Chapter IV: Part 4

Criticism deals with both aspects. It is objective when it is directed upon objective or verifiable facts; it is subjective when it is directed upon subjective facts. It is an objective fact, for instance, that such a man as Shakespeare lived in such a country in such a time, that he wrote various plays of such and such a character, and that these plays were founded upon other plays or legends or histories. But the poetic truth, the poetic beauty of these plays, their covert meanings, the philosophy that lies back of them, are not in the same sense objective facts. In these respects no two persons read them just alike. Hamlet has been interpreted in many ways. Which Hamlet is the true one, Goethe’s, or Coleridge’s, or Hazlitt’s, or Kean’s, or Booth’s? Each is true, so far as it expresses a real and vital conception begotten by the poet upon the critic’s or the actor’s mind. The beauty of a poem or any work of art is not an objective something patent to all; it is an experience of the mind which we each have in different degrees. In fact, the field of our æsthetic perceptions and enjoyments is no more fixed and definite than is the field of our religious perceptions and enjoyments, and we diverge from one another in the one case as much as in the other. This divergence is of course, in both cases, mainly superficial; it is in form and not in essence. Religions perish, but religion remains. Styles of art pass, but art abides. Go deep enough and we all agree, because human nature is fundamentally the same everywhere. All that I mean to say is that the outward expressions of art differ in different ages and among different races as much as do the outward expressions of religion. In all these matters the subjective element plays an important part. Is Browning a greater poet than Tennyson? Is Thackeray a greater novelist than Dickens? Has Newman a better style than Arnold? Is Poe our greatest poet, as many British critics think? These and all similar questions involve the personal equation of the critic, and his answer to them will be given more by his unconscious than by his conscious self. The appeal is not so much to his rational faculties as to his secret affinities or his æsthetic perceptions. You can move a man’s reason, but you cannot by any similar process change his taste or his faith. If we are not by nature committed to certain views, we are committed to a certain habit of mind, to a certain moral and spiritual attitude, which makes these views almost inevitable to us. “It is not given to all minds,” says Sainte-Beuve, “to feel and to relish equally the peculiar beauties and excellences of Massillon,” or, it may be added, of any other author, especially if he be of marked individuality.

We do not and cannot all have the same measure of appreciation of Emerson, or Wordsworth, or Ruskin, or Whitman, or Browning. To enjoy these men “sincerely and without weariness is a quality and almost a peculiarity of certain minds, which may serve to define them.” Sainte-Beuve himself was chiefly interested in an author’s character,--“in what was most individual in his personality.” He had no arbitrary rules, touchstones, or systems, but pressed each new work gently, almost caressingly, till it gave up its characteristic quality and flavor.

But the objective consideration of the merits of a man’s work does not and cannot preclude or measure the subjective attraction or repulsion or indifference which we do or do not feel toward that work. Something deeper and more potent than reason is at work here. Back of the most impartial literary judgment lies the fact that the critic is a person; that he is of a certain race, family, temperament, environment; that he is naturally cold or sympathetic, liberal or reactionary, tolerant or intolerant, and therefore has his individual likes and dislikes; that certain types attract him more than others; that, of two poets of equal power, the voice of one moves him more than that of the other. Something as subtle and vital and hard to analyze as the flavor of a fruit, and analogous to it, makes him prefer this poet to that. One may see clearly the superiority of Milton over Wordsworth, and yet cleave to the latter. How beautiful is “Lycidas,” yet it left Dr. Johnson cold and critical. There is much more of a cry--a real cry of the heart--in Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” One feels that the passion is real in one, and assumed in the other. Is “Lycidas” therefore less a creative work? The affirmative side of the question is not without support. Johnson undervalued some of Gray’s best work; the touch of sympathy was lacking. This touch of sympathy does not wait upon the critical judgment, but often underruns and outruns it. It is said that Miss Martineau found “Tom Jones” dull reading, that Charlotte Brontë cared not for Jane Austen, and that Thackeray placed Cooper above Scott,--all, no doubt, from a lack of the quickening touch of sympathy.

As a rule, we have more sympathy with the authors of our own country than with those of another. Few Englishmen can do justice to Victor Hugo, and even to some Frenchmen he is a “gigantic blusterer.” It is equally hard for a Frenchman to appreciate Carlyle, and how absurd seems Voltaire’s verdict upon Shakespeare,--“a drunken savage”!

The French mind is preëminently a critical mind, yet in France there are and have been as many schools of criticism as of poetry or philosophy or romance. Different types of mind, individual idiosyncrasy, opposing theories and methods, stand out just as clearly in this branch as in any other branch of mental activity. From Madame de Staël down through Barante, Villemain, Nisard, Sainte-Beuve, to Brunetière and the critics of our own day, criticism has been individualistic, and has reflected as many types of mind and points of view as there have been critics. Where shall we look for the final criticism? First it is classicism that rules, then it is romanticism, then naturalism, and next, we are told, it is to be idealism. Whichever it is, it is true enough when uttered by vital and earnest minds, and serves its purpose. There are many excellences, but where is the supreme excellence? The naturalism of Sainte-Beuve is excellent, the positivism of Nisard is excellent, the classicism of Brunetière is excellent, and the determinism of Taine yields interesting results; but all are relative, all are experimental, all are subject to revision. It is given to no man to have a monopoly of truth. It is given to no poet to have a monopoly of beauty. There is one beauty of Milton, another of Wordsworth, another of Burns, another of Tennyson. To seize upon and draw out the characteristic beauty of each, and give his reader a lively sense of it, is the business of the critic.

