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THE MODERN LIBRARY
OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
COPYRIGHT, 1919,
By BONI & LIVERIGHT, ING
Printed in the U. S. A.
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
CRITICISM is no isolated thing; it is not an amusement of
elegant triflers; it is not-as many people think-a sport of
aloof academicians. It is as present as the air, as concrete
as bread, and far more necessary to human civilization than
steam or petrol.. The proverbial Philistine who refuses to
see a play that will not make him laugh practices criticism
of the most formidable kind and reveals in that practice all
he is. For consider the implications of his critical reaction:
the utter lack of humane sympathies, the stubborn defiance
of all gentler influences, the hard determination to give no
part of his earnings for anything that neither stirs his senses
nor flatters his consciousness of superiority. Consider, fur-
thermore, the forces in his civilization that have made him
what he is: the insistence on mechanical values, the steely
ferocities of business competition, the militant subordination
of all the elements of life to one coarse and impoverishing
kind of success. I could go further and point out how this
Philistine's lack of a subtle shame in his attitude, indeed his
brazen pride in it, demonstrates the failure on the part of the
intellectuals of his age and country to create a cultural
atmosphere in which he would be forced, despite himself,
into an uneasy awareness of the poverty of his own soul.
And I could proceed to an analysis of the impotence of
these intellectuals. Or else, I could select another critical
reaction of our average business man: his moral indignation
over a literary or dramatic treatment of sex, and I could
readily derive that from his own furtive grossness or em-
bittered self-repression. ... But it is already clear that
the humblest critical remark made by a random man or
woman in any crowd you please has implications that can
sear the soul or cry to heaven. ...
It follows, does it no“, that the professional critic deals
of ad of suc lack of demonstand co be forority of
atmospheuineasy avered to an ancould selectoral indignatud
and I telectuals. age business atment of serossnes of that
INTRODUCTION
tribal classroohese two the evacia that boating cose alean the wo the
constantly with the deepest forces that govern the life of
man? He is in daily contact with men's notions of those
fundamental values that determine their selection and shap-
ing of the stuff of life into the structures of art; he is in
contact with the infinitely varying moods that the world
evokes in the soul, and with the flaming apparition of beauty
in its myriad forms. And by virtue of his self-appointed
office he is a guide, a universal guide, through the mazes
of art and life. It is no wonder that the average critic, who
is either a teacher or a reviewer, shrinks from his true busi-
ness, and devotes himself to formal studies in literary his-
tory, rhetorical trifling, or the expression of the average
tribal reaction to new books and plays. The ordinary col-
lege classroom, the ordinary literary page of the newspapers,
illustrates these two typical evasions of the critic's function.
And in both cases the evasion is loudly or tacitly justified
by the staggering assumption that literature is but an elegant
diversion-like tennis or motor-boating--that "Job" and
"Faust,” Shelley's verse or Flaubert's prose are less closely
interwoven with the very texture of our lives than the words
of the man who preaches in some conventicle around the
corner, or the mouthing of some politician across the
street. ... The average man knows better. He suspects
that literature is a thing of blood and tears. That is why
he avoids it. Life has become very easy for him to-day.
Religion has lost its power: the social ideals have not yet
achieved theirs. He can make money and spend it and dis-
regard his soul. So long as he can avoid art he can drift
on in his comfortable emptiness and sloth. And the teachers
and reviewers fall in with his mood and either embalm formal
investigations in technical journals or tell him, in the papers
and periodicals, that Booth Tarkington is an interpreter of
human life and O. Henry a master. . ...
We have critics who conceive more nobly and severely
of their calling. Among the older group of them it is neces-
sary to point out only Mr. Paul Elmer More. He is a
scholar of high and fine accomplishment. He not only
knows but with a cold passion proclaims his knowledge of
the oneness of literature and life und of the deep sources
INTRODUCTION
of the critic's aims and works. Unfortunately for the solid-
ity of his fame and the extert of his influence, Mr. More
has an icy and cosmic arrogance which, by its antecedent
assumptions, invalidates his whole critical thought. Un-
daunted by history or science, unsubdued by the surgings of
the "cosmic weather,” calmly oblivious of the crumbling of
every absolute ever invented by man, he continues in his
fierce and growing isolation to assert that he knows what
human life ought to be and what kinds of literature ought to
be permitted to express its character. That a form of art
or life exists and that it engages the whole hearts of men
makes little difference to him. He knows. ... And what
does he know? Only, at bottom, his own temperamental
tastes and impulses which he seeks to rationalize by an ap-
peal to carefully selected and isolated tendencies in art and
thought. And, having rationalized them by an artifice so
fragile, he seeks to impose them upon the men and the art-
ists of his own day in the form of laws. I know his reply
so well. It is this, that if you abandon his method, you
sink into universal scepticism and indiscriminate acceptance.
The truth is that I believe far more than he does. For I
love beauty in all its forms and find life tragic and worthy
of my sympathy in every manifestation. I need no hierar-
chical moral world for my dwelling-place, because I desire
neither to judge nor to condemn. Fixed standards are use-
less to him whose central passion is to have men free. Mr.
More needs them for the same inner reason--infinitely rari-
fied and refined, of course for which they are necessary to
the inquisitor and the militant patriot. He wants to damn
· heretics ... I do not. His last refuge, like that of every
absolutist at bay, would be in the corporate judgment of
mankind. Yes, mankind has let the authoritarians impose
on it only too often. But their day is nearly over. And I
need not stop to show how flimsy a fiction that corporate
judgment is, so soon as any reasonable interpretation is given
to the word judgment. Anatole France and Jules Lemaître
did that years ago (vide infra) with a blending of delicacy
and severity which I could not hope to emulate.
But we are not left, most fortunately, wholly to the mercy
INTRODUCTION
of Mr. More's and Professor Irving Babbit's and Professor
Stuart P. Sherman's vision of a static universe with them-
selves in the inner shrine determining the eternal fixities that
they promulgate. . A group of critics, young men or men
who do not grow old, are at work upon the creation of a
civilized cultural atmosphere in America. Their circle of
readers is still small and their influence limited. Every man's
hand is against theirs. Like a troup of shivering young
Davids-slim and frail but with a glint of morning sunshine
on their foreheads—they face an army of Goliaths. One of
them, the admirable Randolph Bourne, has already fallen.
But enough are left and others are certain to arise. The
purpose of this book is to furnish them with stones for
their slings. ...
For this collection of modern critical passages will give
the liberal critics of America-whose knowledge is not always
equal to the energy and freedom of their minds—docu-
-mentary evidence of three facts of the first importance:
Firstly, that their battle was fought and won in France thirty
years ago; secondly, that in Germany, where the heritage of
Goethe's supreme vision made the battle needless, a com-
plete philosophical basis for the new criticism has been pro-
vided; thirdly, and more obviously, that the chief creative
minds of contemporary England and Ireland are fighting
with them. And that documentary evidence will not only,
as I hope, hearten this school of critics, but by its dissemi-
nation will increase their audience and ease the conflict in
which they are engaged. It is for their sake and for the
sake of those finer and freer influences so often balked and
silenced among us that I would have this little book reach,
sooner or later, the mind of every student and teacher of
literature, the mind of every reviewer of books and plays
in America.
LUDWIG LEWISOHN.
New York,
August, 1919.
NOTE
THE preparation of this anthology would, of course, have
been impossible without the coöperation of both authors and
publishers. Hence I tender my hearty thanks to Messrs.
Brentano for the extracts from Bernard Shaw; to Charles
Scribner's Sons for those from John Galsworthy; to George
H. Doran Company for the selections from Arnold Bennett;
to Little Brown and Company, the Frederick H. Stokes
Company, and Henry Holt and Company for the passages
by W. L. George, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joel Elias
Spingarn. Mr. B. W. Huebsch has been particularly gen-
erous in permitting me to quote from the books of Francis
Hackett and Van Wyck Brooks and from an unpublished
volume of the late Randolph Bourne. Mr. Arthur Symons,
Mr. James Huneker, Mr. Henry L. Mencken, and Mr. John
Copper Powys have most kindly given their personal per-
mission for quotations from their critical writings, and Mr.
Huneker and Mr. Mencken have assisted me in the selection
of appropriate extracts from their works. The translations
of all passages in Part One and Part Two are my own, except
that of Hofmannsthal's "The Poet and His Hearer," which,
through the mediation of Mr. Huebsch, I was enabled to
borrow from a manuscript by Mrs. H. H. Joseph of Cleve-
land. For invaluable suggestions and bibliographical ma-
terial I am deeply indebted to my friends, Dr. T. Böhme
and Professor C. von Klenze.
L. L.

CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION
RODUCTION
.
.
.
.
.
io
.
i
PART ONE
SACH
* ANATOLE FRANCE
I. THE ADVENTURES OF THE SOUL . .
II. THE SACRED GROVES
III. THE GUARDED SECRETS .
IV. THE DISPUTES OF THE FLUTE-PLAYERS
JULES LEMAÎTRE
1. THE CRITICISM OF CONTEMPORARIES.
II. PERSONALITY IN CRITICISM
III. TRADITION AND LOVE
REMY DE GOURMONT
I. THE SELF AND THE WORLD
II. LITERARY INFLUENCES
III. VISION AND EMOTION
IV. FORM AND SUBSTANCE .
OU
PART Two
FRIEDRICH HEBBEL
I. APHORISMS ON ART .
II. APHORISMS ON THE DRAMA
AI
WILHELM DILTHEY
I. THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION
II. EXPERIENCE AND CREATION
.
.
t)
tin
CONTENTS'
PAGE
JOHANNES VOLKELT
THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF TRA-
GEDY . . . . . .
RICHARD MORITZ MEYER
THE MODERN POET,
GEDY
55
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
I. THE HIDDEN POET.
II. THE POET AND HIS HEARER
RICHARD MUELLER-FREIENFELS
CREATIVE ART IN LIFE .
.
.
.
ALFRED KERR
THE CRITIC AS CREATOR,
.
.
PART THREE
GEORGE MOORE
THE VILLA AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
.
87
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I. THE SOURCES OF IDEALISM
II. THE NEW SPIRIT IN LITERATURE
..
ARTHUR SYMONS
I. ON PROSE AND VERSE
II. THE INDEPENDENCE OF POETRY .
IOI
.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
I. SOME PLATITUDES CONCERNING DRAMA 112
II. ART . . . .
:
. - 118
ARNOLD BENNETT
I. A POET AND HIS PEOPLE .
II. ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM
W. L. GEORGE
SINCERITY AND LITERATURE .
.
.
.
.
122
125
.
.
128
CONTENTS
PAGE
.
.
134
THOMAS MACDONAGH
IRELAND AND THE NEW PATHS .
JOHN CORPER Powys
SUSPENDED JUDGMENT. .
.
. 139
PART FOUR
147
153
· 156
159
JAMES HUNEKER
I. CONCERNING CRITICS
ro i
II. THE LAWBREAKER . . . .
JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN
I. ART AS EXPRESSION
II. THE SEVEN ARTS AND THE SEVEN CON-
FUSIONS . . . . .
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN
I. HOMILETICS OF CRITICISM ..
II. THE CRITIC'S FUNCTION .
III. THE PURITAN AND AMERICAN LITER-
ATURE . . .
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
I. LITERATURE AND LIFE .. . .
II. A NOTE ON TRAGEDY . . .
FRANCIS HACKETT
THE SICKBED OF CULTURE . . :
VAN WYCK BROOKS
I. AN EXTERNAL CIVILIZATION
:
II. THE FEAR OF EXPERIENCE
III. UNPRACTICAL CRITICS .
RANDOLPH BOURNE
A LITERARY RADICAL . . . .
·
·
171 .
190
194
198
202
206
PART ONE
ANATOLE FRANCE
I
THE ADVENTURES OF THE SOUL
As I understand criticism it is, like philosophy and his-
tory, a kind of novel for the use of discreet and curious
minds. And every novel, rightly understood, is an autobi-
ography. The good critic is he who relates the adventures
of his soul among masterpieces.
There is no such thing as objective criticism any more
than there is objective art, and all who flatter themselves
that they put aught but themselves into their work are
dupes of the most fallacious illusion. The truth is that one
never gets out of oneself. That is one of our greatest
miseries. What would we not give to see, if but for a
minute, the sky and the earth with the many-facetted eye
of a fly, or to understand nature with the rude and simple
brain of an ape? But just that is forbidden us. We cannot,
like Tiresias, be men and remember having been women.
We are locked into our persons as into a lasting prison.
The best we can do, it seems to me, is gracefully to recog-
nize this terrible situation and to admit that we speak of
ourselves every time that we have not the strength to be
silent.
To be quite frank, the critic ought to say:
“Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself on the sub-
ject of Shakespeare, or Racine, or Pascal, or Goethe--sub-
jects that offer me a beautiful opportunity.”
I had the honor of knowing M. Cuvillier-Fleury, who
was a very earnest old critic. One day when I had come
to see him in his little house in the Avenue Raphael, he
showed me the modest library of which he was proud.
"Sir," he said to me, "oratory, pure literature, philosophy,
history, all the kinds are represented here, without counting
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
criticism which embraces them all. Yes, the critic is by
turn orator, philosopher, historian.”
M. Cuvillier-Fleury was right. The critic is all that or,
at least, he ought to be. He has occasion to show the
rarest, most diverse, most varied faculties of the intellect.
And when he is a Sainte-Beuve, a Taine, a Jules Lemaître,
a Ferdinand Brunetière, he does not fail to do so. Remain-
ing definitely within himself he creates the intellectual his-
tory of man. Criticism is the youngest of all the literary
forms: it will perhaps end by absorbing all the others. It
is admirably suited to a very civilized society with rich
memories and long traditions. It is particularly appropriate
to a curious, learned and polite humanity. For its pros-
perity it demands more culture than any of the other literary
forms. Its creators were Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, Bayle,
Montesquieu. It proceeds simultaneously from philosophy
and history. It has required, for its development, an epoch
of absolute intellectual liberty. It has replaced theology and,
if one were to seek the universal doctor, the Saint Thomas
Aquinas of the nineteenth century, of whom would one be
forced to think but of Sainte-Beuve? ...
According to Littré a book is a bound bundle of paper
sheets whether hand-written or printed. That definition
does not satisfy me. I would define a book as a work of
magic whence escape all kinds of images to trouble the
souls and change the hearts of men. Or, better still, a book
is a little magic apparatus which transports us among the
images of the past or amidst supernatural shades. Those
who read many books are like the eaters of hashish. They
live in a dream. The subtle poison that penetrates their
brain renders them insensible to the real world and makes
them the prey of terrible or delightful phantoms. Books
are the opium of the Occident. They devour us. A day
is coming on which we shall all be keepers of libraries, and
that will be the end.
Let us love books as the mistress of the poet loved her
grief. Let us love them: they cost us dear enough. Yes,
books kill us. You may believe me who adore them, who
have long given myself to them without reserve. Books
ANATOLE FRANCE
slay ulived for lantions were from barbarisks they wer heart
slay us. We have too many of them and too many kinds.
Men lived for long ages without reading and precisely in
those ages their actions were greatest and most useful, for it
was then that they passed from barbarism to civilization.
But because men were then without books they were not
bare of poetry and morality: they knew songs by heart
and little catechisms. In their childhood old women told
them the stories of the Ass's Skin and of Puss in Boots of
which, much later, editions for bibliophiles have been made.
The earliest books were great rocks covered with inscriptions
in an administrative or religious style.
It is a long time since then. What frightful progress we
have made in the interval! Books multiplied in a marvel-
lous fashion in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. To-
day their production has increased an hundredfold. In
Paris alone fifty books are published daily without counting
the newspapers. It is a monstrous orgy. We shall emerge
from it quite mad. It is man's fate to fall successively into
contradictory extremes. In the Middle Ages ignorance bred
fear. Thus maladies of the mind reigned then which we
no longer know. To-day, through study, we are hastening
toward general paralysis. Would it not be wiser and more
elegant to keep some measure?
Let us be lovers of books and let us read them: but let
us not gather them with indiscriminate hands: let us be
delicate: let us choose, and, like that lord in one of Shakes-
peare's comedies, let us say to our book-seller: "I would
that they be well-bound and that they speak of love."
II
THE SACRED GROVES
THE kindly influence of the works of the masters inspires
wise discourse, grave and familiar speech, wavering images
like garlands constantly broken and constantly reknotted,
long reveries, a vague and gentle curiosity that clings to all
things but would exhaust none, the memory of what was
dear, the forgetfulness of ugly cares and the return to one's
...a vague and broken and cech, wavering inspires
* ugly cares angemory of lines to ali
AM
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
own soul. When we read, then, these excellent books, these
books of life, we cause them to pass into ourselves. The
critic must be thoroughly penetrated by the knowledge that
every book exists in as many different forms as it has read-
ers and that a poem, like a landscape, becomes transformed
for every eye that sees it, for every soul that apprehends it.
Some years ago, when I was passing fair days under the
pines of Hohwald, I was astonished, during my long rambles,
to come upon a bench at every point where the shade was
most grateful, the view most extensive, nature most engag-
ing. These rustic benches bore names that betrayed the
sentiments of those who had placed them there. One was
called Friendship's Meetingplace, another Sophie's Rest, a
third Charlotte's Dreami.
These good Alsatians who had contrived for their friends
and for the passers-by these places of rest and of meeting,
taught me what kindness those may practice who have lived
in the lands of the spirit and have long travelled there. I,
for my part, determined to go about placing rustic seats in
the sacred groves and near the fountains of the Muses.
That modest and pious woodman's task suits me marvel-
lously. It requires neither learning nor system and asks
only an exquisite astonishment before the beauty of things.
Let the village sage, let the surveyor measure the roads and
place the mile-stones. As for me, the kindly care of places
of rest and meeting and of dreams shall busy me enough.
Fit for my tastes and adjusted to my strength is that task
of criticism which is lovingly to place benches in beautiful
spots and to say with Anytas of Tegaeus:
“Whoever thou art, come and sit in the shade of this
beautiful laurel tree that we may here sing praises to the
immortal gods!”
III
THE GUARDED SECRETS
M. FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE, of whom I am very fond,
has a great quarrel with me. He reproaches me with mis-
ANATOLE FRANCE
understanding the very laws of criticism, with having no
criterion by which to judge the things of the mind, with
floating amid contradictions with no guide but my instincts,
with never getting out of myself, with being enclosed within
my subjectivity as in a dark prison. Far from complaining
at being thus attacked, I rejoice in this honorable dispute,
every circumstance of which flatters me: the merit of my
opponent, the severity of a censure which yet hides so much
indulgence, the greatness of the interests involved. For,
according to M. Brunetière, there is at stake nothing less
than the intellectual future of our country. ...
I have many disadvantages if I must necessarily contend
with M. Brunetière. I shall not point out the inequalities
so certain as to be obvious at once. I shall merely indicate
one of a very special nature. It is this, that while he finds
my criticism vexatious, I find his excellent. I am thus
reduced to that defensive position which all tacticians con-
sider bad. I hold the powerful critical structures of M.
Brunetière in very high esteem. I admire the solidity of
their materials and the greatness of their plan. I have just
read the discourses delivered at the École normale by this
most able lecturer on the Evolution of Criticism from the
Renaissance to Our Days, and I feel no displeasure in pro-
claiming that his ideas are conducted with much method,
marshalled in an order that is most happy, impressive and
new. Their march, heavy but sure, recalls the famous man-
cuvre of the legionaries, who advanced in closely serried
ranks under protection of their shields to the assault of a
city. That was the famous testudo formation, and it was a
formidable one. A little surprise is mixed, perhaps, with
my admiration when I see whither that army of ideas is
bound. M. Ferdinand Brunetière plans to apply to literary
criticism the theories of evolution. And, if this enterprise
seems interesting and praiseworthy in itself, yet one has not
forgotten the energy recently expended by this critic in the
cause of subordinating science to morals and of weakening
the authority of every doctrine founded on the natural sci-
ences. ... I do not at all affirm that M. Brunetière belies
his own convictions or contradicts himself. I mark a trait
6
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
of his nature, a turn of his character which is, with a great
deal of consistency, to fall voluntarily into the unexpected
and the unforeseen. It was said, one day, that he was
paradoxical, and that saying seemed an ironical one, so
solidly established was his reputation as a good reasoner.
But one has come to see on reflection that he is, in fact, a
trifle paradoxical in his manner. His ability in proving
things is prodigious: he must always be proving something,
and he is fond, at times, of powerfully supporting extraor-
dinary and even stultifying opinions.
By what cruel fate am I doomed to admire a critic who
corresponds so little to my sentiments! For M. Ferdinand
Brunetiére there are simply two kinds of critical methods:
the subjective, which is bad, and the objective, which is
good. According to him, M. Jules Lemaître, M. Paul Des-
jardins and myself—we are tainted with subjectivity, and
that is the worst of evils: for from subjectivity one falls
into illusion, into sensuality and into lust, and judges the
works of man by the pleasure that they give one, which is
an abominable thing. For one must not be pleased with
some product of the mind until one knows whether one is
right in being so pleased; for man is, above all, a rational
animal and he must first use his reason; hence it is neces-
sary to be right and it is not necessary to find pleasure;
for it is the attribute of man to seek to instruct himself by
the methods of logic, which are infallible; hence one ought
always to put a truth at the end of a chain of reasoning,
like a knot at the end of a plait; for without that, the
reasoning will not keep from unravelling, and it must keep
from unravelling; and thereupon one joins together several
strands of reasoning in such a way as to form an indestruc-
tible system--which lasts a dozen years. And that is why
objective criticism is the only good criticism.
M. Ferdinand Brunetière holds the other method to be
fallacious and deceptive. And he gives various reasons. But
I am forced, first of all, to produce the incriminating text.
It is a passage in my Vie littéraire which reads as follows:
“There is no such thing as objective criticism any more
than there is objective art, and all who flatter themselves
that they put aught but themselves into their work are
dupes of the most fallacious illusion. The truth is that one
never gets out of oneself. That is one of our greatest mis-
eries. What would we not give to see, if but for a minute,
the sky and the earth with the many-facetted eye of a fly,
or to understand nature with the rude and simple brain
of an ape? But just that is forbidden us. We cannot, like
Tiresias, be men and remember having been women. We
are locked into our persons as into a lasting prison. The
best we can do, it seems to me, is gracefully to recognize
this terrible situation and to admit that we speak of our-
selves every time that we have not the strength to be
silent.”
M. Brunetière, having quoted these lines, remarks at once
"that one cannot affirm with greater assurance that nothing
is sure." I could easily answer that no contradiction is
involved, since there is no novelty in asserting that we are
fated to know things only by the impressions which they
make on us. That is a truth which observation can estab-
lish and so striking a one that it reaches everyone. It is a
commonplace of philosophy. One need not fix one's atten-
a doctrinal pyrrhonism. I confess that I have more than
once glanced sidewise at absolute scepticism. But I have
never entered that region; I have been afraid to put my
foot on that foundation which engulfs everything one en-
trusts to it. I have feared the formidable sterility of those
two words: "I doubt.” Such is their force that the lips
which have once advisedly uttered them are forever sealed
and can never more be opened. If one doubts, one must be
silent; for whatever discourse one may hold, to speak is in
itself to affirm. And since I have not had the courage of
silence and of renunciation, I have desired to believe and I
have believed. I have believed at least in the relativity of
things and in the succession of phenomena.
In fact, reality and appearance—it is all one. To love
and to suffer in this world, images suffice; it is not necessary
that their objectivity be demonstrated. In whatever fashion
one conceives of life, and though one knows it to be the
8 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
dream of a dream-one lives. That is all we need to found
sciences, arts, moralities, impressionistic and, if you please,
objective criticism. M. Brunetière is of the opinion that one
can leave one's inner self and proceed beyond that self as
much as one desires, like that old professor of Nürenberg
whose surprising adventure M. Josephin Peladan, who is a
mage, has recently related. This professor, who was much
occupied with aesthetics, nightly left his visible body and
proceeded, in his astral body, to compare the legs of the
lovely mortal sleepers with those of the Venus of Praxiteles.
"The self-deception,” M. Brunetière affirms, "if we must
assume its existence, is in believing and teaching that we
cannot get out of our ego when, on the contrary, the whole
business of life is precisely that. And the reason for this
will undoubtedly seem very strong when we remember that
otherwise there would be no such thing as society or lan-
guage or literature or art.” And he adds: “We are men.
.... And we are men, above all, by the power we have of
going forth from ourselves in order to seek, to find and to
recognize those very selves in others.”
That is surely saying a great deal. We are in the cave and
we see the phantoms of the cave. Without that life would
be too sad. It has no charm and no preciousness save by
virtue of the shadows that flit along the sides of the walls
within which we are prisoned, shadows that resemble us
and that we strive to recognize as they pass and, sometimes,
to love.
As a matter of fact, we see the world only through the
medium of our senses which shape and color it as they
please, and M. Brunetière does not contest the point. He
seeks support, on the contrary, in these conditions of our
knowledge to found his objective criticism. Considering
that the senses bring to all men impressions of nature that
are very nearly alike, so that what seems round to one will
hardly seem square to another, and that the sense of hear-
ing functions in the same way if not in the same degree in
all minds, he derives from these facts what we call common
sense, and founds his criticism on this universal agreement.
He is not himself without the perception that it is thus ill-
ANATOLE FRANCE
.: 9
founded. For this agreement, which suffices to form and
preserve societies, does not suffice when it is a question of
establishing the superiority of one poet over another.
Granted that men are sufficiently alike for each to find in
the market places and in the bazaars of a great city what
is necessary for his existence. So much is not doubtful.
But nothing is less probable than that there should be but
two men in one country who feel a Vergilian line in abso-
lutely the same fashion.
In mathematics there is a kind of superior truth which we
all accept. But we do so for the very reason that its per-
ception is not through the senses. Physicists, on the other
hand, are forced to reckon with what is called the per-
enon is never perceived absolutely alike by any two ob-
servers.
M. Brunetière cannot hide from himself the fact that the
personal equation disports itself nowhere more freely than
in the illusive domains of the arts and of literature.
In that field there is never unanimous agreement or stable
opinion. He acknowledges that. Or, at least, begins by
acknowledging it. "To omit our contemporaries whom, it
is clear, we see in no proper perspective, how many varying
judgments have not men, during the past three or four cen-
turies, delivered on a Corneille or a Shakespeare or a Cer-
vantes, a Raphael or a Michel Angelo! Even as there is no
opinion so extravagant and absurd but that some philoso-
pher has upheld it, so there is none, however scandalous or
hostile to great genius, which does not bear the authority.
of some critic's name.” And to prove that the great men
cannot expect any more justice from their peers, he shows
us Rabelais insulted by Ronsard and Corneille publicly pre-
ferring Boursault to Racine. He ought also to have shown
us Lamartine despising La Fontaine; he could also have
exhibited Victor Hugo badly misjudging all our classics ex-
cept Boileau, for whom, in his declining age, he entertained
some kindness.
