Yet let me not seem to underrate the value of what is called judicial
criticism. Criticism as an act of judgment, as a disinterested endeavor
to see the thing as it is in itself and as it stands related to other
things, is justly jealous of our personal tastes and preferences. These
tastes and preferences may blind us to the truth. Can we admire above
them, or even against them? To cherish no writers but those of our own
stripe or mental complexion is the way of the half cultured. Can we
rise to a disinterested view? The danger of individualism in letters
is caprice, bias, partial views; the danger of intellectualism is the
cold, the colorless, the formal.
The ideal critic will blend the two; he will be disinterested and
yet sympathetic, individual and yet escape caprice and bias, warm
with interest and yet cool with judgment; surrendering himself to
his subject and yet not losing himself in it, upholding tradition
and yet welcoming new talent, giving the personal equation free play
without blurring the light of the impersonal intelligence. From
the point of view of intellectualism, criticism seeks to eliminate
the personal equation, that which is private and peculiar to us as
individuals, and to base criticism upon something like universal
principles. What we crave, what our minds literally feed upon, may
blind us to the truly excellent. Our _wants_ are personal; what we
should aim at is an excellence that is impersonal. When we rise to
the sphere of the disinterested, we lose sight of our individual
tastes and predilections. The question then is, not what we want, not
what we have a taste for, but what we are capable of appreciating.
Can we appreciate the best? Can we share the universal mind to the
extent of delighting in the best that has been known and thought in
the world? Emerson said he was always glad to meet people who saw the
superiority of Shakespeare to all other poets. If we prefer Pope to
Shakespeare, as we are apt to at a certain age, we may know by that
that there is an excellence beyond our reach. It is certain that the
mass of readers will not appreciate the best literature, but only the
second or third best. A man’s æsthetic perceptions may be broadened
and educated as well as his intellectual. An unread man feels little
interest beyond his own neighborhood,--the personal doings of the men
and women he sees and knows. Educate him a little, give him his county
paper, and the sphere of his interests is widened; a little more,
and he takes an interest in his State; more still, and he broadens
out to his whole country; still more, and the whole world is within
his sympathy and ken. So in the aesthetic sphere; he gets beyond his
personal tastes and wants into the great world currents of literature
and art. He can appreciate works written in other ages and lands, and
that are quite foreign to his own temperament and outlook. This is to
be disinterested. To emancipate the taste is as much as to emancipate
the intellect; to rise above one’s personal affinities is as much as
to rise above one’s personal prejudices and superstitions. The boy of
a certain stamp has an affinity for the dime novel; if we can lift him
to an appreciation of Scott, or Thackeray, or Hawthorne, how have we
emancipated his taste! So that Brunetière was right in saying that,
in art and literature, the beginning of wisdom is to distrust what we
like. _Distrust_, not repudiate. Let us examine first and see upon
what grounds we like it,--see if we _ought_ to like it; see if it is
akin to that which is of permanent value in the world’s best thought.
A French critic tells a story of a man who sat cool and unmoved under
a sermon that made the people about him shed torrents of tears, and
who excused himself by saying, “I do not belong to this parish.”
One’s tastes must be broader than one’s parish. I suppose any of our
religious brethren would feel a little shy of weeping in the church
of a religious denomination not his own. Our religion is no more
emancipated than are our tastes. Lowell says there are born Popists
and born Wordsworthians; but the more these types can get out of their
limitations and appreciate one another, the more they are emancipated.
V