_Prometheus Illbound_ she has translated into English. His is “a mind,”
she declares, “which must be ranked among the greatest of the world’s
literature.” “Must” is a challenging word. Of how many contemporary
writers dare we use it in this sense? Dare we use it of Anatole France,
or Bergson, or Hardy, or Shaw, or d’Annunzio, or Croce? We should be
foolhardy, indeed, much as we rightly admire these authors, to put any
of them just yet into the pantheon that contains the images of Plato
and Shakespeare and Voltaire. Call no man happy till he is dead, says
an old proverb. It would be still wiser to call no man one of the
world’s greatest writers till he has been dead a hundred years. One
cannot, if one is a quite human being, judge one’s contemporaries with
the same impartial scrutiny with which one judges the mighty dead. The
great man gives to his own age much to which posterity is indifferent,
and gives to posterity much to which his own age may even be hostile.
Tennyson served his age as a giant, and he was accepted as a giant by
most of the fine critics of his age, from Edgar Allan Poe downwards.
If an occasional critic such as Edward FitzGerald came to have doubts
about Tennyson, it was because he himself stood monastically aloof
from the age. It is one of the functions of criticism, no doubt, to
separate the temporary from the immortal elements in the work of
contemporary writers. But this is one of the counsels of perfection
in criticism. The thing has never been infallibly done. Sainte-Beuve
was as ridiculous in writing about Balzac as Lamb was about Shelley.
Not that even posterity is capable of pronouncing what we call final
judgments. We have a way of turning to posterity in despair for a
true verdict on authors. Alas! posterity, though it has not the same
reasons for erroneous judgments, is (like ourselves) of a variable and
uncertain mind. Posterity has made strange blunders about Euripides,
about Ronsard, about Donne, about Pope. Good authors constantly have
to be rescued from the neglect of posterity. All we can be sure of
is that an author who appeals to a succession of generations has
given us something of the true gold of literature. Even if each new
generation to some extent re-estimates the world’s classics, it usually
leaves them secure in the position of classics. Or almost secure, for
who knows whether the world will not one day cease to read Lucian or
Virgil, or _The Pilgrim’s Progress_?
As for contemporary literature, how much of it is there that we dare
confidently add to the ranks even of the minor classics? One is sure
of a certain number of lyrics, notably those of Mr. Yeats. But in
prose one has to be more cautious. Prose, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
lamented the other day, has fallen upon styleless days, and without
style it is difficult to live for ever. Plutarch has survived with a
minimum of it, and so has Marcus Aurelius, and so has Balzac. But on
the whole, it must be admitted that most of the great writers, whether
in prose or poetry, wrote well. M. Gide, it must be admitted, writes
admirably, though not wonderfully. Lady Rothermere does not communicate
the delicacies of his style in _Prometheus Illbound_, but one could not
read even this translation without feeling that the author is a man
of skill and wit in words. I doubt, however, whether there is enough
style in it to give it a place on a shelf with the world’s important
books. Lady Rothermere does not assert, indeed, that _Prometheus
Illbound_ is itself a masterpiece. She claims for it only that it is
“the expression of the humorous side” of one of the world’s greatest
minds. The humour, it seems to me, is too elusive to proceed from a
great mind. Great minds, if they are humorous at all, are humorous in
such a way that the ordinary man can see at least a part of the joke.
M. Gide makes jokes for the favoured few. Many a man who is amused by
the jokes of Plato and of Gibbon will be merely bewildered by the jokes
of M. Gide. He enjoys the swift change of episode as Sterne does, but,
whereas Sterne always saves the situation by giving us comic human
beings passing across his haphazard stage, M. Gide does not create
human beings at all. Lady Rothermere admits that “his world is a world
of abstract ideas, under the action of which most of his characters
move as marionettes.” She quotes: “Time and space are the boards which,
with the help of our minds, have been set up by the innumerable truths
of the universe as a stage for their own performances. And there we
play our parts like determined, convinced, devoted, and voluptuous
marionettes.” This dilettante and purely intellectual attitude to life
is, I believe, impossible to a great mind. It is very tedious to hear
sentimental people repeating the platitude that “great thoughts come
from the heart”; but the platitude happens to be true. Shakespeare, it
may be replied, in some of his moods saw the world as a stage and an
“insubstantial pageant.” On the other hand, he never saw men and women
as marionettes. He was always interested in character, and M. Gide is
not. M. Gide is interested in problems. He is interested in ideas.