In a word, M. Brunetière admits that there are very many
directly conflicting opinions in the republic of letters. It is
10 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
in vain that he bethinks himself later and declares with assur-
ance that "it is not true that the opinions are so divergent
or the divisions so deep." It is equally in vain that he bor-
rows the authority of an opinion of M. Tules Lemaître to
affirm the admission by all lettered men that certain writers
exist, despite their faults, while others simply do not exist.
For instance, Voltaire as a writer of tragic drama exists;
Campistron does not, nor the Abbé Leblanc nor M. de Jouy.
That is the first point that he wishes one to grant him.
But one will hardly do so, for when it came to making out
the two lists there would hardly be any common under-
standing.
| The second point to which he clings is that there are
degrees which are really grades conferred on genius by facul-
ties of grammarians and in the universities of rhetoricians.
Obviously such diplomas might tend a good deal to further
order and regularity in the realm of great fame. Unhappily
they lose much of their value through human contradictori-
ness. These licences and doctorates, which M. Brunetière
believes universally recognized, impress scarcely anyone but
those who confer them.
As a matter of pure theory a critical method is conceivable
which, proceeding from science, might share the latter's cer-
tainty. It may be that the sentiments we entertain toward
the ethics of M. Maurice Barrès or the prosody of Mr. Jean
Moréas depend on the idea we hold concerning the forces
of the cosmos and the mechanics of the heavens. All things
in the universe are inextricably intertwined. In reality,
however, the links of the chain are, in any given spot, so
jumbled that the devil himself could not disentangle them,
even if he were a logician. And in addition, we should
gracefully admit that what humanity knows least about is
its beginnings. . It is the fundamental principles that we
lack in all matters and particularly in our knowledge of the
products of the mind. One cannot foresee to-day, what-
ever one may say, a time when criticism will have the rigor-
ousness of a positive science. One may even believe, rea-
sonably enough, that that time will never come. Never-
theless the great philosophers of antiquity crowned their
ANATOLE FRANCE
II
cosmic systems with a poetics. And they did wisely. For
it is better to speak of beautiful thoughts and forms with
incertitude than to be forever silent. Few things in the
world are so absolutely subject to science that they will let
science reproduce or predict them. And one may be sure
that a poem or a poet will never be among those few. The
things that touch us most nearly, that seem loveliest and
most desirable to us, are precisely those that remain ever
vague to us and partly mysterious. Beauty, virtue and
genius will forever guard their secret. Neither the charm
of Cleopatra nor the sweetness of Saint Francis nor the
poetry of Racine will ever permit themselves to be reduced
to formulæ. If these things sustain a relation to science, it
is to one that is blended with art, that is intuitive, restless,
forever unfinished. That science or, rather, that art exists.
It is philosophy, ethics, history, criticism-in a word, the
whole beautiful romance of man.
Every work of poetry or art has been in all ages the sub-
ject of disputes, and it is perhaps one of the great charms of
beautiful things to remain questionable. And it is vain to
deny that they are all, all questionable. M. Brunetière is
quite unwilling to admit this universal and fatal incertitude.
It is too repugnant to his authoritarian and methodical mind,
which would be forever classifying and judging. Let him
judge, then, since his temper is so judicial. And let him
drive his serried arguments in their terrifying battle array
since he is indeed a warrior critic!
But can he not forgive some innocent soul for concerning
itself with the things of art with less rigorousness and con-
sistency than he has, and with displaying less use of the
reason, above all, of ratiocination? Can he not forgive such
an one for keeping in criticism the tone of familiar talk and
the light step of a stroll; for stopping where he pleases and,
perhaps, indulging in confidences; for following his tastes,
his fancies and even his caprice, provided only that he be
always veracious, sincere and kindly; for not knowing every-
thing nor explaining everything; for believing in the irre-
mediable diversity of opinions and feelings and for speaking
most gladly of that which one must love.
12. A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
IV
THE DISPUTES OF THE FLUTE-PLAYERS
IN AESTHETICS, that is to say in the clouds, one can argue
more and better than in any other subject. It is there that
one must be cautious. It is there that one has everything
to fear: indifference as well as partiality, coldness as well
as passion, knowledge as well as ignorance, artfulness, wit,
subtlety and an innocence which is more dangerous than
craft. In all matters of aesthetics you must dread sophisms,
especially when they are beautiful, and you will find ad-
mirable ones. In this field you must not even trust the
mathematical mind, which is so perfect and so sublime, but
of such delicacy as a mechanism that it cannot work except
in the void, because a grain of sand in its wheelwork is
enough to make it go wrong. One shudders when one thinks
to what length such a grain of sand can drag a mathemati-
cal brain. Think of Pascal!
Aesthetics is founded on nothing solid. It is a castle in
the air. Men have tried to prop it upon ethics. But there
is no ethics. There is no sociology. Nor is there any biology.
The completion of the sciences has never existed except in
the brain of M. Auguste Comte, whose books are propheti-
cal. When an exact biology will have been established, that
is to say in some millions of years, it may perhaps be pos-
sible to establish a sociology. That will also take a great
number of centuries. Then will come the time when you
may properly create an aesthetic science on solid founda-
tions. But by that time our planet will be very old and
will approach the term of its destiny. The sun whose spots,
not without reason, trouble us even now, will in those days
turn to the earth a face of sombre and fuliginous red, half
covered by opaque scoriæ, and the last men, taking refuge
in the depths of mines, will be less anxious to dispute on
the essence of the beautiful than to burn their last frag-
ments of coal before plunging into the eternal ice.
Tradition and universal agreement have been taken as
foundations of criticism. Neither one exists. It is true
ANATOLE FRANCE
13
that an almost general opinion favors certain works. But it
does so by virtue of a prejudice and not at all through choice
and the effect of a spontaneous preference. The works which
everybody admires are those which no one looks at. One
receives them like a precious burden which one hands on to
others without looking at it. Do you really believe that
there is much freedom of judgment in the approbation which
we give to the Greek, the Latin or even the French classics?
And is the taste which draws us to a certain contemporary
work and away from some other really free? Is it not de-
termined by many circumstances quite alien to the content
of the work, the chief of which is the spirit of imitation so
powerful both among men and beasts? That spirit of imi-
tation is necessary to us to help us live without too much
disorder; we carry it into all our actions and it dominates
our aesthetic sense. Without it our opinions in matters of
art would be even more diverse than they are. It is in this
way that some work which, for some reason or other, has,
to begin with, gained the suffrages of some, will thereupon
gather those of many. The first alone were free; all the
others did nothing but obey. They have neither spontaneity,
nor insight, nor courage, nor any character. And their
multiplication creates fame. It all depends on a very small
beginning. One also observes that works despised at their
birth have little chance of pleasing later, and that on the
contrary works celebrated from their appearance will long
guard their reputation and be respected even after they have
become unintelligible. The utter dependence of agreement
upon prejudice is proved by the fact that they cease to-
gether. Numerous instances of this could be given. ...
What an interesting book could be written on the varia-
tions of criticism concerning one of those works with which
men have most busied themselves—Hamlet, the Divine
Comedy, the Iliad. The Iliad charms us to-day by a bar-
barous and primitive character which we discover in it in
all good faith. In the seventeenth century Homer was
praised for having observed the rules of epic composition.
"You may be sure," Boileau said, "that if Homer used
the word 'dog' it is because 'dog' is a noble word in Greek.”
Y
14 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
Such ideas seem absurd to us. Ours may seem equally
absurd in two hundred years. For after all, one cannot
rank amid the eternal verities the perception that Homer
is primitive and that primitive barbarism is admirable.
There is not a single opinion in literature which one cannot
easily fight with its precise opposite. Who, then, will be
able to end the disputes of the flute-players?
-La vie litteraire.

JULES LEMAITRE
THE CRITICISM OF CONTEMPORARIES
I RECALL an old article of M. Étienne on the “Contem-
plations" and a study of M. Saint-Réné Taillandier on the
"Tentation de Saint Antoine” which, at that happy age when
indignation. M. Étienne reproached Victor Hugo from end
to end with obscurity, preposterousness, bad taste. M. Tail-
landier, conscientiously examining Flaubert's "piece of
folly,” found in it no clearness, no understanding of history,
no good sense, no decency, no moral insight, no ideal. Both
of them were right. But, since I was very young, I said to
myself: "Ah, my good and enminent professors, good taste,
good sense, good order, morality, the ideal—any other decent
man of letters could have put those into a book! I could do
that much myself if I desired to! But the radiance, the
sonorousness, the abounding lyricism, the brilliant profusion
of images in the “Contemplations," and the strangeness and
plastic perfection of the “Tentation”—these are the things
of which Hugo and Flaubert alone were capable. It would
have been better had they added good taste and good sense:
but, after all, I do not attach so high an importance to
what I might possess or acquire like any other. Where only
that is lacking which you or I might have furnished, I am
not tempted to make so loud a demand. These common
qualities may, indeed, contribute to the perfection of a work.
But by themselves they cut a poor figure while, on the con-
trary, a powerful originality has its independent value and
sweeps us off our feet or charms us even without them.”

.
15
H
otel
16 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
No doubt I went too far. There are necessary rules the
breach of which prevents a book from attaining its highest
possible value, although the interpretation of these rules
may differ widely in rigor. But I was perhaps right in my
admiration, in spite of all, and in my belief that the true
beauty of a book is something intimate and profound, which
can not be hurt even by breaches of the rules of rhetoric or
of convention; that the worth of a writer is above all in a
way of seeing, of feeling and of speaking which is his very
own and which raises him above the common level. I do
not say, of course, that the means do not matter or that al
facile and conscious singularity will suffice.
thoroughly. There are several writers of our time, how-
ever, rare and interesting ones, whom M. Brunetière does
not love. And he does not precisely because he does not
cupied with the to say, a minath century.
Étienne demanded of Victor Hugo and which abound in
the masters of the seventeenth century. Furthermore he
has, I venture to say, a mind too philosophical, too preoc-
cupied with theories to permit it to be frankly engaged by
any books but such as to which he is sufficiently instructed
and reassured in advance. Since his inclination is to classify,
to range authors in groups, to explain the interconnection
between books, to raise general questions, this preoccupation
deters him from penetrating as deeply as he might into the
intelligence and feeling of a new work. His first impulse is
to compare it to the models” and, while he is hastening to
judge it, he forgets to enjoy it, to discover what, after all,
is its peculiar beauty, and whether the author, despite his
faults and prejudices, has not by chance some originality
and power, some impressions, some view of things which
belonged to him alone and distinguished him. But M. Brunet
tière will not enter into any souls except those that have
been dead two hundred years: he disdains ours. He admits
somewhere that in M. Zola's works there are several hundred
fine pages: why does he not talk about them a little? But
he prefers proving in how many ways the rest are bad. Ah,
yes, there is a good deal of useless coarseness in M. Zola,
becne veriut not endone and inte some to
JUL
JULES LEMAÎTRE
17
and his novels are not perhaps as true as he thinks they
are. He is not so fine a psychologist as La Rochefoucauld,
nor so sure a stylist as Flaubert. What of it? For none
the less M. Zola has his own originality, something that
self; and it is precisely that quality which it would be useful
to define after one has felt it.
In brief, M. Brunetière is an excellent judge of the class-
ics because he loves them. Elsewhere I am often tempted
to challenge him, or, at least, to have the impression that
one can understand the criticism of one's contemporaries
quite differently from him, and in a way that is more just
and more prudent at once.
It is perhaps not well to begin by a criticism of their
faults. That is often too easy and has the best chance of
being quite sterile. Such criticism as leads immediately to
general aesthetic considerations is interesting in itself, but
its ostensible objects and may even easily distort them.
The criticism which seeks to assign to new books their place
in the history of literature and to explain their appearance
is often premature. That which classifies them at once is
very arrogant and exposes itself to sharp contradictions.
Furthermore, these various kinds of criticism may each come
at their fit time. But is it not just and necessary to begin,
so far as possible without any preconception, with a sym-
pathetic reading of such books, in order to arrive at a defi-
nition of what element they contain that is original and
belongs strictly to the writer? And that is not so small a
matter as one might think, nor so quickly managed.
This does not amount to a simple-minded fiction by which
writers are to be assigned at once to the same rank. A
sympathetic study must be preceded by a kind of clearing
and sorting which takes place quite naturally. It is plain
that there are books which are not fit subjects for criticism,
which do not rise into the field of artistic being, quite irre-
spective of the number of editions through which they have
passed. On the other hand, omitting a few doubtful cases,
one knows very well and it is an established fact among
18
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
the truly lettered that certain authors, whatever be their
faults or absurdities exist, as we say, and are worthy of being
regarded closely. The author of "Assommoir” is such an
one, even for M. Brunetière, and M. Edmond de Goncourt
is another, in spite of all--and more surely the brothers
Goncourt come into this class. And equally M. Feuillet,
M. Cherbuliez, M. Theuriet. But many of the sub-natural-
ists and sub-idealists do not.
But all those who are in this class, that is to say all those
who, somewhere in their work, produce an aesthetic im-
pression of some power and continuity--these one has un-
questionably the right to criticise, but not to treat harshly,
and one must, above all, thank them for the pleasure which
they have given us. For the beautiful, wherever it is found,
and in whatever company, is still the beautiful, and one
may say that it is everywhere equal to itself or that, if
there be degrees in it, these degrees are essentially variable
according to differing temperaments, characters, turns of
mind, and according to the day, the hour, the moment.
“Germinie Lacerteux," which M. Brunetière treats with so
much contempt, is certainly a less perfect and solid book
than "Madame Bovary”; but the best pages of "Germinie"
have pleased and moved me as much, though in a different
fashion, as the story of Emma itself. And I am ready to
forgive much to anyone who has once given me this great
pleasure. It is doubtless stupid to say to a critic who seems
to you unduly harsh to a book you love: “Let us see you
write as good a one!” But I should wish him to have said
it to himself. I know very well that authors, on their side,
have often a quite unintelligent contempt for critics. I have
heard a young novelist maintain with less wit than assurance
that the least of novelists and playwrights is still superior
to the best of critics and historians and that, for instance,
a certain purveyor to the “Petit Journal” outweighs M. Taine
who does not invent stories. This young man did not even
know that there are several sorts of invention. I am not
angry with him. It belongs to the character of a good critic
to understand more things than a young novelist and to be
more indulgent.
JULES LEMAÎTRE
19
Thus it is in a spirit of sympathy and of love that one
ought to approach those of our contemporaries who are not
beneath criticism. One ought first to analyze the impres-
sion which one receives from a book; next one should try
to define the author, to describe his "form,” to delineate his
temperament-what the world means to him and what he
seeks in it by preference, what is his feeling toward life,
what is the degree of his sensitiveness, finally, how his mind
is constituted. Thus one comes to identify oneself so com-
pletely with the writer whom one loves that, when he com-
mits grave faults, it gives one pain, genuine pain; but at
the same time one sees so clearly why he let himself go in
that direction, how his faults are a part of his very self,
that they first seem inevitable and almost necessary and
soon more than excusable and even amusing. And that is
why, though there is much to be said against “Bouvard et
Pecuchet,” and though the book is frankly bad if judged
according to the principles of M. Brunetière, I open it gladly
and always read it with pleasure, and here and there with
delight. And that is because I find Flaubert in it in the
full expansiveness or rather, since he has no such quality, in
the extreme contraction of his manias and stubbornnesses
as an artist; but I find him there with all his qualities
more precise, more drily and stringently defined, than al-
most anywhere else. And that in itself pleases me. For
what, in the last analysis, is interesting in a work of art
is the transformation or even the distortion of reality through
a mind; it is that mind itself, provided it be a peerless
one.
"And what one loves in you, madame, is—you!"
What I love in the most unsuccessful book of Flaubert, is
still Flaubert. What pleases me in the severest article of
M. Brunetière is M. Brunetière. In ending then, I am
careful not to wish him a little indulgence, a little frivolity,
a little depravity. He could not but lose thereby. At
least it is not absolutely certain that he would gain, while
such as he is, and though my perceptions are not his one
time in ten, I have no difficulty (if I may be excused for
So solemn a formula) in saluting him as a master.
20
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
II
PERSONALITY IN CRITICISM
IT WOULD seem at first view that the greater a critic's
range of mind and power of sympathy are, the fewer are
the individual characteristics that he will present to one
who desires to define and depict him. The most marked
and original, however, not only among men, but among
writers, are those who do not understand everything, nor
feel everything, nor love everything, but those whose knowl-
edge, intelligence and tastes have definite limitations. The
ideal man who will appear at the end of time, since he will
know and grasp all things equally well, will doubtless almost
wholly lack an intellectual personality; his passions, his
vices, even his whims will be quite attenuated. The mem-
bers of that small philosophical oligarchy which, according
to M. Renan, will perhaps some day rule the world, freed
from all lower passions as they will be by their omniscience,
will surely resemble each other to such an extent that it
will be hard to tell them apart. They will approach the
character of God, the great knower and critic; and God
has no individuality. The writer of to-day who would
grasp wholly and profoundly all the modes in which the
universe is mirrored in men's minds could hardly be de-
fined except był that aptitude to penetrate and grasp all
things except by that in men's minthe modes in who wo
But we have not reached that point yet. In reality there
are as many ways of conceiving of criticism as there are
conceptions of the novel, the theatre or poetry; the writer's
personality may, therefore, be as strongly marked in criti-
cism, if he has one, as in the other kinds. It may merely
be necessary sometimes to take a little more pains to dis-
engage interfectly obvious
It is perfectly obvious (but I need these truisms to regain
confidence) that, like every other writer, a critic necessarily
puts into his writings his temperament and his conception
of life, since it is with his mind that he describes the minds
of others; that the differences between M. Taine, M. Nisard
JULES LEMAÎTRE
21
and Sainte-Beuve are as deep as those, let us say, between
Corneille, Racine and Molière, and that, in a word, criticism
is a representation of the world as personal, as relative, as
vain and hence as interesting as those which constitute the
other literary kinds,
Criticism varies infinitely according to the object studied,
the mind that studies it, the point of view which that mind
occupies. It may consider works, men or ideas. It may
judge or merely define. Dogmatic at first, it has become
historical and scientific; but its evolution does not seem at
an end. Vain as doctrine, necessarily incomplete as science,
it seems to tend to become simply the art of enjoying books
and of enriching and refining one's impressions through
them.
M. Nisard begins by forming for himself a general and,
so to speak, purified idea of the French genius. This idea
he has drawn from a first survey of our literature as a whole.
He includes in it, as an integral part, the beliefs of a spiritual-
istic philosophy. By the ideal thus conceived he measures
the works of writers and exalts or abuses them as they
approach that ideal more or less nearly. Furthermore, he
isolates these works, and usually neglects the personalities
of their authors; or, if he speaks of them at all, it is to
attribute to them, in the name of free will, the merit or
dishonor of having served or betrayed the literary ideal
according to his fundamental definition of it. He deliber-
ately fails to seize upon any necessary bond between the
works and their producers, or between these and their social
environments, or between successive periods. And thus his
history unfolds itself according to an inexorable plan, and
the French spirit seems, according to him, to resemble a
moral personality who developed and then declined in the
course of the ages. Thence arises a history that has rigor-
ous unity. It is extremely systematic and singularly partial
and incomplete; but how interesting is the mind of M.
Nisard, how fine, delicate and disdainful!
M. Taine, in his "History of English Literature," pursues
the opposite course and achieves precisely the same result.
While M. Nisard considers only the works, M. Taine pre-
22
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
deducoust as mure, madecedently, Share. For
tends to consider above all the near or remote causes of
which they are the product; and while M. Nisard cuts the
works from their roots, M. Taine studies these roots to their
last ramifications and even the soil in which they are buried.
But this accounting for books by men, and for men by race
and environment, is often only a snare. For without say-
ing it, the critic had antecedently, by a first rapid review
of English literature, made himself an idea of the English
genius (just as M. Nisard did of the French), and thence
he deduced the conditions and the environment from which
works characteristically English might arise. And all those
which the environment does not explain, he affects to leave
aside. Thus by another road he arrives at an exclusiveness
as narrow as that of M. Nisard. The idealism of the one
and the positivism of the other produce in the end an analo-
gous result. And we may say as before: the history of M.
Taine is singularly systematic, partial and incomplete; but
how interesting is the genius of M. Taine! What power of
generalization and at the same time what magic of color
there are in the work of this poet logician!
Thus whether dogmatic or scientific, literary criticism is
never, in the end of things, anything but the personal and
perishable work of one wretched man. Sainte-Beuve blends
the two methods with much grace, sometimes appreciates
but more often describes, still judges works of art according
to tradition, according to classical taste, but prefers in his
travels through the whole of literature to apply himself to
the drawing of portraits and to moral biographies, and con-
tributes I do not know how many scattered but exquisite
fragments to what he so well named the natural history of
minds.
I pass over the various combinations of dogma, history
and psychology that are characteristic of MM. Scherer,
Montégut and Brunetière. But unless I am badly mistaken
M. Paul Bourget has imagined a kind of criticism that is
almost new. In his hands criticism becomes the story of
his own intellectual and moral development. It is what one
may call egotistic criticism. His mind being eminently and
almost wholly a product of the immediate present (the in-

JULES LEMAÎTRE
23
fluence of the classical tradition is little marked in him),
he confines himself to the writers of the past thirty years
and chooses among them those with whom he finds his in-
telligence and his heart most at one. And he neither draws
their portraits nor writes their biographies, he neither ana-
lyses their books nor studies their methods; he does not
define the impression which their works have made on him
as works of art: he seeks only to explain and describe
clearly those of their states of consciousness and those of
their ideas which he has best appropriated to himself through
imitation or sympathy. And thus, while in reality writing
nothing but the history of his own soul, he gives at the
same time a history of the most original sentiments of his
generation, and actually composes a considerable and defini-
tive fragment of the moral history of our age.
III
TRADITION AND LOVE
Is it possible that I have failed to reproach M. Weiss with
being a wavering and capricious critic and with not having
in his pocket an unvarying yard-stick by which to measure
the works of the mind? One of Montaigne's favorite
thoughts is that we can have no certain knowledge, since
nothing is unchangeable, neither things nor minds, and that
the spirit and its object are involved with each other in a
perpetual maze. Changeful ourselves, we contemplate a
world in change. And even when the object observed has
been forever arrested in its form, it suffices for the mind
wherein it is reflected to be changeable and diverse to make
any responsibility impossible except that for the impression
of the moment.
How then can literary criticism set up as a doctrine?
Works of art defile before the mirror of our minds; but
since the line is long, the mirror is modified in the interval
and when, by chance, the same work returns, it no longer
projects the same image.
Each man may experience that in his own case. Once I
24
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
adored Corneille and despised Racine: to-day I adore Racine
and Corneille is almost indifferent to me. Once the verses
of Musset threw me into raptures; I can find those raptures
no more. I have lived with my ears and eyes filled with
the music and magic of Victor Hugo; to-day I feel the
soul of Victor Hugo to be almost a stranger to mine. I
dare not reread the books which ravished me and made me
cry at fifteen. When I strive to be sincere and to express
what I truly feel, I am appalled to observe how little agree-
ment there is between my impressions and the traditional
judgments held on very great writers, and I hesitate to
speak all my thought.
• It is because that tradition is almost entirely a matter of
artifice and convention. One remembers what one has, per-
haps, felt oneself, or rather what venerated teachers have
declared one should feel. It is never by anything except
such docility and such agreement that a body of literary
judgments can be formed and can persist. Some minds
have enough force and assurance to establish these long
sets of judgments and to rest them upon unchangeable prin-
ciples. These minds are, by will or by nature, less change-
ful mirrors than the others and, if you please, less inventive,
and in them the same works are always reflected in very
nearly the same fashion. But one can easily see that they
have rcthing within them by virtue of which they can im-
pose themselves on other intelligences, and that they con-
tain nothing, in the end, but personal preferences grown
rigid.
One judges that to be good which one loves. There is
the whole matter. (I am not speaking here of those who
think they love what one has declared to them to be good.)
Only some always love the same things and think that all
men must love them; others who are weaker have more
changeable affections and defend these. But whether dog
matic or not, criticism, whatever be its pretensions, can
never go beyond defining the impression which, at a given
moment, is made on us by a work of art wherein the writer
has himself recorded the impression which he received from
the world in a certain hour.
.
..
.
"
JULES LEMAÎTRE
Since this is so and since, moreover, all is vanity, let us
love the books which delight us without worrying about
classifications and doctrines and make a tacit compact with
our own minds that our impression of to-day is no pledge of
what to-morrow's will be. If a recognized masterpiece
shocks me, wounds me, or, what is worse, means nothing to
me at all; if, on the other hand, some book of to-day or
yesterday, which is not perhaps immortal, stirs me to the
very heart, seems to express my whole self and to reveal
me to myself as more intelligent than I hoped, am I to
think myself at fault and to be distressed? Men of genius
are not always quite conscious of themselves and of their
work; they have almost always certain simplicities, igno-
rances, absurdities; they have a coarse facility and spon-
taneity; they do not know all they do, and do not do it
purposefully enough. Above all, in this age of reflection
and of increasing consciousness, there are, besides the men
of genius, artists who without them would not exist, who.
possess them and profit thereby but who, though far less
powerful, are found upon the whole to be more intelligent
than those divine monsters, whose knowledge and insight is
more complete and whose conception of art and life is
subtler. When I meet a book written by one of these men,
what delight! I feel his work to be full of all that has gone
before; I discover in it, together with the traits that con-
stitute his character and his peculiar temperament, the latest
state of mind, the most recent state of consciousness which
humanity has reached. Though such an one is my superior,
he is like me and we are at once on the same plane. All
that he expresses is such that it seems I shall be able to feel
and to experience myself some day. ...
--Les Contemporains.
REMY DE GOURMONT
THE SELF AND THE WORLD
their literary developer is not pret
It is hard to characterize a literary development at that
moment when its fruits are still uncertain, when even the
blooming is not complete in the whole orchard. There are
precocious trees, backward trees, and doubtful trees which
one would not yet like to call barren: the orchard is very
diverse, very rich, too rich;—the density of the leaves
begets shade and the shade discolors the flowers and makes
the fruits grow pale.
It is in this opulent and shadowy orchard that I shall walk,
lingering for an instant at the foot of the trees that are
strongest, most beautiful, most agreeable.
Whenever their importance, their necessity, their perti-
nence deserve it, literary developments are given a name;
often the meaning of this name is not precise, but it is
useful; it serves as a rallying point for those who receive it,
and as a point of orientation for those who give it; thus
the conflict takes place around a banner that is purely
verbal. What does romanticism mean? It is easier to feel
it than to explain it. What does symbolism mean? If you
regard the word in its strictly etymological sense, almost
nothing; if you go beyond that, it may possibly mean: in-
dividualism in literature, liberty in art, the abandoning of
the formulæ of the schools, the tendencies toward whatever
is new, strange, even bizarre; it may also mean: idealism,
a disdain for the mere social anecdote, anti-naturalism, the
tendency to fix attention only upon the characteristic detail
in life, only upon the act that distinguishes one man from
another, the desire to realize only results, only the essential;
26
REMY DE GOURMONT
27
045.31
..
me.
to the poets themselves, finally, symbolism seems allied to
verse that is free, verse that is unswathed, so that its young
body can take its ease freed from the constraints of swad-
dling-clothes and bonds.
