Already I am in a scrape with the critics. I am in a scrape for having
said, a couple of years ago, that a critic was nothing but a sign-post,
and for having added, somewhat later, that he was a fallible sign-post
at that. So now, contributing to a supplement [T] which, being written by
critics, is sure to be read by them, I naturally take the opportunity of
explaining that what I said, if rightly understood, was perfectly civil
and obliging.
[Footnote T: Contributed to the Critical Supplement of _The New
Republic_.]
Perhaps I shall stand a better chance of pardon when it is perceived
that I, too, am fallible, and, what is more, that I am quite aware of
the fact. The reader can see for himself that, from first thoughts to
last--in three years, that is--not only have my opinions on the art of
criticism been modified, but my critical opinions have themselves become
less confident. So, to recall what I did say: I said that critics exist
for the public, and that it is no part of their business to help artists
with good advice. I argued that a critic no more exists for artists than
a palæontologist does for the Dinosaurs on whose fossils he expatiates,
and that, though artists happen to create those exciting objects which
are the matter of a critic's discourse, that discourse is all for the
benefit of the critic's readers. For these, I said, he is to procure
æsthetic pleasures: and his existence is made necessary by the curious
fact that, though works of art are charged with a power of provoking
extraordinarily intense and desirable emotions, the most sensitive
people are often incapable of experiencing them until a jog or a drop of
stimulant even has been given to their appreciative faculties.
A critic should be a guide and an animator. His it is first to bring his
reader into the presence of what he believes to be art, then to cajole
or bully him into a receptive frame of mind. He must, therefore, besides
conviction, possess a power of persuasion and stimulation; and if anyone
imagines that these are common or contemptible gifts he mistakes. It
would, of course, be much nicer to think that the essential part of a
critic's work was the discovery and glorification of absolute beauty:
only, unluckily, it is far from certain that absolute beauty exists, and
most unlikely, if it does, that any human being can distinguish it from
what is relative. The wiser course, therefore, is to ask of critics
no more than sincerity, and to leave divine certitude to superior
beings--magistrates, for instance, and curates, and fathers of large
families, and Mr. Bernard Shaw. At any rate, it is imprudent, I am sure,
in us critics to maintain so stoutly as we are apt to do, that when we
call a work of art "good" we do not mean simply that we like it with
passion and conviction but that it is absolutely so, seeing that the
most sensitive people of one age have ever extolled some things which
the most sensitive of another have cried down, and have cried down what
others have extolled. And, indeed, I will bet whatever this essay may
be worth that there is not a single contributor to this supplement who
would not flatly contradict a vast number of the æsthetic judgements
which have been pronounced with equal confidence by the most illustrious
of his predecessors. No critic can be sure that what he likes has
absolute value; and it is a mark of mere silliness to suppose that what
he dislikes can have no value at all. Neither is there any need of
certainty. A critic must have sincerity and conviction--he must be
convinced of the genuineness of his own feelings. Never may he pretend
to feel more or less or something other than what he does feel; and
what he feels he should be able to indicate, and even, to some extent,
account for. Finally, he must have the power of infecting others with
his own enthusiasm. Anyone who possesses these qualities and can do
these things I call a good critic.
"And what about discrimination?" says someone. "What about the very
meaning of the word?" Certainly the power of discriminating between
artists, that of discriminating between the parts and qualities of a
work of art, and the still different power of discriminating between
one's own reactions, are important instruments of criticism; but they
are not the only ones, nor, I believe, are they indispensable. At any
rate, if the proper end of criticism be the fullest appreciation of art,
if the function of a critic be the stimulation of the reader's power of
comprehending and enjoying, all means to that end must be good. The
rest of this essay will be devoted to a consideration of the means most
commonly employed.
