them the old accusation that they are merely men who have failed in
the arts. There could scarcely be a more unsupported theory. As a
matter of fact, to take Mr Benson's own art, there are probably far
more bad critics who end as novelists than bad novelists who end as
critics. Criticism is usually the beginning, and not the decadence, of
a man's authorship. Young men nowadays criticise before they graduate.
One becomes a critic when one puts on long trousers. It is as natural
as writing poetry. Indeed, the gift seems in some ways to be related
to poetry. It springs at its best from the same well of imagination.
This is not to compare the art of the critic to the art of the poet in
importance, but only in kind. Criticism is by its nature bound to keep
closer to the earth than poetry. It has frequently more resemblance to
the hedge-sparrow than to the lark. It is a chatterbox of argument,
not a divine spendthrift of the beauty that is above argument. It is
the interpreter of an interpretation. It gives us beauty second-hand.
Critics are compared somewhere to "brushers of noblemen's clothes." In
an honest world, however, one might brush a nobleman's clothes not out
of servility, but out of tidiness. There would have been nothing
degrading in it if Queen Elizabeth herself had ironed the stains out
of Shakespeare's doublet, provided she had done it from decent
motives. Critics of the better sort need not worry when their service
is misconstrued as servitude. Those who attack them are usually men
who are under the delusion that it is better to be a bad artist than a
good critic. Thus we find the author of _Lanky Bill and His Dog
Bluebeard_ looking down with patronage on a man like Hazlitt, because
he lacked something that is called the creative gift. Even the life
and work of Walter Pater have not succeeded in dispelling the popular
notion that the imagination is more honourably employed in inventing
sentences for sawdust figures than in relating the experiences of
one's own soul. According to this standard, Mr Charles Garvice must be
ranked higher among imaginative authors than Sir Thomas Browne, and
the _Essays of Elia_ must give place to the novels of Mrs Florence
Barclay. Clearly no line can be drawn on principles of this kind
between imaginative and unimaginative literature. The artists, for the
most part, are as lacking in imagination as the critics. They have
merely chosen a more luxurious form of writing. Oscar Wilde used to
say that anybody could make history, but only a man of genius could
write it; and one might contend in the same way that nearly anybody
can make literature, but only a clever man can criticise it. The
genius of the critic is as much an original gift as the genius of a
runner or a composer.
One need not go back further than Dryden to realise to what an extent
the successful artists have thrown themselves into the work of
criticism. Most of us nowadays find Dryden's prefaces and his _Essay
on Dramatic Poesy_ easier reading than his verse; and, in the age that
followed, criticism seems to have come as naturally to the men of
letters as conversation. Addison, commonplace critic though he was,
was always airing his views on poetry and music; and what is Pope's
_Dunciad_ but a comic epic of criticism? Nor was Dr Johnson less
concerned with thumping the cushion in the matter of literature than
in the matter of morals. His _Lives of the Poets_ does not seem a
great book to us who have been brought up on the romantic criticism
of the nineteenth century, but it is an infinitely better book than
_Rasselas_, which has the single advantage that it is shorter. And so
one might go on through the list of great men of letters from
Johnson's to our own day. Burke, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Macaulay, Carlyle, Thackeray, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne,
Pater, Meredith, Stevenson--I choose more or less at a hazard a list
of imaginative writers who are in the very mid-stream of English
criticism. Even in our own day, how many of the poets and novelists
have graduated as critics! What lover of Mr Henry James is there who
would not almost be willing to sacrifice one of his novels rather than
his _Partial Portraits_? Who is there, even among Mr Bernard Shaw's
detractors, who would wish his dramatic criticisms unwritten? And who
would not exchange a great deal of Mr George Moore's fiction for
another book like _Impressions and Opinions_? Similarly, Mr W. B.