All this sustains but the slightest relation to the syllables
of the word—for we must not permit anyone to insinuate
that symbolism is nothing but a transformation of the old
allegorical method or of the art of personifying an idea
through a human being, a landscape or a fable. For all
art is that, art the primordial and eternal, and any literature
freed from that preoccupation would be beneath descrip-
tion; it would be naught; its aesthetic significance would be
adequate to express the clucking of a curassow or the braying
of a wild ass.
**** Literature, as a matter of fact, is nothing but the artistic
development of the idea, nothing but the symbolizing of the
idea by means of imaginary heroes. These heroes or men
(for in his own sphere every man is a hero) are only roughly
sketched by life; it is art that completes them by giving
them, in exchange for their poor, sick soul, the treasure of an
immortal idea, and the humblest can be called to participa-
tion in this, if he be chosen by a great poet. How humble
a man was that Æneas whom Virgil loaded with all the
burden of being the idea of the power of Rome, how humble
that Don Quixote on whom Cervantes imposed the dreadful
weight of being at the same time Roland and the four sons
of Aymon, Amadis and Palmerin, Tristan and all the knights
of the Round Table! The history of symbolism would be
the history of man himself, since man cannot assimilate an
idea unless it be symbolized. We must not be insistent, for
we might seem to believe that the young devotees of sym-
bolism are ignorant even of the “Vita Nuova” and of the
figure of Beatrice whose frail and pure shoulders remain
unbowed despite the complex burden of symbols with which
the poet overwhelmed them.
Why, then, arose the illusion that the symbolization of
the idea is a novelty?
• It arose from the fact that we witnessed, during the
recent past, a very serious attempt to found literature upon
:28 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
a contempt for the idea and disdain of the symbol. Every-
one knows the theory; it sounds like an extract from a book
of cookery: "Take a slice of life, etc., etc.” M. Zola, hav-
ing invented this recipe, forgot to use it. His "slices of
life” are the heavy poetic fruits of a muddy and tumultuous
lyricism; they are popular romanticism, democratic symbol-
ism, but always filled with an idea, always pregnant with
some allegorical significance-“Germinal," "The Mine," "The
Crowd," "The Strike." Hence the idealistic revolt was not
directed against the literary products of naturalism (or only
against the very base ones), but against its theory or, rather,
against its pretentions. Though but returning to the an-
terior and eternal necessities of art, the rebels while profess-
ing nothing but their wish to reinstate the idea in literature,
believed themselves to be affirming new and even surprising
truths. All they did was to relight the torch and also to
relight, all about them, many small candles.
Nevertheless there is a new truth that has recently come
into literature and art. It is a wholly metaphysical one and
wholly a priori (in apperance), and quite young, since it is
but a century old, and truly new, since it has never before
done service in the field of aesthetics. This truth, marvel-
lous and like an evangel, liberating and of a renewing force,
is the principle of the ideality of the world. In relation to
man the thinking subject, the world and all that is external
to the ego, exists only according to the idea of it which
he forms for himself. We know only phenomena, we reason
only concerning appearances; all truth in itself escapes
us; the essence of things is unassailable by us. It is what
Schopenhauer popularized in the very clear and simple for-
mula: The world is my representation. I do not see what
is; that which is, is what I see. There are as many diverse
and perhaps different worlds as there are thinking men. This
doctrine, which Kant left in the middle of the road to hasten
to the help of ship-wrecked morality, is so beautiful and so
supple that, without injuring its free logic, one may trans-
pose it from theory to the most exacting practice; it is a
principle of universal emancipation for any man capable
of understanding it. It has revolutionized nothing but
REMY DE GOURMONT
aesthetics, but it is of aesthetics that we are speaking here.
In text-books there are still found definitions of the beau-
tiful; the books go farther and give formulæ by which an
artist can arrive at the expression of the beautiful. There
are institutions where men teach these formulæ, which are
nothing but the average or summing up of antecedent ideas
or appreciations. And since aesthetic theories are generally
obscure, there are given examples, ideal paradigms, models
for the artist to follow. In these institutions and the civi-
lized world is only one vast institution) every novelty is
held to be blasphemous and every personal affirmation to
be an act of madness. M. Nordau, who has read the whole
of contemporary literature with a bizarre patience, propa-
gated the notion which is so basely destructive of all intel-
lectual individualism, that non-conformity is the capital
crime in a writer. This is violently untrue. The capital
crime in a writer is conformity, imitation, submission to
rules and teachings. The work of a writer should be not
only the reflection, but the enlarged reflection of his per-
sonality. The only excuse that a man has for writing is that
he express his own self, that he reveal to others the kind of
world that is reflected in his individual mirror; his only
excuse is that he be original; he must say things not said
before and say them in a form not formulated before. He
must create his own aesthetic—and we must admit as many
aesthetics as there are original minds, and judge them ac-
cording to what they are and not according to what they
are not
--Le livre des Masques.
Il
LITERARY INFLUENCES
VERGIL imitated Homer, Racine imitated Euripides, Cor-
neille imitated Seneca. Each chose in a literature which he
reverenced a master in harmony with his temperament. The
French classic writers were pupils of the Latins and the
Greeks, just as the romantics were of the English and the
Germans. A new force in literature, in art, in politics, in
30
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
morals, never arises from within an ethnic group. Each group
once formed and individualized is bound to a uniform pro-
duction or, at least, to one systematized in fixed varieties.
The race, the soil, the climate determine the particular na-
ture of its activities and productions and limit their diver-
sity. Man has the faculty of change, but he cannot change
spontaneously—there is always necessary a leaven external
to the lump. ... Walled China, once its ossification was
complete, scarcely changed in the course of many centuries.
The peoples who change are those that welcome the most
strangers, which may remind the botanist of those plants that
welcome the most insects. England, some parts of whose
organism seem changeless, is less visited throughout most of
its provinces than Central Africa or the shores of the Ama-
zon. ... A stranger there arouses the populace; the peas-
ants in some Coventry believed in a possible invasion by
the Boers. Australia, though scarcely established, is in pro-
cess of degenerating through lack of such ferments. The
United States, if closed to immigration, would fall into com-
plete languor, were it not for the European travels of its
plutocracy, its extreme diversity of climates and soils and
hence of races in the development of its vast empire. Psychi-
cal exchange among peoples is as necessary to the rein-
vigoration of each people as social intercourse is to the
exaltation of individual energy. One has not sufficiently
regarded this necessity when one speaks with regret of the
influence of foreign literatures on our own. There is not a
century since the eleventh during which French thought 'has
not been revived by some foreign ferment; its power con-
sisted in enduring so many fermentations without trouble
and of showing itself, after each crisis, fresher and more
alive. Thus women, and men no less, are made young again
by a new love and find in almost uninterrupted passions the
very principle of their vital activity. In the twelfth century
it was the Celtic legend, the cycle of the Round Table, to
which was added Tristan, which renewed the chansons de
geste; then it was the Greek legend, as in the Enéas and
Alexandre; next the courtliness of Provence with Chréstien
de Troyes; later there were the fabliaux which came from
REMY DE GOURMONT
.
afar, from the very depths of the Orient, and up to the
Renaissance when this torrent grew and rose, foreign influ-
ences did not cease to be the normal enrichment of French
literature, to permit of its continual renewal, to multiply
young flowers on the ancient stem.
The national spirit is no more thwarted by these absorp-
tions than the blood of a man is vitiated by healthy food.
The point is that the food must be healthy. If it is bad, the
suffering organism makes an effort to get rid of it. ...
But an illness is not always useless, nor is a debauch. The
dynamic influence of even a bad foreign literature is pref-
erable to the debility and boredom in which isolated think-
ing is sure to lapse. Action is necessary, no matter in what
sense. This, indeed, is the very principle of the law of
inertia. There is no movement without a cause. And a
force cannot act upon itself but only upon other forces.
The river flows in vain unless the paddles of the mill-wheel
rise against its current. But when one hears the rattle of
the mill, the river finds itself; each time that you see a
movement in any literature, you must look outside of that
literature for the animating force. ... And one might
almost determine scientifically what ought to be, in pro-
portion to its velocity and mass, the initial distance of a
literary influence to make its impact a fruitful one. A
small novelty, coming from very far, might easily outweigh
in usefulnesc sand force a more considerable innovation of
an origin that is too near.
-Le Problème du Style.
III
VISION AND EMOTION
*** THERE are two kinds of style; they correspond to the two
great classes of men—the visuals and the emotionals. Of a
given thing seen, the visual will retain a memory in the
form of a more or less exact, a more or less complicated
image; the emotional will remember only the feeling which
the spectacle aroused in him. Thus also, having read a
novel, the visual could easily retrace its successive scenes,
ature
* 10 were Airl
*
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32 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
which fix themselves in his brain in panoramic form; the
pure emotional type knows only that the book is beautiful
or lively or tiresome, but sometimes he will be able to recite
pages of it. The well-known scholar Maury turned the
pages of a book in his memory of it and read that remem-
bered book with as much certainty as he did the real one.
But the visual memory, if it be limited to the retention of
printed characters, cannot, of course, play any such part in
the elaboration of style as a memory that is truly concrete.
If a landscape is in question and not a book, persons of
this kind will recall only the landscape's impression on their
sensibilities. From the view-point of style they are of the
emotional type.
It may happen (but this is quite rare) that the visual
memory and the emotional memory are equal and balanced
masters of the same brain. The result will give us, accord-
ing to the particular physiology of the man, his race, the
soil that nourished him, a Chateaubriand, a Flaubert. ...
For if a writer possesses the emotional in addition to the
visual memory, if, while evoking a material spectacle he has
also the power of replacing himself into the precise emo-
tional state which the spectacle produced in him, he is
: master of the whole art of writing. ...
Without the visual memory, without the reservoir of im-
ages on which the imagination can draw for ever new and
infinite combinations, there can be no style and no artistic
creation. This faculty alone gives us the power not only
of delineating the varied movements of life through verbal
figures, but also of transforming into visions every associa-
tion of words, every trite metaphor, in brief, the power of
rendering life and death. It is this power that has given
rise to the famous allegories. . .. The style of Michelet
and that of Taine are products of this most happy faculty
of transforming the abstract into the concrete, of making
the stone to breathe and the very stars to tremble. Lan-
guage is full of clichés which were originally bold images,
happy finds of the power over metaphor. All abstract words
are the figurative names of material acts. ... The living
words are compact of images; the smoothest discourse is a
.
.
.-
-
-
-
REMY DE GOURMONT
33
tissue of metaphors more wrinkled than a page of Goncourt
or Saint-Pol-Roux. One has used the expression, worn
medals, and it is almost just. One side represents the sense
with which the word started, the other that which it has
gained. And both sides exist in so obliterated a condition
that the most tyrannical imagination can no longer animate
them. Many of those, however, who use these coins with
predilection also use their eyes at least to sort the tarnished
verbal riches stored up in their memory. In uttering the
word ocean they see, instead of a glaucous immensity, or a
shore of sand or cliffs, the word itself--admirable simplifi-
cation-written in space in printed characters. More ad-
vanced intellectually than the visuals, these privileged indi-
viduals are grouped at the negative pole of that magnet, the
positive pole of which is occupied by artists. A great step
toward simplification has thus been made; a world of signs
has been substituted for a world of things. But the progress
is still greater when the world of signs appears to the eye
without any perceptible form, when the words enclosed in
the brain, as in an apparatus for distribution, pass directly
from their cases at the end of the lips or the pen, without
any intervention of the consciousness or the sensibilities. It
is marvellous, as marvellous as the systematic agitation in
an ant-heap or a bee-hive. While the visuals, even in sub-
.conscious phrases, must translate their vision as exactly as
a painter, and seek words and combinations of words as a
painter seeks colors and combinations of colors, to the mech-
anist's words and epithets come without a shock, fluidly,
all the work of passing from the reality to the idea and
from the idea to the reality having been performed for
them in advance by previous writers. They are quite willing
to employ everything that has been consecrated by common
use, well-known phrases, rich in emotional ferment because
they have been dragged everywhere, flat locutions, proverbs,
all that is used to abridge and to sum up.
But—and this is the chief point–in the opening phrase
of a novel as vulgar as this: "It was on a radiant spring
morning," there may be a genuine emotion. It would show,
without any doubt, that the author is neither a visual nor
34 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
an artist, but not that he is devoid of sensibility; on the
contrary, he is, very notably, an emotional! Only, since he
is incapable of embodying his personal mode of feeling in
stylistic forms of original structure, he chooses phrases
which, having once moved him must also, he believes, move
his readers. One need not even suppose a calculated effect
where there is simply the ingenuous association of a word
and a sentiment. Words have no meaning except by virtue
of the sentiment which they enclose, the representation of
which one then bestows upon them. Even the propositions
of geometry become sentiments, as Pascal has put it in one
of those prodigious phrases which it has taken three cen-
turies to understand. A theorem may be moving and its
solution may make the heart beat faster. It has become a
sentiment in the sense that it is no longer perceived except
in association with a sentiment; it can contain a world of
desires and be an object of love. The most inert words
can be vivified by the sensibility and can thus become senti-
ments. All those that certain political philosophers abuse,
such as justice, truth, equality, democracy, liberty, and a
hundred others, have no value except the purely sentimental
one attributed to them by him who speaks them. Not only
the content of the word has become a sentiment to him who
employs it, but even its material form and the atmosphere
that surrounds it. Any word, any locution, even proverbs,
even mere verbal stop-gaps can become for the writer of
the emotional kind nuclei of sentimental crystalization. Hav-
ing no garden of his own, he buys flowers and fancies that
he has gathered them. Since he does not use his sensibility
to create, it remains abundant; moreover, he distributes it
only in small bits around the words which he desires to
embalm; he has enough left for life, for love, for all the
passions. The writer of an abstract style is almost always
a sentimentalist or, at least, a sensitive soul. The artist
writer is almost never the former, rarely the latter. For he
embodies all his sensibility in his style and has very little
left for life or for profound passion. The one takes a ready-
made phrase or writes over a facile one to which, deceived
by his own feeling, he attributes an emotional value; the
roundut evenord him
REMY DE GOURMONT
35
other takes words that are but handfuls of clay, constructs
the bones of his work and raises à statue which, beautiful
or awkward, heavy or winged, will still keep in its attitude
a little of the life which animated the hands that kneaded
it. And yet the vulgar mind will be more moved by the
banal phrase than by the original one. And this will be
the counter-proof: Opposed to the reader who draws his
emotion from the medium of literature itself, stands the
reader who does not feel what he reads except in so far as
he can apply it to his own life, to his griefs and hopes. He
who savors the literary beauty of a sermon by Bossuet can
not be touched by it in a religious sense, and he who weeps
over the death of Ophelia has no aesthetic sense. These
two categories of writers and readers constitute the two
great types of cultivated humanity. Despite shadings and
confusions, no understanding is possible between them;
without any mutual comprehension, they despise one an-
other. Their animosity extends in two large though, at
times, subterranean streams throughout the length of the
history of literature.
-Le Problème du Style.
IV
FORM AND SUBSTANCE
IN LITERATURE the foundation of things has an impor-
tance that is absolute. There is no variety of literature that
can escape the necessity of sinking its foundations deep and
building them solidly. To the poet we may concede at
times the right of making something out of nothing; but
there are nothings and nothings. The trifling circumstances
of love are nothings. Yet they are, like everything that
touches upon the transmission of life, of an incalculable
importance. Always and unfailingly it is the foundation
that counts. A new fact or a new idea is worth more than
a fine phrase. A lovely phrase is a lovely thing and so is a
lovely flower. But their duration is almost the same-a
day, a century. Nothing dies more swiftly than a style
which does not rest upon the solidity of vigorous thinking,
36 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
Such a style shrivels like a stretched skin; it falls in a heap
as ivy does from the rotten tree that once gave it support.
If any one replies that the ivy may keep a tree with dried-
out roots from falling, I grant it. Style is a force, too. But
its value diminishes with a swiftness proportionate to its
enfeeblement through trying to preserve from annihilation
the fragility which it embraces and supports.
It is probably an error to attempt to distinguish between
form and substance. It smacks of the scholastic reasoning
which helped St. Thomas Aquinas to expatiate on the union
of the soul with the body; he found it easy to prove that
form is a function of the soul and that, before or after the
arrival or departure of the soul, the embryo and the cadaver
could possess only illusory forms. These distinctions no
longer have any validity. There is no such thing as amor-
phous matter; all thought has a limit, hence a form, since
it is a partial representation of true or possible, real or
imaginary life. Substance engenders form exactly as the
tortoise or the oyster do the materials of their respective
shells.
Even those philosophers who bring us that which is new
in thought, bring it united to its form which is also new.
Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Pascal, Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche are all great writers, and several of them
great poets. One should distrust a philosophy stuck in the
mud of the scholastic: it is engulfed because it has delayed
setting its snares for the reason. ...
The great scientists have been, nearly all, so soon as they
took the trouble to write, perfect writers. Their imagination
is necessarily visual. Since they describe what one sees or
will see, their speech produces images. Even the mathema-
tician, the geometrician and the chess-player is, in this sense,
a seer. Linné, Galileo, Leibnitz, Lavoisier, Lamarck, Gauss,
Claude Bernard and Pasteur write with energy and sure-
ness of touch; Goethe did not put less of his literary genius
into his scientific works than into his poems.
.
✓ Form without a foundation, style without thought-what
. a poor thing it is! That poverty is miraculously realized
in the prose of Banville, to mention but one of our illus-
DICIIS.
REMY DE GOURMONT
37
trious contemporaries. The contrast between the supple
and glistening beauty of the robe and the skeleton that
wears it has something pitiful, like a cemetery covered with
flowers. The value of the style is exactly equal to the
value of the thought. That is the central truth.
Errors of judgment occur in this matter because people
believe that there is no style where there is no "poetic
style.” They make an exception in favor of Pascal only to
count up his antitheses and range them on glazed paper
like precious stones. But that is only the shadow of Mon-
taigne. The true Pascal radiates such a light that antitheses
are drowned in it and become invisible. ...
If nothing lives in literature except by its style, that is
because works well thought out are invariably well writ-
ten. But the converse is not true. Style alone is nothing.
It will even happen—for in aesthetics as in love all things
are possible that style which makes certain works live for
a time, will cause others to perish prematurely. Cymodocea
died smothered under her too rich and heavy robe.
The sign of the man in any intellectual work is the
thought. The thought is the man. And style and thought
are one.
-Le Problème du Style.
But the conver thought out xcept by its sty
use ostyle with aesther Styleariah
PART TWO
FRIEDRICH HEBBEL
I
i
APHORISMS ON ART
THE task of all art is the representation of life, that is,
the visible embodiment of the infinite through the individual
phenomenon. Art achieves its aim by grasping the charac-
teristic and significant elements of an individual or a con-
dition.
* * *
This is the first and only law or art, that the infinite
shall be made visible in the concrete and the particular.
Creative art is a spirit that can sink itself into every
form and into every condition of being and can grasp and
render visible-the laws of the former and the fundamental
character of the latter. Its function is to redeem Nature
unto the highest expression of its characteristic life, Man
to his utmost freedom, the Divine which in its infinity we!
cannot grasp unto its necessary existence.
It is the first and the last aim of art to make the life
process itself visible to show how the innermost core of
man's being developes within the surrounding atmosphere,
whether that be favorable or not. It is an error to assert
that only the completed is fit material for the poet. On the
contrary, his subject is the becoming, all that is being born
of its conflicts with the elements of creation.
The characters in creative work are to be at the same
41
42 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
time individual and general. It is the problem that Nature
solves daily in every human being.
* * *
The poet, like the priest, drinks the sacred blood, and
all the world feels the presence of God.
'
',
Art is the conscience of mankind.
In the realm of the aesthetic there are no pure or impure
subjects. The highest subject may be contaminated by an
ignoble form, the lowliest may be transmuted by nobility
of embodiment.
* * *
The substance of a work of art is never immoral. If it
seem so, it is the fault of the form, but not of the form in
its real nature, but of the accidental imperfections of its
execution.
One kind of criticism alone is worthy of respect. It says
to the poet: This is what you willed to create, for this
you were fated to will. It then proceeds to investigate the
relation of the product to the producing will. All other
criticism is of evil.
* * *
One does not sit down to play the piano in order to
demonstrate a mathematical truth. Nor does one write
poetry in order to prove anything. It is the peculiar beauty
of all the higher activities of man that they serve purposes
that were not in the mind of the acting individual.
Whoever absorbs a work of art into himself goes through
the same process as the artist who produced it only he
reverses the order of the process and increases its speed.
* All poetic activity is a revelation. In the poet's soul all
humanity goes through the gestures of its weal and woe and
each poem is a gospel wherein is expressed some deepest
thing that conditions a form of human being or one of its
elements.
FRIEDRICH HEBBEL
43
II
APHORISMS ON THE DRAMA
THE drama is not to tell us new stories, but to show new
relations.
The modern drama, if we are to have such a drama, must
necessarily transcend the Shakespearean and differ from it
in this respect—that the conflict of dramatic reasoning is to
be not only within the characters but is to be transferred to
the idea itself. Thus not only shall the relations of men to
moral concepts be debated, but the validity of those very
concepts.
* * *
All characters must be in the right.
It seems to me a sin against the holy spirit of truth if a
dramatist seeks to infuse into his work a reconciliation with
the fate of man or the world-order which his own soul
has not yet reached.
* * *
In the higher realm of art shiftless characters are as
impossible as shiftless roses are in a garden. Everything
becomes what it can become. . .
The three stages of artistic effect: It can be thus! It is!
It must be thus!
If people could but be taught that the dramatic poet
must busy himself with every species of human character,
even as the naturalist observes every species of animal and
plant, whether the specimens be beautiful or ugly, poisonous
or wholesome, for it is his duty to represent the totality of
things.
* * *
How shall realism and idealism be harmoniously united
in the drama? By heightening the former and subduing
the latter. A charácter must never act or speak beyond
44 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
his world, but for whatever is possible within that world
he may find the purest form, the noblest expression.
Ideas are to the drama what counterpoint is to music-
nothing in themselves, but the basic condition of every-

thing.
Historic plays that turn toward a past which is wholly
dead to the present, and seek to resurrect that past are, to
my mind, testimonials of a thorough misunderstanding of
the art of the drama and its purpose. What I desire to
embody and make visible is the origin of religious and
political conditions which, however modified in the course
of the centuries, persist to our own day. The poet is to
grasp the nature of the process of history.
In my judgment the drama is a great circle that is com-
posed of many smaller ones. Time may and, indeed, must|
fill those smaller ones with its material stuff, for whence
else could the art-form derive the necessity of its continu-
ance? But this substance furnished by partial characters,
even at times by situations, must be purified in the great
enclosing circle of the whole and rationally reduced to its
true inner content.
-Hebbels Tagebücher.
.
."
WILHELM DILTHEY
THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION
I
AT FIRST sight the creative imagination seems a miracle,
a phenomenon utterly different from anything in the daily
life of men. Yet it is but the more powerful organization
of certain individuals which is founded upon the unusual
energy of definite and elementary processes. Starting with
these processes the entire mental life, without deviating from
its general laws, assumes a form that diverges widely from
the ordinary.
In different individuals the images of memory have, under
identical conditions, a very varying degree of clearness and
strength, of concreteness and plasticity. There exists a
series consisting of utterly different kinds of mental repro-
ductions, extending from the representation of mere color-
less and soundless shadows to the power of projecting into
space beyond the unseeing eyes of the body the actual forms
of men and things. Now the gift for creative literature is
closely connected with this extraordinary faculty of sustain-
ing in or lending to reproduced or freely formed mental
images a very high degree of concreteness and plasticity.
For the necessary foundation of the poet's plastic thinking
is the tangibly concrete and the movement of sharply de-
fined figures. It demands, at the same time, a great wealth
of acquired impressions and a great completeness in the
images of the memory. From this wealth and completeness
springs the poet's power of merely, reproductive narration.
What, now, is the relation between wealth of experience
45
46
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
and the free, creative imagination, between the reproduction
and the creation of the forms and circumstances and fates
of men? The power of association which summons to the
mind given elements in a given connection seems sharply
differentiated from the creative power which weaves these
given elements into new combinations. In order to investi-
gate the true relationship between these two basic phenomena
of the psychical life, it is necessary to use the descriptive
method and to refrain from the admixture of any explanatory
hypotheses. Thus alone can the historian of poetry be
trusted to use, in his conception of literature, the subtler in-
sights of psychology instead of the cruder notions of com-
mon life.
In the processes of the mental life as we can grasp them,
the identical representation can no more return to the con-
sciousness that originally produced it than it can arise in
another consciousness. The new spring does not bring back
to me the vision of last year's leaves: to-day cannot re-
awaken in me the images of yesterday except dimly and
indistinctly. Suppose that, without changing our posture,
we close the eyes that have just received the image of an
object, but permit no renewed application of the stimulus
to the retina. At this moment, it is clear, the image into
which perception has been transformed possesses its highest
possible vividness and strength. Yet we shall find that even
in this memory image there is present but a portion of the
elements which were included in the perceptual process, and
we shall find that even here, where the recollection is pur-
poseless and lifeless, a strong effort to recall the whole pic-
ture will reveal an attempt at imitative re-creation. When,
however, the processes of perception and representation are
separated by the intrusion of other images, and we desire
then to recall the entire content of the original perception,
we shall find the character of the resultant representation
conditioned upon a definite attitude in the immediate pres-
ent of the soul. We shall find that the representation will
select only such materials from the actual content of the
original perception as have a direct relation to our present
state of mind, and will thus impart to the image an emo-
WILHELM DILTHEY
47
.
tional coloring that is dependent on a relation, either of
similarity or contrast, to the immediately present mood of
the soul. Thus in times of painful restlessness the image.
of a past condition of quietude, however joyless, can arise
in the soul as a blessed island of sunniest peace. And at
times this process can lead to the building up of represen-
tations that are wholly false. Furthermore, we do not, as
a rule, strive to recall isolated impressions, the recollection
of which depends on the momentary vision given by a definite
perceptual act. We strive to build up representations or
combinations of representations, each of which represents an
object perceived by us originally in many ways and situa-
tions. In that case the building of our representative im-
ages departs still more widely from an act of merely lifeless
reproduction and approaches far more closely an act of
artistic re-creation. There is, in a word, no imaginative
power that is not based upon memory; there is, conversely,
no memory that does not contain an element of the imagi-
native power. Recollection is in itself metamorphosis. A
knowledge of this truth permits us to realize the connection
between the most elementary processes of the psychical life
and the highest achievements of the creative faculty. It
gives us an insight into the origins of that mobile life of
the spirit, wholly individual and forever unique in each
instance, whose happiest expression is the immortal creatures:
of the artistic imagination. For reproduction is itself a
creative process.