He is not interested in men and women. He is a philosopher at play.
Even when he introduces a tragic element into his work, as in _Le Roi
Candaule_, we feel that the whole thing is a game, an experiment. A
great deal of modern French literature makes one think of clever men
amusing themselves in a laboratory. The French are Epicureans of ideas.
They test creeds and philosophies and scepticisms with an exquisite
freshness of curiosity. They seek after truth itself as an amusement.
In no other nation can men talk so admirably of the universe while
smoking cigarettes. In England, if a man talks of God, he either lights
a pipe or stops smoking.
In _Prometheus Illbound_ M. Gide has lit a cigarette, a rather
fragrant cigarette, at the sun. There is perhaps something a little
disproportionate in the action, something, too, a little audacious;
but he does it, if the phrase is not too stale, with a fine gesture,
and as he puffs at it, the glow of his cigarette seems to throw a tiny
light on the immense problems of human existence. He is cosmic in his
interests, if Parisian in his manners. He has Zeus and Prometheus and
the eagle among his chief characters. Zeus, like M. Gide himself, is
an experimentalist. He evidently rules the universe for the sensations
with which it provides him. At least, when we find him walking along
the most famous of the Parisian boulevards, he has just made up his
mind to perform a perfectly gratuitous act--an act which not only
will bring no return but will have no motive. In this mood, he drops
a handkerchief in the street, and, when a thin gentleman named Cocles
gives it back to him, he invites him to write the address of anyone he
pleases on an envelope so that he may send a £20 note to him. The thin
gentleman writes the name of Damocles which he has seen by accident,
and Zeus strikes him on the face and disappears. He sends Damocles the
£20 note, however. Damocles becomes worried as to where the anonymous
note has come from and why. His good fortune, instead of satisfying
him, only raises problems in his mind. He does not know to whom he
owes it or what to do with it. The last we see of him, he is babbling
incoherent questions about it on his death-bed.
Some time before this, however, Prometheus has arrived, and dined with
Cocles and Damocles in a Paris restaurant. He finds Cocles discoursing
in perplexity on the meaningless blow he had received from the unknown
stranger, and he himself unwittingly becomes the cause of a second and
still more distressing accident to Cocles. The conversation having
turned on his eagle, Cocles and Damocles express their desire to see
it, and Prometheus calls it from afar, whereupon “bursting through the
window, it put out Cocles’ eye with one stroke with its wing, and then,
chirruping as it did so, tenderly indeed but imperiously, fell with a
swoop upon Prometheus’ right side. And Prometheus forthwith undid his
waistcoat and offered his liver to the bird.” For the moment, however,
we may leave Prometheus. The important event just now is the damage to
Cocles’ eye. Neither the undeserved blow nor the accident to his eye
ultimately causes misery as the undeserved £20 causes Damocles misery.
When he sees Damocles’ misery on his death-bed, Cocles comments: “There
you see the fate of a man who has grown rich by another’s suffering.”
“But is it true that you suffer?” Prometheus asks him. “From my eye
occasionally,” said Cocles, “but from the blow no more; I prefer to
have received it. It does not burn any more; it has revealed to me my
goodness. I am flattered by it; I am pleased about it. I never cease
to think that my pain was useful to my neighbour and that it brought
him £20.” “But the neighbour is dying of it,” said Prometheus.... It
is clear that M. Gide has not taken it as his province to justify the
ways of God to man. I fancy he suspects Zeus of having acted without
a motive on many previous occasions before the strange adventure of
the boulevard. He is also clearly amused by the workings of the human
conscience. If Damocles had not had a conscience, he would not have
died.