Yeats has revealed his genius in a book of criticism like _Ideas of
Good and Evil_ no less than in a book of verse like _The Wind among
the Reeds_; Mr William Watson's works include a volume of _Excursions
in Criticism_; Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has published two volumes of
critical causeries; Mr Max Beerbohm is no less distinguished as a
critic than as a caricaturist; "A. E." reviews books in _The Irish
Times_, and Mr Walter De la Mare in _The Westminster Gazette_. Here
surely is a list that may suggest a doubt in the minds of those who
take the view that the critics are merely a mob of embittered hacks
who have failed at everything else. This is one of those traditional
fallacies, like the stage Irishman, which men accept apparently for
the sake of ease. Even the most superficial enquiries at the offices
of the newspapers and the weekly reviews would reveal the fact that a
great percentage of the best poets and novelists either are engaged,
or have been engaged in their green and generous days, in the work of
criticism. If Shakespeare were alive to-day he would probably earn his
living at first, not by holding horses' heads, but by turning dramatic
critic. Every artist worth his salt has in him the makings of a
journalist. Milton himself was as ferocious a pamphleteer as any of
those blood-and-thunder rectors whom we see quoted by "Sub Rosa" in
_The Daily News_. Tolstoy was as furiously active, if not so furiously
bitter, a journalist. And who is the most charming and graceful
journalist and critic of our own day but the charming and graceful
novelist, Anatole France?
All this, however, is no reply to Mr Benson's indictment of the
critics on the ground that they do not discover genius, but that the
public has to discover genius in spite of them. It is one of those
indictments which can only be believed on the assumption that the
critics are a race apart who think, as it were, _en masse_. Those who
repeat it seem to regard the critics as a disciplined army of
destruction instead of realising that they are a hopelessly straggling
company of more or less ordinary men and women of varying tastes, with
a sprinkling of men and women of genius among them. They tell us that
the critics attacked the Pre-Raphaelites, but they forget that Ruskin
was a critic and a prophet of the Pre-Raphaelites. They tell us that
the critics cold-shouldered Browning; but W. J. Fox wrote
enthusiastically of Browning almost from the first, and Pater praised
him in his early essays: it was a poet who, alas! was not a
critic--Tennyson--who said the severest things about him. Ibsen,
again, is constantly cited as an example of an artist who had to make
his way to public acceptance through mobs of shrieking critics. But
what do we find to be the case? In England three of the most
remarkable critics of their time, Mr Bernard Shaw, Mr Edmund Gosse,
and Mr William Archer, fought a desperate fight for Ibsen against
almost the entire British public. The critics who attacked Ibsen did
not represent the flower of British criticism, but the flower of the
British public. It will be found, I believe, to be an almost
invariable rule that whenever the critics have attacked men of genius,
they have had the public at their back cheering them on. There are
critics, indeed, who make themselves into the hired mouthpieces of the
public. They long to express not what they themselves think (for they
do not think), but what the public thinks (though it does not think).
Can Mr Benson point to any notable catch of genius ever made by
critics of this kind? I do not, of course, contend that even the most
intelligent reviewer in these days, (who is one of the most
hard-worked of journalists), is in a good position for discovering new
stars of genius. No man can appreciate a Shakespeare that is thrown at
his head, and books are thrown at the heads of reviewers nowadays in
numbers likely to stun or bewilder rather than to evoke the mood of
rapturous understanding. As for the reviewers, they are as varied a
crowd as the rest of the public. One of them enjoys _The Scarlet
Pimpernel_ better than Shakespeare; another blames Miss Marie Corelli
for not writing like Donne; another has read and rather liked Shelley.
On the whole, they are fonder of good books than most people. They
have to read so many bad books as a duty, that many of them ultimately
get a taste for literature as a blessed relief. But, as for attacking
men of genius, why, nine out of ten of them would not attack a mouse,
unless the prejudices of the public they reverence drove them to it.
They are very nice and affable, like the gentleman in _You Never Can
Tell_--the nicest and most affable set of human beings that ever
manufactured butter outside a dairy.
