I have said that Sainte-Beuve was more truly a democratic critic than
is M. Brunetière. He is more tolerant of individualism in letters.
He called himself a naturalist of minds. His main interest in each
work was in what was most individual and characteristic in it. He was
inclusive rather than exclusive, less given to positive judgments, but
more to sympathetic interpretation. He united the method of Darwin
to the sensibility of the artist. Critics like Arnold and Brunetière
uphold the classic and academic traditions. They are aristocratic
because they are the spokesmen of an exclusive culture. They derive
from Catholicism more than from Protestantism; they uphold authority
rather than encourage individuality in life and letters. In criticism
they aim at that intellectual disinterestedness which is indeed
admirable, and which has given the world such noble results, but which
seems unsuited to the genius of our time. Ours is a democratic century,
a Protestant century. Individualism has been the dominant note in
literature. The men of power, for the most part, have not been the
disinterested, but the interested men, the men of conviction and of
more or less partial views, who have not so much aimed to see the thing
as it is in itself as they have aimed to make others see it as they saw
it. In other words, they have been preachers, doctrinaires, men bent
upon the dissemination of particular ideas.
One has only to run over the list of the foremost names in literature
for the past seventy-five years. There is Tolstoi, in Russia, clearly
one of the great world writers, but a doctrinaire through and through.
There are Renan, Victor Hugo, Taine, Thiers, Guizot, in France;
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Huxley, George Eliot,
Mrs. Ward, in English literature, and in American literature Emerson,
Whitman, and Thoreau. All these writers had aims ulterior to those of
pure literature. They were not disinterested observers and recorders.
They obtruded their personal opinions and convictions. They are the
writers with a message. Their thoughts spring from some special bent or
experience, and address themselves to some special mood or want. They
wrote the books that help us, that often come to us as revelations;
works of art, it may be, but of art in subjection to moral conviction,
and they are directed to other than purely æsthetic ends. They gave
expression to their individual tastes and predilections; they were more
or less tethered to their own egos; they may be called the personal
authors, as their predecessors may be called the impersonal. They are
not of the pure breed of men of letters, but represent crosses of
various kinds, as the cross of the artist with the thinker, the savant,
the theologian, the man of science, the reformer, the preacher. These
personal authors belong to the modern world rather than to the ancient;
to a time of individualism rather than to a time of institutionalism;
to an industrial and democratic age, rather than to an imperial and
military age.
Modern life is undoubtedly becoming more and more impersonal in the
sense that it favors less and less the growth and preservation of
great personalities, yet its utilitarian spirit, its tendency to
specialization, its right of private judgment, and its religious
doubts and unrest, find their outcome in individualism in literature.
The disinterested critics and recorders are still among us, but power
has departed from them. The age is too serious, the questions are
too pressing. The man of genius is no longer at ease in Zion. If he
rises at all above the masses, he must share the burden of thought
and conscience of his times. This burden may hinder the free artistic
play of his powers, as it probably has in most of the writers I have
mentioned, yet it will greatly deepen the impression his words will
make. The saying “Art for art’s sake” cannot be impeached, even
by Tolstoi. When rightly understood, it is true. Art would live in
the whole, and not in the part called morals or religion, or even
beauty. But its exponents in our day have been, with few exceptions,
of a feeble type, men of words and fancies like Swinburne or Poe.
In Tennyson we have as pure a specimen of artistic genius as in
Shakespeare, but a far less potent one. His power comes when he thrills
and vibrates with some special thought or cry of his time. With the
great swarms of our minor poets the complaint is, not that the type
is not pure, but that the inspiration is feeble. They have more art
than nature. It is the same with the novelists. Since Hawthorne and
Thackeray the pure artistic gift has no longer been the endowment of
great or profound personalities. George Eliot, Mrs. Ward, Tolstoi, all
interested writers, all with aims foreign to pure art, are the names of
power in our half of the century. Henry James is a much finer artist,
but he has nothing like their hold upon the great common elements of
human life. The disinterested writer gives us a higher, more unselfish
pleasure than the type I am considering; we are compelled to rise more
completely out of ourselves to meet him. I am only insisting that in
our day he has little penetration, and that the men of power have been
of the other class.
I have placed Taine among the interested critics; he was interested
in putting through certain ideas; he had a thesis to uphold; he will
not value all truths equally, he will take what suits him. Like all
men with preconceived ideas, his mind was more like a searchlight than
like a lamp. This makes him stimulating as a critic, but not always
satisfying.
The same is true of our own Emerson, probably our most stimulating
and fertilizing mind thus far. Lowell, as a man of letters, is of a
much purer strain; he is in the direct line of succession of the great
literary names, yet the value of his contribution undoubtedly falls
far short of that of Emerson. As a poet, Emerson was a poor singer
with wonderfully penetrating tones, almost unequaled in this respect.