VIII

Our reading is a search for the excellent, for the vital and characteristic, which may assume as many and diverse forms in art and literature as it does in life and nature. The savant, the scientist, the moralist, the philosopher, may have pleasure in a work that gives little or no pleasure to the literary artist. Criticism may be looked upon as a search for these various values or various phases of truth, which the critic expresses in terms of his own taste, knowledge, insight, etc., for scientific values, philosophical values, literary and poetic values, or moral and religious values, according to the subject upon which the critical mind is directed. No two men look for exactly the same values, nor have the same measure of appreciation of them. Emerson and Lowell, for instance, make quite different demands and form different estimates of the poets they read. Lowell lays the emphasis upon the conventional literary values, Emerson more upon spiritual and religious values. An Englishman will find values in the poets of his own country that a Frenchman does not find, and a Frenchman, values in his poets that an Englishman does not find. See how Schérer and Taine handled Milton. Milton’s great epic has poetic and literary value, often of a high order, but ad philosophy or religion it is grotesque.

IX

Yet let me not seem to underrate the value of what is called judicial criticism. Criticism as an act of judgment, as a disinterested endeavor to see the thing as it is in itself and as it stands related to other things, is justly jealous of our personal tastes and preferences. These tastes and preferences may blind us to the truth. Can we admire above them, or even against them? To cherish no writers but those of our own stripe or mental complexion is the way of the half cultured. Can we rise to a disinterested view? The danger of individualism in letters is caprice, bias, partial views; the danger of intellectualism is the cold, the colorless, the formal.

The ideal critic will blend the two; he will be disinterested and yet sympathetic, individual and yet escape caprice and bias, warm with interest and yet cool with judgment; surrendering himself to his subject and yet not losing himself in it, upholding tradition and yet welcoming new talent, giving the personal equation free play without blurring the light of the impersonal intelligence. From the point of view of intellectualism, criticism seeks to eliminate the personal equation, that which is private and peculiar to us as individuals, and to base criticism upon something like universal principles. What we crave, what our minds literally feed upon, may blind us to the truly excellent. Our _wants_ are personal; what we should aim at is an excellence that is impersonal. When we rise to the sphere of the disinterested, we lose sight of our individual tastes and predilections. The question then is, not what we want, not what we have a taste for, but what we are capable of appreciating. Can we appreciate the best? Can we share the universal mind to the extent of delighting in the best that has been known and thought in the world? Emerson said he was always glad to meet people who saw the superiority of Shakespeare to all other poets. If we prefer Pope to Shakespeare, as we are apt to at a certain age, we may know by that that there is an excellence beyond our reach. It is certain that the mass of readers will not appreciate the best literature, but only the second or third best. A man’s æsthetic perceptions may be broadened and educated as well as his intellectual. An unread man feels little interest beyond his own neighborhood,--the personal doings of the men and women he sees and knows. Educate him a little, give him his county paper, and the sphere of his interests is widened; a little more, and he takes an interest in his State; more still, and he broadens out to his whole country; still more, and the whole world is within his sympathy and ken. So in the aesthetic sphere; he gets beyond his personal tastes and wants into the great world currents of literature and art. He can appreciate works written in other ages and lands, and that are quite foreign to his own temperament and outlook. This is to be disinterested. To emancipate the taste is as much as to emancipate the intellect; to rise above one’s personal affinities is as much as to rise above one’s personal prejudices and superstitions. The boy of a certain stamp has an affinity for the dime novel; if we can lift him to an appreciation of Scott, or Thackeray, or Hawthorne, how have we emancipated his taste! So that Brunetière was right in saying that, in art and literature, the beginning of wisdom is to distrust what we like. _Distrust_, not repudiate. Let us examine first and see upon what grounds we like it,--see if we _ought_ to like it; see if it is akin to that which is of permanent value in the world’s best thought. A French critic tells a story of a man who sat cool and unmoved under a sermon that made the people about him shed torrents of tears, and who excused himself by saying, “I do not belong to this parish.” One’s tastes must be broader than one’s parish. I suppose any of our religious brethren would feel a little shy of weeping in the church of a religious denomination not his own. Our religion is no more emancipated than are our tastes. Lowell says there are born Popists and born Wordsworthians; but the more these types can get out of their limitations and appreciate one another, the more they are emancipated.

V

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM

I

The criticism of criticism is one of the marked literary characteristics of the last ten or fifteen years, both in this country and in Europe. It is seen in France in Brunetière’s essays and in Hennequin’s “Scientific Criticism;” in England in the recent work of Wm. B. Wordsfold on the “Principles of Criticism” and in Mr. John M. Robertson’s two volumes of “Essays toward a Critical Method;” in this country in Mr. Howells’s “Criticism and Fiction,” in Prof. Johnson’s “Elements of Criticism” and in the still more recent work of Professor Sears on “Methods and Principles of Criticism,” besides the numerous discussions of the subject in the magazines and literary journals.

