their kind is usually obvious at a
glance, but their merits or demerits, their relation to the best that
has been thought and done in the world, are not so obvious. Hence we
praise or blame according as they come up to or fall short of their own
ideal. The critic is not so much a botanist naming a new flower, as
he is a brother gardener criticising your horticulture, or a brother
lawyer criticising your brief. We are all critics in this sense one
way or another every day of our lives; we try to get at the real
value of whatever is offered us, whether it be lands, houses, goods,
friends, stocks, bonds, news, pictures, or books; we criticise the
men we deal with and employ in order to find out whom to trust; we
must have our wits about us when we go to market or go shopping. The
critical habit--sifting, testing, comparing, to get at the true value
of things--goes with us through life, or else we come often to grief.
The finer the product, or the higher the purpose it serves, the more
careful is our investigation.
When we come to literature and art our worldly practical wisdom does
not carry very far. It is not now a question of fact or of material
values, but of ideal and æsthetic values; it is a question of truth to
nature and to life, and of the largest, most vital truth. The mass of
readers have little power of divining the good from the bad, the true
from the false, in this field. Not the first best, but the second or
third best will draw the multitude.
The literary value of a work is more intangible and elusive, harder to
define and bring out, than its scientific or moral or other values. It
resides in a certain vitality and genuineness of expression; we have
a sense of having come face to face with something real and alive in
the man, and not, as is so often the case; with something assumed or
put on. There is always an original inherent quality and flavor, as in
natural products. The language is not the mere garment of the thought,
it is the very texture and substance. In all true literature something
more than mind and erudition speak,--a man speaks; a vital personality
is imminent,--a Charles Lamb, a Wordsworth, a Carlyle, a Huxley, an
Emerson, a Thoreau, a Lowell,--all distinct types of intelligence
speaking through character.
Self-expression within certain limits is as important in criticism as
in any other form of literature.
The French critic Ferdinand Brunetière says that the truly personal way
of seeing and feeling, which is a merit of the poet and the novelist,
is a fault in the critic, because the critical function is mainly a
judicial one.
In every man there is the common humanity, a measure of the pure
reason which he shares with all; then there are the race traits, the
family traits, the bias of his times, the bent given by his training
and surroundings, and his own special stamp and make-up,--what we
call his idiosyncrasy. All these things will play a part in his view
of any matter. His success as a critic is when his humanity, his pure
intelligence, furnishes the light which is only colored or refracted
by its passage through these elements. But colored and refracted
it will be, and it is this coloring and refraction or stamp of the
personal equation that gives value and charm to the man’s work as
literature. Reduce criticism to a science, or eliminate the element of
impressionism, and the result is no longer literature. The reason may
be convinced, but the emotions are untouched.
The one thing that distinguishes all modern literatures from the works
of the ancient or classic period is their more permanent subjectivity,
and the piercing lyrical note in them.
Self-expression has been the aim of the modern artist in a much fuller
sense than it was with the artists of the pagan world. Our religion
is a personal and subjective religion,--the kingdom of heaven is
within. Christianity turned the thoughts of men upon themselves.
Self-examination, self-criticism began. Man became conscious of
himself, of his sins, and of his shortcomings, and learned to be more
interested in the elements of his own character.
There is probably no greater delusion than that under which the critic
labors when he thinks he is trying the new work by the standard of the
best that has been thought and achieved in the world. He is trying it
by his own conception of that standard; so much of it as is vital in
his own mind he can apply, and no more. His own individual taste and
judgment are, after all, his tests. The standard of the best is not
some rule of thumb or of yardstick that every one can apply; only the
best can apply the best.
Impressionism, therefore, is at the bottom of all criticism, in
whatever field. The impression which the work makes upon your
intelligence, your taste, your judgment, is all that you can finally
give.
Criticism in France, where the art has been more assiduously cultivated
than in any other country, seems divided between judicial critics like
Brunetière and impressionist critics like Lemaître. The latter states
in terms of his own likes and dislikes what the other aims to state
in terms of the impersonal reason. But their conclusions are likely
to differ only as their temperaments and innate affinities differ.
Brunetière has the more dogmatic mind and the more violent antipathies.
He could call Sainte-Beuve a rat,--a verdict that savors more of
political and religious intolerance than of the impartial reason.
Are we not coming more and more to demand that in all literary and
artistic productions, the producer be present in his work, not merely
as mind, as pure intelligence, but also as a distinct personality,
giving a flavor of his own to the principles he utters? Every vital
creative work is the revelation of a man as well as of a mind, and this
is true in criticism no less than in other forms of literature.
Suppose Brunetière’s criticism lacked that which makes it Brunetière’s,
or Arnold’s lacked that which makes it Arnold’s, should we long care
for it? Eliminate from the works of these men all that is individual,
all that in each makes the impression of a new literary force, the
accent of personality, and you take from the salt its savor. Dare we
say that the most precious thing in literature is the individual and
the specific? Is not a platitude a platitude because it lacks just
these things? The vague and the general may be had in any quantity, at
any time. The distinct and the characteristic are always rare. How many
featureless novels, featureless poems, featureless discourses, how much
savorless criticism of one kind and another, every community produces!
Now and then we catch a distinct personal note, a new, penetrating
voice, and this we remember and follow in criticism as readily as in
poetry or fiction. Have we not here the secret of the greater interest
we take in signed criticism over unsigned?
The pure, disinterested, impersonal reason is a fine thing to
contemplate. Who would flout it or deny it? One might as well throw
stones at the sun. But as the pure white light of the sun is broken up
into a thousand hues and shades as it comes back to us from the living
world, so the light of reason comes to us from literature in a thousand
blended tints and colors, or as modified by the varying moods and
temperaments of the individual writers. Whether or not we want or have
a right to expect this pure white light in criticism, what we get is
the light as it is reduced or colored by the critic’s personality,--the
media of his time, his race, his personal equation. It must render
accurately the objects, form and feature; but the hue, the atmosphere,
the sentiment of it all, the highest value of it all, will be the
contribution of the critic’s most private and radical self.
Every eminent writer has his way of looking at things, gives his own
coloring to general truths, and it is this that endears him to us. Is
the word he speaks _his_ word,--is it inevitable, the verdict of his
character, the outcome of that which is most vital and characteristic
in him? Or is it something he has learned, or the result of fashion,
convention, imitation?
See how the old elements of the air, soil, water, forever recombine
under the touch of that mysterious something we call life, and produce
new herbage, new flowers, new fruit, new men, new women,--forever and
yet never the same. So do the forces of man’s spirit recombine with the
old facts and truisms, and produce new art and new literature.