Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci was such. George Wyndham was not a man on the
scale of Leonardo, and his writings give a very different effect from
Leonardo’s notebooks. Leonardo turned to art or science, and each was
what it was and not another thing. But Leonardo was Leonardo: he had no
father to speak of, he was hardly a citizen, and he had no stake in the
community. He lived in no fairyland, but his mind went out and became a
part of things. George Wyndham was Gentry. He was chivalrous, the world
was an adventure of himself. It is characteristic that on embarking as a
subaltern for Egypt he wrote enthusiastically:
I do not suppose that any expedition since the days of Roman
governors of provinces has started with such magnificence; we might
have been Antony going to Egypt in a purple-sailed galley.
This is precisely the spirit which animates his appreciation of the
Elizabethans and of Walter Scott; which guides him toward Hakluyt and
North. Wyndham was enthusiastic, he was a Romantic, he was an
Imperialist, and he was quite naturally a literary pupil of W. E.
Henley. Wyndham was a scholar, but his scholarship is incidental; he was
a good critic, within the range allowed him by his enthusiasms; but it
is neither as Scholar nor as Critic that we can criticize him. We can
criticize his writings only as the expression of this peculiar English
type, the aristocrat, the Imperialist, the Romantic, riding to hounds
across his prose, looking with wonder upon the world as upon a
fairyland.
Because he belongs to this type, Wyndham wrote enthusiastically and well
about North’s Plutarch. The romance of the ancient world becomes more
romantic in the idiomatic prose of North; the heroes are not merely
Greek and Roman heroes, but Elizabethan heroes as well; the romantic
fusion allured Wyndham. The charms of North could not be expounded more
delightfully, more seductively, with more gusto, than they are in
Wyndham’s essay. He appreciates the battles, the torchlight, the “dead
sound” of drums, the white, worn face of Cicero in his flight peering
from his litter; he appreciates the sharp brusque phrase of North: “he
roundly trussed them up and hung them by their necks.” And Wyndham is
learned. Here, as in his essays on the Pléiade and Shakespeare, the man
has read everything, with a labour that only whets his enjoyment of the
best. There are two defects: a lack of balance and a lack of critical
profundity. The lack of balance peeps through Wyndham’s condemnation of
an obviously inferior translation of Plutarch: “He dedicated the
superfluity of his leisure to enjoyment, and used his Lamia,” says the
bad translator. North: “he took pleasure of Lamia.” Wyndham makes a set
upon the bad translator. But he forgets that “dedicated the superfluity
of his leisure” is such a phrase as Gibbon would have warmed to life and
wit, and that a history, in the modern sense, could not be written in
the style of North. Wyndham forgets, in short, that it is not, in the
end, periods and traditions but individual men who write great prose.
For Wyndham is himself a period and a tradition.
The lack of balance is to be suspected elsewhere. Wyndham _likes_ the
best, but he likes a good deal. There is no conclusive evidence that he
realized all the difference, the gulf of difference between lines like:
En l’an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues;
and even the very best of Ronsard or Bellay, such as:
Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, madame;
Las! le temps, non, mais nous nous en allons
Et tost serons estendus sous la lame.
We should not gather from Wyndham’s essay that the _Phœnix and Turtle_
is a great poem, far finer than _Venus and Adonis_; but what he says
about _Venus and Adonis_ is worth reading, for Wyndham is very sharp in
perceiving the neglected beauties of the second-rate. There is nothing
to show the gulf of difference between Shakespeare’s sonnets and those
of any other Elizabethan. Wyndham overrates Sidney, and in his
references to Elizabethan writings on the theory of poetry omits mention
of the essay by Campion, an abler and more daring though less
common-sense study than Daniel’s. He speaks a few words for Drayton, but
has not noticed that the only good lines (with the exception of one
sonnet which may be an accident) in Drayton’s dreary sequence of “Ideas”
occur when Drayton drops his costume for a moment and talks in terms of
actuality:
Lastly, mine eyes amazedly have seen
Essex’ great fall; Tyrone his peace to gain;
The quiet end of that long-living queen;
The king’s fair entry, and our peace with Spain.
