A play of Dryden’s has been successfully revived by the Phœnix Society.
One or two others might be tried, but not many. For most of Dryden’s
plays, as the curious may satisfy themselves by reading them, are as
dead as a doornail. They bore us in the reading, and would simply drive
us out of the theatre. Some of Dryden’s non-dramatic poems still permit
themselves to be read, but the permission is rarely sought by modern
readers, apart from candidates for some academic examination in English
literature, who have no choice. Yet we all render him lip service as
a great poet. How many are there to pay him proper homage as a great
critic? For a great critic he was, and, moreover, our first dramatic
critic in time as well as in importance. He discussed not the details of
this or that play, but the fundamental principles of drama. He abounded
in ideas, and expressed them with a conversational ease which, in his
time, was an entirely new thing. But it would be impertinent to praise
Dryden’s prose style after Johnson’s exhaustive eulogy and the delicate
appreciations of Professor Ker. What I would point out is that all
Dryden’s critical work can still be read with pleasure, while most of
his dramatic work cannot be read at all. And the humour of it is that
I shall at once be told the dramatic work was “creative,” while the
critical was not.
This distinction, an essentially false one, as I shall hope to show, is
still a great favourite with our authors of fiction; they “create,” their
critics do not. Authors who write, in Flaubert’s phrase, like _cochers
de fiacre_, and who are particularly given to this contrast, it would
be cruel to deprive of a comforting illusion; but authors of merit and
repute also share it, and to them I would urge my modest plea for a
reconsideration of the matter.
What does the dramatist, or writer of fiction in general, create?
Actions and characters? Not so, for these are only created in real life,
by the contending volitions of real men and the impact between their
volitions and external reality. The author creates images of actions and
characters, or, in other words, expresses his intuitions of life. When
the intuition is vivid, when the image is a Falstaff, a Baron Hulot,
a Don Quixote, a Colonel Newcome, we are apt to think of it as a real
person. And they are, in truth, as real to us as anybody in the actual
world whom we have never met but only know of. For the historic person,
unmet, is, just like the imaginary person, only a bundle for us of our
intuitions. Julius Cæsar was a real person, but we can only know of him,
as we know of Mr. Pickwick, by hearsay. These vivid intuitions are what
your author likes to call “creations.” So they are. That is the magic of
art.
And because, to the vast majority of men, their intuitions (in the case
of actual reality encountered, their perceptions) of other men and their
actions are their most interesting experience, art is allowed without
challenge to arrogate to itself this quality of “creation.” There is a
biographical dictionary of Balzac’s personages—some 2,000, if I remember
rightly—of whom a few are actual historical people. But, in fact, you
make no distinction. The one set are as real to you as the others. In
this way the _Comédie Humaine_ does, as its author said, compete with the
_État Civil_. There are few ideas, speculations, judgments in Balzac that
are worth a rap; when he tried abstract thought he was apt to achieve
nonsense. But very few readers want abstract thought. They want “to know
people,” “to see people.” Balzac makes “people,” tells you all about
their families, their incomes, their loves and hates, “splendours and
miseries,” their struggles, their orgies, their squalor, their death.
That is “creative” art. Let us admire it. Let us revel in it. Let us be
profoundly thankful for it.
But when, as so frequently happens, one hears some fourteenth-rate
yarn-spinner, who also makes “people,” but people who were not worth
making, people who are puppets or the mere phantoms of a greensick
brain—when one hears this gentleman claiming kinship with Balzac or with
my friend the distinguished novelist and real artist already mentioned,
as a “creator” one is inclined to smile. “Creation” is a blessed word.
But the thing created may be quite valueless.
And so it is, precisely, with criticism. For criticism is also
“creative.” But it does not create images of people or their lives; it
creates thought, ideas, concepts. That is, it builds up something new
out of the artist’s intuitions and exhibits the relations between them.
Here, in the conceptual world, we are in a different region from the
intuitional world of the artist. Those who care to enter it, who feel at
home in it, are comparatively few; the absence of personal interest, of
“people,” makes it seem cold to the average, gregarious man. “People”
are a natural, ideas an acquired, taste. But the one set are just as
much a “creation” as the other. And in the one set just as in the
other the thing created may not be worth creating. Ideas, expositions,
illustrations in criticism have a distressing habit of being as poor
and conventional and mechanical as many a novelist’s or playwright’s
characters and life histories. There is not a pin to choose between them.
For as the one thing that matters in art is the artist behind it, so the
critic behind it is the one thing that matters in criticism.
These are elementary commonplaces. But they need restating from time
to time. For the average man, with all his interest in life fixed
on “people,” is always falling into the error that the novelist or
playwright makes something, while the critic makes nothing. And your
fourteenth-rate author, sharing the temperament of the average man, falls
into the same error and seems, indeed, inordinately proud of it. He seems
to say: “Why, you, good master critic, couldn’t even begin to do what
_I_, the ‘creative’ artist, do”; and he would probably be surprised by
the answer that it is the critic’s very critical faculty, his endowment
of judgment and taste, which makes the writing of bad plays or novels
impossible, because repugnant to him. It is precisely because the
critical faculty is so rare a thing that so many bad novels and plays get
themselves written.
But enough of these sharp distinctions between the “creation” of images
and the “creation” of concepts! Is not a union of the two, like the union
of butler and lady’s-maid, as described by Mr. Crichton, “the happiest of
all combinations”? Who does not feel how immensely the mere story part
of “Tom Jones” gains by the critical chapter introductions? And, on the
other hand, how the mere critical part of Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic
Poesy” gains by the little touches of story, from the opening moment when
“they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently” to the
close at Somerset Stairs, where “they went up through a crowd of French
people, who were merrily dancing in the open air”?