The same may be said of him as a critic; he was a poor critic with a
wonderfully penetrating glance. He had the hawk’s eye for the game he
was looking for; he could see it amid any tangle of woods or thicket
of the commonplace. His special limitation is that he was looking for
a particular kind of prey. His sympathies were narrow but intense.
The elective affinities were very active in his criticism. He loved
Emersonian poetry, he loved the Emersonian paradoxes, he valued the
wild æolian tones; he delighted in the word that gave the prick and
sting of the electric spark; abruptness, surprise, the sudden, intense,
forked sentence--these took him, these he dealt in. His survey of any
man or matter is never a complete one, never a disinterested one, never
done in the scientific spirit. He writes about representative men, and
exploits Plato, Goethe, Montaigne, etc., in relation to his thought.
He is always on quests for particular ideas, in search for Emersonian
values. He will not do justice to such poets as Poe and Shelley, but
he will do more than justice to Donne and Herbert; he finds in them
what he sets out to find; it is a partial view, but it is penetrating
and valuable; it is not criticism, and does not set out to be; it is
a suggestive study of kindred souls. Emerson’s work is kindling and
inspiring; it unsettles rather than settles; it is not a lamp to guide
your feet, it is a star to give you your bearings.
Carlyle and Ruskin fall into the same category. They sin against the
classic virtues of repose, proportion, serenity, but this makes their
penetrating power all the greater. Carlyle cannot rank with the great
impartial historians, yet as a painter of historical characters and
scenes the vividness and reality of his pictures are almost unequaled.
Carlyle lacked the disinterestedness of the true artist. He had great
power of description and characterization, but he could not as an
historian stand apart from his subject as the great Greek and Roman
historians do. He is a portion of all that he sees and describes. He
is bent upon persuasion quite as much as upon portrayal. He could not
succeed as a novelist or a poet, because of his vehement, intolerant
nature. He succeeds as an historian only in portraying men in whom he
sees the lineaments of his own character, as in Cromwell. He did not or
could not live in the whole, as did his master, Goethe. His mind was
a steep incline. His opinions were like mountain torrents. Arnold, in
one of his letters, complained that in his criticism of Goethe there
was too much of _engouement_,--too much, I suppose, of the fondness of
the gourmand for a particular dish, or of the toper for his favorite
tipple. His enthusiasm was intemperate, and therefore unsound.
Doubtless some such objection as this may be urged against most of
Carlyle’s criticisms. He was ruled by his character more than by his
intellect; his feeling guided his vision. If he is not always a light
to the reason, he is certainly an electric excitant to the imagination
and the moral sense. In his essays, pamphlets, histories, we hardly get
judicial estimates of things; rather do we get overestimates or under
estimates. Yet always is there something that kindles and brings the
blood to the surface. Carlyle will beget a stronger race than Arnold,
but it will not be so cool and clear-headed. Emerson will fertilize
more minds with new thought than Lowell, but there will be many more
cranks and fanatics and hobbyists among them.
Professor Dowden says Landor falls below Shelley and Wordsworth because
he had no divine message or oracle to deliver to the men of his
generation,--no authentic word of the Lord to utter. Landor had great
thoughts, but they were not of first-rate importance with reference
to his times. He was more thoroughly imbued with the classic spirit
than either Shelley or Wordsworth, and the classic spirit is at ease
in Zion. The modern world differs from the ancient in its moral stress
and fervor. This moral stress and fervor both Shelley and Wordsworth
shared, but Landor did not. Where would the world be in thought, in
works, in civilization, had there been no one-sided, overloaded,
fanatical men,--men of partial views, of half-truths, of one idea?
Where would Christianity have been, under the play of disinterested
intellect, without disciples, without devotees, without saints and
martyrs, without its Paul and its Luther, without prejudice, without
superstition, without inflexibility?
We might fitly contrast these two types of mind under the heads of
Protestant and Catholic, the one personal, the other impersonal.