Thus the peculiar organization of the poet reveals itself
in this respect by the energy with which he carries on such
simple processes as perception, memory, reproduction-
processes by virtue of which images of the most manifold
character-such as people in their circumstances and their
fate-move and live in his consciousness. For we have
discovered in memory itself that which makes it akin to
the imagination, and we have found a transforming power
ruling the whole life of the images in our soul. This is
further proved by certain peculiar phenomena of the sense
of sight. Has not everyone lain with closed eyes just before
falling asleep and been delighted with the simplest visual
48
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
images that appeared? To the passive sensitiveness of
sight the inner organic stimuli appear, under such con-
ditions, as waves and wandering mists out of which there
arise, quite without our intervention (since we are wholly
absorbed in passive vision), gleaming and many-colored im-
ages that melt uninterruptedly into each other.
The transforming of those images which the memory af-
fords or the rearrangement of their order is, however, but
the simplest, although the most instructive, example of the
creative processes that characterize the imagination. For
these processes bring forth new images without number by
methods of heightening and softening, reordering and uni-
versalizing, building types and re-transforming the already
transformed, sometimes unconsciously, at others by an act
of the will. Certain elements in the images are thus re-
jected, others emphasized, and memories are completed until
they assume a present and visible form. And this same
transformation that changes and transcends the contents of
experience and perception applies also to the associative
order of the images of representation. There results an
actual thinking in images, in which the imagination achieves
a new freedom. We strive to transform the past by an
activity of thought; imaginatively we forecast the possi-
bilities of the future; we project apparently unfounded hap-
penings and merge ourselves into them; we identify our-
selves with lifeless things and animate them with unheard of
activities. And this whole process is heightened when the
energy that rules it assumes purposefulness and is directed
toward a conscious aim. And the powers that evoke these
transformations from the images of memory are born in
the depths of the soul when life stirs it into delight or
pain, passion or aspiration.
A great principle underlies all this, a force that permits
specially organized temperaments to change the simplest
processes of the psychical life into poetic creation. This
force is most active in children, in primitive men, in persons
under the influence of passion or of dreams and in artists.
It differs wholly from the regulated imagination of the poli-
tician, the inventor and the investigator who constantly con-
WILHELM DILTHEY
49
trol their imagination in order to confine it within the limits
of the real.
The next question is how, from this general trait of the
imagination which lets it approach the creative act, there
arises the specifically poetic imagination and what are the
distinguishing marks of the latter?
We have seen that the imagination is woven into the
whole psychical process. Every expression of our daily
lives involuntarily transforms the data of experience. Our
wishes, our fears, our dreams of the future go beyond the
known reality. Every action is determined by an image
of something that has not yet come into being. The ideals
of life lead the individual and the race toward higher aims.
The great moments of life-birth, love, death—are spiritual-
ized by ceremonies that hide the reality and point beyond it.
From all this I would at once distinguish that activity
of the imagination which tries to build up a second world
different from the world of our daily life and conversation.
An involuntary imaginative activity of this kind is found in
dreams, which are the oldest of poets. It is found in life
wherever man desires voluntarily to free himself from the
bonds of reality-in pure play or, above all, where a festive
heightening of existence seeks to create a world separate
from the real one through masques or disguises or pageantry.
The age of chivalry and the courtly culture of the Renaissance
illustrate how the creation of a poetic world, distinct from
life, is prepared within life. And similarly the religious
imagination builds up a world distinct from the realities of
experience. From an intercourse with unseen powers arise
the visions of divine beings. But they are woven into the
suffering and the activity of life. Thus it is first of all the
needs of life to which the religious imagination in myth and
cult is fettered. As civilization proceeds it is gradually
sundered from the direct religious aims and raises that
second world to the point of independent significance which
it assumes in Homer, in the Greek tragic writers, in Dante,
50
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
in Wolfram von Eschenbach. Thus it is poetry that first
frees the supersensual, religious world from the bonds that
tie it to life's needs and aims.
It is only now that we can grasp the nature of the poetic
imagination. All that has been said hitherto deals only with
the general conditions necessary to its existence. It is the
very inner nature of those psychical processes within which
the poet's world is formed. The foundation of these pro-
cesses always consists of concrete experiences and of the
background of visual images which these experiences offer.
Involuntary and unobserved activities are constantly at
work here. They mould the color and form of the world
in which the poet lives. And here is the point at which
the connection between experience and the poet's imagination
begin to grow clear. The poetic world exists before the
poet draws from any particular happening the idea of a
given work, and before he has written a single line. The
process within which, by virtue of the fundamental psychical
activities, the poetic world arises and the individual work of
art is born, receives the law of its being from a relation to
life's reality which is utterly different from the relation sus-
tained by the elements of experience to the co-ordinative
character of knowledge. The poet lives in the wealth of
the experiences of the world of man as he finds it within
and without himself. And its facts are to him not data
which he uses to satisfy the demands of some system of
his, nor does he seek to generalize from them. His eye
rests upon them in brooding passiveness and they become
meaningful to him. They stir his emotions, now gently, now
powerfully, no matter how far the mere facts lie from the
circle of his personal interests or how distant they are in
the past. They are a portion of his very self.
All the forces of his mind and character work at the web
of the many-colored carpet of representative poetry and its
figures. The soul is the living foundation of all poetry.
But it is at the same time penetrated by thought. For ir
any highly developed man there are but few imaginative:
representations which do not hold some universal element;
and in the world of man there is, by virtue of the influence
pour le of bij They are mis nind of the
WILHELM DILTHEY
:51
vidual whor any indi type of hure then som sugh they chea
of general social conditions and psychical behavior, no in-
dividual who is not representative from more points of view
than one, nor any individual fate which is not an instance
of some more general type of human fortune. These im-
ages of men and of their fates are then so shaped by the
influence of the contemplative mind that, though they pre-
sent but isolated groups of facts, they yet appear so drenched
by the universal as to become representative of it. To
achieve this end there is no necessity at all for a work of
art to contain any general reflections, the function of which
is primarily to ease the passion, to break the tension, to
liberate the audience for a moment from the keenness of its
sympathies and atune it to a more thoughtful mood. ...
II
EXPERIENCE AND CREATION
ery roots and of hisch as Lena
THE individual traits of Goethe's creative imagination
lead us back to a psychical plexus that is ultimately grounded
in his experience and in his grasp of life. Here we pene-
trate to the very roots from which the peculiar character
of his creative activity and of his works arises. Even in
poets whose content is slighter, such as Lenau or Verlaine,
the linguistic imagination, wherever it produces strong ef-
fects, is found to be rooted in a remarkable and profound
activity that embraces the depths of their lives. We are
dealing now, however, with the greatest poetic personality
of modern times. In Goethe the shaping power of the im-
agination which produces that which is new in the sphere of
the individual, the concrete, and the tangible, extended its
universal activity to the practical work of the public offi-
cial, the statesman, the scientist, the cultivator of his own
self. Thus in him the poetic gift was but the highest mani-
festation of a power already active in life. To live, to
create, to write these acts of his were intimately blended.
And this personality appeared in an epoch which the En-
lightenment had delivered from the bonds of religion. All
the great poets prior to Goethe interpreted life and the
52 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
l world under the guidance of traditional ideas. Now at last
the time was ripe for the solution of the highest creative
problem: the interpretation of life out of its own nature
and its representation in its native significance and beauty,
Here at last we have pure naturalness, unclouded vision, the
deepest oneness between life and poetry. Goethe is that
seer of life who revealed to all the poets and philosophers
who came after him the art of interpreting human life simply
upon the basis of its own reality. ...
At this point a number of general reflections again be-
come necessary.
Every poetic work is the representation of a single action.
In its representative character it gives the mere appearance
of some reality by means of words and combinations of
words. Thus it must use all the means of language to pro-
duce its impression and illusion, and in this artistic handling
of language we find an immediate and important aesthetic
characteristic that belongs to every work of art. Next, the
creative work offers its reader or beholder a new freedom in
that it transports him into a world that lies beyond the
necessities of his actual existence. It heightens his con-
sciousness of life. It employs all the forces of his nature
in a vicarious re-experiencing of this world of the imagina-
tion, beginning with a delight in melody, rhythm and con-
crete visualization, and extending to the deepest understand-
ing of the action according to its relations with the whole
breadth of human life. For every true work of poetic crea-
tion emphasizes through that segment of reality which it
presents, some aspect of life that has not hitherto been thus
envisaged. While it makes visible the causal concatenation
of actions, it permits us at the same time to have a vicarious
experience of the values which belong to an action and to its
elements within the organic life process. Thus the action
is raised to its own inherent significance. There is no great
naturalistic work that does not lend expression to such sig-
nificant traits of human life, however comfortless or bizarre,
however rooted in some blind nature they may be. The art
of the greatest poets, then, consists in so presenting an action
that the inner coherence and meaning of life itself shall arise
WILHELM DILTHEY
53
from it. Thus poetry opens to us the understanding of life.
Through the eyes of the great poets we become aware of
the values and interconnection of all human things.
Thus we have reached the decisive insight of our search:
the content of a poetic work, which raises a concrete event
to true significance, has its foundation in the personal ex-
perience of the poet and the circle of ideas in which he
lives. The starting point of poetic activity is always an
experience of life, whether personal or gained through an
understanding of others, present or past, and of the hap-
penings in which they were involved. Each of the innumer-
able states of consciousness through which the poet passes
may, of course, be called an experience in the psychological
sense. Here we shall limit the word to mean those mo-
ments of his life or those aspects of their interplay which
disclose to him a trait of life. We must also let it mean
whatever has come to the poet from the world of ideas, and
the influence of ideas on Dante and Shakespeare and Schil-
ler was very great. And this is just. For all religious,
metaphysical and historic ideas are in the end but precipi-
tates of vital human experiences in the past: they are re-
presentations of these and help the poet to become aware
of new aspects of life only in so far as they clarify his own
actual experiences for him. Thus the idealism of liberty
which Schiller took over from Kant served but to clarify
that great inner experience of his own, in which his lofty
nature became aware of its dignity and sovereignty through
an actual conflict with the world.
Thus the foundations of poetic activity are seen to con-
tain: 1. Personal experience; 2. Insight into the experiences
of others; 3. The widening and deepening of experience
through ideas. It is clear that from this foundation a great
wealth of modifications in the experiences of the poet must
and can arise.....
While upon this foundation a human happening is raised
to its true significance, there arises a poetic structure. Now
as we distinguish in some object in nature its chemical com-
position, its specific gravity, etc., and study each of these
aspects of it separately, so in the case of a work of repre-
54 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
sentative poetry—epic, ballad, drama or novel—it is legiti-
mate to distinguish among substance, dominant mood, cen-
tral motive, fable, characters and means of representation.
The most important among these elements is that of the
central motive. For in it the poet has crystallized his basic
experience in its inner significance and through it that ex-
perience is connected with the fable, the characters and the
plastic form. It holds within itself the creative force that
determines the form of the resultant work of art. As in
the phenomenon of organic growth, so it is from the vital
experience of the poet that the various distinguishable ele-
ments of his work arise. Each of them then functions within
the whole.
Thus every creative work is a living organism of a unique
character. The highest critical understanding of a poet
could be reached if one could reveal the inner nature of
those conditions within him and without him under which
arose that particular modification of his experience and in-
sights which determined the creative activity in question,
and if we could show further precisely how the central mo-
tive, thc fable, the characters and the means of representa-
tion were inherent in that particular modification of his ex-
perience as a man! Thus, too, we could make clear the
peculiar character of his genius both in its strength and in
its limitations through comparison with that of other poets.
-Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung.
JOHANNES VOLKELT
THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF
TRAGEDY
IF IT be true that art shall always present substance of
truly human significance, its connection with fundamental
views of life and of the world is implied at once. This does
not mean, of course, that every work of art, every bit of
pottery, every landscape garden, every lyric is to communi-
cate a definite philosophical attitude. But we may truly
assert this, that both personal and cosmic philosophy have
gone to the making of a work of art and can be felt therein
in exact proportion in which that work and its substance
have been drawn from the depths of human striving and
conflict, in exact proportion to the breadth and insight with
which it brings to our view the character and development,
the driving forces, the aims and values of the life of man.
It is evident from this that the tragic in art is at once
and throughout its whole extent brought into a peculiarly
close relation to the artist's view of man and of the world.
For in tragedy, if anywhere in the realm of art, the humanly
significant appears at its deepest. It does not reveal itself
there in the comparatively insignificant, narrow and super-
ficial way that it commonly does in art that is merely
charming, ingratiating, suggestive. Tragedy is born from
the exertion of the deepest and innermost forces of human
nature, from the stirring up of the whole soul, from the
coming to light of all aspects of our being the great and
the common, the healthful and the sick; it springs from all
that is decisive in our estimate of the inner significance of
human life and of the varying values of human striving.
And thus it comes about that every good tragedy leaves in
55
56 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
us the impression that our consciousness of what it means
to be human has grown riper.
So soon as we acknowledge tragedy to possess this deep-
ened relation to the humanly significant, it follows at once
that the representation of the tragic must be more or less
interpenetrated by the creative mind's attitude toward life
and the world. It is impossible to express the inner sense
of life, its value or lack of value, its impelling forces and
its ends through the creation of character, without the for-
mative influence of the poet's fundamental convictions. It
matters little whether these convictions have assumed the
forms of philosophic thought, or the less sharply defined
form of religious belief or are embodied only as constant
moods and emotional certainties. In any case, consciously
or not, they influence the creative act. The sensuous or the
moralistic, the affirmative of life or the other-worldly, the
reconciled or the riven soul, the self-glorification of the in-
dividual or the profound reverence for higher powers
whatever is contained in the poet's typical mood or vision
stamps itself as form and color upon the creation of tragedy.
And as the poet is more reflectively inclined, as he is more
accustomed to interpret the surface appearances of life by
the significance of deeper connections, and to envisage the
world not merely as given but with more penetrating and
more prescient instincts, so ever more richly and inevitably
will the elements of his most general convictions be woven
into his works. One vision of man and nature confronts
us in Sophocles, another in Shakespeare or in Calderon, an-
other in Schiller and Goethe, one in Grillparzer and another
in Ibsen, even though it may be difficult to embody in pre-
cise conceptions these dim but effectively projected back-
grounds of thought.
The theory of tragedy, likewise, is as little capable of
being divided from a definite view of life and of the world
as the artistic creation of tragic characters and events itself.
This is true in the first place, of course, because the critic
must admit, as I have shown, that the artistic creation of
the tragic necessarily embodies the individual poet's philoso-
phy of life. But it is also true because the critic's theory
JOHANNES VOLKELT
حی
of the tragic depends more or less upon his own back-
ground of thought. However stringently a theory of tragedy
may guard itself against metaphysical derivation or pre-
supposition, however closely and simply it may cling to
psychology and experience, yet the idea which the individ-
ual critic has of the sense and value of life, of the develop-
ment and aim of humanity, and of man's place in the world
will involuntarily determine his fundamental conception of
the character of tragedy. ...
Now it is equally necessary to define the limits beyond
which the dependence of the tragic upon a philosophy of
life and of the world must not be pushed. I desire to point
out especially one violation of these proper limits that is of
frequent occurence and is particularly harmful to any theory
of tragedy. The frequent distrust and contempt of the
aesthetics of tragedy arise not least from the fact that the
tragic is too frequently denied its full freedom of choice
amid the contending philosophies of life.
Critics have too often yielded to the temptation of pre-
scribing one definite philosophy as the necessary basis of
tragedy. It has been too frequently assumed that it is the
function of tragedy to subserve a single rigid vision of life
and of the world. And naturally it has been in each in-
stance that vision which the critic in question confesses to
be his own. If there appear in tragedy some other way of
regarding men and their fate, nature or the soul, he sets it
down as a fault. He assigns to one view of things a prior
right. Within the limits of that view the dramatist is
to move; according to it the public is to form its taste.
Nor is this true only of the philosophers of the older type.
It is not only Schelling, Solger, Hegel, Vischer, Zeising,
Schopenhauer or Hartmann who demand their own philoso-
phy of tragedy: the most modern critics fall into the same
error. On the one hand, the latter complain movingly that
the old aestheticians sought to force their philosophy upon
tragedy; on the other hand they demand of every work of
art their modern vision of the sum of things and thus exer-
cise an equal tyranny. Whoever, in a word, demands of
tragedy that it exhibit the method of thought characteristic
58 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
of Darwin or Haeckel or Nietzsche, is no more justified
from the standpoint of aesthetics than he who demands that
it express an Hegelian or a Christian-theistic attitude.
These intolerant critics should consider how limited are
the validity and convincing power of any single philosophy.
Each of these critics insists that precisely his views of man
and of the world are to form the guiding spirit of tragedy.
Thus each of them really denies to the great majority among
artists and among the public the capacity of being rightly
moved by tragic art. For if the auditor does not enter the
circle of ideas peculiar to Schelling or Nietzsche, Schopen-
hauer or Darwin, he lacks, according to the critic, under-
standing and feeling both for the kernel and centre of the
tragic; in an auditor or artist of this kind the tragic would
therefore be but superficially and distortedly reflected. It
is strange that these critics have never been impressed with
their own arrogance in excluding by far the greater portion
of both artists and public from the appreciation of tragedy.
The undoubted dependence of the tragic upon a philosophy
of life must be understood in a far more liberal sense. We
must at once grant the poet a playground of many philoso-
phies. We must be tolerant enough not only to permit poets
to unfold the tragic from the basis of different philosophies;
we must rejoice thereat. And of the auditor or reader we
must demand that he shall quite simply enter into the world-
view of the poet as it arises more or less clearly from the
depth of the artistic whole; that he shall live himself into
the tragic in that particular form and color which the poet's
world-view has lent it. The poet on his part may ask that
the reader will not hastily or insistently demand the world-
view he has himself attained through his own mind or
through that of a philosopher he reveres, in which he dwells
unbendingly and from whose vantage-point he exercises a
criticism purely negative.
Thus in this question of the dependence of tragedy upon
philosophy, it is our first duty to practice tolerance. It is
not for us to deplore the fact, but to rejoice at it, that the
fundamentally different ways in which the lot of man and
the course of nature have been reflected in notable spirits
JOHANNES VOLKELT
59
shall find an expression in works of creative art. Art must
be hospitable to the multiform developments of our thoughts
concerning life and the world, to their incessant flux and
conflict. The philosophical and religious conflicts of the
human spirit must find expression in the creations of art,
which is in very truth a living element in the development
of civilization. If are were limited to founding itself
upon but one philosophical attitude—the Hegelian, for in-
stance, or the Darwinian and materialistic—such an exclu-
sion of all the other directions of human meditation, inves-
tigation and striving would lead to a state of incredible artis-
tic impoverishment and dessication. And that limitation
would also imply, as I have pointed out, an arrogant in-
justice against men who occupy a different philosophical
ground from yourself. Thus in the world of art, the freest
activity that is possible must be granted to those different
attitudes to the sum of experience which the human mind
has conquered in the course of its development.
-Aesthetik des Tragischen,
RICHARD MORITZ MEYER
THE MODERN POET
IN ORDER to show the specific nature of that which is
called "modern” in the world literature of the present, we
can do no better than to fix our attention upon the poetic
process itself.
That this process is changeless and unchangeable is a
prejudice that yields at once to both historical and psycho-
logical investigation. If we compare but for a moment the
birth of a poem among such primitive men as can still be
observed with the birth of one within the zones of our civili-
zation, we shall find that there remain but two things com-
mon to the two processes, two inevitable circumstances: the
element of subjective excitement; the object that induces
the excitement. Beyond that we shall find that even the
most naïve poetry of any modern is differentiated from the
choric chant at the bier of a hero or from the marching song
of battle by an infinite measure of consciousness, tradition,
formal demands, and striving after originality. ... The
poetic process itself undergoes a long but ceaseless develop-
ment. The fact that the momentary results of this develop-
ment are felt, even though not consciously felt, by any
given group of contemporaries is proven by the fact that
each epoch in history has a different conception of the typi-
cal poet. The change that has taken place in men's views
concerning the character of the poet and his work has been
so remarkable that I am inclined to regard the formation
of the modern ideal of the poet as the central and determin-
ing fact in the literary development of our period.
It is impossible to enter exhaustively into the ideal of
the poet. It will suffice to point out a few important phases
in its development. That development is characterized by
poetic. PThe fact even thousaries is het concepte in
60
RICHARD MORITZ MEYER
61
two chief factors: the poet becomes more sharply differ-
entiated from the tribal group which is his audience; poetic
activity is progressively liberated from the stimulus of an
external exciting cause. The history of the poetic process
is essentially the history of these two gradual liberations.
Among primitive men the poet is merely one of many
whom a group experience has wrought up emotionally to
such a pitch that a liberation from excitement is as strongly
desired as the satisfaction of a physical need. From the
group of the mourners, the rejoicing, the enraged, the ter-
ror-stricken, there leaps forth one in whom the passion
common to all has crystalized into intelligible speech; an-
other leaps forth, perhaps a third. And each time the group
of by-standers expresses its assent and inner liberation by
cries and ululations. Here we observe that the poet has no
existence separate from the tribe. The excitement once past,
he is a mere tribal unit like any other. He makes no de-
mand of his tribe; the tribe makes no demand of him.
Nevertheless we shall have to assume even in this "pre-
centor” of primitive times a specific gift: in some small
measure, at least, a god gave him, above his brethren, the
power to utter what he suffered. If and whenever this in-
dividual gift was heightened, the man in question became
capable of reacting to stimuli not powerful enough to excite
the tribal group. He no longer uttered his cry only under
the immediate stimulus of death, war, hunger. The vivid
recollection of these things sufficed him. And thus took
place the first liberation of poetry from the immediate occa-
sion, the first poetic projection of the past and distant. Our
man with his individual emotion is now seen to stand among
his calmer tribesmen, whom he draws into the circle of his
own mood. Thus he becomes to them the seer, the inspired
one, the vessel of a divine revelation. And this conception,
which has never been wholly separated from the image of
the poet, has been emphasized in very varying degrees at dif-
ferent times.
When, in the course of time, the tribe begins to feel the
need of an excited mood (whether as an atmosphere for
the prophesying of secret things, or because the heightened
62
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
speech of poetry comes to seem proper for the expression of
divine messages), a new and very definite view of the poetic
character and speech is bound to arise. For such speech is
now demanded of the poet who is regarded as an artificer,
as the possessor of certain technical methods and dexterities,
such as the smith and the medicinman possess of their
crafts. Men then say that he knows how to "make" some-
thing, that he is a "maker," a poet. His activity is then
ranked with the chief arts of the two primitive sexes and
he is said to "forge" or to "weave” his verses. Without the
urge of an inner excitement of his own he must now be
prepared to practice his art upon a tribal demand and
proceed to his performance as the priest proceeds to the
the offering of a sacrifice. The poet is now well differenti-
ated from the tribal mass by the possession of a definite
skill; poetic exercises in celebration, perhaps, of illustri-
ous ancestors are demanded of him and his work is recog-
nized and rewarded. This new element, likewise, that,
namely, of the notion of a poetic art that can be consciously
learned and practiced according to rules, has faded only
temporarily from the universal idea of the poet. It has done
so usually in periods of literary storm and stress when the
poet has been assigned his most ancient function of merely
lending his personal voice to a tribal passion.
Through this undue emphasis upon an acquired art of
poetry and the accompanying neglect of personal talent,
there arose in the Middle Ages the type of the learned poet
who lives in equal estrangement from the public and from
the stimulation through personal emotion. This poet is still
distinguished from his fellowmen by the possession of a
peculiar dexterity. But this possession is no longer seen as
the result of a cultivated gift but as the fruit of his industry.
What is demanded of him is the fulfillment of prescribed
literary laws, although the formulæ of courtesy still ally
him to his inspired ancestor. In reality poetry had become
a profession, and one of which the higher classes were a
little ashamed. In hours of leisure a gentleman might write
verses, but the making of "master pieces” was left to the
members of the poetic guild. ...
RICHARD MORITZ MEYER
63
It is clear that our age has essentially transcended these
three primitive types of the poetic character. They survive
merely in a few stormy chanters, a few coldly cultural arti-
ficers, and the many industrious purveyors of cheap fiction.
In the higher orders of literature we will have none of them.
For in the primitive seer our taste and judgment misses the
element of form, in the artificer that of personality, in the
mere poetic workman that of truth. The last we hold to
be the lowest, for in him any inner connection between the
poet and the poem has been abandoned. In him there is no
imed in the derm pled whenents the higher all the
the direotion of tendency. ...
It was the new cult of genius which came to the conti-
nent from England and was nourished on the contemplation
of ancient and oriental folk-art, that again set free the spe-
cifically poetic within the poet. But the new ideal was
useless without men to correspond to it. Young proclaimed
it amid great applause. But it was not until more than
fifty years after the production of his own chief work that
great original forces revealed themselves in English poetry.
In the meantime Johann Gottfried Herder in the city of
Strassburg evoked in the soul of the young Goethe the first
great example of the modern poetic ideal.
The poetry of Goethe is based wholly upon inner experi-
ence. He called his works the fragments of a great con-
fession; he insists that his poems were, in the higher sense,
always poems of occasion. Therein we see first of all the
revival of the inner oneness between the poet and his work.
... The poet shall create only when he must! The inner
impulse shall be as strong as it was in primitive times. But
it is to be a personal impulse, not a group impulse. The
inner oneness of the poet with his work has been regained;
his oneness with his public has been definitely lost. The
primitive poet was a function of the group; the later poet
was commissioned by one or many to record for them; the
Hence he faces a new and most difficult task: he must
create not only his work but also his public. ....
The union between the "occasion” and the poem has also
64 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
been reconstituted in the modern poet. The primitive stage
has again been touched. But also with an essential differ-
ence. The primitive impulse of the poetic process was im-
mediate and elemental. You must speak now or die! Such
was the feeling of the prophets of the old covenant. To-day
stimulus and actual expression are usually divided by a
rather long period of development. For almost the normal
age of man Goethe carried an experience in his heart, which
finally received eternal form in his ballad of the pariah. In
a word, all those phases of the poetic process that seem of
most importance to the modern poet are of comparatively
recent origin.
It goes without saying that what I mean here is the de-
velopment of the completed inner image of his creative work.
The poet's execution could at any period have demanded
years of labor, and may, on the other hand, even now have a
magic swiftness. ... What we are concerned with is the
inner labor.
The power of the poetic "occasion" to project itself effec-
tively through years of the poet's life is the distinctive mark
of the creative embryology of our age. ... And what is it
that takes place during this period of silent growth and
ripening? The adaptation of the subjective experience to
its objective form. The experience of the poet can no longer
be uttered through an improvisation; he can no longer select
a serviceable form in some treatise on poetics. He must
wait until, amid the daily impressions of artistic forms, his
experience assumes a form that shall make it communicable
to other men. Not a form, assuredly, that shall lend it a
popular triviality, but one that shall make the "confession”
intimately accessible to the seeing soul that has lacked the
experience to be communicated. The modern poet, in brief,
is a man in whose soul a human experience wins an artistic
form.