A Western college professor lately discussed some phases of the subject under the head of “Democratic Criticism;” whereupon other college professors raised the voice of protest, one of them asking ironically, Why not have a democratic botany and zoölogy and geology and astronomy? I think it may be said in reply that, so far as democracy is based upon natural law and means free inquiry, a fair field and no favor, we have these things already. All science is democratic, in the sense that it is no respecter of persons, has no partialities, stops at no arbitrary boundaries, and places all things on an equal footing before natural law. Surely the spirit of science makes directly for democracy. When science shows us that the universe is all made of one stuff, that the celestial laws, as Whitman said, do not need to be worked over and rectified, that inherent power and worth alone finally tell, and that there is not one rule for the heavens above and another for the earth below, it is making smooth the way for democratic ideas and ideals.

Still, pure science is outside the domain of literature, and does not reflect a people’s life and character as literature does. It does not hold the mirror of man’s imagination up to nature, but resolves nature in the alembic of his understanding. It is not an exponent of personality, as art is, but an index of the development and progress of the impersonal reason. But when we enter the region of the sentiments and the emotions--the subjective world of criticism, literature, art--the case is different. Here we find reflected social and arbitrary distinctions; here we find mirrored the spirit and temper of men as they are acted upon and modified by the social organism and the ideals of different times and races. A democratic community will have standards of excellence in art and criticism differing from those of an aristocratic community, and will be drawn by different qualities. It seems to me that Dr. Triggs was quite right in saying that a criticism that estimates literary products according to absolute standards, that clings to the past, that cultivates the academic spirit, that is exclusive and unsympathetic, may justly be called aristocratic; and that a criticism that follows more the comparative method, that adheres to principles instead of to standards, and lays the stress upon the vital and the characteristic in a man’s work, rather than upon its form and extrinsic beauty, is essentially democratic.

No doubt the ideal of the monumental works of antiquity is essentially anti-democratic. It was fostered by an exclusive culture. It goes with the idea of the divine right of kings, of a privileged class, and is at war with the spirit of our times. The Catholic tradition in religion and the classical tradition in literature are as foreign to the spirit of democracy as is the monarchical tradition in politics. They are all branches from the same root. The classical tradition begat Milton, but it did not beget Shakespeare, the most marvelous genius of the modern world. To the classic tradition, as it spoke through Voltaire, Shakespeare was a barbarian. Indeed, Shakespeare’s art was essentially democratic, how much soever it may have occupied itself with royal and aristocratic personages. It is as free as an uncaged bird, and pays no tribute to classic models. Its aim is inward movement, fusion, and vitality, rather than outward harmony and proportion. A Greek play is like a Greek temple,--chaste, severe, symmetrical, beautiful. A play of Shakespeare is, as Dr. Johnson long ago suggested, more like a wood or a piece of free nature.

II

Democratic and aristocratic may not be the best terms to apply to the two opposing types of critics,--men like Matthew Arnold or the French critic Ferdinand Brunetière, on the one hand, both the spokesmen of authority in letters; and men like Sainte-Beuve and Anatole France, and the younger generation of English and American critics on the other, men who are more tolerant of individual differences and more inclined to seek the reason of each work within itself. Yet these terms indicate fairly well two profoundly different types.

Brunetière is a militant and dogmatic critic, as we saw by his severe denunciation of Zola while lecturing in this country a few years since. One of his eulogists speaks of him as the “autocrat of triumphant convictions.” Of democratic blood in his veins there is very little. He reflects the old orthodox and aristocratic spirit in his dictum that nature is not to be trusted; that both in taste and in morals what comes natural to us and gives us pleasure is, for that very reason, to be avoided. Nature is depraved. In morals, would we attain to virtue, we must go counter to her; and in art and literature, would we attain to wisdom, we must distrust what we like. This suspicion of nature was the keynote of the old theology, which found its authority in a miraculous revelation, and it is the keynote of the old Aristotelian criticism, which found its authority in a body of rules deduced from the masters. The new theology looks for a scientific basis for its morals, or seeks for the sanction of nature herself; and democratic criticism aims to stand upon the same basis, and cleaves to principles and not to standards, not by yielding to the caprices of uninformed taste, but by seeking the law and test of every work within itself. We no longer judge of the worth of a man by his creed, but by what he is in and of himself; by his natural virtues and aptitudes; and we no longer condemn a work of art because it breaks with the old traditions.