XXVIII
ON THE BEAUTY OF STATISTICS
One of the most unexpected pages in Sir Edward Cook's _Life of
Florence Nightingale_, is that in which he describes Miss Nightingale,
in a phrase Lord Goschen once used about himself, as a "passionate
statistician." Somehow one did not associate statistics with Florence
Nightingale. She had already taken her place in the sentimental
history of the world as the angel of the wounded soldier. It is a
disturbance to one's preconceptions to be asked to regard her as the
angel among the Blue Books. As Sir Edward Cook reveals her to us,
however, she is ardent in the pursuit of figures as other women in
pursuit of a figure. We read how she helped one of the General
Secretaries of the International Statistical Congress of 1860 to draw
up the programme for the section dealing with sanitary statistics, at
which, indeed, her own pet scheme for uniform hospital statistics was
the chief subject of discussion. Her faith in statistics, however,
went far beyond that of statistical congresses. She believed that
statistics were in a measure the voice of God. "The laws of God were
the laws of life, and these were ascertainable by careful, and
especially by statistical, inquiry." That is how Sir Edward Cook
explains his remark that her passion for statistics was "even a
religious passion."
It is by no means to be wondered at that the religion of statistics
made its appearance in the nineteenth century. The surprising thing
is, that no church has yet been founded in its honour. In the history
of religion, philosophy and magic, numbers have again and again played
a leading part; and what are statistics but numbers on regimental
parade? Pythagoras found in number the ultimate principle of creation.
Xenocrates went a step farther when he defined the soul as "a number
which moves itself." To the unphilosophical reader the definition of
Xenocrates is the merest riddle till one realises that he was probably
trying to destroy the idea that the soul was something material, a
fact of space, as might be connoted by words like "thing" or "living
being." This is why, in order to express the soul, it was necessary to
use an abstraction; and what so abstract as number? Nor did the
numerical explanation of the universe stop here. "Pure reason,"
Gomperz tells us, in speaking of the Pythagoreans in _Greek
Thinkers_, "was assimilated to unity, knowledge to duality, opinion
to triplicity, sense-perception to quadruplicity." What a jargon it
all seems--a game of the intellect! But the heavenly arithmetic has
lingered in the world to our own day, and among simple people, too.
The mystery of numbers has entered into folklore as well as into
philosophy, as that fine jingle, "Green grow the rushes, O!" which
survives in half a dozen English counties, shows. It has always seemed
to me the perfect expression of the fantastic lyricism of numbers:
I'll sing you one O!
Green grow the rushes O!
What is your one O?
And so on till we reach the number twelve in the catalogue of holy
delights:
Twelve are the twelve apostles;
Eleven, eleven went up to heaven;
Ten are the ten commandments;
Nine are the bright shiners;
Eight are the bold rainers:
Seven, seven are the stars in heaven;
Six are the proud walkers;
Five are the symbols at your door;
Four are the gospelmakers;
Three, three is the rivals;
Two, two is the lilywhite boys,
Clothed all in green, O!
One is one and all alone
And ever more shall be so.
What it all means is for the folklorists to dispute about. It is
interesting in the present connection chiefly as the ruins of an
arithmetical statement of the mysteries of the universe. Similar
chants of number are known in all religions. They are common to
Christianity, Mohammedanism and Judaism. One is told that, on the
night of the Passover, Jewish families chant a list of numbers,
beginning "Who knoweth One?" and going on to "Who knoweth thirteen?"
with its answer:
I, saith Israel, know thirteen: Thirteen divine
attributes--twelve tribes--eleven stars--ten
commandments--nine months preceding childbirth--eight days
preceding circumcision--seven days of the week--six books of
the Mishnah--five books of the Law--four matrons--three
patriarchs--two tables of the covenant--but One is our God,
who is over the heavens and the earth.
This list may be regarded as a mere aid to memory, and no doubt it is
to some extent that. But it is also an example of the religious use of
numbers--a use which has given various numbers a magic significance.
One has an example of this magic significance in the custom, among
those who resort to holy wells, of walking round the well nine times
in the opposite direction to the sun. One always has to do things by
threes or sevens or nines. Similarly, the belief in the maleficent
power of thirteen is commoner in London than in Patagonia, where,
indeed, they do not know how to count up to thirteen. One remembers,
too, how in recent years the prophetic sort of evangelical Christians
were on the look out for some great statesman or conqueror upon whom
they could fix the dreaded number of the Antichrist, 666. First it was
Napoleon; later it was Gladstone, the letters of whose name, if you
slightly misspelt it in Greek, stood for numbers which added up to the
awful total. I recall the relief with which in my own childhood I
discovered the fact that, however wrongly my name was spelt, and in
whatever language, it was not possible to work out 666 as the answer.
