is a masterpiece of inexpertness. And the couplet:
The Bosun turned: "I'll give you a thick ear!
Do it? I didn't. Get to hell from here!"
is like a Sunday-school teacher's lame attempt to repeat a blasphemous
story. Mr. Masefield, on the other hand, is, we always feel, wrestling
with language. If he writes in a hurry, it is not because he is
indifferent, but because his soul is full of something that he is eager to
express. He does not gabble; he is, as it were, a man stammering out a
vision. So vastly greater are his virtues than his faults as a poet,
indeed, that the latter would only be worth the briefest mention if it
were not for the danger of their infecting other writers who envy him his
method but do not possess his conscience. One cannot contemplate with
equanimity the prospect of a Masefield school of poetry with all Mr.
Masefield's ineptitudes and none of his genius.
Criticism, however, it is to be feared, is a fight for a lost cause if it
essays to prevent the founding of schools upon the faults of good writers.
Criticism will never kill the copyist. Nothing but the end of the world
can do that. Still, whatever the practical results of his work may be, it
is the function of the critic to keep the standard of writing high--to
insist that the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences are
like torn strips of newspaper for commonness. He is the enemy of
sloppiness in others--especially of that airy sloppiness which so often
nowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel. It was amazing to
find with what airiness a promising writer like Mr. Compton Mackenzie gave
us some years ago _Sinister Street_, a novel containing thousands of
sentences that only seemed to be there because he had not thought it worth
his while to leave them out, and thousands of others that seemed to be
mere hurried attempts to express realities upon which he was unable to
spend more time. Here is a writer who began literature with a sense of
words, and who is declining into a mere sense of wordiness. It is simply
another instance of the ridiculous rush of writing that is going on all
about us--a rush to satisfy a public which demands quantity rather than
quality in its books. I do not say that Mr. Mackenzie consciously wrote
down to the public, but the atmosphere obviously affected him. Otherwise
he would hardly have let his book go out into the world till he had
rewritten it--till he had separated his necessary from his unnecessary
sentences and given his conversations the tones of reality.
There is no need, however, for criticism to lash out indiscriminately at
all hurried writing. There are a multitude of books turned out every year
which make no claim to be literature--the "thrillers," for example, of Mr.
Phillips Oppenheim and of that capable firm of feuilletonists, Coralie
Stanton and Heath Hosken. I do not think literature stands to gain
anything, even though all the critics in Europe were suddenly to assail
this kind of writing. It is a frankly commercial affair, and we have no
more right to demand style from those who live by it than from the authors
of the weather reports in the newspapers. Often, one notices, when the
golden youth, fresh from college and the reading of Shelley and Anatole
France, commences literary critic, he begins damning the sensational
novelists as though it were their business to write like Jane Austen. This
is a mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to what
pretends to be literature. That is why one is often impelled to attack
really excellent writers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch or Mr. Galsworthy,
as one would never dream of attacking, say, Mr. William Le Queux. To
attack Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is, indeed, a form of appreciation, for
the only just criticism that can be levelled against him is that his later
work does not seem to be written with that singleness of imagination and
that deliberate rightness of phrase which made _Noughts and Crosses_ and
_The Ship of Stars_ books to be kept beyond the end of the year. If one
attacks Mr. Galsworthy, again, it is usually because one admires his best
work so whole-heartedly that one is not willing to accept from him
anything but the best. One cannot, however, be content to see the author
of _The Man of Property_ dropping the platitudes and the false
fancifulness of _The Inn of Tranquillity_. It is the false pretences in
literature which criticism must seek to destroy. Recognizing Mr.
Galsworthy's genius for the realistic representation of men and women, it
must not be blinded by that genius to the essential second-rateness and
sentimentality of much of his presentation of ideas. He is a man of genius
in the black humility with which he confesses strength and weakness
through the figures of men and women. He achieves too much of a pulpit
complacency--therefore of condescendingness--therefore of falseness to the
deep intimacy of good literature--when he begins to moralize about time
and the universe. One finds the same complacency, the same
condescendingness, in a far higher degree in the essays of Mr. A.C.
Benson. Mr. Benson, I imagine, began writing with a considerable literary
gift, but his later work seems to me to have little in it but a good man's
pretentiousness. It has the air of going profoundly into the secrecies of
love and joy and truth, but it contains hardly a sentence that would waken
a ruffle on the surface of the shallowest spirit. It is not of the
literature that awakens, indeed, but of the literature that puts to sleep,
and that is always a danger unless it is properly labelled and
recognizable. Sleeping-draughts may be useful to help a sick man through a
bad night, but one does not recommend them as a cure for ordinary healthy
thirst. Nor will Mr. Benson escape just criticism on the score of his
manner of writing. He is an absolute master of the otiose word, the
superfluous sentence. He pours out pages as easily as a bird sings, but,
alas! it is a clockwork bird in this instance. He lacks the true innocent
absorption in his task which makes happy writing and happy reading.
