Every critic or would-be critic has his own little theory of criticism,
as every baby in _Utopia Limited_ had its own ickle prospectus. This
makes him an avid, but generally a recalcitrant, student of other
people’s theories. He is naturally anxious, that is, to learn what
the other people think about what inevitably occupies so much of his
own thoughts; at the same time, as he cannot but have formed his
own theory after his own temperament, consciously or not, he must
experience a certain discomfort when he encounters other theories based
on temperaments alien from his own. You have, in fact, the converse
of Stendhal’s statement that every commendation from _confrère_ to
_confrère_ is a certificate of resemblance; every sign of unlikeness
provokes the opposite of commendation. So I took up with somewhat mixed
feelings an important leading article in the _Literary Supplement_ on
“The Function of Criticism.” Important because its subject is, as Henry
James said once in a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, among “the highest
speculations that can engage the human mind.” (Oho! I should like to hear
Mr. Bottles or any other _homme sensuel moyen_ on _that_!) Well, after
reading the article, I have the profoundest respect for the writer,
whoever he may be; he knows what he is talking about _au fond_, and can
talk admirably about it. But then comes in that inevitable recalcitrancy.
It seems to me that if the writer is right, then most art and criticism
are on the wrong tack. Maybe they are—the writer evidently thinks they
are—but one cannot accept that uncomfortable conclusion offhand, and so
one cannot but ask oneself whether the writer _is_ right, after all.
He is certainly wrong about Croce. The ideal critic, he says, “will
not accept from Croce the thesis that all expression is art; for he
knows that if expression means anything it is by no means all art.” Now
the very foundation-stone of the Crocean æsthetic is that art is the
expression of intuitions; when you come to concepts, or the relations of
intuitions, though the expression of them is art, the concepts themselves
(what “expression means”) are not; you will have passed out of the region
of art. Thus your historian, logician, or zoologist, say, has a style of
his own; that side of him is art. But historical judgments, logic, or
zoology are not. Croce discusses this distinction exhaustively, and, I
should have thought, clearly. Yet here our leader-writer puts forward as
a refutation of Croce a statement carefully made by Croce himself. But
this is a detail which does not affect the writer’s main position. I only
mention it as one of the many misrepresentations of Croce which students
of that philosopher are, by this time, used to accepting as, apparently,
inevitable.
Now, says the writer, the critic must have a philosophy and, what
is more, a philosophy of a certain sort. That the critic must have
a philosophy we should, I suppose, all agree; for the critic is a
historian, and a historian without a theory of realities, a system of
values, _i.e._, a philosophy, has no basis for his judgments—he is merely
a chronicler. (And a chronicler, let me say in passing, is precisely what
I should call the writer’s “historical critic”—who “essentially has no
concern with the greater or less literary excellence of the objects whose
history he traces—their existence is alone sufficient for him.”) But what
particular philosophy must the critic have? It must be, says the writer,
“a humanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, and subject to
an intimate, organic governance by an ideal of the good life.” Beware of
confusing this ideal of good life with mere conventional morality. Art
is autonomous and therefore independent of that. No; “an ideal of the
good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and the organic force
of a true ideal, _must inevitably_ be æsthetic. There is no other power
than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or conceive it; we
can express it only in æsthetic terms.” And so we get back to Plato and
the Platonic ideas and, generally, to “the Greeks for the principles of
art and criticism.” “The secret” of the humanistic philosophy “lies in
Aristotle.”
But is not this attempt to distinguish between conventional morality and
an ideal of the good life, æsthetically formed, rather specious? At any
rate, the world at large, for a good many centuries, has applauded, or
discountenanced, Greek criticism as essentially moralistic—as importing
into the region of æsthetics the standards of ordinary, conventional
morality. That is, surely, a commonplace about Aristotle. His ideal
tragic hero is to be neither saint nor utter villain, but a character
between these two extremes. Further, he must be illustrious, like Œdipus
or Thyestes (Poetics, ed. Butcher, XIII. 3). Again, tragedy is an
imitation of persons who are above the common level (XV. 8). It seems
to me that the standards applied here are those of our ordinary, or
conventional, morality, and I am only confused by the introduction of
the mysterious “ideal of the good life.” It seems to me—that may be my
stupidity—but it seemed so, also, to our forefathers, for it was this
very moralism of Greek criticism that led men for so many centuries to
demand “instruction” from art. And that is why it was such a feather in
Dryden’s cap (Dryden, of whom our leader-writer has a poor opinion, as
a critic without a philosophy) to have said the memorable and decisive
thing: “delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy; instruction
can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it
delights.”
This “ideal of good life” leads our leader-writer far—away up into the
clouds. Among the activities of the human spirit art takes “the place
of sovereignty.” It “is the manifestation of the ideal in human life.”
This attitude, of course, will not be altogether unfamiliar to students
of æsthetics. Something not unlike it has been heard before from the
“mystic” æstheticians of a century ago. It leaves me unconvinced. I
cannot but think that that philosophy makes out a better case which
assigns to art, as intuition-expression, not the “place of sovereignty”
but the place of foundation in the human spirit; for which it is not
flower nor fruit, but root. You see, Croce, like “cheerfulness” in
Boswell’s story of the other philosopher, will come “breaking in.”