Cocles and Damocles, however, are only minor characters in this thin
fantastic story. Prometheus is the real hero, though the accidents do
not happen to him. He has only his eagle and his habit of lecturing
about it. But it is his lectures about his eagle that give the book its
meaning. His eagle is really a figure in an allegory--an allegory on a
new plan. In the old-fashioned allegory one was more conscious of what
the allegorical figures meant, than of the figures themselves. It was
as if the author had tied labels round their necks. M. Gide realizes
that we have got beyond such ancient simplicities. He consequently
gives his figures no labels, but bids us “Guess!” and we go on guessing
till the end of the story. He has constructed a puzzle, and, though we
do not know whether it is worth solving or not, he contrives to make us
immensely curious about it and immensely determined to solve it. Most
people, when they have read his story, will ask, “What does he mean?
What is this eagle of Prometheus?” Why does he first say that everyone
has an eagle and that one must nourish one’s eagle? And why does he in
the end kill his eagle and make a meal of it? And does M. Gide approve
of the last proceeding? I see that the majority of critics identify
the eagle with the human conscience. I think it is more than that. It
is everything that prevents man from resting satisfied with a pagan
philosophy of acceptance before the world’s beauty. It is that fury
in the human breast that makes men desire progress. It is the moral
consciousness of the race that leads men into profound self-denials and
profounder questionings. When Prometheus kills and eats his eagle, he
grows fat and cheerful. Does M. Gide then look back regretfully on the
moral history of mankind? On the contrary. The eagle was found to be
delicious, and at dessert they all drank his health. “‘Has he, then,
been useless?’ asked one. ‘Do not say that, Cocles!--his flesh has
nourished us. When I questioned him he answered nothing; but I eat him
without bearing him a grudge: if he had made me suffer less, he would
have been less fat; less fat he would have been less delectable.’ ‘Of
his past beauty, what is there left?’ ‘I have kept all his feathers.’”
“It is with one of them,” adds M. Gide, “that I write this little
book.” Yes, M. Gide is a moralist, though a gay one, and _Prometheus
Illbound_ is a tract. He, too, desires progress--even if it be progress
somewhere beyond and away from progress. His book is an amusing, though
not a very amusing, parable. It will appeal to those who prefer subtle
little thoughts to vehement great ones.
FINALE
THE CRITIC
People often forget that criticism, like poetry, is of many kinds.
The critics themselves are, perhaps, the worst transgressors in the
matter. They are divided into almost as many sects as the theologians,
and every sect but one regards its own standards as the very rules of
salvation. This would not matter so much if it did not lead to the
excommunication of all the critics who cannot subscribe to the same
creed. There is nothing more absurd in the history of literature than
the severities of the excommunicating sort of critic. A critic has
the right to condemn any work, critical or other, which is bad of its
kind. He has not the right to say that only his own kind of criticism
is good. There are as many ways of writing about books as of writing
about flowers. The poet reveals to us a different flower from the
flower of the botanist. Wordsworth’s “small celandine” is not seen
through the same eyes as the plant of which the botanist tells us: “The
lesser celandine is a species of _Ranunculus_ (_R. Ficarus_), a small
low-growing herb with smooth heart-shaped leaves and bright yellow
flowers about an inch across, borne each on a stout stalk springing
from a leaf-axil.” There is yet another sort of writer on flowers
whose work is a charming compound of poetry, science and any sort of
relevant gossip, whether philological or herbalist--who will inform us,
for instance, that _Ranunculus_ is a diminutive of _rana_, “a frog,”
which has the same damp, marshy haunts as the flower, and that Nicholas
Culpepper held that even to carry the plant about one’s body next the
skin helped to cure piles. These are but three out of scores of ways
of writing about flowers, and it is mere sectarianism to deny the
excellence of any of them.
It is, of course, open to the man of science to declare that Wordsworth
was not a botanist. It is possible, indeed, that Wordsworth did not
know that his “host of golden daffodils” belonged to the natural order
_Amaryllidaceæ_. This, however, would be to quarrel about words.
Wordsworth and the man of science alike give an honest report of the
flowers they have seen, and for my part I find Wordsworth’s report
the more interesting. It is much the same with books as with flowers.