Discriminating critics, as opposed to those other two great classes--the
Impressionistic and the Biographical--are peculiar in this amongst other
things: they alone extract light from refuse and deal profitably with
bad art. I am not going back on my axiom--the proper end of criticism is
appreciation: but I must observe that one means of stimulating a taste
for what is most excellent is an elaborate dissection of what is not. I
remember walking with an eminent contributor to _The New Republic_ and a
lady who admired so intemperately the writings of Rupert Brooke that
our companion was at last provoked into analyzing them with magisterial
severity. He concluded by observing that a comparison of the more airy
and fantastic productions of this gallant young author with the poems of
Andrew Marvell would have the instant effect of putting the former in
their place. The lady took the hint; and has since confessed that never
before had she so clearly seen or thoroughly enjoyed the peculiar
beauties, the sweetness, the artful simplicity and sly whimsicality of
the most enchanting of English poets. The discriminating critic is not
afraid of classifying artists and putting them in their places. Analysis
is one of his most precious instruments. He will pose the question--"Why
is Milton a great poet?"--and will proceed to disengage certain definite
qualities the existence of which can be proved by demonstration and
handled objectively with almost scientific precision. This sort of
criticism was brought to perfection in the eighteenth century; and
certainly it did sometimes lead critics quite out of sight and reach of
the living spirit of poetry. It was responsible for masses of amazing
obtuseness (especially in criticism of the visual arts); it was the
frequent cause of downright silliness; it made it possible for Dr.
Johnson, commenting on the line _Time and the hour runs through the
roughest day_, to "suppose every reader is disgusted at the tautology";
but it performed the immense service of stimulating enthusiasm for clear
thought and exact expression. These discriminating and objective critics
will always be particularly useful to those whose intellects dominate
their emotions, and who need some sort of intellectual jolt to set
their æsthetic sensibilities going. Happily, the race shows no signs of
becoming extinct, and Sir Walter Raleigh and M. Lanson are the by no
means unworthy successors of Dr. Johnson and Saint-Evremond.
It is inexact to say that the nineteenth century invented impressionist
criticism, the nineteenth century invented nothing except the electric
light and Queen Victoria. But it was in the later years of that century
that Impressionism became self-conscious and pompous enough to array
itself in a theory. The method everyone knows: the critic clears his
mind of general ideas, of canons of art, and, so far as possible, of all
knowledge of good and evil; he gets what emotions he can from the work
before him, and then confides them to the public. [U] He does not attempt
to criticize in the literal sense of the word; he merely tells us what a
book, a picture, or a piece of music makes him feel. This method can
be intensely exciting; what is more, it has made vast additions to our
æsthetic experience. It is the instrument that goes deepest: sometimes
it goes too deep, passes clean through the object of contemplation, and
brings up from the writer's own consciousness something for which in the
work itself no answerable provocation is to be found. This leads, of
course, to disappointment and vexation, or else to common dishonesty,
and can add nothing to the reader's appreciation. On the other hand,
there are in some works of art subtleties and adumbrations hardly to
be disentangled by any other means. In much of the best modern
poetry--since Dante and Chaucer, I mean--there are beauties which
would rarely have been apprehended had not someone, throwing the whole
apparatus of objective criticism aside, vividly described, not the
beauties themselves, but what they made him feel. And I will go so far
as to admit that in a work of art there may be qualities, significant
and precious, but so recondite and elusive that we shall hardly grasp
them unless some adventurer, guided by his own experience, can trace
their progress and show us their roots in the mind from which they
sprang.
[Footnote U: Happily, I have never laid great claims to that prevalent
modern virtue, originality; otherwise, I might have been somewhat dashed
by coming across the following passage, only the other day, in the
miscellaneous writings of Gibbon (_de mes lectures Oct_. 3, 1762): "Till
now (says he) I was acquainted only with two ways of criticising a
beautiful passage: the one, to shew, by an exact anatomy of it, the
distinct beauties of it, and whence they sprung; the other, an idle
exclamation, or a general encomium which leaves nothing behind it.
Longinus has shown me that there is a third. He tells me his own
feelings upon reading it; and tells them with such energy that he
communicates them."]