More important than the lack of balance is the lack of critical
analysis. Wyndham had, as was indicated, a gusto for the Elizabethans.
His essay on the Poems of Shakespeare contains an extraordinary amount
of information. There is some interesting gossip about Mary Fitton and a
good anecdote of Sir William Knollys. But Wyndham misses what is the
cardinal point in criticizing the Elizabethans: we cannot grasp them,
understand them, without some understanding of the pathology of
rhetoric. Rhetoric, a particular form of rhetoric, was endemic, it
pervaded the whole organism; the healthy as well as the morbid tissues
were built up on it. We cannot grapple with even the simplest and most
conversational lines in Tudor and early Stuart drama without having
diagnosed the rhetoric in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century mind.
Even when we come across lines like:
There’s a plumber laying pipes in my guts, it scalds,
we must not allow ourselves to forget the rhetorical basis any more than
when we read:
Come, let us march against the powers of heaven
And set black streamers in the firmament
To signify the slaughter of the gods.
An understanding of Elizabethan rhetoric is as essential to the
appreciation of Elizabethan literature as an understanding of Victorian
sentiment is essential to the appreciation of Victorian literature and
of George Wyndham.
Wyndham was a Romantic; the only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it.
What is permanent and good in Romanticism is curiosity—
... l’ardore
Ch’ l’ ebbe a divenir del mondo esperto
E degli vizii umani e del valore—
a curiosity which recognizes that any life, if accurately and profoundly
penetrated, is interesting and always strange. Romanticism is a short
cut to the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples
only back upon themselves. George Wyndham had curiosity, but he employed
it romantically, not to penetrate the real world, but to complete the
varied features of the world he made for himself. It would be of
interest to divagate from literature to politics and inquire to what
extent Romanticism is incorporate in Imperialism; to inquire to what
extent Romanticism has possessed the imagination of Imperialists, and to
what extent it was made use of by Disraeli. But this is quite another
matter: there may be a good deal to be said for Romanticism in life,
there is no place for it in letters. Not that we need conclude that a
man of George Wyndham’s antecedents and traditions must inevitably be a
Romanticist writer. But this is the case when such a man plants himself
firmly in his awareness of caste, when he says “The gentry must not
abdicate.” In politics this may be an admirable formula. It will not do
in literature. The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all that he
has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone. For they require
that a man be not a member of a family or of a caste or of a party or of
a coterie, but simply and solely himself. A man like Wyndham brings
several virtues into literature. But there is only one man better and
more uncommon than the patrician, and that is the Individual.
The Local Flavour
In a world which is chiefly occupied with the task of keeping up to date
with itself, it is a satisfaction to know that there is at least one man
who has not only read but enjoyed, and not only enjoyed but read, such
authors as Petronius and Herondas. That is Mr. Charles Whibley, and
there are two statements to make about him: that he is not a critic, and
that he is something which is almost as rare, if not quite as precious.
He has apparently read and enjoyed a great deal of English literature,
and the part of it that he has most enjoyed is the literature of the
great ages, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We may opine that
Mr. Whibley has not uttered a single important original judgment upon
any of this literature. On the other hand, how many have done so? Mr.
Whibley is not a critic of men or of books; but he convinces us that if
we read the books that he has read we should find them as delightful as
he has found them; and if we read them we can form our own opinions. And
if he has not the balance of the critic, he has some other equipoise of
his own. It is partly that his tastes are not puritanical, that he can
talk about Restoration dramatists and others without apologizing for
their “indecency”; it is partly his sense for the best local and
temporal flavours; it is partly his healthy appetite.
A combination of non-critical, rather than uncritical, qualities made
Mr. Whibley the most appropriate person in the world for the work by
which he is best known. We should be more grateful for the “Tudor
Translations Series” if we could find copies to be bought, and if we
could afford to buy them when we found them. But that is not Mr.