Arnold was of similar temper with Brunetière. His elements of style are “dignity and distinction,” a part of the classic tradition, a survival from the feudal and aristocratic world, from a literature of courts and courtiers, as distinguished from a literature of the people, a democratic literature. Distinction of utterance, distinction of manners, distinction of dress and equipage--they are all of a piece, and adhere in the aristocratic and monarchical ideal. The special antipathy of this ideal is the common; all commonness is vulgar. When Arnold came to this country and became interested in the lives of Grant and Lincoln, he found them both wanting in distinction,--there was no savor of the aristocratic in their words or manners. And the criticism is true. From all accounts, Grant presented a far less distinguished appearance at Appomattox than did Lee; and Lincoln was easily outshone in aristocratic graces by some members of his cabinet. Indeed, the predominant quality of the two men was their immense commonness. Washington and Jefferson came much nearer the aristocratic ideal. Lincoln and Grant both had greatness of the first order, but their type was democratic and not aristocratic. The aristocratic ideal of excellence embraces other qualities; there is more pride, more exclusiveness in it; it holds more by traditions and special privileges. Lincoln had less distinction than Sumner or Chase, Grant less than Sherman or Lee, but each had an excellence the others had not. The choice, the refined, the cultured, belong to one class of excellencies: the qualities of Lincoln and Grant belong to another and more fundamental kind. Arnold himself had distinction,--he had urbanity, lucidity, proportion, and many other classic virtues,--but he had not breadth, sympathy, heartiness, commonness. The quality of distinction, an air of something choice, high-bred, superfine, will doubtless count for less and less in a country like ours. In literature and in character we are looking for other values, for the true, the vital, the characteristic. There is nothing in life or character more winsome than commonness wedded to great excellence; the ordinary crowned with the extraordinary, as in Lincoln the man, Socrates the philosopher, Burns or Wordsworth the poet. Distinction wins admiration, commonness wins love. The note of equality, the democratic note, is much more pronounced in Browning than in Tennyson, in Shelley than in Arnold, in Wordsworth than in Milton, and it is more pronounced in American poets than in English. In times and for a people like ours, the suggestion of something hearty and heroic in letters is more needed than the suggestion of something fine and exquisite. Distinction is not to be confounded with dignity or elevation, which flourishes more or less in all great peoples. A common laboring man may show great dignity, but never distinction. Dignity often shone in the speeches of the old Indian chiefs, but not distinction, as the term is here used.

The more points at which a man touches his fellow man, the more democratic he is. The breadth of his relation to the rest of the world, that is the test. Sainte-Beuve was more truly a democratic critic than is Brunetière. The democratic producer in literature will differ from the aristocratic less in his standards of excellence than in the atmosphere of human equality and commonness which he effuses. We are too apt to associate the common with the vulgar. There is the commonness of a Lincoln or a Grant, and there is the commonness of the lower strata of society. There is the commonness of earth, air, and water, and there is the commonness of dust and mud; the commonness of the basic and the universal, and the commonness of the cheap and tawdry. Grant’s calmness, self-control, tenacity of purpose, modesty, comprehensiveness of mind, were uncommon in degree, not in kind. He was the common soldier with extraordinary powers added, but the common soldier was always visible. So with Lincoln,--his greatness was inclusive, not exclusive.

III

So far as good taste means “good form,” and so far as good form is established by social and conventional usages of the fashionable world, the poet of democracy has little to do with it. But so far as it is based upon the inherent fitness of things and the health and development of the best there is in a man, so far is he bound to enlist himself in its service. In a world where everybody is educated and reads books, much poor literature will circulate; but will not the good, the best, circulate also? Will there not be the few good judges, the saving remnant? Is there not as much good taste and right reason now in England or France as during more rigidly monarchical times?

The ideal democracy is not the triumph of barbarism or the riot of vulgarity, but it is the triumph of right reason and natural equality and inequality. Some things are better than others, better from the point of view of the whole of life. These better things we must cling to and make much of in a democracy, as in an aristocracy. We must aspire to the best that is known and thought in the world. This best a privileged class seeks to appropriate to itself; a democracy seeks to share it with all. All are not capable of receiving it, but all may try. They will be better able to-morrow if they have the chance to-day. We must not ignore the vulgarity, the bad taste incident to democratic conditions. If we do, we never get rid of them. Political equality brings to the foreground many unhandsome human traits, the loud, the mediocre, the insolent, etc. All the more must we fix attention upon the true, the noble, the heroic, the disinterested. The rule of temperance, of good taste, of right reason, antedates any and every social condition. Democracy cannot abrogate fundamental principles. The essential conditions of life are not changed, but arbitrary, accidental conditions are modified. One still needs food and raiment and shelter and transportation; he is still subject to the old hindrances and discouragements within himself.

We must give the terms good taste, right reason a broader scope; that is all. The principles of good taste when applied to art are not fixed and absolute, like those of mathematics or the exact sciences. They are vital and elastic. They imply a certain fitness and consistency. Shakespeare shocked the classic taste of the French critics. He violated the unities and mixed prose and poetry. But what was good taste in Shakespeare--that is, in keeping with his spirit and aim--might be bad taste in Racine. What is permissible to an elemental poet like Whitman would jar in a refined poet like Longfellow. But bad taste in Whitman, that is, things not in keeping with the ideal he has before him, jar the same as in any other poet. He has many lines and passages and whole poems that set the teeth of many readers on edge, that are yet in perfect keeping with his plan and spirit. They go with the poet of the Cosmos, but not with the poet of the drawing-room or library. My taste is not shocked, but my courage is challenged.

