CRITICISM:
Matthew Arnold and Ruskin.
The term “criticism” may appropriately be used to designate all writing
in which logic predominates over emotion. The style of criticism is
the style of argument, exposition, and debate, as well as of literary
analysis; and it is the appropriate style to be used in mathematical
discussions and all scientific essays.
Of course the strictly critical style may be united with almost any other.
We are presenting pure types; but very seldom does it happen that any
composition ordinarily produced belongs to any one pure type. Criticism
would be dull without the enlivening effects of some appeal to the
emotions. We shall illustrate this point in a quotation from Ruskin.
The critical style has just one secret: It depends on a very close
definition of work in ordinary use, words do not have a sufficiently
definite meaning for scientific purposes. Therefore in scientific writing
it is necessary to define them exactly, and so change common words into
technical terms. To these may be added the great body of words used in
no other way than as technical terms.
Of course our first preparation for criticism is to master the technical
terms and technical uses of words peculiar to the subject we are treating.
Then we must make it clear to the reader that we are using words in their
technical senses so that he will know how to interpret them.
But beyond that we must make technical terms as we go along, by defining
common words very strictly. This is nicely illustrated by Matthew Arnold,
one of the most accomplished of pure critics. The opening paragraphs
of the first chapter of “Culture and Anarchy”―the chapter entitled
“Sweetness and Light”―will serve for illustration, and the student is
referred to the complete work for material for further study and imitation.
From “Sweetness and Light.”
The disparagers of culture, [says Mr. Arnold], make its motive
curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness
and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a
smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing
so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity
and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction,
separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have
not got it. No serious man would call this _culture,_ or attach any
value to it, as culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very
different estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must
find some motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real
ambiguity; and such a motive the word _curiosity_ gives us.
I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the
foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense.
A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be
meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word
always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity.
In the _Quarterly Review,_ some little time ago, was an estimate of
the celebrated French critic, M. Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate
estimate it in my judgment was. And its inadequacy consisted chiefly
in this: that in our English way it left out of sight the double sense
really involved in the word _curiosity,_ thinking enough was said to
stamp M. Sainte-Beuve with blame if it was said that he was impelled
in his operations as a critic by curiosity, and omitting either to
perceive that M. Sainte-Beuve himself, and many other people with
him, would consider that this was praiseworthy and not blameworthy,
or to point out why it ought really to be accounted worthy of blame
and not of praise. For as there is a curiosity about intellectual
matters which is futile, and merely a disease, so there is certainly
a curiosity,―a desire after the things of the mind simply for their
own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are,―which is,
in an intelligent being, natural and laudable. Nay, and the very desire
to see things as they are implies a balance and regulation of mind which
is not often attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very
opposite of the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean
to blame when we blame curiosity. Montesquieu says: ‘The first motive
which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence
of our nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent.’
This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion,
however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this
passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term
_curiosity_ stand to describe it.
Starting with exact definitions of words, it is easy to pass to exact
definitions of ideas, which is the thing we should be aiming at all
the time. The logical accuracy of our language, however, is apparent
throughout.
Matthew Arnold does not embellish his criticism, nor does he make any
special appeal to the feelings or emotions of his readers. Not so Ruskin.
He discovers intellectual emotions, and makes pleasant appeals to those
emotions. Consequently his criticism has been more popular than Matthew
Arnold's. As an example of this freer, more varied critical style, let
us cite the opening paragraphs of the lecture “Of Queens' Gardens”——in
“Sesame and Lilies”:
From “Sesame and Lilies.”
It will be well … that I should shortly state to you my general
intention… The questions specially proposed to you in my former
lecture, namely How and What to Read, rose out of a far deeper one,
which it was my endeavor to make you propose earnestly to yourselves,
namely, Why to Read I want you to feel, with me, that whatever advantage
we possess in the present day in the diffusion of education and of
literature, can only be rightly used by any of us when we have apprehended
clearly what education is to lead to, and literature to teach. I wish
you to see that both well directed moral training and well chosen reading
lead to the possession of a power over the ill-guided and illiterate,
which is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense kingly;*
conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men. Too many
other kingships (however distinguished by visible insignia or material
power) being either spectral, or tyrannous; spectral―that is to say,
aspects and shadows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the
“likeness of a kingly crown have on;” or else tyrannous―that is to say,
substituting their own will for the law of justice and love by which all
true kings rule.
*The preceding lecture was entitled “Of Kings's Treasures.”
There is then, I repeat (and as I want to leave this idea with you, I
begin with it, and shall end with it) only one pure kind of kingship,
―an inevitable or eternal kind, crowned or not,―the kingship, namely,
which consists in a stronger moral state and truer thoughtful state
than that of others, enabling you, therefore, to guide or to raise them.
Observe that word “state” we have got into a loose way of using it. It
means literally the standing and stability of a thing; and you have the
full force of it in the derived word “statue”―“the immovable thing.”
A king's majesty or “state,” then, and the right of his kingdom to be
called a State, depends on the movelessness of both,―without tremor,
without quiver of balance, established and enthroned upon a foundation
of eternal law which nothing can alter or overthrow.
Believing that all literature and all education are only useful so
far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, and therefore kingly,
power,―first over ourselves, and, through ourselves, over all around
us,―I am now going to ask you to consider with me further, what special
portion or kind of this royal authority, arising out of noble education,
may rightly be possessed by women; and how far they also are called to a
true queenly power,―not in their households merely, but over all within
their sphere. And in what sense, if they rightly understood and exercised
this royal or gracious influence, the order and beauty induced by such
benignant power would justify us in speaking of the territories over which
each of them reigned as ‘Queens' Gardens.’
Here still is the true critical style, with exact definitions; but the
whole argument is a metaphor, and the object of the criticism is to
rouse feelings that will lead to action.
It will be observed that words which by definition are to be taken in
some sort of technical sense are distinguished to the eye in some way.
Matthew Arnold used italics. Ruskin first places “state” within quotation
marks, and then, when he uses the word in a still different sense,
he writes it with a capital letter―State. Capitalization is perhaps
the most common way for designating common words when used in a special
sense which is defined by the writer―or defined by implication. This is
the explanation of the capital letters with which the writings of Carlyle
are filled. He constantly endeavors to make words mean more than, or
something different from, the meaning they usually have.
The peculiar embellishments of the critical writer are epigram, paradox,
and satire. An _epigram_ is a very short phrase or sentence which is
so full of implied meaning or suggestion that it catches the attention
at once, and remains in the memory easily. The _paradox_ is something
of the same sort on a larger scale. It is a statement that we can
hardly believe to be true, since it seems at first sight to be
self-contradictory, or to contradict well known truths or laws; but
on examination we find that in a peculiar sense it is strictly true.
_Satire_ is a variation of humor peculiarly adapted to criticism, since
it is intended to make the common idea ridiculous when compared with the
ideas which the critic is trying to bring out: it is a sort of argument
by force of stinging points. We may find an example of satire in its
perfection in Swift, especially in his “Gulliver's Travels”―since these
are satires the point of which we can appreciate to-day. Oscar Wilde
was peculiarly given to epigram, and in his plays especially we may find
epigram carried to the same excess that the balanced structure is carried
by Macaulay. More moderate epigram may be found in Emerson and Carlyle.
Paradox is something that we should use only on special occasion.