It is not always the authors, on the other hand, whose pretences it is the
work of criticism to destroy. It is frequently the wild claims of the
partisans of an author that must be put to the test. This sort of
pretentiousness often happens during "booms," when some author is talked
of as though he were the only man who had ever written well. How many of
these booms have we had in recent years--booms of Wilde, of Synge, of
Donne, of Dostoevsky! On the whole, no doubt, they do more good than harm.
They create a vivid enthusiasm for literature that affects many people who
might not otherwise know that to read a fine book is as exciting an
experience as going to a horse-race. Hundreds of people would not have the
courage to sit down to read a book like _The Brothers Karamazov_ unless
they were compelled to do so as a matter of fashionable duty. On the other
hand, booms more than anything else make for false estimates. It seems
impossible with many people to praise Dostoevsky without saying that he is
greater than Tolstoy or Turgenev. Oscar Wilde enthusiasts, again, invite
us to rejoice, not only over that pearl of triviality, _The Importance of
Being Earnest_, but over a blaze of paste jewelry like _Salomé_.
Similarly, Donne worshippers are not content to ask us to praise Donne's
gifts of fancy, analysis and idiosyncratic music. They insist that we
shall also admit that he knew the human heart better than Shakespeare. It
may be all we like sheep have gone astray in this kind of literary riot.
And so long as the exaggeration of a good writer's genius is an honest
personal affair, one resents it no more than one resents the large nose or
the bandy legs of a friend. It is when men begin to exaggerate in
herds--to repeat like a lesson learned the enthusiasm of others--that the
boom becomes offensive. It is as if men who had not large noses were to
begin to pretend that they had, or as if men whose legs were not bandy
were to pretend that they were, for fashion's sake. Insincerity is the one
entirely hideous artistic sin--whether in the creation or in the
appreciation of art. The man who enjoys reading _The Family Herald_, and
admits it, is nearer a true artistic sense than the man who is bored by
Henry James and denies it: though, perhaps, hypocrisy is a kind of homage
paid to art as well as to virtue. Still, the affectation of literary
rapture offends like every other affectation. It was the chorus of
imitative rapture over Synge a few years ago that helped most to bring
about a speedy reaction against him. Synge was undoubtedly a man of fine
genius--the genius of gloomy comedy and ironic tragedy. His mind delved
for strangenesses in speech and imagination among people whom the new age
had hardly touched, and his discoveries were sufficiently magnificent to
make the eyes of any lover of language brighten. His work showed less of
the mastery of life, however, than of the mastery of a theme. It was a
curious by-world of literature, a little literature of death's-heads, and,
therefore, no more to be mentioned with the work of the greatest than the
stories of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Unfortunately, some disturbances in
Dublin at the first production of _The Playboy_ turned the play into a
battle-cry, and the artists, headed by Mr. Yeats, used Synge to belabour
the Philistinism of the mob. In the excitement of the fight they were soon
talking about Synge as though Dublin had rejected a Shakespeare. Mr. Yeats
even used the word "Homeric" about him--surely the most inappropriate word
it would be possible to imagine. Before long Mr. Yeats's enthusiasm had
spread to England, where people who ignored the real magic of Synge's
work, as it is to be found in _Riders to the Sea_, _In the Shadow of the
Glen_, and _The Well of the Saints_, went into ecstasies over the inferior
_Playboy_. Such a boom meant not the appreciation of Synge but a
glorification of his more negligible work. It was almost as if we were to
boom Swinburne on the score of his later political poetry. Criticism makes
for the destruction of such booms. I do not mean that the critic has not
the right to fling about superlatives like any other man. Criticism, in
one aspect, is the art of flinging about superlatives finely. But they
must be personal superlatives, not boom superlatives. Even when they are
showered on an author who is the just victim of a boom--and, on a
reasonable estimate, at least fifty per cent of the booms have some
justification--they are as unbeautiful as rotten apples unless they have
this personal kind of honesty.
It may be thought that an attitude of criticism like this may easily sink
into Pharisaism--a sort of "superior-person" aloofness from other people.
And no doubt the critic, like other people, needs to beat his breast and
pray, "God be merciful to me, a--critic." On the whole, however, the
critic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimes
imagined. He is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He is
not concerned with getting rid of the dross except in so far as it hides
the gold. In other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a
subsidiary affair. None of the best critics have been men of destructive
minds. They are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowers
than with the weeds. If I may change the metaphor, the whole truth about
criticism is contained in the Eastern proverb which declares that "Love is
the net of Truth." It is as a lover that the critic, like the lyric poet
and the mystic, will be most excellently symbolized.