In Whitman’s case the appeal is not so directly and exclusively to our æsthetic perceptions as it is in most other poets; he is elemental where they are cultured and artificial; at the same time he can no more escape æsthetic principles than they can. Because a flower, a gem, a well-kept lawn, etc., are beautiful, we are not compelled to deny beauty to rocks, trees, and mountains. If Whitman does not, in his total effects, attain to something like this kind of beauty, he is not a poet.

IV

I have said that Sainte-Beuve was more truly a democratic critic than is M. Brunetière. He is more tolerant of individualism in letters. He called himself a naturalist of minds. His main interest in each work was in what was most individual and characteristic in it. He was inclusive rather than exclusive, less given to positive judgments, but more to sympathetic interpretation. He united the method of Darwin to the sensibility of the artist. Critics like Arnold and Brunetière uphold the classic and academic traditions. They are aristocratic because they are the spokesmen of an exclusive culture. They derive from Catholicism more than from Protestantism; they uphold authority rather than encourage individuality in life and letters. In criticism they aim at that intellectual disinterestedness which is indeed admirable, and which has given the world such noble results, but which seems unsuited to the genius of our time. Ours is a democratic century, a Protestant century. Individualism has been the dominant note in literature. The men of power, for the most part, have not been the disinterested, but the interested men, the men of conviction and of more or less partial views, who have not so much aimed to see the thing as it is in itself as they have aimed to make others see it as they saw it. In other words, they have been preachers, doctrinaires, men bent upon the dissemination of particular ideas.

One has only to run over the list of the foremost names in literature for the past seventy-five years. There is Tolstoi, in Russia, clearly one of the great world writers, but a doctrinaire through and through. There are Renan, Victor Hugo, Taine, Thiers, Guizot, in France; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Huxley, George Eliot, Mrs. Ward, in English literature, and in American literature Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. All these writers had aims ulterior to those of pure literature. They were not disinterested observers and recorders. They obtruded their personal opinions and convictions. They are the writers with a message. Their thoughts spring from some special bent or experience, and address themselves to some special mood or want. They wrote the books that help us, that often come to us as revelations; works of art, it may be, but of art in subjection to moral conviction, and they are directed to other than purely æsthetic ends. They gave expression to their individual tastes and predilections; they were more or less tethered to their own egos; they may be called the personal authors, as their predecessors may be called the impersonal. They are not of the pure breed of men of letters, but represent crosses of various kinds, as the cross of the artist with the thinker, the savant, the theologian, the man of science, the reformer, the preacher. These personal authors belong to the modern world rather than to the ancient; to a time of individualism rather than to a time of institutionalism; to an industrial and democratic age, rather than to an imperial and military age.

Modern life is undoubtedly becoming more and more impersonal in the sense that it favors less and less the growth and preservation of great personalities, yet its utilitarian spirit, its tendency to specialization, its right of private judgment, and its religious doubts and unrest, find their outcome in individualism in literature. The disinterested critics and recorders are still among us, but power has departed from them. The age is too serious, the questions are too pressing. The man of genius is no longer at ease in Zion. If he rises at all above the masses, he must share the burden of thought and conscience of his times. This burden may hinder the free artistic play of his powers, as it probably has in most of the writers I have mentioned, yet it will greatly deepen the impression his words will make. The saying “Art for art’s sake” cannot be impeached, even by Tolstoi. When rightly understood, it is true. Art would live in the whole, and not in the part called morals or religion, or even beauty. But its exponents in our day have been, with few exceptions, of a feeble type, men of words and fancies like Swinburne or Poe. In Tennyson we have as pure a specimen of artistic genius as in Shakespeare, but a far less potent one. His power comes when he thrills and vibrates with some special thought or cry of his time. With the great swarms of our minor poets the complaint is, not that the type is not pure, but that the inspiration is feeble. They have more art than nature. It is the same with the novelists. Since Hawthorne and Thackeray the pure artistic gift has no longer been the endowment of great or profound personalities. George Eliot, Mrs. Ward, Tolstoi, all interested writers, all with aims foreign to pure art, are the names of power in our half of the century. Henry James is a much finer artist, but he has nothing like their hold upon the great common elements of human life. The disinterested writer gives us a higher, more unselfish pleasure than the type I am considering; we are compelled to rise more completely out of ourselves to meet him. I am only insisting that in our day he has little penetration, and that the men of power have been of the other class.

I have placed Taine among the interested critics; he was interested in putting through certain ideas; he had a thesis to uphold; he will not value all truths equally, he will take what suits him. Like all men with preconceived ideas, his mind was more like a searchlight than like a lamp. This makes him stimulating as a critic, but not always satisfying.

