A young critic was recently so obliging as to send me the proof of an
article in the hope that I might find something in it to interest me.
I did, but not, I imagine, what was expected. The article discussed a
modern author of European reputation, and incidentally compared his mind
and his style with that of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. These three,
it appeared, were contemporary English novelists, and—here was the
interesting thing to me in our young critic’s article—I had never heard
of one of them. They were evidently “intellectuals”—the whole tenor of
the article showed that—the idols of some young and naturally solemn
critical “school,” familiar classics, I dare say, in Chelsea studios
and Girton or Newnham rooms. One often wonders what these serious young
people are reading, and here, it seemed, was a valuable light. They must
be reading, at all events, Mr. X., and Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. Otherwise,
our young critic would never have referred to them with such gravity
and with so confident an assumption that his particular set of readers
would know all about them. And yet the collocation of these three names,
these coterie classics, with that of the great European author, famous
throughout the whole world of polite letters, struck one as infinitely
grotesque. It showed so naïve a confusion of literary “values,” so queer
a sense of proportion and congruity. It was, in short, coterie criticism.
There seems to be a good deal of that about just now. One sees
innumerable reviews of innumerable poets, which one supposes to be
written by other poets, so solemnly do the writers take their topic and
their author and themselves. And for the most part this writing bears the
mark of “green, unknowing youth”—the bland assumption that literature
was invented yesterday, and that, since the Armistice, we cannot but
require a brand-new set of literary canons, estimates, and evaluations.
Evidently our young warriors have come back from the front with their
spirit of _camaraderie_ still glowing within them. Well, youth will be
served, and we must resign ourselves, with a helpless shrug, to a deluge
of crude over-estimates, enthusiastic magnifications of the ephemeral,
and solemn examinations of the novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. And
we must be prepared to see the old reputations going down like a row of
ninepins. We shall have to make a polite affectation of listening to the
young gentlemen who dismiss Meredith as “pretentious” and tell us that
Hardy “can’t write” and that Anatole France is _vieux jeu_. For if you
are always adoring the new because it is new, then you may as well make
a complete thing of it by decrying the old because it is old. The breath
you can spare from puffing the “Georgians” up you may as well use for
puffing the “Victorians” out. And thus the world wags.
What is more, it is thus that the history of literature gets itself
evolved. For it is time that I tried to see what good can be said of
the coteries, as well as what ill, and this, I think, can be said for
them—that they keep the ball rolling. It is they, with their foolish face
of praise, who discover the new talents and begin the new movements.
If you are always on the pounce for novelties you must occasionally
“spot a winner” and find a novelty that the outer world ratifies into a
permanency. The minor Elizabethan dramatists were once the darlings of
a coterie, but Webster and one or two others still survive. The Lakists
were once coterie poets, and, if Southey has petered out, Wordsworth
remains. Of course they make awful “howlers.” A coterie started the
vogue of that terribly tiresome “Jean Christophe,” of Romain Rolland,
and where is it now? On the other hand, a coterie “discovered” Pater,
and it was a real find; the world will not willingly let die “Marius” or
the “Renaissance.” Henry James began as the idol of a coterie, and “The
Golden Bowl” is not yet broken. It may be—who knows?—that the novels of
Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. will by and by range themselves proudly on
our shelves alongside Fielding and Jane and Meredith and Hardy.
But while these young reputations are still to make in the great world,
let us not, as Mrs. Gamp says, proticipate; let us keep our high estimate
of them modestly to ourselves, and not stick them up on the classic shelf
among the best bindings before their time. What makes it worse is that
the coteries are apt to have no classic shelf. Their walls are lined and
their boudoir tables littered with new books, and nothing but new books.
Women are great offenders in this way, especially the women whom American
journals call “Society Ladies”—who are accustomed, in the absence of
contradiction and criticism and other correctives (tabooed as “bad
form”), to mistake their wayward fancies for considered judgments. We
want a modern Molière to write us another _Femmes Savantes_. (I present
the idea to Mr. Bernard Shaw. They have dubbed him “the English Molière.”
Well, here’s a chance for him to make good.) There is Lady Dulcibella.
She is always recommending you a new book that nobody else has ever heard
of. “Oh, how perfectly sweet of you to call on this horrid wet afternoon!
_Have_ you read ‘Mes Larmes’? It’s written by a Russian actress with such
wonderful red hair, you can’t think, and they say she was a princess,
until those dreadful Bolshevists, you know. We met her at Florence in
the winter, and everybody said she was just like one of the Botticellis
in the Accademia. They _do_ say that Guido da Verona—or D’Annunzio, or
somebody (don’t you think that horrid little D’Annunzio is just like a
frog?)—was quite mad about her. But ‘Mes Larmes’ is perfectly _sweet_,
and don’t forget to order it. Two lumps or three?” And listen to the
chatter of some of those wonderfully bedizened ladies who variegate, if
they don’t exactly decorate, the stalls of one of our Sunday coterie
theatres. The queer books they rave about! The odd Moldo-Wallachian or
Syro-Phœnician dramatists they have discovered!
All this, it is only fair to remember, may leave our young critic
inviolate. After all, he may belong to no coterie, or only to a coterie
of one; he may have sound critical reasons for the faith that is in him
about Mr. X., and Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. And even if he does represent a
coterie, he might, I suppose, find a fairly effective retort to some
of my observations. “You talk of our love of novelties for novelty’s
sake. But you have admitted that, if we always go for the new, we must
sometimes light on the true. What we really go for is life. The new is
more lively than the old. The actual, the present, the world we are at
this moment living in, has more to say to us in literature than the old
dead world, the ‘sixty years since’ of your classic Scott. The classic,
as Stendhal said, is what pleased our grandfathers; but I am out to
please my grandfather’s grandson. And our coteries, I dare say, are often
kept together by the mere docility of mind, the imitative instinct, of
their members. But is there not a good deal of mere docility among the
old fogey party, the people who reject the new because it is new and
admire the old because it is old? Is not this mere imitative instinct at
work also among the upholders of literary traditions and the approved
classics? Absurdity for absurdity, the youthful coterie is no worse than
the old fogey crowd.” To put all straight I will now go and read the
novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z.