--Die Weltliteratur im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert.
gh years oology of owerhed of silente
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
THE HIDDEN POET
It is beneath the dignity of poets, the dead and the living,
to accept any praise but that true praise which is the confi-
dence of living men. But the characteristic of our age is
one of many meanings and wavering outlines. We rest upon
shifting foundations; we know that to be insecure which
our ancestors believed to be firm. A gentle but chronic
dizziness vibrates among us. And there is much in this
period of time that announces itself to but few, and much is
lacking of which many believe that it is truly with us. Thus
the poets might at times well ask themselves whether they
truly exist for this time in which they are cast; whether,
amid the worn and traditional praise that is flung them, there
is anywhere being brought them the one true praise that
befits their dignity-the confidence of living men, the ac-
knowledgment of their leadership. But perhaps it is true
(and it would be a beautiful truth and one worthy of an
age that has stripped itself of all ostentation and all rhetoric),
that precisely now this one true praise is being continually
offered to our poets, but offered in a way so hidden and
indirect that it requires some thought and some knowledge
of the world to become aware of this hidden reckoning with
the poet, the hidden yearning after him, this fleeing to the
refuge of his power.
It is thus, if I do not err, that things are to-day. And
my way of seeing all this forces me to shock you a little
first of all. For I must assert that reading, this immoderate
65
66 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
habit, this monstrous sickness, if you will, of our time,
which has been far too much abandoned to the statisticians
and publishers' accountants, has its unregarded and far sub-
tler aspects and expresses, indeed, nothing but an unassuag-
able yearning for the delights of poetry. This assertion will
shock you, and you will reply that in no other epoch has
poetry played so modest a part as it does in the reading
matter of our time, and that it is lost amid the huge masses
of books that people really read. You will tell me that my
assertion may have been true of the listeners to the tales
of Araby, or perhaps of the contemporaries of the "Princess
de Clèves,” or the generation of "Werther," but that it is
surely least applicable to our age which is one of scientific
handbooks and encyclopedias of useful knowledge and of
innumerable periodicals in which there is no place for poetry.
You will remind me that it is the women and the children
who read plays and poems nowadays. But I have asked
your permission to speak of things that do not lie wholly
on the surface, and I would have us all reflect for a mo-
ment upon the wide difference of our reading from the read-
ing of former times. This reading of ours seems to me
noteworthy precisely as it is most restless, aimless and ap-
parently irrational. We are immeasurably removed from
the quiet lover of polite letters, from the old amateur of
some popular science, from the reader of novels and mem-
oirs in some earlier and calmer age. Precisely by virtue of
its feverishness, its indiscriminateness, its unquiet wander-
ing from book to book, its stirring and seeking, does the
reading of our generation seem to me a function of our very
lives, a noteworthy attitude in us, a symbolical gesture.
Almost do I see as the central gesture of our whole age
man with a book in his hand, even as the kneeling man with
folded hands was the symbol of another age. I am not, of
course, thinking of those who desire to learn definite things
from particular volumes. I speak of others who, always
according to their stage of knowledge, read varied books,
constantly changing them, never long at rest with one, driven
by an uninterrupted and ever unstilled yearning. But the
reaming of all such, it might seem, is not for the poet at all.
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
67
It is the man of science who can still their longing or, for
the great majority, even the mere journalist. They read
the newspapers rather even than books, and although they
do not know just what they are seeking, yet it is surely not
poetry, but shallow explanations of things to quiet the mo-
ment, groups of external facts, facile and apparently new
"truths"--all the raw material of existence. I am repeating
here what we all glibly say and superficially believe. But
I think, nay, I know, that all this is but an appearance,
For they seek more, they seek something different, these
hundreds of thousands in their many thousands of books
which they pass from hand to hand until the pages are
soiled and tattered: they seek something far from these
unrelated things, these air-spun, short-lived theories which
one book after another offers them; they are seekers, but no
dialetic has been granted them subtle enough to permit them
to ask themselves and to say what they seek; they have no
largeness of outlook and no synthetic power; the only means
whereby they can express what happens within them is
that one dumb and eloquent gesture with which they lay
aside a book they have opened and turn to another. And
this must be so continually: for they seek in book after
book what the contents of none of these thousand books
can give them; they seek something that hovers between
the contents of all these individual books, something that
may unite into one harmony the contents of them all. They
devour the most realistic of all literatures and are seeking
something intensely spiritual that which, as by a magical
transfusion of living blood, may unite their lives with the
veins of the great life of the world. They seek in books
what once they sought before fragrant altars, in the twilight
of cathedrals which their yearning had taught to soar. They
seek what is to unite them more powerfully than aught else
with the world and at the same time take from them the
world's heaviness. They' seek a self, leaning upon which,
their own selves may grow less disquieted. In a word, they
seek all the enchantment of poetry. But it is not their
affair to account accurately for themselves, nor to know that
it is the poet for whom they are looking behind the journal-
68 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
ist and the ephemeral writer. For wherever they seek they
find. The novelist who delights them, the journalist who
gives a savor to their daily lives and casts the sharp lights
of larger existence across their morning and their evening
path-truly I have neither the courage nor the desire to
separate these from the poet. I know no penny-a-liner, not
the most wretched of his trade, upon whose productions, un-
worthy of that light though they may be, there does not
fall something of the poet's radiance, when these productions
are seen by an eye wholly unspoiled, by, an imagination
throttled through the dryness and the hardship of life. And
that is so, simply because that scribbler uses, however in-
eptly, the most marvellous of all instruments—a living
speech. To be sure, he humiliates himself by robbing that
language of as much of its nobility, its radiance, its life as
he can; but he can never impoverish it so utterly but that
some broken rhythms, some combinations of words which,
in his own despite, he commands, or some images which his
scribbling disgraces while it displays them—but that these
may not fall like magic beams into some quite young, some
quite crude soul. ...
And now, having touched upon the great mystery of
speech, I have suddenly revealed the goal to which I would
lead you. It is by virtue of language that the poet from his
secret places rules a world whose single members may deny
him and may even have forgotten his existence. And yet it
is he who leads their thoughts together or leads them apart,
who rules and nurses their imagination, and by whose grace
even their whimsies and their maddest pranks are ruled.
Like all genuine forces this silent sorcery works inexorably.
For everything that is written in a language and everything,
I dare to assert, that is thought in it, derives from the
products of those few who have ever dealt with that lan-
guage creatively. And all that which, in the widest sense,
we call literature, down to the libretto of an old-fashioned
opera and the paper-backed novel—all derives from the few
great books of the world. The descent has been degraded,
it has been distorted by indiscriminate crossings to the point
of grotesqueness, but it is a descent in the direct line. And
is he rules and imsies and its silent sorcerwage and
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
so it is really the poets, and ever the poets alone, it is the
words that they have forever united or by some antithesis
forever separated, the figures and situations by which they
have symbolized the eternal happening—it is still the poets.
with whom the imagination of the hundred thousands is con-
cerned. The man on the omnibus who has his half-read paper
under his workingman's smock, the shop assistant and the
little seamstress who lend each other cheap novels, and all
the innumerable readers of worthless books—is it not strange
to reflect that even these, somehow, in those hours in which
their eyes pass over the dark lines of print, are busy with
the poets, suffer the violence of the poets, of those solitary
souls whose existence they do not suspect and from whose
authentic productions so deep an abyss severs them and
their kind! It is the spirituality of the poets, their warmth
binding to each other the atoms that would fly asunder, it
is their magic alone that holds these books together and
makes of each a separate world and an island upon which
the imagination may dwell. Without this magic which gives
them an appearance of form, these books would fall to
fragments and would be dead matter after which not the
hand of the meanest would be stretched out.
Thousands of hands grasp continually after those books.
in which science has heaped up the harvest of its laborious
days and nights. These books, above all, seem to have
made adepts of the finer and more coherent minds. And
am I going too far if once again I assert that here too ]
discover a hidden yearning for the poet, a yearning which,
as perverse as many impulses of love, pretends to hold it .
self averted from the object of its secret wishes and to flee!
from it forever? Surely, surely, it is only those few who
work within a given science who seek its true character, its;
stern and limited existence surrounded by an abyss of
eternal cold! The unproved, seeking souls of the multi-
tude would find this cold so terrible that it would scorch
them and drive them forever from its place!
That there are men who can live in an air sered by the
coldness of unending space, this is a secret of the spirit, a
secret like that of the poets who are able to live under the
day de acoins, i den toy imbject orely seek the base of
70
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
pressure of all the gathered and present experience of man-
kind. But it is not for the multitude and cannot be for it.
For men and women are in the midst of life and from sci-
ence, taken in its stern and pure sense, no path leads back
to life. There is a striving in all the arts to become pure
art, and this striving has been expressed by the saying,
which must not be taken for more than a figure of speech,
that they strive to become music. And so in each science
there lives the striving to purify itself into mathematics.
And this, if you please, is still the one human thing in the
sciences, their permanent spiritualization by humanity: for
thus they seek to carry into the universe the subjective cal-
culations of the race, and man, as in the old saying, remains
the measure of all things. But even thus the path leads to
the icy and the solitary. And the crowd who takes up
books of science again and again is not impelled toward
the burning frosts of eternity; its members are no adepts
and must forever remain with all their seething questions in
the outer courts. For the objects of their yearning are the
connective emotions, the cosmic emotions, the emotions
stirred by thought, precisely those which a true and stringent
science must always deny itself and which the poet alone
can give. They who snatch the books of science and even
of pseudo-science, even as those others who grasp after
novels or newspapers or any printed rag, do so because they
would not stand shivering in their nakedness under the stars.
They yearn for what only the poet can give them when
he throws over that nakedness the folds of his garment.
And poetic creation, as Hebbel says somewhere in his jour-
nals, is throwing the world around one like a mantel that
will warm us. Of this warmth the multitude would par-
take; for its sake they would snare for themselves frag-
ments of the poetic power, when they imagine that they
pay homage to science. Their mind is set upon a feeling
thought, an intellectualized emotion, upon a mediation be-
tween them and all that science, in its great renunciation,
accepts as forever unapproachable to the needs of man.
But they seek the poet and they name him not..
-Der Dichter und diese Zeit.
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
71
THE POET AND HIS HEARER
NEVER again will an awakened age demand of its poets,
either of individuals or of them collectively, an expression
of itself in exhausting eloquence, an accounting drawn up
in intelligible formulæ. The century through which we are
struggling has wrought us phenomena too strong, has stirred
up too mightily the masked dance of mute apparitions; too
powerfully have the wordless secrets of nature and the still
shadow of the past swept in upon us. An awakened age
will make more and more mystical demands. A tremendous
process has stamped anew the experience of the poet and
also the experience of him for whom the poet exists—the
individual. The poet and he for whom poetry exists no
longer resemble figures from any past era. I will not say
how much more they seem to resemble the priest and the
true believer, or the beloved and the lover, in the Platonic
sense, or the enchanter and the enchanted. For these com-
parisons hide as much as they reveal of an intangible rela-
tion, in which the buried magics of all these relationships
mingle with still other nameless elements which belong to
the present day alone.
But this intangible relation exists. The book is here, full
of its power over the soul, over the senses. It is here and
it whispers where the light is to be obtained from life, and
how pieasure runs its course, how leadership of men is won
and how the hour of death should be borne. The book
exists and within it the conception of wisdom and the con-
ception of seduction. There it lies and is silent or speaks,
and is so much the more ambiguous, more dangerous, more
mysterious in that everything is more ambiguous, more
powerful, more mysterious in this immeasurably intangible
and, in the highest sense, poetic age. There is no meaning
in making a cheap antithesis and contrasting books with
real life. For if books were not an element of life, a highly
equivocal, volatile, perilous, magical element of life, then'
they would be nothing at all, and it would be wasting breath
72
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
to speak of them. But in the hand of each of us they are
something different, and they come to life only when they
combine with a living soul. They do not speak, they an-
swer rather; this makes of them a demoniac force. The
time is yet to come for their synthesis, but in a thousand dark
hours these fountain-springs, welling up from the deep, are
not denied to the individual, and I am no longer sure, when
I regard these things in their secret, more beautiful connec-
tion, whether I may still speak of "sorry offspring," where
continuously, after barren times, things born of the spirit
work in turn upon the spirit. Never before have seekers
brought themselves so completely to the written poem: as
upon the poets themselves, so there lies upon them the com-
pulsion to leave nothing outside. It is wrestling, a chaos
which struggles for breath within these who bend with
greedy eyes over the book as well as in those who have
brought forth the books. In the readers of whom I speak
(the individuals, unusual, and yet not so unusual as one
might think) all darkness would be banished as in a living
bath, all discords be forgotten, everything would forever be
united. For them also, as for the creating artist, the spirit
liberates itself from the material substance, not by despising
it, but rather by grasping hold of it with such intensity that
it forces its way out. To them also in their most exalted
moments nothing is remote, nothing near, no phase of the ·
soul beyond reach, no baseness base. It befalls them, as
it does the poet, and their breathings in such moments are
of creative force. They read at such times, which are great
events and which cannot occur at will, nothing in which
they do not believe, just as the poets cannot bear to produce
anything in which they do not believe. I say, "believe,”
and I say it in a profounder sense than that with which, I
fear, it rings out to you in the haste of this discourse. I do
not mean it as the losing of one's self in the fantastic en-
chantment of the versified word, as self-forgetfulness over
a book, a short and a superficial fascination. What I mean
to say is just the oppopsite: I mean it in its full religious
significance; as a faith in the truth over and above all
appearance of reality, a holding fast and being held in the
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
i
depths of one's soul, a resting from the whirl of existence.
Thus the poets believe what they fashion and fashion what
they believe. The universe is crumbling away, but their
visions are for them the points which uphold the edifice of
the world. But to accept this word vision as I give it, not
to connect it with any preconceived idea, to include under
this conception the true penetration of mere matter as well
as a vast, comprehensive view of cosmic happenings—this I
must leave to you, for you sit before me, many people, and
I do not know to whom I speak; but I speak only for those
who wish to follow me and not for him who has promised
himself to remain aloof. I can appeal only to those for
whom poetry exists, through whose own being the poet
first acquires life. For he is ever the answerer only and
without questioners he who replies is a shadow. To be
sure, we are concerned above all with life and the living,
our interest is for the men and women of this age, the only
ones who are real to us; for whose sake suns have been
burnt out, and new suns have fashioned themselves, for
whose sake prehistoric ages existed and immense forests, and
countless animals; for whose sake Rome fell and Carthage
was destroyed, that they might live to-day and breathe as
they do live and breathe, and be wrapped around in this
living flesh, the moisture of their eyes beaming in them,
and their hair and their brows formed just as they are
formed. It is they with whom we are concerned, their pains,
their pleasures, their embraces and their isolations. But it
is a thoughtless antithesis to contrast these, the living, with
written poetry as with something foreign to them, since
poetry is, indeed, nothing but a function of the living. For
it does not live, it is lived. To those, however, who have
once experienced a thousand pages of Dostoyevsky and who
have entered into the personality of Ottilie in the "Elective
Affinities," or have lived a poem of Goethe or a poem of
Stephan George, to these I say nothing estranging when I
speak of this experience as a religious experience, the only
religious experience possibly, of which they were ever con-
scious. But this experience cannot be dissected nor de-
scribed. One can recall it, but one cannot bring it close to
74 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
those who have never been touched by it. Whoever under-
stands how to read, reads believingly, for he rests his soul
upon the vision. He keeps none of himself apart. For one
enchanted instant everything is equally near to him, every-
thing equally remote, for he feels in touch with all things.
Nothing of the past has been lost to him and the future has
nothing greater to offer. He is for one magic moment the
conqueror of time. Wherever he may be, everything is
within reach and every particle of discord is dissolved. The
single thing for him becomes the many, for he sees it sym-
bolically, indeed the one is for him the universal and he is
happy without the sting of hope. He does not lose him-
self; he possesses himself completely for that single instant;
he equals the full measure of himself.
- Der Dichter und diese Zeit.
RICHARD
MUELLER-FREIENFELS
CREATIVE ART IN LIFE
I. TO THE modern mind, trained in the biological sci-
ences, it is no longer possible to present art as a gift of the
gods to mortals and as having nothing in common with
ordinary life. Equally fallacious is the wide-spread opinion
that creative literature is a dispensable luxury or a diver-
sion which, however praiseworthy, stands in opposition to
life. Were literature nothing more than that, it would be
difficult to understand why no people on earth has ever been
able to dispense with it, and why men of the highest general
endowment have dedicated themselves wholly to its pursuit.
No, literature is deeply rooted and intertwined with life's
totality and its fruits produce a seed that gives birth to new
forces in the practical world. For literature, like all the
aesthetic functions, is a completion and a necessary com-
pletion of the practical life. It stands on the same ground
as the other arts and as play, and like these its biological
value consists in its employment of talents and faculties
which would else be unused and become atrophied through
the one-sidedness that all practical life entails. It is by
virtue of art alone that man can develop into that "totality"
which was the human ideal of Schiller. Modern scientists,
moreover, have shown physiologically and biologically, in
what exact ways aesthetic activity achieves that harmonious
cultivation of the whole organism which the life process
demands.
Thus we divide life into two great realms: First there is
the pr ctical side, the activities of which are directed toward
purely external aims, and secondly there is the aesthetic life
which has no aims that lie outside of itself, but carries its
own inherent value and expresses itself biologically through
75
76 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
the exercise of organs and functions that would be uncul-
tivated but for it. The exercise of these organs and func-
tions is accompanied by pleasurable emotions. To the prac-
tical life belong nearly all the vocational activities of man;
to the aesthetic life belong play, pure science and art. We
do not regard art, as has often been done, as a species of
play; we place art beside play. The two have much in
common. But we speak of art only where human activity
is directed to the production of creative work or where hu-
man receptivity strives to make such a work its own. On
the higher cultural levels we always find this division into
artist and audience. But what is truly common to all the
aesthetic functions is that they are a necessary completion
of the practical life, that they awaken feelings of pleasure
and thus intensify and heighten the consciousness of life.
But since, as a rule, they follow no practical purposes, they
stand without the ordinary, practical coil of living, and from
this fact arises the well-recognized aloofness and self-sustain-
ing power of all the aesthetic functions to which Kant's
definition of the “disinterested" has often been applied.
Hence we call such works works of art that are calculated
to afford us aesthetic experiences-experiences that are aloof
from external aims, that complete the practical life and are
accompanied by emotions of pleasure. It is to be observed,
of course, that in the world of reality this theoretical cleav-
age between practical and aesthetic functions is rarely quite
complete. Practical activities are at times accompanied by
a certain aesthetic satisfaction; artistic activities are often
blended with extra-aesthetic elements.
2. What obviously differentiates literature from the other
arts is the circumstance that it communicates aesthetic ex-
periences through the medium of language. We must re-
member, however, that language is merely a means of ex-
pression and never the actual material of the aesthetic ex-
perience as tones are in music. Language, as a phenomenon
of acoustics, has not nearly the same importance in poetry
as tones have in music; in most literature the true signifi-
cance lies in the images, feelings, passions, volitional stimuli
which are merely communicated by means of this acoustic
RICHARD MUELLER-FREIENFELS 77
enceduce the all music art of speech. Never have been
phenomenon and which, in music, are quite secondary. That
is not true, in an equal degree, of all kinds of poetry. In
the lyric, language as a phenomenon of acoustics plays a
far more important part than in the novel. It is there
usually more than a mere medium of expression. Every-
where in language there inheres this dualism of its acoustic-
motor aspect and those meanings, that is to say, those spirit-
ual experiences which are liberated by the acoustic-motor
element. In all good works of art this dualism is unobtru-
sive, since here the two aspects of language have been
blended into a complete oneness of effect. Nevertheless, we
can never call literature an art of speech in the same sense
in which we can call music an art of tones. Nor is it cor-
rect to reduce the dualism of language and of the spiritual
experiences which it communicates to the old distinction
between form and content. We shall show hereafter that
creative form includes, above all, the entire circle of mean-
ings. Hence we can define the place of literature in life's
totality simply by saying: Literature, by means of lan-
guage, generates in us spiritual experiences that complete
and enrich life. It need merely be added that the experi-
ences communicated by imaginative literature are apt to be
less purely aesthetic than those communicated through the
other arts. They are, of course, predominantly so. But
since the raw material of poetic creation is derived from
common and hence generally practical life, extra-aesthetic
elements, above all ethical, religious, etc., play an important
part.
3. Thus literature is concerned with the enrichment of -
life. This is the common purpose of all creative literature
as it addresses itself to man. No divergence of opinion
appears until one inquires into precisely what is meant by
enrichment. For the experiences communicated by litera-
ture do not, as in music, stand wholly apart from life, but
gain their content from its very stuff. There arises the
question, which has been the subject of many a heated con-
troversy, whether literature is to bring as its enrichment
only a quantitative broadening and increase of the life com-
mon to all men, or whether it is to effect a qualitative
78 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
change, intensification and heightening. This question is
forever returning in different forms. Men demand at one
time the greatest naturalness, the most exact imitation; at
other times art is valued precisely for the changes which it
makes in the raw material of reality. Let me call the
tendency which aims at the most faithful representation of
life and seeks to produce in literature something that shall
be qualitatively equivalent to reality, a broadening of life.
If, on the other hand, literature aims at a qualitative trans-
formation of its raw material and neglects imitative exact-
ness for the sake of definite changes, I shall call that a
heightening of life.
It is easy to see that both of these tendencies have always
been present in art, that each has sustained itself by the
side of the other, but that they have often been in an attitude
of mutual hostility. The mere broadening of life is usually
designated by the term naturalism. This form of art gives
us representations which rest on exactly the same basis as
the common life of every day. That kind of art, on the
other hand, which aims at a heightening and intensification
of life, and hence reworks its substance into something quite
new, we may for the present call idealistic or stylistic art.
There is still a third kind of art, namely romantic art. It
is not concerned with a broadening of life, but flees by pref-
erence from common things. It seeks its novelty, however,
only in its substance, in the choice of things distant in time
and space. But it does not seek, like idealistic art, to
transform the character of things. Thus romantic art is un-
realistic. It denies common life, but only as substance and
does not strive to create life in a new form.
But even as we define these three types of art, we are
bound to admit that the boundaries that divide them are
never very exact or sharp. Goethe began largely as a
naturalist. Through conscious study of the art of the
Greeks he developed that idealistic method which we admire
in his "Iphigenie.” By its side, however, are found works
of his that are strongly romantic. And indeed, several of
these literary tendencies will often be found blended in the
same work. Thus we find in the same work both naturalism
RICHARD MUELLER-FREIENFELS. 79
and romanticism, a further proof that these two kinds differ --
from each other only in their choice of subject matter. One
need merely think of E. T. A. Hoffmann or of Zola, both
of whom mix the boldest romanticism with their naturalism.
But although mixed forms and transitional forms exist, it is
never difficult to tell in a given case which of these three
tendencies has dominated an individual writer. It is not
the duty of the psychologist or the critic to condemn any
one of these tendencies. Each has always sustained itself
by the side of the other two, and no violence of criticism
has affected it. And whatever has such power of persistence
has earned its right to be. And indeed, the more closely
one analyses the different tendencies of art, the more their
fundamental differences seem to disappear or to become
merely differences of degree, so that even in naturalism and
romanticism one finds certain idealising elements which have
simply not reached the point of conscious and clear unfold-
ment.
Poetik.
ALFRED KERR
THE CRITIC AS CREATOR
... I DEMAND this of the true critic: “Let him give the
criticism of hate and of love, tempered by historic justice.
Like the King of Israel, let him love two things—the sling
and the harp."
These, I believe, are the symbolical implements of the
critic--the sling and the harp.
In the dreams of the day and of the night these two
hover before his vision—the sling and the harp.
Hatred and love are better than likes and dislikes. The
contemplation of any work of art leads to an unconscious
addition. Imagine the force of the good and the bad single
impressions to be stated in terms of numbers. The critic's
mood depends upon the size of these numbers, his judgment
upon their sums. Nothing is significant until it has been
dissected into its spiritual elements. To do this is the most
serious task of criticism. Thus criticism may give both-
the arbitrary and the objective. The personal element must
lie in the presentation, the objective in the ultimate valua-
tion. Criticism should seek to envisage a work of art as the
historian of literature will envisage it in twenty-five years;
but let not critics be ashamed of their most spontaneous
impulses—the impulses of hatred and of love. For criticism
is an art, no science. ...
I. I offer criticisms in living speech.
2. They seek to disengage the trait of eternity.
3. Their aim is to light torches; and to illuminate whole
kinds by exhibiting the force of an example through selected
traits.
4. I am grateful to anyone who grasps the fact that an
artistic form of bright serenity does not conceal an empty
80
ALFRED KERR
81
fribble; it may conceal a fighter of the spirit. The dull
seriousness that usually wins people's respect is not a better
ethos. It is impotence. ...
5. The inner form of my criticism is concision.
It would rather be extract than lemonade; it would rather
operate with a flash-light than with a string of oil wicks.
It must have the power of building up a man's portrait in a
few pages. Conciseness is the form of the future, the postu-
late of an age (in so far as it is not that of a temperament)
which is richer, more winged, passionate in its haste. Eheu,
fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni!
6. I have no desire to follow streams of tendency; I
would dissect souls. I have never had the intention of
writing a book concerning the progress of a movement, al-
ways of recording in permanent form the soul of a man. ...
8. Thus I aim after the essential, not the complete. There
are no chapters on The Weavers or Hannele or The Beaver-
coat of Hauptmann-no chapters on the thrice-discussed.
The innermost being of the man is to shine through the
sections of which he is the subject.
9. One who is only an impressionist may perish of his
critical futility. From what is said of a particular play,
for instance, there should arise a profounder understanding
of the nature of the theatre, of the character of dramatic
effects. Mere impressionism is not enough. There are ob-
jective demands.
10. The critic may laughingly receive the reproach of
mannerism. What is mannerism? Every form of presenta-
tion that seems best and inevitable to the author; every
style whose melody sounds in the author before the crowd
is accustomed to its rhythm. Every new phenomenon in
literature demands a new technique of reading. Each one
(a criticism that seeks to crystalize no less than others) asks
that such a technique be formed.
What, then, is mannerism? A deficiency in the reader. ...
12. I would put an end to the stupid distinction: this
man is no creator, but a critic.
The true critic is always in my vision of him a poet, a
"maker.” And it makes almost no very great difference
82 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
figures frand the critice of an a
whether he creates a serious author or an amusingly bad
one. Even as a poet may be almost equally great in the act
of creating a Falstaff or a great hero. For the poet, too,
draws his figures from life. Imagination is memory. He
is a constructor. And the critic is a constructor of con-
structors. He analyzes the being of an author, causes the
author's innermost nature to arise before us; he reproduces
the kernel of the man's brain, sets the whole reproduced
figure (in his vision of it) on its two legs and bids his
creature to go forth!
The true critic is ever a poet, a creator.
13. Why does one review certain things? Because one
believes that sometimes a decent review has a better chance
of lasting than a shoddy play. Why drive the reviewer's
trade? For the reviewer's sake. Neither for the sake of
the public nor of the "author.”
The critic contemplates poets as the poet contemplates
men. He contemplates poets as tragic or semi-tragic or
quaintly amusing members of the family of man-as human
beings who create, even as others only experience. He con-
templates that part of their experience which is embodied as
creation. He writes a great work whose heroes are all poets.