The same is true of our own Emerson, probably our most stimulating and fertilizing mind thus far. Lowell, as a man of letters, is of a much purer strain; he is in the direct line of succession of the great literary names, yet the value of his contribution undoubtedly falls far short of that of Emerson. As a poet, Emerson was a poor singer with wonderfully penetrating tones, almost unequaled in this respect. The same may be said of him as a critic; he was a poor critic with a wonderfully penetrating glance. He had the hawk’s eye for the game he was looking for; he could see it amid any tangle of woods or thicket of the commonplace. His special limitation is that he was looking for a particular kind of prey. His sympathies were narrow but intense. The elective affinities were very active in his criticism. He loved Emersonian poetry, he loved the Emersonian paradoxes, he valued the wild æolian tones; he delighted in the word that gave the prick and sting of the electric spark; abruptness, surprise, the sudden, intense, forked sentence--these took him, these he dealt in. His survey of any man or matter is never a complete one, never a disinterested one, never done in the scientific spirit. He writes about representative men, and exploits Plato, Goethe, Montaigne, etc., in relation to his thought. He is always on quests for particular ideas, in search for Emersonian values. He will not do justice to such poets as Poe and Shelley, but he will do more than justice to Donne and Herbert; he finds in them what he sets out to find; it is a partial view, but it is penetrating and valuable; it is not criticism, and does not set out to be; it is a suggestive study of kindred souls. Emerson’s work is kindling and inspiring; it unsettles rather than settles; it is not a lamp to guide your feet, it is a star to give you your bearings.

Carlyle and Ruskin fall into the same category. They sin against the classic virtues of repose, proportion, serenity, but this makes their penetrating power all the greater. Carlyle cannot rank with the great impartial historians, yet as a painter of historical characters and scenes the vividness and reality of his pictures are almost unequaled. Carlyle lacked the disinterestedness of the true artist. He had great power of description and characterization, but he could not as an historian stand apart from his subject as the great Greek and Roman historians do. He is a portion of all that he sees and describes. He is bent upon persuasion quite as much as upon portrayal. He could not succeed as a novelist or a poet, because of his vehement, intolerant nature. He succeeds as an historian only in portraying men in whom he sees the lineaments of his own character, as in Cromwell. He did not or could not live in the whole, as did his master, Goethe. His mind was a steep incline. His opinions were like mountain torrents. Arnold, in one of his letters, complained that in his criticism of Goethe there was too much of _engouement_,--too much, I suppose, of the fondness of the gourmand for a particular dish, or of the toper for his favorite tipple. His enthusiasm was intemperate, and therefore unsound. Doubtless some such objection as this may be urged against most of Carlyle’s criticisms. He was ruled by his character more than by his intellect; his feeling guided his vision. If he is not always a light to the reason, he is certainly an electric excitant to the imagination and the moral sense. In his essays, pamphlets, histories, we hardly get judicial estimates of things; rather do we get overestimates or under estimates. Yet always is there something that kindles and brings the blood to the surface. Carlyle will beget a stronger race than Arnold, but it will not be so cool and clear-headed. Emerson will fertilize more minds with new thought than Lowell, but there will be many more cranks and fanatics and hobbyists among them.

Professor Dowden says Landor falls below Shelley and Wordsworth because he had no divine message or oracle to deliver to the men of his generation,--no authentic word of the Lord to utter. Landor had great thoughts, but they were not of first-rate importance with reference to his times. He was more thoroughly imbued with the classic spirit than either Shelley or Wordsworth, and the classic spirit is at ease in Zion. The modern world differs from the ancient in its moral stress and fervor. This moral stress and fervor both Shelley and Wordsworth shared, but Landor did not. Where would the world be in thought, in works, in civilization, had there been no one-sided, overloaded, fanatical men,--men of partial views, of half-truths, of one idea? Where would Christianity have been, under the play of disinterested intellect, without disciples, without devotees, without saints and martyrs, without its Paul and its Luther, without prejudice, without superstition, without inflexibility?

We might fitly contrast these two types of mind under the heads of Protestant and Catholic, the one personal, the other impersonal. With the Protestant type goes individualism, which, as I have said, is so marked a feature of the modern world. With the Catholic type goes institutionalism, which was so marked a feature of the ancient world. With the former goes the right of private judgment, innovation, progress, new forms of art; with the latter goes authority, obedience, the power of the past. The Protestant type is more capricious and willful; it is restless, venturesome, impatient of rules and precedents; the older type is more serene, composed, conservative, orderly. In criticism it is more objective; it upholds the standards, it lays down the law; it cherishes the academic spirit. The French mind is the more Catholic; the English the more Protestant. In literature the Protestant type is the more subjective and creative; it makes new discoveries, it founds new orders. Catholicism is exterior, formal, imposing; it takes little account of personal needs and peculiarities, while Protestantism is almost entirely concerned with the private, interior world. Individualism in religion begat Protestantism, and upon Protestantism it begat the numerous progeny of the sects, the thousand and one isms that now divide the religious world. To this spirit religion is something personal and private to every man, and in no sense a matter of forms and rituals. In fact, individualism fairly confronts institutionalism. This spirit carried into the region of æsthetics or literature gives rise to like results,--to a freer play of personal taste and preferences, to more intense individual utterances, to new and unique types of artistic genius, and to new lines of activity in the æsthetic field.