With the Protestant type goes individualism, which, as I have said,
is so marked a feature of the modern world. With the Catholic type
goes institutionalism, which was so marked a feature of the ancient
world. With the former goes the right of private judgment, innovation,
progress, new forms of art; with the latter goes authority, obedience,
the power of the past. The Protestant type is more capricious
and willful; it is restless, venturesome, impatient of rules and
precedents; the older type is more serene, composed, conservative,
orderly. In criticism it is more objective; it upholds the standards,
it lays down the law; it cherishes the academic spirit. The French mind
is the more Catholic; the English the more Protestant. In literature
the Protestant type is the more subjective and creative; it makes new
discoveries, it founds new orders. Catholicism is exterior, formal,
imposing; it takes little account of personal needs and peculiarities,
while Protestantism is almost entirely concerned with the private,
interior world. Individualism in religion begat Protestantism, and
upon Protestantism it begat the numerous progeny of the sects, the
thousand and one isms that now divide the religious world. To this
spirit religion is something personal and private to every man, and in
no sense a matter of forms and rituals. In fact, individualism fairly
confronts institutionalism. This spirit carried into the region of
æsthetics or literature gives rise to like results,--to a freer play of
personal taste and preferences, to more intense individual utterances,
to new and unique types of artistic genius, and to new lines of
activity in the æsthetic field.
Another name for it is the democratic spirit. Its special dangers
are the crude, the odd, the capricious, just as the danger of
institutionalism is the coldly formal, the lifeless, the traditional.
In English literature the former begat Shakespeare, as it did
Tupper; the latter begat Milton, as it did Young and Pollock. With
institutionalism goes the divine right of kings, the sacredness of
priests, the authority of forms and ceremonies, and the slavery of the
masses; with individualism goes the divinity of man, the sacredness
of life, the right of private judgment, the decay of traditions and
forms, and the birth of the modern spirit. With one goes stateliness,
impressiveness, distinction, as well as the empty, the moribund, the
despotic; with the other goes force, strenuousness, originality, as
well as the loud, the amorphous, the fanatical.
V
Goethe said that a loving interest in the person and the works of an
author, amounting to a certain one-sided enthusiasm, alone led to
reality in criticism; all else was vanity. No doubt more will come of
the contact of two minds under these circumstances than from what is
called the judicial attitude; there will be more complete fusion and
interpenetration; without a certain warmth and passion there is no
fruitfulness, even in criticism. In the field of art and literature,
to be disinterested does not mean to be cold and judicial; it means
to be free from bias, free from theories and systems, with mind open
to receive a clear impression of the work’s characteristic merits and
qualities.
It is tradition that always stands in the way of the new man. In
politics, it is the political tradition; in religion, the religious
tradition; and in literature, the literary tradition. Professional
criticism is the guardian of the literary tradition, and this is why
any man who essays a new departure in literary art has reason to fear
criticism or despise it, as the case may be.
It is when we take up any new work in the judicial spirit, bent upon
judging and classifying, rather than upon enjoying and understanding,
the conscious analytical intellect on duty and the sympathies and the
intuitions under lock and key, that there is danger that judicial
blindness will fall upon us. When we approach nature in the spirit
of technical science, our minds already preoccupied with certain
conclusions and systems, do we get as much of the joy and stimulus
which she holds for us as do the children on the way to school of a
spring morning with their hands full of wild flowers, or as does the
gleesome saunterer over hills in summer with only love and appreciation
uppermost in his mind?
Professional criticism often becomes mere pedagogical narrowness and
hardness; it gets crushed over with rules and precedents, pinched
and sterilized by routine and convention, so that a new work makes
no impression upon it. The literary tradition, like the religious
tradition, ceases to be vital and formative.
Is it not true that all first-class works have to be approached with
a certain humility and free giving of one’s self? In a sense, “except
ye become as little children” ye cannot enter the kingdom of the great
books.
I suppose that to get at the true inwardness of any imaginative work,
we must read it as far as possible in its own spirit, and that if it
does not engraft and increase its own spirit upon us, then it is feeble
and may easily be brushed aside.
Criticism which has for its object the discovery of new talent and,
in Sainte-Beuve’s words, to “apportion to each kind of greatness its
due influence and superiority,” is one thing; and criticism the object
of which is to uphold and enforce the literary tradition, is quite
another. Consciously or unconsciously, when the trained reader opens
a new book he is under the influence of one or the other of these
notions,--either he submits himself to it disinterestedly, intent only
upon seizing and appreciating its characteristic quality, or he comes
prepossessed with certain rules and standards upon which his taste
has been formed. In other words, he comes to the new work simply as a
man, a human being seeking edification, or he comes clothed in some
professional authority, seeking judgment.
Our best reading is a search for the excellent; but what is the
excellent? Is there any final standard of excellence in literature?
Each may be excellent after its kind, but kinds differ. There is one
excellence of Milton and Arnold and the classic school, and another
excellence of Shakespeare and Pope and Burns and Wordsworth and
Whitman, or of the romantic and democratic school. The critic is to
hold a work up to its own ideal or standard. Of the perfect works, of
the works that aim at perfection, at absolute symmetry and proportion,
appealing to us through the cunning of their form, scheme, structure,
details, ornamentation, we make a different demand from the one we
make of a primitive, unique, individual utterance or expression of
personality like “Leaves of Grass,” in which the end is not form, but
life; not perfection, but suggestion; not intellect, but character; not
beauty, but power; not carving, or sculpture, or architecture, but the
building of a man.