Whibley’s fault. The introductions which he wrote for some of the
translators are all that such introductions should be. His Urquhart’s
_Rabelais_ contains all the irrelevant information about that writer
which is what is wanted to stimulate a taste for him. After reading the
introduction, to read Urquhart was the only pleasure in life. And
therefore, in a country destitute of living criticism, Mr. Whibley is a
useful person: for the first thing is that English literature should be
read at all. The few people who talk intelligently about Stendhal and
Flaubert and James know this; but the larger number of people who skim
the conversation of the former do not know enough of English literature
to be even insular. There are two ways in which a writer may lead us to
profit by the work of dead writers. One is by isolating the essential,
by pointing out the most intense in various kinds and separating it from
the accidents of environment. This method is helpful only to the more
intelligent people, who are capable of a unique enjoyment of perfect
expression, and it concentrates on the very best in any art. The other
method, that of Mr. Whibley, is to communicate a taste for the
period—and for the best of the period so far as it is of that period.
That is not very easy either. For a pure journalist will not know any
period well enough; a pure dilettante will know it too egotistically, as
a fashion of his own. Mr. Whibley is really interested; and he has
escaped, without any programme of revolt, from the present century into
those of Tudor and Stuart. He escapes, and perhaps leads others, by
virtue of a taste which is not exactly a literary taste.
The “Tudor Translations” form part of a pronounced taste. Some are
better written than others. There is, of course, a world of
difference—of which Mr. Whibley is perhaps unaware—between even Florio
and his original. The French of Montaigne is a mature language, and the
English of Florio’s living translation is not. Montaigne could be
translated into the English of his time, but a similar work could not
have been written in it. But as the English language matured it lost
something that Florio and all his inferior colleagues had, and that they
had in common with the language of Montaigne. It was not only the
language, but the time. The prose of that age had life, a life to which
later ages could not add, from which they could only take away. You find
the same life, the same abundance, in Montaigne and Brantôme, the
alteration in Rochefoucauld as in Hobbes, the desiccation in the classic
prose of both languages, in Voltaire and in Gibbon. Only, the French was
originally richer and more mature—already in Joinville and Commines—and
we have no prose to compare with Montaigne and Rabelais. If Mr. Whibley
had analysed this vitality, and told us why Holland and Underdowne,
Nashe and Martin Marprelate are still worth reading, then he could have
shown us how to recognize this quality when it, or something like it,
appears in our own lifetime. But Mr. Whibley is not an analyst. His
taste, even, becomes less certain as he fixes it on individuals within
his period. On Surrey’s blank verse he is feeble; he does not even give
Surrey the credit of having anticipated some of Tennyson’s best effects.
He has no praise for Golding, quite one of the best of the verse
translators; he apologizes for him by saying that Ovid demands no
strength or energy! There is strength and energy, at least, in Marlowe’s
_Amores_. And he omits mention of Gawain Douglas, who, though he wrote
in Scots, was surely a “Tudor” translator. Characteristically, Mr.
Whibley praises Chapman because
it gives proof of an abounding life, a quenchless energy. There is a
grandeur and spirit in Chapman’s rendering, not unworthy the
original....
This is commonplace, and it is uncritical. And a critic would not use so
careless a phrase as “Tasso’s masterpiece.” The essay on Congreve does
not add much to our understanding:
And so he set upon the boards a set of men and women of quick brains
and cynical humours, who talked with the brilliance and rapidity
wherewith the finished swordsman fences.
We have heard of this conversation like fencing before. And the
suspicion is in our breast that Mr. Whibley might admire George
Meredith. The essay on Ralegh gives still less. The reality of that
pleasing pirate and monopolist has escaped, and only the national hero
is left. And yet Ralegh, and Swift, and Congreve, and the underworld of
sixteenth and seventeenth-century letters, are somehow kept alive by
what Mr. Whibley says of them.
Accordingly, Mr. Whibley does not disappear in the jungle of journalism
and false criticism; he deserves a “place upon the shelves” of those who
care for English literature. He has the first requisite of a critic:
interest in his subject, and ability to communicate an interest in it.