(Ah, if only they were all poets!) And that work is a work
of creation. Expression, structure, the grasp upon a human
being—all are mine. Assuredly the critic shows his creatures
as they are, measured by those norms which for certain
ages the Caucasian races have used to declare a thing great
or bungling. He makes something of them. Robert Schu-
mann said of the critics that "they were not to imagine
themselves the gods of artists who could, if they pleased, -
let them starve.” He meant the false critics. For it is an
accident, O poets, that we choose you. We are not de-
pendent on this subject rather than another. Enter there-
fore into the work of the critic as into a house of the erring
-as into a house of man. Behold the creatures of the
critic; behold them shape their artificial manikins. Behold
their contortions, their swollen dullness, their attempted
cheating, their pallor of defeat! And behold the happy few,
the creators—tragic even in their victory. Behold these few
ALFRED KERR
83
selling their own blood and their forth-streaming life for
the visions of their art, for these phantoms by the grace
of their poor souls, for puppets, vampires. ... Behold!
14. To be a critic, if you are nothing beyond that, is a
stupid vocation. Derivative doctrines grow stale faster than
this morning's buns. There is value, I believe, only in such
criticism as constitutes a work of art in itself, so that it can
still affect men when its contents have grown false and its
subjects mildewed. Criticism is to be viewed as a creative
kind.
Ah, if criticism were a science! But the imponderable
elements are too strong. It is, at its best, an art. And it
will become greater as it grows more an art. Think of the
sublime Lessing. His doctrine of the transitory moment
seems nonsense to-day; his doctrine of catharsis is empty
talk, based on a misunderstanding of Aristotle. But the
way in which he expressed both--that is immortal. It is
the art in the critic that lives on. What is productive
criticism? No critic has ever yet produced, ever yet
begotten a poet! Productive criticism creates a work of
art in criticism. Every other interpretation is empty. And
only he among critics has the right to approach a poet who
is himself one.
15. Thus in criticism one must not only speak truth-
that is, indeed, a presupposition-but in the embodiment
of truth one must build a work of art, beget beauty, create
form. Only such criticism is productive. It is production.
Here the critic occupies a point where all differences between
his craft and the craft of the official poet cease. He is no
longer a living antithesis of the front line of the poetic army.
He is within, one in kind with his fellows, the representative
of a department of creative art. The men at whom his
art aims, the objects of his creative activity are poets. This
is the only possible sense of the chatter concerning pro-
ductive criticism-namely, that criticism is in itself pro-
duction. ...
17. The critic of the future will say: I have no desire to
be a serf ordering the ranks in the crowd of the moderately
gifted, the ungifted and of those very few whom I regard
.84
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
as standing above me. I would, at times, be the herald of
these few. Not as their creature, but as their kinsman.
18. The critic of the future will in general hold fast to
this truth: to build systems is only to invite dizziness; per-
manence belongs only to what has been well said.
-Das neue Drama.
PART THREE
GEORGE MOORE
THE VILLA AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
RESPECTABILITY has wound itself about society, a sort
of octopus, and nowhere are you quite free from one of its
horrible suckers. The power of the villa residence is supreme:
art, science, politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its
requirements. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes
to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly
realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality
of materialism; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue,
but the meanness of a Frith—not the winged realism of
Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a coloured photo-
graph.
To my mind there is no sadder spectacle of artistic de-
bauchery than a London theatre; the overfed inhabitants of
the villa in the stalls hoping for gross excitement to assist
them through their hesitating digestions; an ignorant mob
in the pit and gallery forgetting the miseries of life in im-
becile stories reeking of the sentimentality of the back
stairs. Were other ages as coarse and as common as ours?
It is difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more
intelligent than those that applaud Mr. Pettit's plays. Im-
possible that an audience that could sit out Edward II.
could find any pleasure in such sinks of literary infamies as
In the Ranks and Harbour Lights. Artistic atrophy is be-
numbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the
rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the
fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama
is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they
are peopled—the miser in the old castle counting his gold
by night, the dishevelled woman whom he keeps for ambigu-
ous reasons confined in a cellar. Let all this be waived.
We must not quarrel with the ingredients. The miser and
87
88 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
the old castle are as true, and not one jot more true, than
the million events which go to make up the phenomena of
human existence. Not at these things considered separately
do I take umbrage, but at the miserable use that is made
of them, the vulgarity of the complications evolved from
them, and the poverty of beauty in the dialogue.
Not the thing itself, but the idea of the thing evokes the
idea. Schopenhauer was right; we do not want the thing,
but the idea of the thing. The thing itself is worthless; and
the moral writers who embellish it with pious ornamentation
are just as reprehensible as Zola, who embellishes it with
erotic arabesques. You want the idea drawn out of obscur-
ing matter, this can best be done by the symbol. The sym-
bol, or the thing itself, that is the great artistic question.
In earlier ages it was the symbol; a name, a plume, sufficed
to evoke the idea; now we evoke nothing, for we give
everything; the imagination of the spectator is no longer
called into play. In Shakespeare's days to create wealth in
a theatre it was only necessary to write upon a board, “A
magnificent apartment in a palace.” This was no doubt
primitive and not a little barbarous, but it was better by
far than by dint of anxious archæology to construct the
Doge's palace upon the stage. By one rich pillar, by some
projecting balustrade taken in conjunction with a moored
gondola, we should strive to evoke the soul of the city of
Veronese: by the magical and unequalled selection of a
subtle and unexpected feature of a thought or aspect of a
landscape, and not by the up-piling of extraneous detail,
are all great poetic efforts achieved.
"By the tideless dolorous inland sea,
In a land of sand, of ruin, and gold.”
And, better example still,
.
“Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois,”
that impeccable, that only line of real poetry Alfred de
Vigny ever wrote; and being a great poet Shakespeare con-
GEORGE MOORE
89
sciously or unconsciously observed more faithfully than any
other poet these principles of art; and, as is characteristic of
the present day, nowhere do we find these principles, so
grossly violated as in the representation of his plays. I had
painful proof of this some few nights after my arrival in
London. I had never seen Shakespeare acted, and I went to
the Lyceum and there I saw that exquisite love song—for
Romeo and Juliet is no more than a love song in dialogue
tricked out in silks and carpets and illuminated building, a
vulgar bawd suited to the gross passion of an ignorant
public. I hated all that with the hatred of a passionate
heart, and I longed for a simple stage, a few simple indica-
tions, and the simple recitation of that story of the sacrifice
of the two white souls for the reconciliation of two great
families. My hatred did not reach to the age of the man
who played the boy-lover, but to the offensiveness with
which he thrust his individuality upon me, longing to realize
the poet's divine imagination: and the woman, too, I wished
with my whole soul away, subtle and strange though she
was, and I yearned for her part to be played by a youth as
in old time: a youth cunningly disguised, would be a sym-
bol; and my mind would be free to imagine the divine Juliet
of the poet, whereas I could but dream of the bright eyes
and delicate mien and motion of the woman who had thrust
herself between me and it.
But not with symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa
to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds
to its material wants. The villa has not time to think, the
villa is the working bee. The tavern is the drone. It has
no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is
therefore a little more refined, or, should I say? depraved,
in its taste. The villa in one form or other has always
existed, and always will exist so long as our present social
system holds together. It is the basis of life, and more
important than the tavern. Agreed: but that does not say
that the tavern was not an excellent corrective influence to
the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgaris-
ing effect on artistic work of all kinds, and the club has
been proved impotent to replace it, the club being no more
90 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
than the correlative of the villa. Let the reader trace villa
through each modern feature. I will pass on at once to the
circulating library, at once the symbol and glory of villaism.
The subject is not unfamiliar to me; I come to it like the
son to his father, like the bird to its nest. Singularly in-
appropriate comparison, but I am in such excellent humour
to-day; humour is everything. It is said that the tiger will
sometimes play with the lamb! Let us play.) We have the
villa well in our mind. The father who goes to the city in
the morning, the grown-up girls waiting to be married, the
big drawing-room where they play waltz music, and talk
of dancing parties. But waltzes will not entirely suffice,
nor even tennis; the girls must read. Mother cannot keep
a censor (it is as much as she can do to keep a cook, house-
maid, and page-boy), besides the expense would be enor-
mous, even if nothing but shilling and two-shilling novels
were purchased. Out of such circumstances the circulating
library was hatched.
The villa made known its want, and art fell on its knees.
Pressure was put on the publishers, and books were pub-
lished at 315. 6d.; the dirty, outside public was got rid of,
and the villa paid its yearly subscription, and had nice large,
handsome books that none but the élite could obtain, and
with them a sense of being put on a footing of equality
with my Lady This and Lady That, and certainty that
nothing would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary
and Maggie that they might not read, and all for two
guineas a year. English fiction became pure, and the garlic
and assafætida with which Byron, Fielding, and Ben Jonson
so liberally seasoned their works, and in spite of which, as
critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared from our
literature. English fiction became pure, dirty stories were to
be heard no more, were no longer procurable. But at this
point human nature intervened; poor human nature! when
you pinch it in one place it bulges out in another, after
the fashion of a lady's figure. Human nature has from
the earliest time shown a liking for dirty stories; dirty
stories have formed a substantial part of every literature (I
employ the words "dirty stories” in the circulating library
GEORGE MOORE
91
sense); therefore a taste for dirty stories may be said to be
inherent in the human animal. Call it a disease if you will
-an incurable disease—which, if it is driven inwards, will
break out in an unexpected quarter in a new form and with
redoubled virulence. This is exactly what has happened.
Actuated by the most laudable motives, Mudie cut off our
rations of dirty stories, and for forty years we were ap-
parently the most moral people on the face of the earth.
It was confidently asserted that an English woman of sixty
would not read what would bring the blush of shame to
the cheeks of a maiden of any other nation. But humilia-
tion and sorrow were awaiting Mudie. True it is that we
still continued to subscribe to his library, true it is that we
still continued to go to church, true it is that we turned
our faces away when Mdlle. de Maupin or the Assommoir
was spoken of; to all appearance we were as good and chaste
as even Mudie might wish us, and no doubt he looked back
upon his forty years of effort with pride; no doubt he beat
his manly breast and said, "I have scorched the evil one out
of the villa; the head of the serpent is crushed for ever-
more”; but lo, suddenly, with all the horror of an earth-
quake, the slumbrous law courts awoke, and the burning
cinders of fornification and the blinding and suffocating
smoke of adultery were poured upon and hung over the
land. Through the mighty columns of our newspapers the
terrible lava rolled unceasing, and in the black stream the
villa, with all its beautiful illusions, tumbled and disappeared.
and. Thradultery wen and the awoke, ant of an ever-
ble lava foliehe mightyotold upon and and suffoc
--Confessions of a Young Man.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I
THE SOURCES OF IDEALISM
LET us imagine a community of a thousand persons,
organized for the perpetuation of the species on the basis of
the British family as we know it at present. Seven hundred
of them, we will suppose, find the British family arrange-
ment quite good enough for them. Two hundred and ninety-
nine find it a failure, but must put up with it since they
are in a minority. The remaining person occupies a position
to be explained presently. The 299 failures will not have
the courage to face the fact that they are irremediable fail-
ures, since they cannot prevent the 700 satisfied ones from
coercing them into conformity with the marriage law. They
will accordingly try to persuade themselves that, whatever
their own particular domestic arrangements may be, the
family is a beautiful and holy natural institution. For the
fox not only declares that the grapes he cannot get are
sour: he also insists that the sloes he can get are sweet.
Now observe what has happened. The family as it really
is is a conventional arrangement, legally enforced, which the
majority, because it happens to suit them, think good enough
for the minority, whom it happens not to suit at all. The
family as a beautiful and holy natural institution is only a
fancy picture of what every family would have to be if
everybody was to be suited, invented by the minority as a
mask for the reality, which in its nakedness is intolerable
to them. We call this sort of fancy picture an Ideal; and
the policy of forcing individuals to an act on the assumption
that all ideals are real, and to recognize and accept such
92
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
93
action as standard moral conduct, absolutely valid under all
circumstances, contrary conduct or any advocacy of it being
discountenanced and punished as immoral, may therefore be
described as the policy of Idealism. Our 299 domestic fail-
ures are therefore become idealists as to marriage; and in
proclaiming the ideal in fiction, poetry, pulpit and platform
oratory, and serious private conversation, they will far outdo
the 700 who comfortably accept marriage as a matter of
course, never dreaming of calling it an “institution,” much
less a holy and beautiful one, and being pretty plainly of
opinion that Idealism is a crackbrained fuss about nothing.
The idealists, hurt by this, will retort by calling them Philis-
tines. We then have our society classified as 700 Philistines
and 299 idealists, leaving one man unclassified: the man
strong enough to face the truth the idealists are shirking.
Such a man says of marriage, "The thing is a failure for
many of us. It is insufferable that two human beings,
having entered into relations which only warm affection can
render tolerable, should be forced to maintain them after
such affections have ceased to exist, or in spite of the fact
that they have never arisen. The alleged natural attrac-
tions and repulsions upon which the family ideal is based
do not exist; and it is historically false that the family
was founded for the purpose of satisfying them. Let us
prövide otherwise for the social ends which the family sub-
serves, and then abolish its compulsory character alto-
gether.” What will be the attitude of the rest to this out-
spoken man? The Philistines will simply think him mad.
But the idealists will be terrified beyond measure at the
proclamation of their hidden thought-at the presence of
the traitor among the conspirators of silence at the rending
of the beautiful veil they and their poets have woven to
hide the unbearable face of the truth. They will crucify
him, burn him, violate their own ideals of family affection
by taking his children away from him, ostracize him, brand
him as immoral, profligate, filthy, and appeal against him
to the despised Philistines, specially idealized for the occa-
sion as Society. How far they will proceed against him
depends on how far his courage exceeds theirs. At his
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
worst, they call him cynic and paradoxer: at his best they
do their utmost to ruin him, if not to take his life. Thus,
purblindly courageous moralists like Mandeville and La
Rochefoucauld, who merely state unpleasant facts without
denying the validity of current ideals, and who indeed de-
pend on those ideals to make their statements piquant, get
off with nothing worse than this name of cynic, the free use
of which is a familiar mark of the zealous idealist. But take
the case of the man who has already served us as an example:
Shelley. The idealists did not call Shelley a cynic: they
called him a fiend until they invented a new illusion to en-
able them to enjoy the beauty of his lyrics, this illusion
being nothing less than the pretence that since he was at
bottom an idealist himself, his ideals must be identical with
those of Tennyson and Longfellow, neither of whom ever
wrote a line in which some highly respectable ideal was not
implicit.
Here the admission that Shelley, the realist, was an ideal-
ist, too, seems to spoil the whole argument. And it cer-
tainly spoils its verbal consistency. For we unfortunately
use this word ideal indifferently to denote both the institution
which the ideal masks and the mask itself, thereby producing
desperate confusion of thought, since the institution may
be an effete and poisonous one, whilst the mask may be, and
indeed generally is, an image of what we would fain have
in its place. If the existing facts, with their masks on, are
to be called ideals, and the future possibilities which the
masks depict are also to be called ideals--if, again, the
man who is defending existing institutions by maintaining
their identity with their masks is to be confounded under
one name with the man who is striving to realize the future
possibilities by tearing the mask and the thing masked
asunder, then the position cannot be intelligibly described by
mortal pen: you and I, reader, will be at cross purposes at
every sentence unless you allow me to distinguish pioneers
like Shelley and Ibsen as realists from the idealists of my
imaginary community of one thousand. If you ask why
I have not allotted the terms the other way, and called
Shelley and Ibsen idealists and the conventionalists realists,
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
95
I reply that Ibsen himself, though he has not formally made
the distinction, has so repeatedly harped on conventions and
conventionalists as ideals and idealists that if I were now
perversely to call them realities and realists, I should con-
I should help them. Doubtless I shall be reproached for
puzzling people by thus limiting the meaning of the term
ideal. But what, I ask, is that inevitable passing perplexity
compared to the inextricable tangle I must produce if I
follow the custom, and use the word indiscriminately in its
two violently incompatible senses? If the term realist is
objected to on account of some of its modern associations, I
can only recommend you, if you must associate it with
something else than my own description of its meaning (I
do not deal in definitions), to associate it, not with Zola
and Maupassant, but with Plato.
Now let us return to our community of 700 Philistines,
299 idealists, and I realist. The mere verbal ambiguity
against which I have just provided is as nothing beside that
which comes of any attempt to express the relations of
these three sections, simple as they are, in terms of the
ordinary systems of reason and duty. The idealist, higher
in the ascent of evolution than the Philistine, yet hates the
deal inne, but to our co The is as not the relats of the
the easy-going Philistine is guiltless. The man who has
risen above the danger and the fear that his acquisitiveness
will lead him to theft, his temper to murder, and his affec-
tions to debauchery: this is he who is denounced as an
arch-scoundrel and libertine, and thus confounded with the
lowest because he is the highest, And it is not the ignorant
and stupid who maintain this error, but the literate and the
cultured. When the true prophet speaks, he is proved to
be both rascal and idiot, not by those who have never read
of how foolishly such learned demonstrations have come off
in the past, but by those who have themselves written
volumes on the crucifixions, the burnings, the stonings, the
headings and hangings, "the Siberia transportations, the
calumny and ostracism which have been the lot of the
pioneer as well as of the camp follower. It is from men
96 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
of established literary reputation that we learn that William
Blake was mad, that Shelley was spoiled by living in a low
set, that Robert Owen was a man who did not know the
world, that Ruskin was incapable of comprehending political
economy, that Zola was a mere blackguard, and that Ibsen
was "a Zola with a wooden leg.” The great musician, ac-
cepted by the unskilled listener, is vilified by his fellow-
musicians: it was the musical culture of Europe that pro-
nounced Wagner the inferior of Mendelssohn and Meyer-
beer. The great artist finds his foes among the painters,
and not among the men in the street: it was the Royal
Academy which placed forgotten nobodies above Burne-
Jones. It is not rational that it should be so; but it is so,
for all that.
The realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether,
and sees in them only something to blind us, something to
numb us, something to murder self in us, something whereby,
instead of resisting death, we can disarm it by committing
suicide. The idealist, who has taken refuge with the ideals
because he hates himself and is ashamed of himself, thinks
that all this is so much the better. The realist, who has
come to have a deep respect for himself and faith in the
validity of his own will, thinks it so much the worse. To
the one, human nature, naturally corrupt, is held back from
ruinous excesses only by self-denying conformity to the
ideals. To the other these ideals are only swaddling clothes
which man has outgrown, and which insufferably impede his
movements. No wonder the two cannot agree. The ideal-
ist says, “Realism means egotism; and egotism means de-
pravity.” The realist declares that when a man abnegates
the will to live and be free in a world of the living and
free, seeking only to conform to ideals for the sake of being,
not himself, but “a good man," then he is morally dead and
rotten, and must be left unheeded to abide his resurrection,
if that by good luck arrive before his bodily death. Un-
fortunately, this is the sort of speech that nobody but a
realist understands. It will be more amusing as well as
more convincing to take an actual example of an idealist
criticising a realist. The Quintessence of Ibsenism.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
97
II
THE NEW SPIRIT IN LITERATURE
differencek ens he is the every
ofte ecce is more Eldboet wie eine of these con ese linebaders
TO IBSEN, from beginning to end, every human being is
a sacrifice, whilst to Dickens he is a farce. And there you
have the whole difference. No character drawn by Dickens
is more ridiculous than Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck,
or more eccentric than old Ekdal, whose toy game-preserve
in the garret is more fantastic than the house of Miss Havis-
ham; and yet these Ekdals wring the heart whilst Micawber
and Chivery (who sits between the lines of clothes hung out
to dry because "it reminds him of groves" as Hjalmar's gar-
ret reminds old Ekdal of bear forests) only shake the sides.
It may be that if Dickens could read these lines he would
say that the defect was not in him but in his readers; and
that if we will return to his books now that Ibsen has opened
our eyes we will have to admit that he also saw more in
the soul of Micawber than mere laughing gas. And indeed
one cannot forget the touches of kindliness and gallantry
which ennoble his mirth. Still, between the man who occa-
sionally remembered and the man who never forgot, between
Dick Swiveller and Ulrik Brendel, there is a mighty differ-
ence. The most that can be said to minimize it is that
some of the difference is certainly due to the difference in
the attitude of the reader. When an author's works pro-
duce violent controversy, and are new, people are apt to read
them with that sort of seriousness which is very appropri-
ately called deadly: that is, with a sort of solemn paralysis
of every sense except a quiet abstract and baseless moment-
ousness which has no more to do with the contents of the
author's works than the horrors of a man in delirium tre-
mens have to do with real rats and snakes. The Bible is
a sealed literature to most of us because we cannot read it
naturally and unsophisticatedly: we are like the old lady
who was edified by the word Mesopotamia, or Samuel But-
ler's Chowbok, who was converted to Christianity by the
effect on his imagination of the prayer for Queen Adelaide.
Many years elapsed before those who were impressed with
98 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
Beethoven's music ventured to enjoy it sufficiently to dis-
cover what a large part of it is a riot of whimsical fun. As
to Ibsen, I remember a performance of The Wild Duck, at
which the late Clement Scott pointed out triumphantly that
the play was so absurd that even the champions of Ibsen
could not help laughing at it. It had not occurred to him
that Ibsen could laugh like other men. Not until an author
has become so familiar that we are quite at our ease with
him, and are up to his tricks of manner, do we cease to
imagine that he is, relatively to older writers, terribly
serious.
Still, the utmost allowance we can make for this differ-
ence does not persuade us that Dickens took the improvi-
dence and futility of Micawber as Ibsen took the improvi-
dence and futility of Hjalmar Ekdal. The difference is plain
in the works of Dickens himself; for the Dickens of the
second half of the nineteenth century (the Ibsen half) is a
different man from the Dickens of the first half. From
Hard Times and Little Dorrit to Our Mutual Friend every
one of Dickens' books lays a heavy burden on our conscience
without flattering us with any hopes of a happy ending.
But from The Pickwick Papers to Bleak House you can
read and laugh and cry and go happy to bed after forget-
ting yourself in a jolly book. I have pointed out elsewhere
how Charles Lever, after producing a series of books in
which the old manner of rollicking through life as if all its
follies and failures were splendid jokes, and all its conven-
tional enjoyments and attachments delightful and sincere,
suddenly supplied the highly appreciative Dickens (as editor
of All the Year Round) with a quite new sort of novel,
called A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance, which affected
both Dickens and the public very unpleasantly by the bitter
but tonic flavor we now know as Ibsenism; for the hero
began as that uproarious old joke, the boaster who, being
a coward, is led into all sorts of dangerous situations, like
Bob Acres and Mr. Winkle, and then unexpectedly made
them laugh very much on the wrong side of their mouths,
exactly as if he were a hero by Ibsen, Strindberg, Turgenieff,
Tolstoy, Gorki, Tchekov, or Brieux. And here there was
hand
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
99
no question of the author being taken too gloomily. His
readers, full of Charles O'Malley and Mickey Free, were
approaching the work with the most unsuspicious confidence
in its entire jollity. The shock to the security of their
senseless laughter caught them utterly unprepared; and they
resented it accordingly.
Now that a reaction against realism has set in, and the
old jolly ways are coming into fashion again, it is perhaps
not so easy as it once was to conceive the extracrdinary
fascination of this mirthless comedy, this tragedy that
stripped the soul naked instead of bedizening it in heroic
trappings. But if you have not experienced this fascination
yourself, and cannot conceive it, you may take my word
for it that it exists, and operates with such power that it puts
Shakespeare himself out of countenance. And even for
those who are in full reaction against it, it can hardly be
possible to go back from the death of Hedwig Ekdal to the
death of Little Nell otherwise than as a grown man goes
down on all fours and pretends to be a bear for the amuse-
ment of his children. Nor need we regret this: there are
noble compensations for our increase of wisdom and sor-
row. After Hedwig you may not be able to cry over Little
Nell, but at least you can read Little Dorrit without calling
it twaddle, as some of its first critics did. The jests do
not become poorer as they mature into earnest. It was not
through joyless poverty of soul that Shelley never laughed,
but through an enormous apprehension and realization of
the gravity of things that seemed mere fun to other men.
If there is no Swiveller and no Trabbs' boy in The Pilgrim's
Progress, and if Mr. Badman is drawn as Ibsen would have
drawn him and not as Sheridan would have seen him, it
does not follow that there is less strength (and joy is a
quality of strength) in Bunyan than in Sheridan and Dick-
ens. After all, the salvation of the world depends on the
men who will not take evil good-humoredly, and whose
laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him.
"Rightly to be great,” said Shakespeare when he had come
to the end of mere buffoonery, "is greatly to find quarrel in
a straw.” The English cry of "Amuse us: take things
100 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
easily: dress up the world prettily for us” seems mere
cowardice to the strong souls that dare look facts in the
face; and just so far as people cast off levity and idolatry
they find themselves able to bear the company of Bunyan
and Shelley, of Ibsen and Strindberg and the great Russian
realists, and unable to tolerate the sort of laughter that
African tribes cannot restrain when a man is flogged or an
animal trapped and wounded. They are gaining strength
and wisdom: gaining, in short, that sort of life which we
call the life everlasting, a sense of which is worth, for pure
well-being alone, all the brutish jollities of Tom Cringle
and Humphrey Clinker, and even of Falstaff, Pecksniff, and
Micawber.
-The Quintessence of Ibsenism.
ARTHUR SYMONS
ON PROSE AND VERSE
COLERIDGE defined prose as "words in good order," poetry
as “the best words in the best order.” But there is no rea-
son why prose should not be the best words in the best order.
Rhythm alone, and rhythm of a regular and recurrent kind
only, distinguishes poetry from prose. It was contended by
an Oxford professor of poetry, M. W. J. Courthope, that
the lines of Marlowe,-
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
are of a different substance from the substance of prose,
and that it is certain that Marlowe "could only have ven-
and burned towers by escaping from the limits of ordinary
language, and conveying his metaphor through the har-
monious and ecstatic movement of rhythm and metre.” To
this it may be answered that any writer of elevated prose,
Milton or Ruskin, could have said in prose precisely what
Marlowe said in verse, and could have made fine prose of
it: the imagination, the idea, a fine kind of form, would
have been there; only one thing would have been lacking,
the very finest kind of form, the form of verse. It would
have been poetical substance, not poetry; the rhythm trans-
forms it into poetry, and nothing but the rhythm.
When Wordsworth declares, in the Preface to the "Lyri-
cal Ballads," that "there neither is nor can be any essential
IOI
102
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
difference between the language of prose and metrical com-
position," he is perfectly right, and Coleridge is certainly
wrong in saying, "I write in metre because I am about to
use a language different from that of prose.” Both forget
that what must be assumed is poetical substance, and that,
given poetical substance, the actual language of the prose
and of the verse may very well be identical. When Coler-
idge says that he would have preferred "Alice Fell” in
prose, he is, very justly, criticising the substance of that
"metrical composition,” which is wholly unpoetical: there,
and not in the language, is the distinction between its essen-
tial prose and poetry.
There is in prose, whenever it is good prose, but not
necessarily inherent in it, a certain rhythm, much laxer than
that of verse, not, indeed, bound by formal laws at all; but,
in its essence, like the intonation which distinguishes one
voice from another in the repetition of a single phrase.
