Now that the _Literary Supplement_ costs 6_d._, one feels entitled to
examine one’s relation to it with a certain sense of solemnity. But I
well know what mine is, before examination. Even when it cost 3_d._, my
relation to it was always one of weekly disconcertment. It revealed to me
so many things I didn’t know and never should know, yet known presumably
to some other reader. Now omniscience is derided as a “foible,” but why
should one be ashamed to confess it as an ideal? Frankly, I envy the
man who was so various that he seemed to be not one but all mankind’s
epitome. He must have got more fun out of life than your profound
specialist. It is to give this various reader this variety of fun that (I
surmise, but the editor will know for certain) the _Supplement_ exists.
But for me, imperfectly various, it means something bordering on despair.
I suppose other readers are more sensible, and just take what suits
them, leaving the rest. But I simply hate leaving anything. Take the ten
columns modestly headed “New Books and Reprints.” What a world of unknown
topics and alien ideas and unfathomable theories about everything this
simple title covers! Is there any reader whose intellectual equipment
includes at once the biography of Absalom Watkin, of Manchester, the
Indian Trade Inquiry Reports on Hides and Skins, an elementary knowledge
of the Bengali language, and the particular philosophy of mysticism
entertained by Mr. Watkin (not Absalom, but another)? Mine doesn’t—and
there’s the pang, for each and all these subjects, simply because they
are there, staring me in the face, the face of an absolutely blank mind
about them, excite my intellectual curiosity. I should like to know all
about ergatocracy—merely on the strength of its alluring name—and the
true story, from the Franciscan point of view, of the Franciscans and
the Protestant Revolution in England, and Lord Grey’s reminiscences of
intercourse with Mr. Roosevelt, and the history of the Assyrian “millet”
in the great war, and what is meant by the “Free Catholic” tendency in
the Nonconformist Churches. Yet it is fairly certain that I shall have
to do without any knowledge of most, if not all, of these matters which
presumably engage the enlightened interest of some other readers.
That is why I say the _Supplement_ disconcerts me every week. It makes
me feel ignorant and, what is worse, lonely, cut off from so many human
sympathies, cold to enthusiasms that are agitating other breasts,
isolated in a crowd who, for all I know, may be banding themselves
against me with the secret password “ergatocracy,” an uninitiated
stranger among the friends of Mr. Absalom Watkin of Manchester. Indeed,
unlike “the master of this college,” I am so far from feeling that “what
I don’t know isn’t knowledge” as to find it the one sort of knowledge I
itch to possess and suppose myself to have lost a golden opportunity in
missing. There are strong men about, I am aware, who say they don’t care.
They profess themselves content with knowing a few things thoroughly,
with their own little set of enthusiasms, and repeat proverbs about jacks
of all trades. I respect these sturdy men, but all the time my heart
goes out to the other kind, the men of versatility, the men whose aim
is to understand everything, to sympathize with every human emotion, to
leave no corner of experience unexplored. And some such aim as this is
indispensable for the critic, whose business is primarily to understand.
To understand what he criticizes he has to begin by putting himself in
its author’s place and standing at his point of view—to take on, in
short, in turn, innumerable other personalities, temperaments, and tastes
than his own. Other men may, but a critic must, be versatile. He must
have the faculty of lending himself, with profusion, to other minds and
other experiences—lending himself, but not giving, reserving the right of
resuming his own individuality and of applying his own standards.
That resumption of self is easy enough. The true difficulty is in
surrendering it, even for a while. One finds the task particularly hard,
I think, in lending oneself to tastes one has outgrown. Remember your
schoolboy enthusiasm over Macaulay’s style. You have lost that long ago,
and are now, perhaps, a little ashamed of it. Yet you must recapture
it, if only for a moment; that is to say, you must try to reflect in
yourself the joy that Macaulay felt in writing as he did, if you are
sitting down to try to criticize him adequately. This is difficult, this
momentary renunciation of your present taste in favour of the taste you
have outgrown. Remember your schoolboy attitude to Scott; how you read
feverishly for the story and nothing but the story, and simply skipped
the long prefaces and introductions and copious historical notes? To-day
your taste has matured, and you see the prefaces and notes as a welcome
setting for the story, as completing for you the picture of the author’s
mind in the act of composition. But you will have to go back to your
discarded taste and think only of the story if you are recommending Scott
to your youngsters.
This difficulty is perpetually confronting one in the theatre. I confess,
I find the theatre almost as disconcerting as the _Literary Supplement_
for an analogous, though not identical, reason. In that case you have the
bewildering spectacle of things unknown; in this, of tastes outgrown.
One afternoon I saw a little play translated from the French, limpid in
expression, simplicity itself in form, spare almost to austerity in its
use of theatrical means. Not a word, not a situation, was emphasized.
This or that point was neatly, briefly indicated, offered just as a
germ which might be safely left to your own intelligence to develop.
The action was pure acted irony, but not an ironical word was uttered.
This, of course, is the sort of play that refreshes the jaded critic,
and he has to resist the temptation to over-praise it. The next evening
I saw a play diligently crammed with everything that the other had
carefully left out—emphasis, repetition, six words where one would have
sufficed, “dramatic” situations and suspenses, the gentle humours of
life concentrated into eccentricities of stage “character.” There is a
numerous, and entirely respectable, public with a taste in this stage; it
likes dots on its _i_’s, things thrust under its nose, so that it can see
them, and repeated over and over again, so that it can understand them.
That is a taste which the jaded critic cannot but have outgrown. Yet the
play was good, sound work of its kind, and the critic’s first duty was
to force himself back into his outgrown taste and see the play with the
spirit with which the author wrote it and its proper public received it.
I say his first duty; it was open to him afterwards to recover his own
personality and make his distinctions. But this first duty was hard.
It is an ever-recurring trial of critical conscience. “These are our
troubles, Mr. Wesley,” as the peevish gentleman said when the footman put
too much coal on the fire.