Another name for it is the democratic spirit. Its special dangers are the crude, the odd, the capricious, just as the danger of institutionalism is the coldly formal, the lifeless, the traditional. In English literature the former begat Shakespeare, as it did Tupper; the latter begat Milton, as it did Young and Pollock. With institutionalism goes the divine right of kings, the sacredness of priests, the authority of forms and ceremonies, and the slavery of the masses; with individualism goes the divinity of man, the sacredness of life, the right of private judgment, the decay of traditions and forms, and the birth of the modern spirit. With one goes stateliness, impressiveness, distinction, as well as the empty, the moribund, the despotic; with the other goes force, strenuousness, originality, as well as the loud, the amorphous, the fanatical.

V

Goethe said that a loving interest in the person and the works of an author, amounting to a certain one-sided enthusiasm, alone led to reality in criticism; all else was vanity. No doubt more will come of the contact of two minds under these circumstances than from what is called the judicial attitude; there will be more complete fusion and interpenetration; without a certain warmth and passion there is no fruitfulness, even in criticism. In the field of art and literature, to be disinterested does not mean to be cold and judicial; it means to be free from bias, free from theories and systems, with mind open to receive a clear impression of the work’s characteristic merits and qualities.

It is tradition that always stands in the way of the new man. In politics, it is the political tradition; in religion, the religious tradition; and in literature, the literary tradition. Professional criticism is the guardian of the literary tradition, and this is why any man who essays a new departure in literary art has reason to fear criticism or despise it, as the case may be.

It is when we take up any new work in the judicial spirit, bent upon judging and classifying, rather than upon enjoying and understanding, the conscious analytical intellect on duty and the sympathies and the intuitions under lock and key, that there is danger that judicial blindness will fall upon us. When we approach nature in the spirit of technical science, our minds already preoccupied with certain conclusions and systems, do we get as much of the joy and stimulus which she holds for us as do the children on the way to school of a spring morning with their hands full of wild flowers, or as does the gleesome saunterer over hills in summer with only love and appreciation uppermost in his mind?

Professional criticism often becomes mere pedagogical narrowness and hardness; it gets crushed over with rules and precedents, pinched and sterilized by routine and convention, so that a new work makes no impression upon it. The literary tradition, like the religious tradition, ceases to be vital and formative.

Is it not true that all first-class works have to be approached with a certain humility and free giving of one’s self? In a sense, “except ye become as little children” ye cannot enter the kingdom of the great books.

I suppose that to get at the true inwardness of any imaginative work, we must read it as far as possible in its own spirit, and that if it does not engraft and increase its own spirit upon us, then it is feeble and may easily be brushed aside.

Criticism which has for its object the discovery of new talent and, in Sainte-Beuve’s words, to “apportion to each kind of greatness its due influence and superiority,” is one thing; and criticism the object of which is to uphold and enforce the literary tradition, is quite another. Consciously or unconsciously, when the trained reader opens a new book he is under the influence of one or the other of these notions,--either he submits himself to it disinterestedly, intent only upon seizing and appreciating its characteristic quality, or he comes prepossessed with certain rules and standards upon which his taste has been formed. In other words, he comes to the new work simply as a man, a human being seeking edification, or he comes clothed in some professional authority, seeking judgment.

Our best reading is a search for the excellent; but what is the excellent? Is there any final standard of excellence in literature? Each may be excellent after its kind, but kinds differ. There is one excellence of Milton and Arnold and the classic school, and another excellence of Shakespeare and Pope and Burns and Wordsworth and Whitman, or of the romantic and democratic school. The critic is to hold a work up to its own ideal or standard. Of the perfect works, of the works that aim at perfection, at absolute symmetry and proportion, appealing to us through the cunning of their form, scheme, structure, details, ornamentation, we make a different demand from the one we make of a primitive, unique, individual utterance or expression of personality like “Leaves of Grass,” in which the end is not form, but life; not perfection, but suggestion; not intellect, but character; not beauty, but power; not carving, or sculpture, or architecture, but the building of a man.

It is no doubt a great loss to be compelled to read any work of literary art in a conscious critical mood, because the purely intellectual interest in such a work which criticism demands, is far less satisfying than our æsthetic interest. The mood in which we enjoy a poem is analogous to that in which it was conceived. We have here the reason why the professional reviewer is so apt to miss the characteristic quality of the new book, and why the readers of great publishing houses make so many mistakes. They call into play a conscious mental force that is inimical to the emotional mood in which the work had its rise; what was love in the poet becomes a pale intellectual reflection in the critic.

Love must come first, or there can be no true criticism; the intellectual process must follow and be begotten by an emotional process. Indeed, criticism is an afterthought; it is such an account as we can give of the experience we have had in private communion with the subject of it. The conscious analytical intellect takes up one by one, and examines the impression made upon our subconsciousness by the new poem or novel.