The scientific critic shakes his head over the imaginative treatment
of books. His ideal critic would write about books in the spirit of
a Linnæus rather than of a Wordsworth. This, I think, is to take a
narrow view of criticism. Criticism is an art which has developed in
a score of different directions, and it is best to use the word in a
sense that includes them all. Criticism--good criticism, at least--is
almost any sort of good writing about books by a man or woman of taste.
Criticism, says the dictionary, is the art of judging. As a matter of
fact, criticism is something more than that. The good critic does a
great deal more than deliver judgments on books and authors. He may at
times play the part of the defending counsel rather than that of the
judge. There are occasions on which he makes no attempt to hide the
warmth of his feelings. He cannot announce a masterpiece as though a
summary of pros and cons expressed what it meant to him. That is why I
like to think of a critic as a portrait-painter rather than a judge.
The portrait-painter reveals the character of his subject. He does not
label or analyse it so much as set before us a synthesis of all the
most interesting things he has seen, felt and thought in observing
it. The judgment is always there, but it may be implicit rather than
explicit. The author sits to the critic for his portrait. Even the book
may be said--if we may put a slight constraint on language--to sit to
the critic for its portrait. In criticism the character-sketch of the
book or author is as important as any technical analysis. Criticism
is a magic mirror, in which a work of art is reflected with a new
emphasis and in new relations. The critic must bathe his subject in the
light of his own mind--his taste, his enthusiasm, his moral ideas, his
knowledge. Hence criticism is an extremely personal thing. It relates,
if one may adapt Anatole France’s famous phrase, the adventures of
masterpieces in the soul of the critic, or--to put it a little more
precisely--in the intellectual and imaginative world of the critic.
It is said that, if we adopt this view, we are denying the existence
of any standards in criticism. This is not so. One may believe in the
conscience while admitting that moral standards fluctuate. Similarly,
one may believe in the literary conscience while admitting that
literary standards fluctuate. There is an eternal difference between
good and evil, but what seems good to one generation may seem evil to
another, and it is possible to recognise the goodness of a man, such
as an Old Testament polygamist or a Scottish Sabbatarian, whose moral
standards are in conflict with ours. We can hold to our own moral
standards while realising that they are not the only conceivable moral
standards. There is, no doubt, a perfect moral standard somewhere,
but only a perfect spirit could perceive it. The rest of us can but
do our best, and we cannot even do that. Milton was right when he made
“all-judging Jove” the one supreme critic of literature. Meanwhile, the
standards of sublunar critics are but guesses. The critic who claims
that they are more is simply a dogmatist who climbs into a pulpit when
he should be going on a pilgrimage.
Brunetière accused Anatole France of having no standards, and it is
possible that Anatole France does not subscribe to any Thirty-nine
Articles of criticism. But if to have a conscience is to have
standards, and if taste is conscience in the æsthetic world, who can
deny that Anatole France has very fine literary standards indeed? It
is obvious that he all the time measures an author by the excellence
of all the authors he has loved, just as most of us get our standards
of character from the love and veneration we have felt for good men.
This love of excellence is indisputably the first of all the requisites
of a critic--love of excellence and acquaintance with excellence. The
critic’s first standard is his enthusiasm for the great writers. “By
‘poetry,’ in these pages,” says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in one of his
books of criticism, “I mean what has been written by Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare and some others.” It is an admirable definition. It puts
us in touch with the writer’s standards at once. It suggests, too, the
reflection that all the good critics have been men who agreed in the
main with posterity in regard to literature. They have accepted the
tradition. Even the revolutionary critics, such as Coleridge, have
accepted the tradition for the most part, while advancing on it. It is
scarcely possible for a man so whimsical or irreverent of the tradition
as Samuel Butler to be a good critic. Nor is the man who cannot enter
into the tradition that puts Homer and Dante and Shakespeare among
the greatest of the poets capable of criticising the free verse of
our own day. There is clearly, however, a danger in traditionalism.
To criticise not in the spirit but in the letter of the tradition is
to become a formalist, a pedant, and it is probable that the French
injured their literature in the seventeenth century by their too
literal respect for the Greeks. The critic must have respect for the
life of his own times as well as for the writings of the dead. He
cannot safely yield to the belief that great literature is a temple
that has already been built. If he does not know that creation is still
going on, he is little more than a guide to the ruins of classical
architecture.
