Is it not equally true that the value of criticism as a guide to the
judgment or the taste, teaching us what to admire and what to condemn,
is less than its value as an intellectual pleasure and stimulus, its
power to awaken ideas? Judgment is good, but inspiration is better.
How rarely we make the judgments of the greatest critics our own! We
are pleased when they confirm our own, but is not our main interest
and profit in what the critic gives us out of himself? We do not, for
instance, care very much for Carlyle’s literary judgments, but for
Carlyle’s quality of mind, his flashes of poetic insight, his burden
of conscience, his power of portraiture, his heroic moral fibre, we
care a great deal. Arnold thought Carlyle’s criticism less sound
than Johnson’s,--more tainted with _engouement_, with passion and
appetite, as it probably is; but how much more incentive, how much more
quickening power, how much more of the stuff of which life is made, do
we get from Carlyle than from Johnson or from Arnold himself!
That the criticism is sound is not enough,--it must also warm and
stimulate the mind; and if it do this we shall not trouble ourselves
very much about its conclusions. Even M. Brunetière says that there are
masterpieces in the history of literature and art whose authors were
downright fools, as there are, on the other hand, mediocre works from
the hands of men of vast intelligence. Very many readers, I fancy, will
not rest in the main conclusions at which Tolstoi arrives in his recent
discussion of the question “What is art?” but who can fail to feel that
here is a large, sincere, helpful soul, whose conception of life and of
art is of great value? If we were to estimate Ruskin by the soundness
of his judgments alone, we should miss the most important part of him.
It is as a prophet of life as well as a critic of art that we value
him. Would he be a better critic were he less a prophet?
Or take a more purely critical mind, such as Matthew Arnold’s. Do we
care very much even for his literary judgments? Do we not care much
more for his qualities as a writer,--his lucidity, his centrality,
his style, his continuity of thought, his turns of expression, his
particular interpretation of literature and life? His opinions may be
sound, but this is not the secret of his power; it resides in something
more intimate and personal to himself. The late Principal Shairp was
probably as sound a critic as was Arnold, but his work is of much less
interest, because it does not contain the same vital expression of a
new and distinct type of mind. Arnold was a better critic of literature
than of life and history. There were other values than literary ones
that were not so clearly within his range. In 1870 he thought the
Germans would stand a poor chance in the war with France. How could
the German _Gemeinheit_, or commonness, stand up before the French
_esprit_? In our civil war, he expected the South to win. Did not the
South have distinction? But distinction counts for more in style than
in war. Arnold’s criticism has the great merit of being a clear and
forcible expression of a fine-bred, high-toned, particular type of
man, and that type a pure and noble one. There was no bungling, no
crudeness, no straining, no confusion, no snap judgment, and apparently
no bias. He was as steady as a clock. His ideas were continuous and
homogeneous; they run like living currents all through his works,
and give them unity and definitiveness. He is not to be effaced or
overthrown; he is only to be matched and appraised. His word is not
final, but it is fit and challenges your common sense. His contribution
flows into the current of English criticism like a clear stream into
a turbid one; it is not deep, but pellucid,--a tributary that improves
the quality of the whole. It gives us that refreshment and satisfaction
that we always get from the words of a man who speaks in his own right
and from ample grounds of personal conviction.
Positive judgments in literature or in art, or in any matters of taste,
are dangerous things. The crying want always is for new, fresh power to
break up the old verdicts and opinions, and set all afloat again. “We
must learn under the master how to destroy him.” The great critic gives
us courage to reverse his judgments. Dr. Johnson said that Dryden was
the writer who first taught us to determine the merit of composition
upon principle; but criticism has been just as much at variance with
itself since Dryden’s time as it was before. It is an art, and not a
science,--one of the forms of literary art, wherein, as in all other
forms of art, the man, and not the principle, is the chief factor.