His defects are both of intellect and feeling. He has no dissociative
faculty. There were very definite vices and definite shortcomings and
immaturities in the literature he admires; and as he is not the person
to tell us of the vices and shortcomings, he is not the person to lay
before us the work of absolutely the finest quality. He exercises
neither of the tools of the critic: comparison and analysis. He has not
the austerity of passion which can detect unerringly the transition from
work of eternal intensity to work that is merely beautiful, and from
work that is beautiful to work that is merely charming. For the critic
needs to be able not only to saturate himself in the spirit and the
fashion of a time—the local flavour—but also to separate himself
suddenly from it in appreciation of the highest creative work.
And he needs something else that Mr. Whibley lacks: a creative interest,
a focus upon the immediate future. The important critic is the person
who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes to bring
the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems. If
the critic consider Congreve, for instance, he will have always at the
back of his mind the question: What has Congreve got that is pertinent
to our dramatic art? Even if he is solely engaged in trying to
understand Congreve, this will make all the difference: inasmuch as to
understand anything is to understand from a point of view. Most critics
have some creative interest—it may be, instead of an interest in any
art, an interest (like Mr. Paul More’s) in morals. These remarks were
introduced only to assist in giving the books of Mr. Whibley a place, a
particular but unticketed place, neither with criticism, nor with
history, nor with plain journalism; and the trouble would not have been
taken if the books were not thought to be worth placing.
A Note on the American Critic
This gallery of critics is not intended to be in any sense complete. But
having dealt with three English writers of what may be called critical
prose, one’s mind becomes conscious of the fact that they have something
in common, and, trying to perceive more clearly what this community is,
and suspecting that it is a national quality, one is impelled to
meditate upon the strongest contrast possible. Hence these comments upon
two American critics and one French critic, which would not take exactly
this form without the contrast at which I have hinted.
Mr. Paul More is the author of a number of volumes which he perhaps
hopes will break the record of mass established by the complete works of
Sainte-Beuve. The comparison with Sainte-Beuve is by no means trivial,
for Mr. More, and Professor Irving Babbitt also, are admirers of the
voluminous Frenchman. Not only are they admirers, but their admiration
is perhaps a clue both to much of their merit and to some of their
defects. In the first place, both of these writers have given much more
attention to French criticism, to the study of French standards of
writing and of thought, than any of the notable English critics since
Arnold; they are therefore much nearer to the European current, although
they exhibit faults which are definitely transatlantic and which
definitely keep them out of it. The French influence is traceable in
their devotion to ideas and their interest in problems of art and life
as problems which exist and can be handled apart from their relations to
the critic’s private temperament. With Swinburne, the criticism of
Elizabethan literature has the interest of a passion, it has the
interest for us of any writing by an intellectual man who is genuinely
moved by certain poetry. Swinburne’s intelligence is not defective, it
is impure. There are few ideas in Swinburne’s critical writings which
stand forth luminous with an independent life of their own, so true that
one forgets the author in the statement. Swinburne’s words must always
be referred back to Swinburne himself. And if literature is to Swinburne
merely a passion, we are tempted to say that to George Wyndham it was a
hobby, and to Mr. Whibley almost a charming showman’s show (we are
charmed by the urbanity of the showman). The two latter have gusto, but
gusto is no equivalent for taste; it depends too much upon the appetite
and the digestion of the feeder. And with one or two other writers, whom
I have not had occasion to discuss, literature is not so much a
collection of valuable porcelain as an institution—accepted, that is to
say, with the same gravity as the establishments of Church and State.
That is, in other words, the essentially uncritical attitude. In all of
these attitudes the English critic is the victim of his temperament. He
may acquire great erudition, but erudition easily becomes a hobby; it is
useless unless it enables us to see literature all round, to detach it
from ourselves, to reach a state of pure contemplation.
