When one thinks of it, how diverse and contradictory have been the
judgments of even the best critics! Behold how Macaulay’s verdicts
differ from Carlyle’s, Carlyle’s from Arnold’s, Arnold’s from Frederic
Harrison’s or Morley’s or Stephen’s or Swinburne’s; how Taine and
Sainte-Beuve diverge upon Balzac; how Renan and Arnold diverge upon
Hugo; how Lowell and Emerson diverge upon Whitman; and how wide
apart are contemporary critics about the merits of Browning, Ibsen,
Tolstoi. Landor could not tolerate Dante, and even the great Goethe
told Eckermann that Dante was one of the authors he was forbidden to
read. In Byron’s judgment, Griffiths and Rogers were greater poets
than Wordsworth and Coleridge. The German Professor Grimm sees in
Goethe “the greatest poet of all times and all people,” which makes
Matthew Arnold smile. Chateaubriand considered Racine as much superior
to Shakespeare as the Apollo Belvidere is superior to an uncouth
Egyptian statue. Every nation, says a French critic, has its chords of
sensibility that are utterly incomprehensible to another. “Many and
diverse,” says Arnold, “must be the judgments passed upon every great
poet, upon every considerable writer.” And it seems that the greater
the writer or poet, the more diverse and contradictory will be the
judgments upon him. The small men are easily disposed of,--there is no
dispute about them; but the great ones baffle and try us. It is around
their names, as Sainte-Beuve somewhere remarks, that there goes on a
perpetual critical tournament.
It would seem that the nearer we are, in point of time, to an event,
a man, a book, a work of art, the less likely we are to estimate them
rightly, especially if they are out of the usual and involve great
questions and points. Such a poet as Dante or Victor Hugo or Whitman,
or such a character as Napoleon or Cromwell or John Brown, or such an
artist as Angelo or Turner or Millet, will require time to settle his
claim. In literature, the men of the highest order, to be understood,
must undoubtedly, in a measure, wait for the growth of the taste of
themselves, or until their own ideals have become at home in men’s
minds. With every great innovation, in whatever field, every year that
passes finds our minds better adjusted to it and more keenly alive to
its merits. Contemporary criticism is bound to be contradictory. Men
take opposite views of current questions; they are too near them to
see all their bearings. How different the aspect the slavery question
wears at this distance, and the civil war that grew out of it, from
the face they wore a generation or two ago! It is only the few great
minds that see to-day what the masses will see to-morrow. They occupy a
vantage ground of character and principle that is like an eminence in a
landscape, commanding a wide view. Sainte-Beuve certainly did injustice
to Balzac, and Schérer to Béranger. Theirs were contemporary judgments,
and personal antipathy played a large part in them. Sainte-Beuve says
that when two good intellects pass totally different judgments on the
same author, it is because they are not fixing their thoughts, for
the moment, on the same object; they have not the whole of him before
their eyes; their view does not take him in entirely. That is just it:
we each look for different values; we are more keenly alive to some
merits than to others; what one critic misses another sees. We are more
or less like chemical elements, that unite eagerly with some of their
fellows, and not with others. The elective affinities are at work
everywhere,--where is the critical genius that is a universal solvent?
Probably Sainte-Beuve himself comes as near it as anybody who has lived.