It is not truth alone that makes literature; it is truth plus a man.
Readers fancy they are interested in the birds and flowers they find
in the pages of the poets; but no, it is the poets themselves that
they are interested in. There are the same birds and flowers in the
fields and woods,--do they care for them? In many of the authors of
whom Sainte-Beuve writes I have no interest, but I am always interested
in Sainte-Beuve’s view of them, in the play of his intelligence and
imagination over and around them. After reading his discussion of
Cowper, or Fénelon, or Massillon, or Pascal, it is not the flavor of
these writers that remains in my mind, but the flavor of the critic
himself. I am under his spell, and not that of his subject. Is not
this equally true of the criticism of Goethe, or Carlyle, or Macaulay,
or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Coleridge, or any other? The pages of these
writers are no more a transparent medium, through which we see the
subject as in itself it is, than are those of any other creative
artist. Science shows us, or aims to show us, the thing as it is;
but art shows it to us tinged by the prismatic rays of the human
spirit. Criticism that warms and interests is perpetual creation, as
Sainte-Beuve suggested. It is a constant combination of the subject
with the thought of the critic. When Mr. James writes upon Sainte-Beuve
we are under his spell; it is Mr. James that absorbs and delights us
now. We get the truth about his subject, of course, but it is always
in combination with the truth about Mr. James. The same is true when
Macaulay writes about Milton, and Carlyle about Burns or Johnson,
and Emerson about Montaigne or Plato, and Lowell about Thoreau or
Wordsworth,--the critic reveals himself in and through his subject.
We do not demand that Arnold get the real Arnold out of the way
and merge himself into general humanity (this he cannot do in any
case), but only that he put aside the conscious exterior Arnold, so
to speak,--Arnold the supercilious, the contemptuous, the hater of
dissent, the teaser of the Philistine. The critic must escape from
the local and accidental. We would have Macaulay cease to be a Whig,
Johnson cease to be a Tory, Schérer forget his theological training,
and Brunetière escape from his Catholic bias.
V
No matter how much truth the critic tells us, if his work does not
itself rise to the dignity of good literature, if he does not use
language in a vital and imaginative way, we shall not care for him.
Literary and artistic truth is not something that can be seized and
repeated indifferently by this man and by that, like the truths of
science: it must be reproduced or recreated by the critic; it must be
as vital in his page as in that of his author. The truths of science
are static; the truths of art are dynamic. If a mediocre mind writes
about Shakespeare, the result is mediocre, no matter how much bare
truth he tells us.
What, then, do we mean by a great critic? We mean a great mind that
finds complete self-expression in and through the works of other
men. Arnold found more complete self-expression through literary
criticism than through any other channel: hence he is greatest here;
his theological and religious criticism shows him to less advantage.
Sainte-Beuve tried poetry and fiction, but did not find a complete
outlet for his talent till he tried criticism. Not a profound or
original mind, but a wonderfully flexible, tolerant, sympathetic,
engaging one; a climbing plant, one might say, that needed some support
to display itself to the best advantage. We say of the French mind
generally that it is more truly a critical mind than the English;
it finds in criticism a better field for the display of its special
gifts--taste, clearness, brevity, flexibility, judgment--than does
the more original and profoundly emotional English. French criticism
is rarely profound, but it is always light, apt, graceful, delicate,
lucid, felicitous,--clear sense and good taste marvelously blended.
Criticism in its scientific aspects or as a purely intellectual
effort--a search for the exact truth, a sifting of evidence, weighing
and comparing data, disentangling testimony, separating the false
from the true, as with the lawyer, the doctor, the man of science,
the critic of old texts and documents--is one thing. Criticism of
literature and art, involving questions of taste, style, poetic and
artistic values, is quite another, and demands quite other powers.
In the former case it is mainly judicial, dispassionate, impersonal;
in the latter case the sympathies and special predilections are more
involved. We seek more or less to interpret the imaginative writer, to
draw out and emphasize his special quality and stimulus, to fuse him
and restate him in other terms; and in doing this we give ourselves
more freely. We cannot fully interpret what we do not love, and love
has eyes the judgment knows not of. What a man was born to say, what he
speaks out of his most radical selfhood,--that the same fate and power
in you can alone fully estimate and interpret.