I
The saddest thing about the trade of writing is that the writer can
never know, nor hope to know, if he is a good workman. In literary
criticism there are no criteria, no accepted standards of excellence
by which to test the work. Sainte-Beuve says that the art of criticism
consists in saying the first thing that comes into one’s head.
Doubtless he was thinking of his own head, a fairly good one. There is
a difference between the first thing that comes into one head and the
first thing that comes into another; and it is not always the best kind
of head that concerns itself with literary criticism.
Having no standards, criticism is an erring guide. Its pronouncements
are more interesting than valuable, and interesting chiefly from the
insight that they give into the mind, not of the writer criticised,
but of the writer criticising. Hence the greater interest that they
have when delivered by one of whom the reader already knows something.
So the newspapers are not altogether unwise when asking an eminent
merchant to pass judgment on a new poet, or a distinguished soldier
to “sit” in the case of a rising young novelist. We learn something
about the merchant or the soldier, and that may amuse. As a guide to
literary excellence even the most accomplished critic’s judgment on his
contemporaries is of little value. Posterity more frequently reverses
than affirms it.
The reason is not far to seek. An author’s work is usually the product
of his environment. He collaborates with his era; his co-workers are
time and place. All his neighbors and all the conditions in which they
live have a hand in the work. His own individuality, unless uncommonly
powerful and original, is “subdued to what it works in.” But this is
true, too, of his critic, whose limitations are drawn by the same iron
authority. Subject to the same influences, good and bad, following
the same literary fashions, the critic who is contemporary with his
author holds his court in the market-place and polls a fortuitous jury.
In diagnosing the disorder of a person suspected of hydrophobia the
physician ought not to have been bitten by the same dog.
The taste of the many being notoriously bad and that of the few
dubious, what is the author to do for judgment on his work? He is to
wait. In a few centuries, more or less, may arise a critic that we call
Posterity. This fellow will have as many limitations, probably, as the
other had—will bow the knee to as many literary Baäls and err as widely
from the paths leading to the light. But his false gods will not be
those of to-day, whose hideousness will disclose itself to his undevout
vision, and in his deviations from the true trail he will cross and
chart our tracks. Better than all, he will know and care little about
the lives and characters, the personalities, of those of us whose work
has lasted till his time. On that coign of vantage he will stand and
deliver a juster judgment. It will enable him to judge our work with
impartiality, as if it had fallen from the skies or sprung up from the
ground without human agency.
One can hardly overrate the advantage to the critic of ignorance of his
author. Biographies of men of action are well enough; the lives that
such men live are all there is of them except themselves. But men of
thought—that is different. You can not narrate thought, nor describe
it, yet it is the only relevant thing in the life of an author.
Anything else darkens counsel. We go to biography for side lights on
an author’s work; to his work for side lights on his character. The
result is confusion and disability, for personal character and literary
character have little to say to each other, despite the fact that
so tremendous a chap as Taine builded an entire and most unearthly
biography of Shakspeare on no firmer foundation than the “internal
evidence” of the plays and sonnets. Of all the influences that make for
incapable criticism the biographer of authors is the most pernicious.
One needs not be a friend to organized labor to wish that the fellow’s
working hours might be reduced from twenty-four to eight.
Neither the judgment of the populace nor that of the critics being
of value to an author concerned about his rank in the hierarchy of
letters, and that of posterity being a trifle slow, he seems to be
reduced to the expedient of taking his own word for it. And his
opinion of himself may not be so far out of the way. Read Goethe’s
conversations with Eckermann and see how accurately the great man
appraised himself.
When scratched in a newspaper Heine said: “I am to be judged in the
assizes of literature. I know who I am.”
About the shrine of every famous author awaits a cloud of critics to
pay an orderly and decorous homage to his genius. There is no crowding:
if one of them sees that he can not perform his prostration until
after his saint shall have been forgotten along with the intellectual
miracles he wrought, that patient worshiper turns aside to level his
shins at another shrine. There are shrines enough for all, God knows!
The most mischievous, because the ablest, of all this sycophantic
crew is Mr. Howells, who finds every month, and reads, two or three
books—always novels—of high literary merit. As no man who has anything
else to do can critically read more than two or three books in a
month—and I will say for Mr. Howells that he is a conscientious
reader—and as some hundreds are published in the same period, one is
curious to know how many books of high literary merit he would find if
he could read them all. But Mr. Howells is no ordinary sycophant—not
he. True, having by mischance read a book divinely bad, even when
judged according to his own test, and having resolved to condemn
nothing except in a general way—as the artillerists in the early days
of the Civil War used to “shell the woods”—he does not purpose to lose
his labor, and therefore commends the book along with the others;
but as a rule he distributes the distinctions that he has to confer
according to a system—to those, namely, whose work in fiction most
nearly resembles his own. That is his way of propagating the Realistic
faith which his poverty of imagination has compelled him to adopt and
his necessities to defend. “Ah, yes, a beautiful animal,” said the
camel of the horse—“if he only had a hump!”