It is no doubt a great loss to be compelled to read any work of
literary art in a conscious critical mood, because the purely
intellectual interest in such a work which criticism demands, is
far less satisfying than our æsthetic interest. The mood in which
we enjoy a poem is analogous to that in which it was conceived. We
have here the reason why the professional reviewer is so apt to miss
the characteristic quality of the new book, and why the readers of
great publishing houses make so many mistakes. They call into play
a conscious mental force that is inimical to the emotional mood in
which the work had its rise; what was love in the poet becomes a pale
intellectual reflection in the critic.
Love must come first, or there can be no true criticism; the
intellectual process must follow and be begotten by an emotional
process. Indeed, criticism is an afterthought; it is such an account as
we can give of the experience we have had in private communion with the
subject of it. The conscious analytical intellect takes up one by one,
and examines the impression made upon our subconsciousness by the new
poem or novel.
Where nothing has been sown, nothing can be reaped. The work that has
yielded us no enjoyment will yield us no positive results in criticism.
Dr. Louis Waldstein, in his suggestive work on “The Subconscious
Self,” discovers that the critical or intellectual mood is foreign
to art; that it destroys or decreases the spontaneity necessary to
creation. This is why the critical and the creative faculty so rarely
go together, or why one seems to work against the other. Probably in
all normal, well-balanced minds the appreciation of a work of the
imagination is a matter of feeling and intuition long before it is a
matter of intellectual cognizance. Not all minds can give a reason for
the faith that is in them, and it is not important that they should;
the main matter is the faith. Every great work of art will be found
upon examination to have an ample ground of critical principles to rest
upon, though in the artist’s own mind not one of these principles may
have been consciously defined.
Indeed, the artist who works from any theory is foredoomed to at least
partial failure. And art that lends itself to any propaganda, or to
any idea “outside its essential form, falls short of being a pure art
creation.”
The critical spirit, when it has hardened into fixed standards, is
always a bar to the enjoyment or understanding of a poet. One then has
a poetical creed, as he has a political or religious creed, and this
creed is likely to stand between him and the appreciation of a new
poetic type. Macaulay thought Leigh Hunt was barred from appreciating
his “Lays of Ancient Rome” by his poetical creed, which may have been
the case. Jeffrey was no doubt barred from appreciating Wordsworth by
his poetical creed. It was Byron’s poetical creed that led him to rank
Pope so highly. A critic who holds to one of the conflicting creeds
about fiction, either that it should be realistic or romantic, will
not do justice to the other type. If Tolstoi is his ideal, he will set
little value on Scott; or if he exalts Hawthorne, he will depreciate
Howells. What the disinterested observer demands is the best possible
work of each after its kind. Or, if he is to compare and appraise the
two kinds, then I think that without doubt his conclusion will be that
the realistic novel is the later, maturer growth, more in keeping with
the modern demand for reality in all fields, and that the romantic
belongs more to the world of childish things, which we are fast leaving
behind us.
Our particular predilections in literature must, no doubt, be carefully
watched. There is danger in personal absorption in an author,--danger
to our intellectual freedom. One would not feel for a poet the
absorbing and exclusive love that the lover feels for his mistress,
because one would rather have the whole of literature for his domain.
One would rather admire Rabelais with Sainte-Beuve, as a Homeric
buffoon, than be a real “Pantagruelist devotee,” who finds a flavor
even in “the dregs of Master François’s cask” that he prefers to all
others. No doubt some of us, goaded on by the opposite vice in readers
and critics, have been guilty of an intemperate enthusiasm toward
Whitman and Browning. To make a cult of either of these authors, or
of any other, is to shut one’s self up in a part when the whole is
open to him. The opposite vice, that of violent personal antipathy, is
equally to be avoided in criticism. Probably Sainte-Beuve was guilty
of this vice in his attitude toward Balzac; Schérer in his criticism
of Béranger, and Landor in his dislike of Dante. One might also cite
Emerson’s distaste for Poe and Shelley, and Arnold’s antipathy to
Victor Hugo’s poetry. Likes and dislikes in literature that are
temperamental, that are like the attraction or repulsion of bodies
in different electrical conditions, are hard to be avoided, but the
trained reader may hope to overcome them. Taste is personal, but the
intellect is, or should be, impersonal, and to be able to guide the
former by the light of the latter is the signal triumph of criticism.