Impressionistic criticism of literature is not much approved nowadays,
though Mr. Arthur Symonds and one or two of his contemporaries still
preserve it from the last outrages of a new and possibly less subtle
generation, while M. Proust, by using it to fine effect in his
extraordinary masterpiece, may even bring it again into fashion. But
it has got a bad name by keeping low company; for it has come to be
associated with those journalistic reviewers who describe, not the
feelings and ideas provoked in them by reading a book, but what they
thought and felt and did at or about the time they were supposed to be
reading it. These are the chatterboxes who will tell you how they got
up, cut themselves shaving, ate sausages, spilt the tea, and nearly
missed the train in which they began to read the latest work of
Benedetto Croce, which, unluckily, having got into conversation with
a pretty typist or a humorous bagman, they quite forgot, left in
the carriage, and so can tell you no more about. But this is not
Impressionism, it is mere vulgarity.
If in literary criticism the impressionist method is falling into
disfavour, in the criticism of music and painting it holds the field.
Nor is this surprising: to write objectively about a symphony or a
picture, to seize its peculiar intrinsic qualities and describe them
exactly in words, is a feat beyond the power of most. Wherefore, as
a rule, the unfortunate critic must either discourse on history,
archæology, and psychology, or chatter about his own feelings. With the
exception of Mr. Roger Fry there is not in England one critic capable of
saying so much, to the purpose, about the intrinsic qualities of a work
of visual art as half a dozen or more--Sir Walter Raleigh, Mr. Murry,
Mr. Squire, Mr. Clutton Brock, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and Mr.
McCarthy to begin with--can be trusted to say easily, and, if necessary,
weekly, about the intrinsic qualities of a book. To be sure, Mr. Fry is
a great exception: with my own ears have I heard him take two or three
normally intelligent people through a gallery and by severely objective
means provoke in them a perfect frenzy of enthusiasm for masterpieces of
utterly different schools and ages. Doubtless that is what art-criticism
should be; but perhaps it is wrong to despise utterly those who achieve
something less.
Just at present it is the thing to laugh at biographical and historical
critics, a class of which Sainte-Beuve is the obvious representative,
and to which belong such writers as Taine and Francesco de Sanctis and
all who try to explain works of art by describing their social and
political circumstances. "At any rate," it is said, "these are not
_critics_." I shall not quarrel over words; but I am persuaded that,
when they care genuinely for books and have a gift of exposition, these
perform the same function as their more æsthetically-minded brethren. I
am sure that a _causerie_ by Sainte-Beuve often sends a reader, with
a zest he had never found unaided, to a book he had never opened
unadvised. There are plenty of men and women, equipped to relish the
finest and subtlest things in literature, who can hardly come at a book
save through its author, or at an author save through the story of his
life and a picture of his surroundings; wherefore, few things do more to
promote and disseminate a taste for art and letters and, I will add, for
all things of the spirit, than biographical and historical criticism and
the discussion of tendencies and ideas.
And this brings me to my conclusion. Though the immediate object of
criticism is to put readers in the way of appreciating fully a work or
works in the merit of which the critic believes, its ultimate value lies
further afield in more general effects. Good criticism not only puts
people in the way of appreciating particular works; it makes them feel,
it makes them remember, what intense and surprising pleasures are
peculiar to the life of the spirit. For these it creates an appetite,
and keeps that appetite sharp: and I would seriously advise anyone who
complains that his taste for reading has deserted him to take a dip into
the great critics and biographers and see whether they will not send him
back to his books. For, though books, pictures, and music stand charged
with a mysterious power of delighting and exciting and enhancing the
value of life; though they are the keys that unlock the door to the
world of the spirit--the world that is best worth living in--busy men
and women soon forget. It is for critics to be ever jogging their
memories. Theirs it is to point the road and hold open the unlocked
doors. In that way they become officers in the kingdom of the mind, or,
to use a humbler and preferable term, essential instruments of culture.