It has been said often enough that all good criticism is praise. Pater
boldly called one of his volumes of critical essays _Appreciations_. There
are, of course, not a few brilliant instances of hostility in criticism.
The best-known of these in English is Macaulay's essay on Robert
Montgomery. In recent years we have witnessed the much more significant
assault by Tolstoy upon almost the whole army of the authors of the
civilized world from Æschylus down to Mallarmé. _What is Art?_ was
unquestionably the most remarkable piece of sustained hostile criticism
that was ever written. At the same time, it was less a denunciation of
individual authors than an attack on the general tendencies of the
literary art. Tolstoy quarrelled with Shakespeare not so much for being
Shakespeare as for failing to write like the authors of the Gospels.
Tolstoy would have made every book a Bible. He raged against men of
letters because with them literature was a means not to more abundant life
but to more abundant luxury. Like so many inexorable moralists, he was
intolerant of all literature that did not serve as a sort of example of
his own moral and social theories. That is why he was not a great critic,
though he was immeasurably greater than a great critic. One would not turn
to him for the perfect appreciation even of one of the authors he spared,
like Hugo or Dickens. The good critic must in some way begin by accepting
literature as it is, just as the good lyric poet must begin by accepting
life as it is. He may be as full of revolutionary and reforming theories
as he likes, but he must not allow any of these to come like a cloud
between him and the sun, moon and stars of literature. The man who
disparages the beauty of flowers and birds and love and laughter and
courage will never be counted among the lyric poets; and the man who
questions the beauty of the inhabited world the imaginative writers have
made--a world as unreasonable in its loveliness as the world of nature--is
not in the way of becoming a critic of literature.
Another argument which tells in favour of the theory that the best
criticism is praise is the fact that almost all the memorable examples of
critical folly have been denunciations. One remembers that Carlyle
dismissed Herbert Spencer as a "never-ending ass." One remembers that
Byron thought nothing of Keats--"Jack Ketch," as he called him. One
remembers that the critics damned Wagner's operas as a new form of sin.
One remembers that Ruskin denounced one of Whistler's nocturnes as a pot
of paint flung in the face of the British public. In the world of science
we have a thousand similar examples of new genius being hailed by the
critics as folly and charlatanry. Only the other day a biographer of Lord
Lister was reminding us how, at the British Association in 1869, Lister's
antiseptic treatment was attacked as a "return to the dark ages of
surgery," the "carbolic mania," and "a professional criminality." The
history of science, art, music and literature is strewn with the wrecks of
such hostile criticisms. It is an appalling spectacle for anyone
interested in asserting the intelligence of the human race. So appalling
is it, indeed, that most of us nowadays labour under such a terror of
accidentally condemning something good that we have not the courage to
condemn anything at all. We think of the way in which Browning was once
taunted for his obscurity, and we cannot find it in our hearts to censure
Mr. Doughty. We recall the ignorant attacks on Manet and Monet, and we
will not risk an onslaught on the follies of Picasso and the
worse-than-Picassos of contemporary art. We grow a monstrous and unhealthy
plant of tolerance in our souls, and its branches drop colourless good
words on the just and on the unjust--on everybody, indeed, except Miss
Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, and a few others whom we know to be
second-rate because they have such big circulations. This is really a
disastrous state of affairs for literature and the other arts. If
criticism is, generally speaking, praise, it is, more definitely, praise
of the right things. Praise for the sake of praise is as great an evil as
blame for the sake of blame. Indiscriminate praise, in so far as it is the
result of distrust of one's own judgment or of laziness or of insincerity,
is one of the deadly sins in criticism. It is also one of the deadly dull
sins. Its effect is to make criticism ever more unreadable, and in the end
even the publishers, who love silly sentences to quote about their bad
books, will open their eyes to the futility of it. They will realize that,
when once criticism has become unreal and unreadable, people will no more
be bothered with it than they will with drinking lukewarm water. I mention
the publisher in especial, because there is no doubt that it is with the
idea of putting the publishers in a good, open-handed humour that so many
papers and reviews have turned criticism into a kind of stagnant pond.
Publishers, fortunately, are coming more and more to see that this kind of
criticism is of no use to them. Reviews in such-and-such a paper, they
will tell you, do not sell books. And the papers to which they refer in
such cases are always papers in which praise is disgustingly served out to
everybody, like spoonfuls of treacle-and-brimstone to a mob of
schoolchildren.
Criticism, then, is praise, but it is praise of literature. There is all
the difference in the world between that and the praise of what pretends
to be literature. True criticism is a search for beauty and truth and an
announcement of them. It does not care twopence whether the method of
their revelation is new or old, academic or futuristic. It only asks that
the revelation shall be genuine. It is concerned with form, because beauty
and truth demand perfect expression. But it is a mere heresy in æsthetics
to say that perfect expression is the whole of art that matters. It is the
spirit that breaks through the form that is the main interest of
criticism. Form, we know, has a permanence of its own: so much so that it
has again and again been worshipped by the idolators of art as being in
itself more enduring than the thing which it embodies. Robert Burns, by
his genius for perfect statement, can give immortality to the joys of
being drunk with whiskey as the average hymn-writer cannot give
immortality to the joys of being drunk with the love of God. Style, then,
does seem actually to be a form of life. The critic may not ignore it any
more than he may exaggerate its place in the arts. As a matter of fact, he
could not ignore it if he would, for style and spirit have a way of
corresponding to one another like health and sunlight.
It is to combat the stylelessness of many contemporary writers that the
destructive kind of criticism is just now most necessary. For, dangerous
as the heresy of style was forty or fifty years ago, the newer heresy of
sylelessness is more dangerous still. It has become the custom even of men
who write well to be as ashamed of their style as a schoolboy is of being
caught in an obvious piece of goodness. They keep silent about it as
though it were a kind of powdering or painting. They do not realize that
it is merely a form of ordinary truthfulness--the truthfulness of the word
about the thought. They forget that one has no more right to misuse words
than to beat one's wife. Someone has said that in the last analysis style
is a moral quality. It is a sincerity, a refusal to bow the knee to the
superficial, a passion for justice in language. Stylelessness, where it is
not, like colour-blindness, an accident of nature, is for the most part
merely an echo of the commercial man's world of hustle. It is like the
rushing to and fro of motor-buses which save minutes with great loss of
life. It is like the swift making of furniture with unseasoned wood. It is
a kind of introduction of the quick-lunch system into literature. One
cannot altogether acquit Mr. Masefield of a hasty stylelessness in some of
those long poems which the world has been raving about in the last year or
two. His line in _The Everlasting Mercy:_