The critic must be governed by his sense of life, both in men and in
books. The sense of the past alone is not enough. Even as he reads
Æschylus or Shakespeare, it is his sense of life, not his sense of
the past, that is the more important. Hence the best critics have
been men in whom the sense of life, which is the imaginative artist’s
sense, has been strong. They have been, for the most part, men who have
also attempted with some success other forms of literature--poets,
novelists, essayists, such as Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve, Lamb, Matthew
Arnold and Anatole France. The old sneer that the critics are men who
have failed in literature might almost be reversed, so far as the good
critics are concerned. The good critics are men who have succeeded in
literature.
A good critic tells us as interesting things about his subject as
Gilbert White tells us about a bird. It is essentially the same kind
of illuminated observation that enables Gilbert White to write well
about a blackcap and Anatole France to write well about Pierre Loti.
“With an exquisitely delicate skin,” we are told of Loti, “he feels
nothing deeply. While all the pleasures and sorrows of the world leap
around him like dancing girls before a Rajah, his soul remains empty
and depressed, indolent and unoccupied. Nothing has entered it. This
is an excellent disposition for the writing of pages which perturb
the reader.” To deny the possession of critical standards to a writer
whose work is full of imaginative criticism such as this is to speak
of standards as though they were a sort of plumbline existing entirely
outside the imagination of the critic. It is to fail to see that, as
Anatole France says, “every book has as many different aspects as it
has readers and a poem like a landscape, is transformed in all the eyes
that see it, in all the souls that conceive it.” It is the object of
the critic to enable us to share this magical transformation with him,
not to issue immutable decrees. Anatole France, it may be, exaggerates
the personal element in criticism at the expense of the traditional. He
compares himself to a man who goes about “placing rustic benches in the
sacred woods and near the fountains of the Muses.” “It demands neither
system nor learning,” he declares, “and only requires a pleasant
astonishment before the beauty of things. Let the village dominie, the
land surveyor, measure the road and set up the milestones!” This is
extravagant and fanciful, but it shows us at least the bright side of
the moon of criticism. The other side of the moon is useful, but it is
not the side that gives us light.
THE END
_A Selection from the
Catalogue of_
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
❦
Complete Catalogues sent
on application
The
Art of Reading
By
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
_8°_
Editor, novelist, poet, and critic, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is one of
the most versatile as well as distinguished living men of letters. His
are fresh viewpoints, opening up ever new possibilities of appreciation
for the reader at the same time that they educate his judgment.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
On the Art of Writing
By
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
In a fresh and untrammeled manner the author deals with the
craftsmanship as well as the content of letters. The scope of the
volume is indicated by the appended chapter titles: “The Practice of
Writing,” “On the Difference between Verse and Prose,” “Interlude,”
“On Jargon,” “On the Special Difficulty of Prose,” “On the Lineage of
English Literature,” “English Literature in our Universities.”
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
Studies in Literature
Second Series
By
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
A new collection of essays which demonstrates the author’s peculiar
ability to say something original about even the most threadbare
subject. J. C. Squire in The Observer (London) says: “The man is rare
who, with Sir Arthur’s combination of sense and sensibility, learning
and levity, love of the exquisite and sympathy with the normal, can
range over the whole field of ancient and modern literature and
vitalize whatever he touches.” This volume includes essays on Byron,
Shelley, Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and “The Victorian Age.”
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
Books and Folks
By
Edward N. Teall
“Writing after having had unusual experience with books and people, and
in a vein that is as creditable to the books as it must be pleasing to
the people, his treatise is of great value.”
_Evening Post_, July 9, 1921.
“In a time when so many literary counsellors are drawing attention to
the freakish, the rebellious writers, and to the ones who would pioneer
new styles and methods it is refreshing to have at hand a book that
speaks lovingly for the art of letters, the whole art, and for the
individual and unbiased appreciation.
“... The book is a most acceptable library companion. There’s no
pretense and no posing in all of its pages.”--_Oakland Tribune_, July
10, 1921.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Page 139: “way-born” should be “way-worn”.