So much for the mysteries of numbers. To most people the whole thing
will appear a chronicle of superstitions, as astrology does. But, just
as astronomy has taken the place of the superstitions of the stars, so
statistics has taken the place of the superstitions of numbers. It is
as though men had suspected all along that stars and numbers had some
significance beyond their immediate use and beauty, but for hundreds
of years they could only guess what it was. It was not till the
eighteenth century indeed that the science of statistics was
discovered--under its present name, at least--and ever since then men
have been debating whether it is a science or only a method. Whichever
you prefer to call it, it may be described as an explanation of human
society in terms of number. It is the discovery of the most efficient
symbols that have yet been invented for the realistic portraiture of
men in the mass. Symbols, I say advisedly, for statistics is more
closely allied to Oriental than to Western art in that it avoids the
direct imitation of life and appeals to the imagination through
conventional figures. Perhaps it is a certain suspicion of Orientalism
that accounts for the fanatical hatred of statistics which still
exists among many of the apostles of the West. For statistics is a new
thing which has had to fight as desperately for recognition as
Impressionist art or Wagnerian opera. Infuriated Victorians still
speak of "lies, damned lies, and statistics," as the three degrees of
wickedness; and the statistician is denounced in superlatives as a
sort of gaoler of humanity, who would give us all numbers instead of
names. Now, I am not concerned to defend bad statisticians any more
than bad artists. Statistics has its charlatans, its bounders after a
new thing, as well as its Da Vincis and its Michelangelos. Or,
perhaps it is more comparable to music than to painting or sculpture.
The philosophy of number is the philosophy of proportion, of harmony,
of rhythm, and statistics is the study of the proportions, harmonies,
rhythms of society. Music and poetry, it should be remembered, are
both an affair of number. "I lisped in numbers," said the poet, "for
the numbers came." And the statistician has the same apology.
Statistics, of course, is largely concerned, like the arts, with the
disharmonies of life, but it deals with them in terms of harmony. It
is a method of asserting order amid chaos, and that is why the lovers
of chaos attempt to spread the idea among the people that statistics
is a dangerous innovation, a black-coated tyranny. That is why
landlords who benefit by the social chaos have fought so hard against
the valuation of land, and churches against the registration of
ecclesiastical property. Similarly, there was a middle-class party
that denounced the income tax because it would mean a statistical
inquest into the wealth of manufacturers and shopkeepers. Among savage
tribes, we are told, it is a common custom to hide one's name, because
those who know one's name have a magic power over one's soul.
Similarly, in civilised societies, the rich man likes to hide his
number. He knows that in some way the knowledge of this will give
society a new control over him. It is possible to ignore all the evils
of monopolised riches till one knows the numbers of the rich. To
many people it is a turning-point in social and political belief to
discover such a fact as that, of the total income of Great Britain and
Ireland in 1908,
5,500,000 people received L909,000,000,
while
39,000,000 people received L935,000,000.
In other words, the fact that one-half of the wealth of Great Britain
and Ireland goes to the twelve per cent. of the population who belong
to the class with incomes over L160 a year. It is a terrible
revelation both of poverty and of riches. The figures thunder at one's
imagination more effectively than a sea of rhetoric. And the figures
concerning destitution and the housing of the poor are still more
terrible in their realism. Shelley never wrote a revolutionary hymn
that more surely prophesied the coming of a new society. Social greed,
that has withstood ten thousand prophets and poets, at last begins to
feel troubled in the unaccustomed presence of the statistician. Not
the statistician in his study, of course: he is no more than a
dryasdust inventor. But the statistician, like Florence Nightingale,
with the genius of a fine purpose and a sure aim with sure facts. This
is not to discredit any of the old battalions of reform. It is merely
to hail the coming of the new regiment of the statisticians, who fight
with tables instead of swords, and whose leaders exhort them on the
eve of battle with passages out of Blue Books. Statistics and the man
I sing. Let the next great epic be an Arithmiad.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_.
2. The word Oedipus uses an "OE" ligature in the original.
3. Missing text added on page 211 to correct "particularisations" to
"particularisations of".
4. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies
in spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation have been retained.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Book of This and That, by Robert Lynd