To show what literary criticism has accomplished in education of the
public taste I beg to refer the reader to any number of almost any
magazine. Here is one, for instance, containing a paper by one Bowker
on contemporary English novelists—he novelists and she novelists—to
the number of about forty. And only the “eminent” ones are mentioned.
To most American readers some of the books of most of these authors
are more or less familiar, and nine in ten of these readers will
indubitably accept Mr. Bowker’s high estimate of the genius of the
authors themselves. These have one good quality—they are industrious:
most of them have published ten to forty novels each, the latter number
being the favorite at this date and eliciting Mr. Bowker’s lively
admiration. The customary rate of production is one a year, though
two are not unusual, there being nothing in the law forbidding. Mr.
Bowker has the goodness to tell us all he knows about these persons’
methods of work; that is to say, all that they have told him. The
amount of patient research, profound thought and systematic planning
that go to the making of one of their books is (naturally) astonishing.
Unfortunately it falls just short of the amount that kills.
Add to the forty eminent English novelists another forty American,
equally eminent—at least in their own country—and similarly
industrious. We have then an average annual output of, say, eighty
novels which have the right to expect to be widely read and
enthusiastically reviewed. This in two countries, in one of which the
art of novel writing is dead, in the other of which it has not been
born. Truly this is an age of growing literary activity; our novelists
are as lively and diligent as maggots in the carcass of a horse. There
is a revival of baseball, too.
If our critics were wiser than their dupes could this mass of
insufferable stuff be dumped upon the land? Could the little men and
foolish women who write it command the persevering admiration of
their fellow-creatures, who think it a difficult thing to do? I make
no account here of the mere book-reporters of the newspapers, whose
purpose and ambition are, not to guide the public taste but to follow
it, and who are therefore in no sense critics. The persons whom I
am considering are those ingenious gentlemen who in the magazines
and reviews are expected to, and do, write of books with entire
independence of their own market. Are there anywhere more than one,
two or three like Percival Pollard, with “Gifford’s heavy hand” to
“crush without remorse” the intolerable rout of commonplace men and
women swarming innumerous upon the vacant seats of the dead giants and
covering the slopes of Parnassus like a flock of crows?
Your critic of widest vogue and chief authority among us is he who is
best skilled in reading between the lines; in interpreting an author’s
purpose; in endowing him with a “problem” and noting his degree of
skill in its solution. The author—stupid fellow!—did not write between
the lines, had no purpose but to entertain, was unaware of a problem.
So much the worse for him; so much the better for his expounder.
Interlinear cipher, purpose, problem, are all the critic’s own, and
he derives a lively satisfaction in his creation—looks upon it and
pronounces it good. Nothing is more certain than that if a writer of
genius should “bring to his task” of writing a book the purposes which
the critics would surely trace in the completed work the book would
remain forever unwritten, to the unspeakble advantage of letters and
morals.
In illustration of these remarks and suggesting them, take these
book reviews in a single number of _The Atlantic_. There we
learn, concerning Mr. Cable, that his controlling purpose in
_The Grandissimes_ was that of “presenting the problem of the
reorganization of Southern society”—that “the book was in effect a
parable”; that in _Dr. Sevier_ he “essayed to work out through personal
relations certain problems [always a problem or two] which vexed him
regarding poverty and labor”; that in _Bonaventure_ he “sets himself
another task,” which is “to work out [always something to ‘work out’]
the regeneration of man through knowledge”—a truly formidable “task.”
Of the author of _Queen Money_, we are told by the same expounder
that she has “set herself no task beyond her power,” but “had it in
mind to trace the influence of the greed for wealth upon a section of
contemporaneous society.” Of Mr. Bellamy, author of _Looking Backward_
(the heroine of which is not Mrs. Lot) we are confidently assured in
ailing metaphor that “he feels intensely the bitter inequalities of
the present order” of things and “thinks he sees a remedy,”—our old
friends again: the “problem” and the “solution”—both afterthoughts of
Mr. Bellamy. The “task” which in _Marzio’s Crucifix_ Marion Crawford
“sets himself” is admirably simple—by a “characteristic outwardness”
to protect us against “a too intimate and subtle corrosive of life.”
As a savior of the world against this awful peril Crawford may justly
have claimed a vote of thanks; but possibly he was content with that
humbler advantage, the profit from the sale of his book. But (it may be
protested) the critic who is to live by his trade must say _something_.
True, but is it necessary that he live by his trade?
Carlyle’s prophecy of a time when all literature should be one vast
review is in process of fulfilment. Aubrey de Vere has written a
critical analysis of poetry, chiefly that of Spenser and Wordsworth. An
_Atlantic_ man writes a critical analysis of Aubrey de Vere’s critical
analysis. Shall I not write a critical analysis of the _Atlantic_ man’s
critical analysis of Aubrey de Vere’s critical analysis of poetry? I
can do so adequately in three words: It is nonsense.