Now Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt have endeavoured to establish a criticism
which should be independent of temperament. This is in itself a
considerable merit. But at this point Mr. More particularly has been led
astray, oddly enough, by his guide Sainte-Beuve. Neither Mr. More nor
Sainte-Beuve is primarily interested in art. Of the latter M. Benda has
well observed that
on sait—et c’est certainement un des grands éléments de son
succès—combien d’études l’illustre critique consacre à des auteurs
dont l’importance littéraire est quasi nulle (femmes, magistrats,
courtisans, militaires), mais dont les écrits lui sont une occasion
de pourtraiturer une âme; combien volontiers, pour les maîtres, il
s’attache à leurs productions secondaires, notes, brouillons,
lettres intimes, plutôt qu’à leurs grandes œuvres, souvent beaucoup
moins expressives, en effet, de leur psychologie.
Mr. More is not, like Sainte-Beuve, primarily interested in psychology
or in human beings; Mr. More is primarily a moralist, which is a worthy
and serious thing to be. The trouble with Mr. More is that you cannot
disperse a theory or point of view of morals over a vast number of
essays on a great variety of important figures in literature, unless you
can give some more particular interest as well. Sainte-Beuve has his
particularized interest in human beings; another critic—say Remy de
Gourmont—may have something to say always about the art of a writer
which will make our enjoyment of that writer more conscious and more
intelligent. But the pure moralist in letters—the moralist is useful to
the creator as well as the reader of poetry—must be more concise, for we
must have the pleasure of inspecting the beauty of his structure. And
here M. Julien Benda has a great advantage over Mr. More; his thought
may be less profound, but it has more formal beauty.
Mr. Irving Babbitt, who shares so many of the ideals and opinions of Mr.
More that their names must be coupled, has expressed his thought more
abstractly and with more form, and is free from a mystical impulse which
occasionally gets out of Mr. More’s hand. He appears, more clearly than
Mr. More, and certainly more clearly than any critic of equal authority
in America or England, to perceive Europe as a whole; he has the
cosmopolitan mind and a tendency to seek the centre. His few books are
important, and would be more important if he preached of discipline in a
more disciplined style. Although he also is an admirer of Sainte-Beuve,
he would probably subscribe to this admirable paragraph of Othenin
d’Haussonville:[4]
Footnote 4:
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, fevr. 1875, quoted by Benda, _Belphégor_, p.
140.
Il y a une beauté littéraire, impersonnelle en quelque sorte,
parfaitement distincte de l’auteur lui-même et de son organisation,
beauté qui a sa raison d’être et ses lois, dont la critique est
tenue de rendre compte. Et si la critique considère cette tâche
comme au-dessous d’elle, si c’est affaire à la rhétorique et à ce
que Sainte-Beuve appelle dédaigneusement les Quintilien, alors la
rhetorique a du bon et les Quintilien ne sont pas à dédaigner.
There may be several critics in England who would applaud this notion;
there are very few who show any evidence of its apprehension in their
writings. But Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt, whatever their actual tastes,
and although they are not primarily occupied with art, are on the side
of the artist. And the side of the artist is not the side which in
England is often associated with critical writing. As Mr. More has
pointed out in an interesting essay, there is a vital weakness in
Arnold’s definition of criticism as “the disinterested endeavour to know
the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of
practice, politics, and everything of the kind.” The “disinterested
endeavour to know” is only a prerequisite of the _critic_, and is not
_criticism_, which may be the result of such an endeavour. Arnold states
the work of the critic merely in terms of the personal ideal, an ideal
for oneself—and an ideal for oneself is not disinterested. Here Arnold
is the Briton rather than the European.
Mr. More indicates his own attitude in praising those whom he elevates
to the position of masters of criticism:
If they deal much with the criticism of literature, this is because
in literature more manifestly than anywhere else life displays its
infinitely varied motives and results; and their practice is always
to render literature itself more consciously a criticism of life.
“Criticism of life” is a facile phrase, and at most only represents one
aspect of great literature, if it does not assign to the term
“criticism” itself a generality which robs it of precision. Mr. More
has, it seems to me, in this sentence just failed to put his finger on
the right seriousness of great literary art: the seriousness which we
find in Villon’s _Testament_ and which is conspicuously absent from _In
Memoriam_; or the seriousness which controls _Amos Barton_ and not _The
Mill on the Floss_.