Prose, in its rudimentary stage, is merely recorded speech;
but, as one may talk in prose all one's life without knowing
it, so it may be that the conscious form of verse (speech,
that is, reduced to rules, and regarded as partly of the
nature of music) was of earlier origin. A certain stage of
civilisation must have been reached before it could have
occurred to any one that ordinary speech was worth being
preserved. Verse is more easily remembered than prose,
because of its recurrent beat, and whatever men thought
worth remembering, either for its beauty (as a song or
hymn) or for its utlity (as a law), would naturally be put
into verse. Verse may well have anticipated the existence
of writing, but hardly prose. The writing-down of verse,
to this day, is almost a materialization of it; but prose exists
only as a written document.
The rhythm of verse, thać rhythm which distinguishes it
from prose, has never been traced with any certainty to its
origin. It is not even certain whether its origin is conse-
quent upon the origin of music, or whether the two are
independent in their similar but by no means identical
capacity. That a sense of regular cadence, though no
sense of rhyme, is inherent in our nature, such as it now is,
ARTHUR SYMONS
103
may be seen by the invariably regular rhythm of children's
songs and of the half-inarticulate verse arrangements by
which they accompany their games, and by the almost in-
variable inaccuracy of their rhymes. It is equally evident
that the pleasure which we derive from the regular beat of
to every form of regular rhythm, from the rocking of the
cradle to the sound of a lullaby. Prose cuts itself sharply
off from this great inheritance of susceptibility to regular
rhythm, and thus, by what is looked upon as natural or
instinctive in it, begins its existence a lawless and accidental
thing.
In its origin, prose is in no sense an art, and it never has
and never will become an art, strictly speaking, as verse is,
or painting, or music. Gradually it has found out its capaci-
ties; it has discovered how what is useful in it can be
trained to beauty; it has learned to set limits to what is
unbounded in it, and to follow, at a distance, some of the
laws of verse. Gradually it has developed laws of its own,
nite, less peculiar to it as a form, than those of verse.
Everything that touches literature as literature affects prose,
which has come to be the larger half of what we call lit-
erature.
It is the danger and privilege of prose that it has no
limits. The very form of verse is a concentration; you can
load every rift with more ore. Prose, with its careless
lineage direct from speech, has a certain impromptu and
casualness about it; it has allowed itself so much licence
among trivialities that a too serious demeanour surprises;
we are apt to be repelled by a too strait observance of law
on the part of one not really a citizen. And there is one
thing that prose cannot do; it cannot sing. A distinction
there is between prose and lyrical verse, even in actual lan-
guage, because here words are used by rhythm as notes in
music, and at times with hardly more than that musical
meaning. As Joubert has said, in a figure which is a precise
definition: “In the style of poetry every word reverberates
like the sound of a well-tuned lyre, and leaves after it num-
104 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
berless undulations.” The words may be the same, no rarer;
the construction may be the same, or, by preference, simpler; ..
but, as the rhythm comes into it, there will come also some-
thing which, though it may be born of music, is not music.
Call it atmosphere, call it magic; say, again with Joubert:
"Fine verses are those that exhale like sounds or perfumes”;
we shall never explain, though we may do something to dis-
tinguish, that transformation by which prose is changed
miraculously into poetry.
Again, it is Joubert who has said once and for all the
significant thing: "Nothing is poetry which does not trans-
port: the lyre is in a certain sense a winged instrument.”
Prose indeed may transport us, though not of the necessity
with which poetry is bound to do so. But, in all the trans-
port of prose, something holds us to the ground; for prose,
though it may range more widely, has no wings. That is
why substance is of so much greater importance in prose
than in verse, and why a prose-writer, Balzac or Scott, can
be a great writer, a great novelist, and yet not a great writer
of prose; here, as elsewhere, prose makes conquest of new
tracts of the earth, with leave to fix firm foundations there,
by its very lack of skill in flight. The prose play, the
novel, come into being as exceptions, are invented by men
who cannot write plays in verse, who cannot write epics;
and, the usurper once firmly settled, a new dynasty begins,
which we come to call legitimate, as is the world's way with
all dynasties.
Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is
only in prose that an illusion of external reality can be
given. Compare, not only the surroundings, the sense of
time, locality, but the whole process and existence of char-
acter, in a play of Shakespeare and in a novel of Balzac.
I choose Balzac among novelists, because his mind is nearer
to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of any
novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poet.
Take King Lear and take Père Goriot. Goriot is a Lear
at heart, and he suffers the same tortures and humiliations.
But precisely where Lear grows up before the mind's eye
into a vast cloud and shadowy monument of trouble, Goriot
ARTHUR SYMONS
105
grows downward into the earth and takes root there, wrap-
ping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty
that he comes so close to us and is so recognisable. Lear
may exchange his crown for the fool's bauble, knowing
nothing of it; but Goriot knows well enough the value of
every banknote that his daughters rob him of. In that
definiteness, that new power of "stationing” emotion in a
firm and material way, lies one of the great opportunities
of prose.
The novel and the prose play are the two great imagina-
tive forms which prose has invented for itself. The essay
corresponds in a sense to meditative poetry: has the lyric
any analogue in prose? None, I think, in structural form,
though there may be outbursts, in such elaborate prose as
De Quincey's, which are perhaps only too lyrical, and seem
to recognise a more fixed and releasing rhythm, that of
verse. The prose of science, philosophy, and even history,
has few fundamental duties to literature, or to prose as a
fine art. Science, when it is not pure speculation, is con-
cerned with mere facts, or theories of facts; and where a
fact in itself is more important than the expression or illu-
mination of that fact, there can be no literature. Philoso-
phers have often been dreamers, poets turned inside out;
and such may well bring concrete beauty into the domain
of abstract thought. But for the most part philosophers
have regarded prose much as ascetics have regarded the
body; as a necessary part of matter, a necessary evil. To
the historian prose becomes much more important, yet re-
mains less important than it is to the novelist. The his-
torian, after all, like the man of science, is concerned prima-
rily with facts. He undertakes to tell us the truth about
the past, and it is only when he competes with the novelist,
and attempts psychology, that he is free to become a writer
of actual literature. Much fine literature has been written
under the name of criticism. But for the critic to aim at
making literature is to take off something from the value
of his criticism as criticism. It may produce a work of
higher value. But it will cease to be, properly speaking,
what we distinguish as criticism.
106
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
Only in the novel and in the prose play does prose be-
come free to create, free to develop to the utmost limits
of its vitality. Together with fiction I would include auto-
biography, perhaps of all forms of fiction the most con-
vincing. In all these we see prose at work directly on life.
"The sense of cadence in prose,” says Rémy de Gourmont,
“has nothing in common with the sense of music; it is a
sense wholly physiological. We set our sensations obscurely
to rhythm, like prolonged cries of joy or sorrow. And thus
everything can give finer shades, and adapt itself better to
thought, in prose than in verse.” It is thus in prose that
men confess themselves, with minute fidelity; Rousseau's
“Confessions” could have been written only in prose. All
the best fiction, narrative or dramatic, is a form of con-
fession, personal or vicarious; and, in a sense, it is all per-
sonal; for no novelist or dramatist ever rendered vitally a
single sensation which he had not observed in himself or
which he had not tested by himself. In verse even Villon
cannot "rhythme ses sensations" so minutely as Rousseau
can in prose. The form forces him to give only the essence
of his sensations, and to give them in a manner modified by
that form. In prose we can almost think in words. Per-
haps the highest merit of prose consists in this, that it
allows us to think in words.
There is no form of art which is not an attempt to cap-
ture life, to create life over again. But art, in verse, being
strictly and supremely an art, begins by transforming. Prose
fiction transforms, it is true, it cannot help transforming;
but by its nature it is able to follow line for line in a way
that verse can never do. “The artifices of rhythm," said
Poe, “are an insuperable bar to the development of all
points of thought or expression which have their basis in
truth.... One writer of the prose tale, in short, may
bring to his theme a vast variety of modes or inflexion of
thought and expression—(the ratiocinative, for example, the
sarcastic or humorous) which are not only antagonistical to
the nature of the poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of
its most peculiar and indispensable adjuncts: we allude, of
course, to rhythm." It is, in fact, that physiological quality
ARTHUR SYMONS
107
which gives its chief power, its rarest subtlety, to prose.
Prose listens at the doors of all the senses, and repeats their
speech almost in their own tones. But poetry (it is again
Baudelaire who says it) "is akin to music through a prosody
whose roots plunge deeper in the human soul than any
classical theory has indicated.” Poetry begins where prose
ends, and it is at its chief peril that it begins sooner. The
one safeguard for the poet is to say to himself: What I
can write in prose I will not allow myself to write in verse,
out of mere honour towards my material. The further I
can extend my prose, the further back do I set the limits
of verse. The region of poetry will thus be always the
beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible chance of
any confusion of territory.
--The Romantic Movement in English Poetry.
II
THE INDEPENDENCE OF POETRY
CRITICS or historians of poetry are generally concerned
with everything but what is essential in it. They deal with
poetry as if it were a fashion, finding merit in its historical
significance, as we find interest in an early Victorian bonnet,
not because it is beautiful, but because people once thought
it "genteel.” But poetry is a reality, an essence, and is
unchanged by any change in fashion; and it is the critic's
business to find it where it is, to proclaim it for what it is,
and to realise that no amount of historical significance or
adaptability to a former fashion can make what is bad
poetry in the present century good poetry in any century
of the past.
There is a theory, at present much in vogue, by which
the evolution of poetry is to be studied everywhere but in
the individual poet. This theory has been summed up by
M. Rémy de Gourmont in an essay on one of its chief
practitioners, Ferdinand Brunetière: "Literary history," he
says, "is no longer to be a succession of portraits, of indi-
vidual lives; the question is now of poetry or of history,
not of poets or of historians; works are to be studied, with-
108
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
of poetry artists in their con particulieve that the se
out too much importance being given to their writers, and
we are to be shown how these works give birth to one an-
other by natural necessity; how from the species poetry are
born the varieties sonnet and madrigal; how, under the influ-
ence of surroundings, the lyrical variety is transformed, with-
out losing its essential characteristics, into eloquence, with
many further metamorphoses.” The same point of view is
expressed by Mr. Courthope when he tells us that “it is
unphilosophical to believe that a single poet can turn the
art of poetry into any channel he will by his own genius:
the greatest artists are those who best understood the con-
flict of tendencies in their own age, and who, though they
rise above it into the region of universal truth, are moved
by it to reflect in their work its particular form and char-
acter.” In other words, we are to believe that the cart
drives the horse, that the taste of the time makes the genius
of the poet. It is the poet who, by his genius, makes the
taste of the time. All that conflicts of tendencies” and
the like have to do with the poet is to help him now and
again to a convenient form, to suggest to him the lute or
the stage, to give him this or that malleable lump of ma-
terial. He is supremely fortunate if, like Shakespeare, born
with a genius for drama, he finds a stage already alive and
awaiting him; comparatively unfortunate if, like Goethe,
his dramatic genius, lacking a stage for its complete ex-
pression, can but create individual works, which, however
great, lose their chance of wholly organic development. No
great poet ever owed any essential part of his genius to his
age; at the most he may have owed to his age the oppor-
tunity of an easy achievement.
Take, for instance, Chatterton. Chatterton's "masculine
persuasive force” is one of the most genuine things in our
literature, and is in no degree affected by the mask which
it pleased him to put on. Chatterton required no "needs of
the public taste" to guide him into a "channel of great
poetical expression.” He found for himself that "channel
of great poetical expression”; he found accounts in black-
letter and turned them into living poetry, and it has been
made a crime to him that he was an alchemist of the mind,
ARTHUR SYMONS
109
fot a poet in the was an exception ; eighteenth cen
and transmuted base metal into gold. It was his whim to
invent a language for the expression of the better part of
himself, a language which came as close as he could get it
to come to that speech of the Middle Ages which he had
divined in Gothic architecture and in the crabbed charac-
ters of old parchments. In Chatterton the whole modern
romantic movement began consciously and as a form of
achieved art; and it is not necessary to remember that he
died at an age when no other English poet had done work
in any degree comparable with his, at least for those quali-
ties of imagination typical of him, in order to give him
his due place in English poetry. The existence of Chat-
terton, at the moment when he happened to exist, proves
as conclusively as need be that the man of genius is not of
his age, but above it.
The poet who typifies for us the eighteenth century, in
which Chatterton was an exception, is Pope; and Pope was
not a poet in the true sense, a born poet who had the mis-
fortune to be modified by the influence of the age into
which he was born, but a writer of extraordinary prose
capacity and finish, who, if he had lived in another age
and among genuine poets, would have had no more than a
place apart, admired for the unique thing which he could
do, but not mistaken for a poet of true lineage. Pope's
poetic sensibility may be gauged by a single emendation
which he made in the text of his edition of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare had made Antony say to Cleopatra, “O grave
charm!” To Pope it seemed ridiculous that a light woman
should possess gravity in charm. He proposed "gay,” and
nature seemed to be reasserted: "O gay charm!” what more
probable and sufficient?
The poetry of the eighteenth century has no fundamental
relation with the rest of English poetry. The poets of
every other age can be brought together under a single con-
ception: they harmonise, for all their differences; but be-
tween the poets of every other age and the poets of the
eighteenth century there is a gap, impossible to pass over.
Here and there, as in the best work of Collins, we can dis-
tinguish some of the eternal signs of poetry. But, for the
110
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
most part, the gap is so palpable that we find critics tacitly
acknowledging it by their very efforts to bridge it over,
and asking us, with Mr. Courthope, in speaking of Pope,
to admit that it is on a false principle of criticism that
Warton, and those who think with him, blame his poetry
on account of the absence of qualities which they find in
other poets.” If those qualities, which are to be found in
other poets and not in Pope, are precisely the fundamental
qualities which constitute poetry, why should these quali-
ties be quietly laid aside for the occasion, and, the eigh-
teenth century once over, taken up again as if nothing had
happened?
The principles of poetry are eternal, and such divine ac-
cidents as Christopher Smart and Thomas Chatterton in an
age in which the national taste" was turned persistently
from those principles, are enough to show that no pressure
of contemporary fashion can wholly hinder a poet from
speaking out in his own and the only way. In the Preface
to his "Specimens of Later English Poets” Southey had the
frankness to admit that "the taste of the public may better
be estimated from indifferent poets than from good ones;
because the former write for their contemporaries, the latter
for posterity,” And he asks, naïvely enough: “Why is
Pomfret the most popular of the English poets? The fact
is certain, and the solution would be useful.” Who is aware
to-day of the existence of a poem called “The Choice” or of
a poet called Pomfret? Pomfret held his own for a hun-
dred years, and now is extinct. Enquiry as to why he was
the most popular of the English poets is, however amusing
for the social historian, beside the question for the student
of poetry. What matters to him is not that “The Choice”
was once considered by the public to be an incomparable
poem, but that it was and remains a tame and mediocre
piece of verse, never really rising to poetry, and that pre-
cisely similar material could be and had been lifted into
poetry by the genius of a genuine poet, such as Herrick.
Again, the influence of one poet on another has its in-
terest, its importance even; but all that seriously matters
is that part which was not influenced, the poet himself. The
ARTHUR SYMONS
III
personal contact of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Eliza-
bethan reading of Keats, had their influence on the form
and sometimes on the very impulse to existence of the poetry
of each poet. But it was of the nature of a lucky or unlucky
accident; it was at the most the equivalent of some natural
excitement, a sunset or the face of a woman. Nor did the
French Revolution create the poetry which gave it expres-
sion or moralised over it. King George the Third inspired
the genius of Byron, but only better than the "dark blue
ocean,” because comic material was more valuable to Byron
than heroic or sublime material. But that Shelley con-
ceived himself to be atheist, philanthropist, or democrat;
that Keats fell in love with Fanny Brawne and not with
another woman; that Coleridge took opium and Wordsworth
lived in the open air in Cumberland: these things go to
the making of the man who is the poet; they touch or in-
spire him, in what is deepest or most sensitive in his nature;
and though they will never explain to us how he came to
have the power of creation, they will explain to us some-
thing more than his method.
To distinguish poetry, then, where it exists, to consider it
in its essence, apart from the accidents of the age in which
it came into being, to define its qualities in itself; that is
the business of the true critic or student. And in order to
do this he must cast aside all theories of evolution or the
natural growth of genius, and remember that genius is always
an exception, always something which would be a disease if
it were not a divine gift. He must clear his mind of all
limiting formulas, whether of milieu, Weltschmerz, or mode.
He must disregard all schools or movements as other than
convenient and interchangeable labels. He must seek, in
short, only poetry, and he must seek poetry in the poet,
and nowhere else.
C
-The Romantic Movement in English Poetry.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
SOME PLATITUDES CONCERNING DRAMA
A DRAMA must be shaped so as to have a spire of meaning.
Every grouping of life and character has its inherent moral;
and the business of the dramatist is so to pose the group
as to bring that moral poignantly to the light of day. Such
is the moral that exhales from plays like Lear, Hamlet, and
Macbeth. But such is not the moral to be found in the
great bulk of contemporary drama. The moral of the aver-
age play is now, and probably has always been, the triumph
at all costs of a supposed immediate ethical good over a
supposed immediate ethical evil.
The vice of drawing these distorted morals has permeated
the drama to its spine; discoloured its art, humanity, and
significance; infected its creators, actors, audience, critics;
too often turned it from a picture into a caricature. A
drama which lives under the shadow of the distorted moral
forgets how to be free, fair, and fine-forgets so completely
that it often prides itself on having forgotten.
Now, in writing plays, there are, in this matter of the
moral, three courses open to the serious dramatist. The
first is: To definitely set before the public that which it
wishes to have set before it, the views and codes of life by
which the public lives and in which it believes. This way
is the most common, successful and popular. It makes the
dramatist's position sure, and not too obviously authorita-
tive.
The second course is: To definitely set before the public
those views and codes of life by which the dramatist him-
II2
JOHN GALSWORTHY
113
self lives, those theories in which he himself believes, the
more effectively if they are the opposite of what the public
wishes to have placed before it, presenting them so that the
audience may swallow them like powder in a spoonful of
jam.
There is a third course: To set before the public no cut-
and-dried codes, but the phenomena of life and character,
selected and combined, but not distorted, by the dramatist's
outlook, set down without fear, favour, or prejudice, leaving
the public to draw such poor moral as nature may afford.
This third method requires a certain detachment; it requires
a sympathy with, a love of, and a curiosity as to, things
for their own sake; it requires a far view, together with
patient industry, for no immediately practical result.
It was once said of Shakespeare that he had never done
any good to any one, and never would. This, unfortunately,
could not, in the sense in which the word “good” was then
meant, be said of most modern dramatists. In truth, the
good that Shakespeare did to humanity was of a remote,
and, shall we say, eternal nature; something of the good
that men get from having the sky and the sea to look at.
And this partly because he was, in his greater plays at all
events, free from the habit of drawing a distorted moral.
Now, the playwright who supplies to the public the facts
of life distorted by the moral which it expects, does so that
he may do the public what he considers an immediate good,
by fortifying its prejudices; and the dramatist who supplies
to the public facts distorted by his own advanced morality,
does so because he considers that he will at once benefit the
public by substituting for its worn-out ethics his own. In
both cases the advantage the dramatist hopes to confer on
the public is immediate and practical.
But matters change, and morals change; men remain-
and to set men, and the facts about them, down faithfully,
so that they draw for us the moral of their natural actions,
may also possibly be of benefit to the community. It is,
at all events, harder than to set men and facts down, as they
ought, or ought not to be. This, however, is not to say that
a dramatist should, or indeed can, keep himself and his
114 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
alities alomit with inist" is intent to
temperamental philosophy out of his work. As a man lives
and thinks, so will he write. But it is certain, that to the
making of good drama, as to the practice of every other
art, there must be brought an almost passionate love of
discipline, a white-heat of self-respect, a desire to make
the truest, fairest, best thing in one's power; and that to
these must be added an eye that does not flinch. Such
qualities alone will bring to a drama the selfless character
which soaks it with inevitability.
The word "pessimist” is frequently applied to the few
dramatists who have been content to work in this way. It
has been applied, among others, to Euripides, to Shake-
speare, to Ibsen; it will be applied to many in the future.
Nothing, however, is more dubious than the way in which
these two words "pessimist” and “optimist” are used; for
the optimist appears to be he who cannot bear the world
as it is, and is forced by his nature to picture it as it ought
to be, and the pessimist one who cannot only bear the world
as it is, but loves it well enough to draw it faithfully. The
true lover of the human race is surely he who can put up
with it in all its forms, in vice as well as in virtue, in de-
feat no less than in victory; the true seer he who sees not
only joy but sorrow, the true painter of human life one
who blinks nothing. It may be that he is also, incidentally,
o appeared by one with
Wit's true beneble range of scientist and as des
In the whole range of the social fabric there are only two
impartial persons, the scientist and the artist, and under
the latter heading such dramatists as desire to write not
only for to-day, but for to-morrow, must strive to come.
But dramatists being as they are made—past remedy-
it is perhaps more profitable to examine the various points
at which their qualities and defects are shown.
The plot! A good plot is that sure edifice which slowly
rises out of interplay of circumstance on temperament, and
temperament on circumstance, within the enclosing atmos-
phere of an idea. A human being is the best plot there
is; it may be impossible to see why he is a good plot, be-
cause the idea within which he was brought forth cannot be
fully grasped; but it is plain that he is a good plot. He is
JOHN GALSWORTHY
VI
115
organic. And so it must be with a good play. Reason
alone produces no good plots; they come by original sin,
sure conception, and instinctive after-power of selecting
what benefits the germ. A bad plot, on the other hand,
is simply a row of stakes, with a character impaled on each-
characters who would have liked to live, but came to un-
timely grief; who started bravely, but fell on these stakes,
placed beforehand in a row, and were transfixed one by
one, while their ghosts stride on, squeaking and gibbering,
through the play. Whether these stakes are made of facts
or of ideas, according to the nature of the dramatist who
planted them, their effect on the unfortunate characters is
the same; the creatures were begotten to be staked, and
staked they are! The demand for a good plot, not unfre-
quently heard, commonly signifies: “Tickle my sensations
by stuffing the play with arbitrary adventures, so that I
need not be troubled to take the characters seriously. Set
the persons of the play to action, regardless of time, se-
quence, atmosphere, and probability!”
Now, true dramatic action is what characters do, at once
contrary, as it were, to expectation, and yet because they
have already done other things. No dramatist should let
his audience know what is coming; but neither should he
suffer his characters to act without making his audience feel
that those actions are in harmony with temperament, and
arise from previous known actions, together with the tem-
peraments and previous known actions of the other char-
acters in the play. The dramatist who hangs his characters
to his plot, instead of hanging his plot to his characters, is
guilty of cardinal sin.
The dialogue! Good dialogue again is character, mar-
shalled so as continually to stimulate interest or excite-
ment. The reason good dialogue is seldom found in plays
is merely that it is hard to write, for it requires not only a
knowledge of what interests or excites, but such a feeling
for character as brings misery to the dramatist's heart when
his creations speak as they should not speak—ashes to his
mouth when they say things for the sake of saying them-
disgust when they are "smart."
116
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
The art of writing true dramatic dialogue is an austere
art, denying itself all license, grudging every sentence de-
voted to the mere machinery of the play, suppressing all
jokes and epigrams severed from character, relying for fun
and pathos on the fun and tears of life. From start to finish
good dialogue is hand-made, like good lace; clear, of fine
texture, furthering with each thread the harmony and
strength of a design to which all must be subordinated.
But good dialogue is also spiritual action. In so far as
the dramatist divorces his dialogue from spiritual action-
that is to say, from progress of events, or toward events
which are significant of character--he is stultifying rò dpáua
the thing done; he may make pleasing disquisitions, he is
not making drama. And in so far as he twists character
to suit his moral or his plot, he is neglecting a first principle,
that truth to Nature which alone invests art with hand-
made quality.
The dramatist's license, in fact, ends with his design.
In conception alone he is free. He may take what character
or group of characters he chooses, see them with what eyes,
knit them with what idea, within the limits of his tempera-
ment; but once taken, seen, and knitted, he is bound to treat
them like a gentleman, with the tenderest consideration of
their mainsprings. Take care of character; action and dia-
logue will take care of themselves! . The true dramatist
gives full rein to his temperament in the scope and nature
of his subject; having once selected subject and characters,
he is just, gentle, restrained, neither gratifying his lust for
praise at the expense of his offspring, nor using them as
puppets to flout his audience. Being himself the nature
that brought them forth, he guides them in the course pre-
destined at their conception. So only have they a chance
of defying Time, which is always lying in wait to destroy
the false, topical, or fashionable, all-in a word—that is
not based on the permanent elements of human nature.
The perfect dramatist rounds up his characters and facts
within the ring-fence of a dominant idea which fulfils the
craving of his spirit; having got them there, he suffers them
to live their own lives.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
117
Y
Plot, action, character, dialogue! But there is yet an-
other subject for a platitude. Flavour! An impalpable
quality, less easily captured than the scent of a flower, the
peculiar and most essential attribute of any work of art! It
is the thin, poignant spirit which hoyers up out of a play,
and is as much its differentiating essence as is caffeine of
coffee. Flavour, in fine, is the spirit of the dramatist pro-
jected into his work in a state of volatility, so that no one
can exactly lay hands on it, here, there, or anywhere. This
distinctive essence of a play, marking its brand, is the one
thing at which the dramatist cannot work, for it is outside
his consciousness. A man may have many moods, he has but
one spirit; and this spirit he communicates in some subtle,
unconscious way to all his work. It waxes and wanes with
the currents of his vitality, but no more alters than a chest-
nut changes into an oak.
For, in truth, dramas are very like unto trees, springing
from seedlings, shaping themselves inevitably in accord-
ance with the laws fast hidden within themselves, drinking
sustenance from the earth and air, and in conflict with the
natural forces round them. So they slowly come to full
growth, until warped, stunted, or risen to fair and gracious
height, they stand open to all the winds. And the trees
that spring from each dramatist are of different race; he is
the spirit of his own sacred grove, into which no stray tree
can by any chance enter.
. One more platitude. It is not unfashionable to pit one
form of drama against another-holding up the naturalistic
to the disadvantage of the epic; the epic to the belittlement
of the fantastic; the fantastic to the detriment of the na-
turalistic. Little purpose is thus served. The essential
meaning, truth, beauty, and irony of things may be re-
vealed under all these forms. Vision over life and human
nature can be as keen and just, the revelation as true, in-
spiring, delight-giving, and thought-provoking, whatever
fashion be employed-it is simply a question of doing it
well enough to uncover the kernel of the nut. Whether the
violet come from Russia, from Parma, or from England,
matters little. Close by the Greek temples at Pæstum there
118
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
are violets that seem redder, and sweeter, than any ever
seen-as though they have sprung up out of the footprints
of some old pagan goddess; but under the April sun, in a
Devonshire lane, the little blue scentless violets capture
every bit as much of the spring. And so it is with drama-
need only have caught some of the precious fluids, revela-
tion, or delight, and imprisoned them within a chalice to
which we may put our lips and continually drink. ...