Spenser, also, it appears, “set himself a task,” had his “problem,”
“worked it out.” “The figures of his embroidered poem,” we are told,
“are conceived and used in accordance with a comprehensive doctrine
of the nature of humanity, which Spenser undoubtedly meant to enforce
through the medium of his imagination.” That is to say, the author
of _The Faerie Queene_ did not “sing because he could not choose but
sing,” but because he was burdened with a doctrine. He had a nut to
crack and, faith! he must crack it or he would be sick. “Resolved into
its moral elements” (whether by Aubrey de Vere or the _Atlantic_ man
I can only guess without reading de Vere’s work in two volumes, which
God forbid!) the glowing work of Spenser is a sermon which “teaches
specifically how to attain self-control and how to meet attacks from
without; or rather how to seek those many forms of error which do
mischief in the world, and to overcome them for the world’s welfare.”
Precisely: the animal is a pig and a bird; or rather it is a fish. So
much for Spenser, whom his lovers may re-read if they like in the new
light of this person’s critical analysis. It is rather hard that, being
dead, he can not have the advantage of going over his work with so
intelligent a guide as Aubrey de Vere. He would be astonished by his
own profundity.
How literary reviewing may be acceptably done in Boston may be judged
by the following passage from the Boston _Literary Review_:
“When Miss Emma Frances Dawson wrote _An Itinerant House_ she was
plainly possessed of a desire to emulate Poe and turn out a collection
of stories which, once read, the mention of them would make the blood
curdle. There is no need to say that Poe’s position is still secure,
but Miss Dawson has succeeded in writing some very creditable stories
of their kind.”
The reviewer that can discern in Miss Dawson’s work “a desire to
emulate Poe,” or can find in it even a faint suggestion of Poe, may
justly boast himself accessible to any folly that comes his way. There
is no more similarity between the work of the two writers than there
is between that of Dickens and that of Macaulay, or that of Addison
and that of Carlyle. Poe in his prose tales deals sometimes with the
supernatural; Miss Dawson always. But hundreds of writers do the same;
if that constitutes similarity and suggests intentional “emulation”
what shall be said of those tales which resemble one another in that
element’s omission? The truth probably is that the solemn gentleman
who wrote that judgment had not read Poe since childhood, and did not
read Miss Dawson at all. Moreover, no excellence in her work would
have saved it from his disparaging comparison if he had read it. “Poe’s
position” would still have been a “secure,” for to such minds as his it
is unthinkable that an established fame (no matter how, when or where
established) should not signify an unapproachable merit. If he had
lived in Poe’s time how he would have sneered at that writer’s attempt
to emulate Walpole! And had he been a contemporary of Walpole that
ambitious person would have incurred a stinging rap on the head for
aspiring to displace the immortal Gormley Hobb.
The fellow goes on:
“To one steeped in the gruesome weirdness of a master of the gentle art
of blood-curdling the stories are not too impressive, but he who picks
up the book fresh from a fairy tale is apt to become somewhat nervous
in the reading. The tales allow Miss Dawson to weave in some very
pretty verse.”
The implication that Miss Dawson’s tales are intended to be “gruesome,”
“blood-curdling,” and so forth, is a foolish implication. Their
supernaturalism is not of that kind. The blood that they could curdle
is diseased blood which it would be at once a kindly office and a high
delight to shed. And fancy this inexpressible creature calling Miss
Dawson’s verse “pretty”!—the _ballade_ of “The Sea of Sleep” “pretty”!
My compliments to him:
Dull spirit, few among us be your days,
The bright to damn, the fatuous to praise;
And God deny, your flesh when you unload,
Your prayer to live as tenant of a toad,
With powers direr than your present sort:
Able the wights you jump on to bewart.
The latest author of “uncanny” tales to suffer from the ready
reckoner’s short cut to the solution of the problem of literary merit,
the ever-serviceable comparison with Edgar Allan Poe, is Mr. W. C.
Morrow. Doubtless he had hoped that this cup might pass by him—had
implored the rosy goddess Psora, who enjoys the critic’s person and
inspires his pen, to go off duty, but it was not to be; that diligent
deity is never weary of ill doing and her devotees, pursuing the evil
tenor of their way, have sounded the Scotch fiddle to the customary
effect. Mr. Morrow’s admirable book, _The Ape, the Idiot and Other
People_, is gravely ascribed to the paternity of Poe, as was Miss
Dawson’s before it, and some of mine before that. And until Gabriel,
with one foot upon the sea and the other upon the neck of the last
living critic, shall swear that the time for doing this thing is up,
every writer of stories a little out of the common must suffer the same
sickening indignity. To the ordinary microcephalous bibliopomps—the
book-butchers of the newspapers—criticism is merely a process of
marking upon the supposed stature of an old writer the supposed stature
of a new, without ever having taken the trouble to measure that of the
old; they accept hearsay evidence for that. Does one write “gruesome
stories”?—they invoke Poe; essays?—they out with their Addison;
satirical verse?—they have at him with Pope—and so on, through the
entire category of literary forms. Each has its dominant great name,
learned usually in the district school, easily carried in memory and
obedient to the call of need. And because these strabismic ataxiates,
who fondly fancy themselves shepherding auctorial flocks upon the
slopes of Parnassus, are unable to write of one writer without thinking
of another, they naturally assume that the writer of whom they write
is affected with the same disability and has always in mind as a model
the standard name dominating his chosen field—the impeccant hegemon of
the province.