Where nothing has been sown, nothing can be reaped. The work that has yielded us no enjoyment will yield us no positive results in criticism. Dr. Louis Waldstein, in his suggestive work on “The Subconscious Self,” discovers that the critical or intellectual mood is foreign to art; that it destroys or decreases the spontaneity necessary to creation. This is why the critical and the creative faculty so rarely go together, or why one seems to work against the other. Probably in all normal, well-balanced minds the appreciation of a work of the imagination is a matter of feeling and intuition long before it is a matter of intellectual cognizance. Not all minds can give a reason for the faith that is in them, and it is not important that they should; the main matter is the faith. Every great work of art will be found upon examination to have an ample ground of critical principles to rest upon, though in the artist’s own mind not one of these principles may have been consciously defined.

Indeed, the artist who works from any theory is foredoomed to at least partial failure. And art that lends itself to any propaganda, or to any idea “outside its essential form, falls short of being a pure art creation.”

The critical spirit, when it has hardened into fixed standards, is always a bar to the enjoyment or understanding of a poet. One then has a poetical creed, as he has a political or religious creed, and this creed is likely to stand between him and the appreciation of a new poetic type. Macaulay thought Leigh Hunt was barred from appreciating his “Lays of Ancient Rome” by his poetical creed, which may have been the case. Jeffrey was no doubt barred from appreciating Wordsworth by his poetical creed. It was Byron’s poetical creed that led him to rank Pope so highly. A critic who holds to one of the conflicting creeds about fiction, either that it should be realistic or romantic, will not do justice to the other type. If Tolstoi is his ideal, he will set little value on Scott; or if he exalts Hawthorne, he will depreciate Howells. What the disinterested observer demands is the best possible work of each after its kind. Or, if he is to compare and appraise the two kinds, then I think that without doubt his conclusion will be that the realistic novel is the later, maturer growth, more in keeping with the modern demand for reality in all fields, and that the romantic belongs more to the world of childish things, which we are fast leaving behind us.

Our particular predilections in literature must, no doubt, be carefully watched. There is danger in personal absorption in an author,--danger to our intellectual freedom. One would not feel for a poet the absorbing and exclusive love that the lover feels for his mistress, because one would rather have the whole of literature for his domain. One would rather admire Rabelais with Sainte-Beuve, as a Homeric buffoon, than be a real “Pantagruelist devotee,” who finds a flavor even in “the dregs of Master François’s cask” that he prefers to all others. No doubt some of us, goaded on by the opposite vice in readers and critics, have been guilty of an intemperate enthusiasm toward Whitman and Browning. To make a cult of either of these authors, or of any other, is to shut one’s self up in a part when the whole is open to him. The opposite vice, that of violent personal antipathy, is equally to be avoided in criticism. Probably Sainte-Beuve was guilty of this vice in his attitude toward Balzac; Schérer in his criticism of Béranger, and Landor in his dislike of Dante. One might also cite Emerson’s distaste for Poe and Shelley, and Arnold’s antipathy to Victor Hugo’s poetry. Likes and dislikes in literature that are temperamental, that are like the attraction or repulsion of bodies in different electrical conditions, are hard to be avoided, but the trained reader may hope to overcome them. Taste is personal, but the intellect is, or should be, impersonal, and to be able to guide the former by the light of the latter is the signal triumph of criticism.

VI

“THOU SHALT NOT PREACH ”

_After Reading Tolstoi on “What is Art?”_

There is one respect in which pure art and pure science agree: both are disinterested, and seek the truth, each of its kind, for its own sake; neither has any axe to grind. Both would live in the whole,--one through reason and investigation, the other through imagination and contemplation. Science seeks to understand the universe, art to enjoy it. A man of pure science like Darwin is as disinterested as a great artist like Shakespeare. He has no practical or secondary ends; the truth alone is his quest. He is tracing the footsteps of creative energy through organic nature. He is like a detective working up a case. His theory about it is only provisional, for the moment. Every fact is welcome to him, and the more it seems to tell against his theory of the case, the more eagerly he weighs it and studies it. Indeed, the man of science follows an ideal as truly as does the poet, and will pass by fortune, honors, and all worldly success, to cleave to it. Tolstoi thinks that science for science’ sake is as bad as art for art’s sake; but is not knowledge a reward in itself, and is there any higher good than that mastery of the intellect over the problems of the universe which science gives? By bending science to particular and secondary ends we lay the basis of our material civilization, but it is still true that the final end of science is, not our material benefit, but our mental enlightenment; nor is the highest end of art the good which the preacher and the moralist seek to give us. A poem of Milton’s or Tennyson’s carries its own proof, its own justification. When we demand a message of the poet, or of any artist, outside of himself, outside of the truth which he unconsciously conveys through his own personality and point of view, we degrade his art, or destroy that disinterestedness which is its crown. Art exists for ideal ends; it looks askance at devotees, at doctrinaires, at all men engaged in the dissemination of particular ideas. I am not now thinking of art as mere craft, but as the province of man’s freest, most spontaneous, most joyous, most complete soul activity,--the kind of activity that has no other end, seeks no other reward, than it finds in or of itself, the joy of being and beholding, the free play of creative energy. Art does not rebuke vice, it depicts it; it does not urge reform, it shows us the reformers. Its work is play, its lesson is an allegory. The preacher works by selection and exclusion, the artist by inclusion and contrast.