-From “The Inn of Tranquility.” (Copyright, 1912, by
Charles Scribner's Sons. By permission of the Publishers.)
II
ART
Art is that imaginative expression of human energy,
which, through technical concretion of feeling and percep-
tion, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by
exciting in him impersonal emotion. And the greatest Art is
that which excites the greatest impersonal emotion in an
hypothecated perfect human being.
Impersonal emotion! And what—I thought=do I mean
by that? Surely I mean: That is not Art, which, while I
am contemplating it, inspires me with any active or direc-
tive impulse; that is · Art, when, for however brief a mo-
ment, it replaces within me interest in myself by interest in
itself. For, let me suppose myself in the presence of a
carved marble bath. If my thoughts be: “What could I
buy that for?" Impulse of acquisition; or: "From what
quarry did it come?” Impulse of inquiry; or: "Which
would be the right end for my head?” Mixed impulse of
inquiry and acquisition-I am at that moment insensible
at sight of its colour and forms, if ever so little and for
ever so short a time, unhaunted by any definite practical
thought or impulse—to that extent and for that moment it
has stolen me away out of myself and put itself there in-
JOHN GALSWORTHY
119
stead; has linked me to the universal by making me forget
the individual in me. And for that moment, and only while
that moment lasts, it is to me a work of Art. The word
“impersonal,” then, is but used in this my definition to
signify momentary forgetfulness of one's own personality
and its active wants.
So Art-I thought—is that which, heard, read, or looked
on, while producing no directive impulse, warms one with
unconscious vibration. Nor can I imagine any means of
defining what is the greatest Art, without hypothecating a
perfect human being. But since we shall never see, or know
if we do see, that desirable creature-dogmatism is ban-
ished, “Academy” is dead to the discussion, deader than
even Tolstoy left it after his famous treatise “What is Art?”
For, having destroyed all the old Judges and Academies,
Tolstoy, by saying that the greatest Art was that which ap-
pealed to the greatest number of living human beings, raised
up the masses of mankind to be a definite new Judge or
Academy, as tyrannical and narrow as ever were those whom
he had destroyed.
This, at all events—I thought-is as far as I dare go in
defining what Art is. But let me try to make plain to my-
self what is the essential quality that gives to Art the
power of exciting this unconscious vibration, this impersonal
emotion. It has been called Beauty! An awkward word
a perpetual begging of the question; too current in use, too
ambiguous altogether; now too narrow, now too wide-a
word, in fact, too glib to know at all what it means. And
how dangerous a word—often misleading us into slabbing
with extraneous floridities what would otherwise, on its
own plane, be Art! To be decorative where decoration is
not suitable, to be lyrical where lyricism is out of place, is
assuredly to spoil Art, not to achieve it. But this essential
quality of Art has also, and more happily, been called
Rhythm. And, what is Rhythm if not that mysterious har-
mony between part and part, and part and whole, which
gives what is called life; that exact proportion, the mystery
of which is best grasped in observing how life leaves an
animate creature when the essential relation of part to
120 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
whole has been sufficiently disturbed. And I agree that
this rhythmic relation of part to part, and part to whole
in short, vitality—is the one quality inseparable from a
work of Art. For nothing which does not seem to a man
possessed of this rhythmic vitality, can ever steal him out
of himself.
And having got thus far in my thoughts, I paused, watch-
ing the swallows; for they seemed to me the symbol, in their
swift, sure curvetting, all daring and balance and surprise,
of the delicate poise and motion of Art, that visits no two
men alike, in a world where no two things of all the things
there be, are quite the same.
Yes I thought-and this Art is the one form of human
energy in the whole world, which really works for union,
and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the
continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of
oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the ever-
lasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous,
dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within
ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to
be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relax-
ation from that itching, a minute's profound, and as it
were secret, enfranchisement. The active amusements and
relaxations of life can only rest certain of our faculties, by
indulging others; the whole self is never rested save through
that unconsciousness of self, which comes through rapt con-
templation of Nature or of Art.
And suddenly I remembered that some believe that Art
does not produce unconsciousness of self, but rather very
vivid self-realisation.
Ah! but--I thought-that is not the first and instant
effect of Art; the new impetus is the after effect of that
momentary replacement of oneself by the self of the work
before us; it is surely the result of that brief span of en-
largement, enfranchisement, and rest.
Yes, Art is the great and universal refreshment. For Art
is never dogmatic; holds no brief for itself—you may take
it or you may leave it. It does not force itself rudely
where it is not wanted. It is reverent to all tempers, to all
JOHN GALSWORTHY
I2I
points of view. But it is wilful the very wind in the
comings and goings of its influence, an uncapturable fugi-
tive, visiting our hearts at vagrant, sweet moments; since
we often stand even before the greatest works of Art with-
out being able quite to lose ourselves! That restful oblivion
comes, we never quite know when--and it is gone! But
when it comes, it is a spirit hovering with cool wings, bless-
ing us from least to greatest, according to our powers; a
spirit deathless and varied as human life itself.
-From "The Inn of Tranquility." (Copyright, 1912, by
Charles Scribner's Sons. By permission of the Publishers.)
ARNOLD BENNETT
A POET AND HIS PEOPLE
.. I MET ten thousand men on the Putney High Street,
and they were all my brothers. But I alone was aware of
it. As I stood watching autobus after autobus swing round
in a fearful semicircle to begin a new journey, I gazed my-
self into a mystic comprehension of the significance of what
I saw. A few yards beyond where the autobuses turned was
a certain house with lighted upper windows, and in that
house the greatest lyric versifier that England ever had,
and one of the great poets of the whole world and of all the
ages, was dying: a name immortal. But nobody looked;
nobody seemed to care; I doubt if anyone thought of it.
This enormous negligence appeared to me to be fine, to be
magnificently human.
The next day all the shops were open, and hundreds of
fatigued assistants were pouring out their exhaustless pa-
tience on thousands of urgent and bright women; and flags
waved on high, and the gutters were banked with yellow
and white flowers, and the air was brisk and the roadways
were clean. The very vital spirit of energy seemed to have
scattered the breath of life generously, so that all were in-
toxicated by it in the gay sunshine. He was dead then.
The waving posters said it. When Tennyson died I felt
less hurt; for I had serious charges to bring against Ten-
nyson, which impaired my affection for him. But I was
more shocked. When Tennyson died, everybody knew it,
and imaginatively realized it. Everybody was touched.
I was saddened then as much by the contagion of a general
grief as by a sorrow of my own. But there was no general
I 22
ARNOLD BENNETT
123
grief on Saturday. Swinburne had written for fifty years,
and never once moved the nation, save inimically, when
“Poems and Ballads” came near to being burnt publicly by
the hangman. (By "the nation," I mean newspaper read-
ers. The real nation, busy with the problem of eating,
dying, and being born all in one room, has never heard of
either Tennyson or Swinburne or George R. Sims.) There
are poems of Tennyson, of Wordsworth, even of the spe-
ciously recondite Browning, that have entered into the gen-
eral consciousness. But nothing of Swinburne's! Swinburne
had no moral ideas to impart. Swinburne never publicly
yearned to meet his Pilot face to face. He never galloped
on one of Lord George Sanger's horses from Aix to Ghent.
He was interested only in ideal manifestations of beauty
and force. Except when he grieved the judicious by the
expression of political crudities, he never connected art with
any form of morals that the British public could under-
stand. He sang. He sang supremely. And it wasn't enough
for the British public. The consequence was that his fame
spread out as far as undergraduates, and the tiny mob of
undergraduates was the largest mob that ever worried itself
about Swinburne. Their shouts showed the high-water mark
of his popularity. When one of them wrote in a facetious
ecstasy over "Dolores,”
But you came, O you procuratores
And ran us all in!
that moment was the crown of Swinburne's career as a
popular author. With its incomparable finger on the pub-
lic pulse the Daily Mail, on the day when it announced
Swinburne's death, devoted one of its placards to the per-
formances of a lady and a dog on a wrecked liner, and an-
other to the antics of a lunatic with a revolver. The Daily
Mail knew what it was about. Do not imagine that I am
trying to be sardonic about the English race and its organs.
Not at all. The English race is all right, though ageing
now. The English race has committed no crime in de-
manding from its poets something that Swinburne could
124 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
not give. I am merely trying to make clear the exceeding
strangeness of the apparition of a poet like Swinburne in a
place like England.
Last year I was walking down Putney Hill, and I saw
Swinburne for the first and last time. I could see nothing
but his face and head. I did not notice those ridiculously
short trousers that Putney people invariably mention when
mentioning Swinburne. Never have I seen a man's life more
clearly written in his eyes and mouth and forehead. The
face of a man who had lived with fine, austere, passionate
thoughts of his own! By the heavens, it was a noble sight.
I have not seen a nobler. Now, I knew by hearsay every
crease in his trousers, but nobody had told me that his face
was a vision that would never fade from my memory. And
nobody, I found afterwards by inquiry, had "noticed any-
thing particular” about his face. I don't mind, either for
Swinburne or for Putney. I reflect that if Putney ignored
Swinburne, he ignored Putney. And I reflect that there is
great stuff in Putney for a poet, and marvel that Swinburne
never perceived it and used it. He must have been born
English, and in the nineteenth century, by accident. He
was misprized while living. That is nothing. What does
annoy me is that critics who know better are pandering to
the national hypocrisy after his death. In a dozen columns
he has been sped into the unknown as "a great Victorian!”
Miserable dishonesty! Nobody was ever less Victorian than
Swinburne. And then when these critics have to skate over
the "Poems and Ballads” episode-thin, cracking ice!-how
they repeat delicately the word "sensuous," "sensuous."
Out with it, tailorish and craven minds, and say "sensual!”
For sensual the book is. It is fine in sensuality, and no
talking will ever get you away from that. Villiers de L'Isle
Adam once wrote an essay on "Le Sadisme Anglais," and
supported it with a translation of a large part of Anactoria."
And even Paris was startled. A rare trick for a supreme
genius to play on the country of his birth, enshrining in the
topmost heights of its literature a lovely poem that cannot
be discussed! ... Well, Swinburne has got the better of
us there. He has simply knocked to pieces the theory that
ARNOLD BENNETT
125
great art is inseparable from the Ten Commandments. His
greatest poem was written in honour of a poet whom any
English Vigilance Society would have crucified. "Sane”
critics will naturally observe, in their quiet manner, that
"Anactoria” and similar feats were “so, unnecessary."
Would it were true!
--Books and Persons.
ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM
I LEARN that Mr. Elkin Mathews is about to publish a
collected uniform edition of the works (poems and criti-
cism) and correspondence of the late Lionel Johnson. I
presume that this edition will comprise his study of Thomas
Hardy. The enterprise proves that Lionel Johnson has ad-
mirers capable of an excellent piety; and it also argues a
certain continuance of the demand for his books. I was
never deeply impressed by Lionel Johnson's criticisms, and
still less by his verse, but in the days of his activity I was
young and difficult and hasty. Perhaps my net was too
coarse for his fineness. But, anyhow, I would give much
to have a large homogeneous body of English literary criti-
cism to read at. And I should be obliged to anyone who
would point out to me where such a body of first-rate criti-
cism is to be found. I have never been able to find it for
myself. When I think of Pierre Bayle, Ste. Beuve and
Taine, and of the keen pleasure I derive from the immense
pasture offered by their voluminous and consistently ad-
mirable works, I ask in vain where are the great English
critics of English literature. Beside these French critics,
the best of our own seem either fragmentary or provincial-
yes, curiously provincial. Except Hazlitt we have, I be-
lieve, no even approximately first-class writer who devoted
his main activity to criticism. And Hazlitt, though he is
very readable, has neither the urbaneness, nor the science,
nor the learning, nor the wide grasp of life and history that
characterize the three above-named. Briefly, he didn't
know enough.
126
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
Lamb would have been a first-class critic if he hadn't
given the chief part of his life to clerkship. Lamb at any
rate is not provincial. His perceptions are never at fault.
Every sentence of Lamb proves his taste and his powerful
intelligence. Coleridge-well, Coleridge has his compre-
hensible moments, but they are few; Matthew Arnold, with
study and discipline, might perhaps have been a great critic,
only his passion for literature was not strong enough to
make him give up school-inspecting and there you are!
Moreover, Matthew Arnold could never have written of
women as Ste. Beuve did. There were a lot of vastly in-
teresting things that Matthew Arnold did not understand
and did not want to understand. He, too, was provincial
(I regret to say)--you can feel it throughout his letters,
though his letters make very good quiet reading. Churton
Collins was a scholar of an extreme type; unfortunately he
possessed no real feeling for literature, and thus his judg-
ment, when it had to stand alone, cut a figure prodigiously
absurd. And among living practitioners? Well, I have no
hesitation in de-classing the whole professorial squad
Bradley, Herford, Dowden, Walter Raleigh, Elton, Saints-
bury. The first business of any writer, and especially of
any critical writer, is not to be mandarinic and tedious, and
these lecturers have not yet learnt that first business. The
best of them is George Saintsbury, but his style is such that
even in Carmelite Street the sub-editors would try to correct
it. Imagine the reception of such a style in Paris! Still,
Professor Saintsbury does occasionally stray out of the uni-
versity quadrangles, and puts on the semblance of a male
human being as distinguished from an asexual pedagogue.
Professor Walter Raleigh is improving. Professor Elton has
never fallen to the depths of sterile and pretentious banality
which are the natural and customary level of the remaining
three. . . . You think I am letting my pen run away
with me? Not at all. That is nothing to what I could say
if I tried. Mr. J. W. Mackail might have been one of our
major critics, but there again-he, too, prefers the security
of a Government office, like Mr. Austin Dobson, who, by
the way, is very good in a very limited sphere. Perhaps
ARNOLD BENNETT
127
Austin Dobson is as good as we have. Compare his low
flight with the terrific sweeping range of a Ste. Beuve or
a Taine. I wish that some greatly gifted youth now aged
about seventeen would make up his mind to be a literary
critic and nothing else.
-Books and Persons.
W. L. GEORGE
SINCERITY AND LITERATURE
THE assassins of sincerity are the publisher and the po-
liceman. Dismiss the illusion that banned books are bold
and bad; for the most part they are kindly and mild, silly
beyond the conception of Miss Elinor Glyn, beyond the
sentimental limits of Mrs. Barclay; they are seldom vicious
in intent, and too devoid of skill to be vicious in achieve-
ment. The real bold books are unwritten or unpublished;
for nobody but a fool would expect a publisher to be fool
enough to publish them. There are, it is true, three or
four London publishers who are not afraid of the libraries,
but they are afraid of the police, and any one who wishes
to test them can offer them, for instance a translation of
"Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre.” The publisher is
to a certain extent a human being; he knows that works of
this type (and this one is masterly) are often works of art;
he knows that they are salable, and that assured profits
he lita follow on But he does nd its backereszt
by the police. But he does not publish them, because he
also knows that the police and its backers, purity societies
and common informers, would demand seizure of the stock
after the first review and hurry to the police court all those
who had taken part in the printing and issue of the works.
As a result many of these books are driven underground into
the vile atmosphere of the vilest shops; some are great works
of art; one is, in the words of Mr. Anatole France "minded
I say more than that "Madame Bovary,” the greaest novel
the world has seen, is now being sold in a shilling paper
edition under a cover which shows Madame Bovary in a
128
W. L. GEORGE
129
sort of private dining room, dressed in a chemise, and pre-
paring to drink off a bumper of champagne. (Possibly the
designer of this cover has in his mind sparkling burgundy.)
Several cases are fresh in my memory where purity, living
in what Racine called "the fear of God, sir, and of the
police," has intervened to stop the circulation of the novel.
One is that of “The Yoke," a novel of no particular merit,
devoid of subversive teaching, but interesting because it was
frank, because it did not portray love on the lines of musi-
cal comedy, because it faced the common sex problem of
the middle-aged spinster and the very young man, because
it did not ignore the peril which everybody knows to be
lurking within a mile of Broadway. "The Yoke” enjoyed
a large sale at six shillings and was not interfered with, pre-
sumably because those who can afford six shillings may be
abandoned to the scarlet woman. It was then published
at a shilling. Soon after, the secret combination of common
informer, purity group, and police forced the publisher into
a police court, compelled him to express regret for the pub-
lication, and to destroy all the remaining copies and moulds.
That is a brief tragedy, and it in no wise involves the
library system. Another tragedy may be added. In 1910
Sudermann's novel, "Das Hohe Lied,” was published under
the title of “The Song of Songs.” It is not a very inter-
esting novel; it is long, rather crude, but it relates faithfully
enough the career of a woman who lived by the sale of her-
self. The trouble was that she made rather a success of it,
and it was shown in a few scenes that she did not always
detest the incidents of this career, which is not unnatural.
In December, 1910, two inspectors from the Criminal In-
vestigation Department called on the publisher and in-
formed his manager that a complaint had been made against
the book; it was described as obscene. The officers appar-
ently went on to say that their director, Sir Melville Mac-
naghten, did not associate himself with that opinion, but
their object was to draw the publisher's attention to the
fact that a complaint had been made. Thereupon, without
further combat, the publisher withdrew the book. Nobody
can blame him; he was not in business to fight battles of
130 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
"Th that if he mato court, sm were
this kind, and I suppose that few British juries would have
supported him. They would, more likely, have given the
case against him first and tried to get hold of a private
copy of the book after, presumably to read on Sunday after-
noons. The interesting part of the business is that the
accusation remained anonymous, that the police did not
associate itself with it, but came humbly, helmet in hand,
to convey the displeasure of some secret somebody with
some secret something in the book. And there you are!
That is all you need to snuff out the quite good work of a
novelist with a quite good European reputation. ...
Now and then a publisher dares, and dares too far. Such
is the case of "The Rainbow" by Mr. D. H. Lawrence,
where the usual methods of Puritan terrorism were applied,
where the publisher was taken into court, and made to eat
humble pie, knowing that if he refused he must drink hem-
lock. Certainly “The Rainbow” was a bad book, for it
was an ill-written book, a book of hatred and desire_but
many of us are people of hatred and desire, and I submit
that there is no freedom when a minority of one in a nation
of fifty millions is hampered in the expression of his feel-
ings. More than one opinion has been held by one man and
is now the belief of all the world. The beliefs of tomorrow
will be slain if we suppress to-day the opinion of one; I
would surrender all the rupees and virgins of Bengal for
the sake of the atom of truth which may, in another age,
build up immortal understanding in the heart of man. ...
This secret terrorism is a national calamity, for it pro-
cures the sterilisation of the English novel. It was always
so, for there is not complete sincerity in "Tom Jones,” or
in “A Mummer's Wife,” even as the word sincerity is un-
derstood in England, and there is little nowadays. We have
to-day a certain number of fairly courageous novelists whose
works are alluded to in other chapters, but they are not
completely sincere. If they were they would not be con-
cerned with censorships; they would not be published at all.
I do not suggest that they wish to be insincere, but they
cannot help it. Their insincerity, I suspect, as exemplified
by the avoidance of certain details, arises from the neces-
W. L. GEORGE
131
sity of that avoidance; it arises also from the habit of con-
cealment and evasion which a stupefied public, led by a
neurotic faction, has imposed upon them.
Our novelists openly discuss every feature of social life,
politics, religion, but they cast over sex a thick veil of
ellipse and metaphor. Thus Mr. Onions suggests, but dares
not name, the disease a character contracts; Mr. Lawrence
leaves in some doubt the actual deed of his “Trespasser,"
while "H. H. Richardson” leaves to our conjectures the
habits of Schilsky. (So do I, you see; if I were to say
exactly what I mean it would never do.)
It may be said that all this is not insincerity, and that
there is no need to dwell upon what the respectable call
the unwholesome, the unhealthy, the unnecessary, but I
think we must accept that the bowdlerising to which a
novelist subjects his own work results in lopsidedness. If
a novelist were to develop his characters evenly, the three-
hundred-page novel might extend to five hundred; the addi-
tional two hundred pages would be made up entirely of the
sex preoccupations of the characters, their adventures and
attempts at satisfaction. There would be as many scenes in
the bedroom as in the drawing-room, probably more, given
that human beings spend more time in the former than in
detail that would bring out an intimacy of contact, a com-
pleteness of mutual understanding which does not generally
come about when characters meet at breakfast or on the
golf course. The additional pages would offer pictures of
the sex side of the characters, and thus would compel them
to come alive; at present they often fail to come alive be-
cause they develop only on say five sides out of six.
No character in a modern English novel has been fully
developed. Sometimes, as in the case of Mendel, of Jude
the Obscure, of Mark Lennan, of Gyp Fiörsen, one has the
impression that they are fully developed because the book
mainly describes their sex adventures, but one could write
a thousand pages about sex adventures and have done noth-
ing but produce a sentimental atmosphere. A hundred kisses
do not make one kiss, and there is more truth in one page
132 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
sons that suggested in't fall the charact
of "Madame Bovary” than in the shackled works of Mr.
Hardy. It is not his fault, it is a case ofmif England but
knew-and, therefore, if Hardy but could. Our literary
characters are lopsided because their ordinary traits are fully
portrayed, analysed with extraordinary minuteness, while
their sex life is cloaked, minimised, or left out. Therefore,
as the ordinary man does indulge his sexual proclivities,
as a large proportion of his thoughts run on sex if he is a
live man, the characters in modern novels are false. They
are megacephalous and emasculate. If their religious views,
their political opinions, their sporting tastes were whittled
down as cruelly as their sexual tendencies, then the charac-
ters would become balanced; they would be dwarfs, but
they would be true; if all the characteristics of men were
as faintly suggested in them as their sexual traits, the per-
sons that figure in novels would simulate reality.
They would not be reality, but they would be less untrue
than they are to-day. This, however, is merely theory, for
it is impossible to apply to the novel the paradox that in-
sincerity in everything being better than insincerity in one
thing, it is desirable to be insincere throughout. The para-
dox cannot be applied because then a novel of ideas could
not be written; shrouded religious doubt, shy socialism, sug-
gested anarchism, would reduce the length by nine-tenths,
make of the novel a short story. It would be perfectly
balanced and perfectly insincere; æsthetically sound, it
would satisfy nobody. We should be compelled to pad it
out with murder, theft, and arson, which, as everybody
knows, are perfectly moral things to write about.
It is a cruel position for the English novel. The novelist
may discuss anything but the main preoccupation of life.
If he describes the city clerk he may dilate upon city
swindles, but he must select warily from among the city
clerk's loves. The novelist knows these loves, records them
in his mind, speaks of them freely, but he does not write
them down. If he did, his publisher would go to gaol. For
this reason there is no completely sincere writing. The
novelist is put into the witness box, but he is not sworn to
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth;
W. L. GEORGE
133
he is sworn to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. He
Obviously this is an unhealthy state, for the soul of a
people is in its books, and I suspect that it does a people no
good if its preoccupations find no outlet; it develops in-
hibitions, while its Puritan masters develop phobias. The
cloaking of the truth makes neither modesty nor mock
modesty; it makes impurity. There is no market for por-
nography, for pornography makes no converts who were not
already converted. I believe that the purity propaganda
creates much of the evil that lives; I charge advertising re-
formers with minds full of hate, bishops full of wind, and
bourgeois full of fear, with having exercised through the
pulpit and the platform a more stimulating effect upon
youth, and with having given it more unhealthy informa-
tion about white slavery, secret cinemas, and disorderly
houses than it could ever have gained from all the books
that were ever printed in Amsterdam. I once went to a
meeting for men only, and came out with two entirely new
brands of vice; a bishop held up to me the luridities of
secret cinemas, and did everything for me except to give
me the address. But he filled my mind with cinemas. One
could multiply these instances indefinitely. I do not think
that we should cover things up; we had enough of that
at its height, and when women, in bodice and bustle, did
their best to make respectability difficult; no; we do not
want things covered up, but we do not want them adver-
tised. I believe that as good coin drives out bad, the Puri-
tans would find a greater safety and the world a greater
freedom in allowing good literature to vie with bad; the
good would inevitably win; no immoral literature is good;
all bad literature dies. The seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies in England and France produced the vilest pornog-
raphy we know. Those centuries also produced Molière and
Fielding. Well, to-day you can buy Molière and Fielding
everywhere but the pornography of those centuries is dead,
and you can find it nowhere except in a really good West
End club.
-Literary Chapters.
THOMAS MacDONAGH
IRELAND AND THE NEW PATHS
IN LITERATURE it will be found that the characteristic con-
tribution of each great master is two-fold. The new mes-
sage comes in a new form, the new wine in a new vessel.
No great poet has really put new wine into old bottles. . ..
A new verse, a new style in prose-something that can be
weighed and measured-a new manifestation that can be
seen, comes always with that new imponderable, incom-
mensurable, elusive something which one knows to be fine
literature, but which cannot be tested by any such sure
standards. I will say that poetry may be not only a criti-
cism of life, as Matthew Arnold thought, but an interpreta-
tion of life, or, at its highest, an illumination of life. The
ancient Irish critic of the Triads had this for one of his
marks of the poet, imbas forosna, knowledge that illumines.
I will say this. I know well enough what I mean by these
terms. But when I come to apply them to some actual piece
of literature, more especially of new literature, they help
me little. This new thing is unlike all the fine literature
that I know. Is it a criticism of life? Is it an interpreta-
tion? Is it an illumination? What really is life? When
so illuminated does it change and become different from all
that we know by experience? What right have we to limit
it to experience? Are we looking only for the experience of
the intellectual thing, forgetting the intuitive? Are not
these terms of criticism only words of praise and no stand-
ards at all? And so—though with the old standard of
beauty we have set aside the old standard of truth-so back
to the tragic query, What is truth?
If, in the course of these studies, I have said that poetry
134
THOMAS MACDONAGH
135
is a criticism, or an interpretation, or an illumination of
life, I use the terms with reference to work that has fallen
back into perspective not work in the near shadow of
which we stand. To answer one of my questions just put,
I use them as terms of praise, not as tests for the next
poem that comes.
On the other hand one can really, if only in a negative
way, judge the form of a new work. Forms change and
become outworn though the essential stuff of literature may
be the same from age to age. A five-act play, written new
in just Shakespeare's verse, if such a thing could be done,
would be something of a sham antique. Good Tennysonian
blank verse betrays many pretentious poems. The imita-
tors of Blake and Browning have not surpassed their mas-
ters. Whitman, however, the most confident of us cannot
condemn so easily. He may be but another eccentric. He
may be the great innovator. The futurists may be charla-
tans, or fools, or lunatics. They may be prophets. The
difference of their manner from the good old ways does not
prove their rightness or their greatness; but the hostile *
critics of their works use words and weapons so like those
used against other work that survived attack and after-
wards became right and great and good, that one cannot
lightly join them. Most writers who made daring depart-
ures in form merely wandered off and were lost. Yet the
new path of some pioneer to-day may prove the right turn-
ing for all. The path of glory in literature has not been,
as many appear to think, the broad and easy way. It is
now beaten broad enough—up to a certain point, reached
a generation ago—by the feet of many who have followed
in the tracks of men who discovered things in the heavens
and on earth, not keeping their eyes on their feet, and of
men who ran hither and thither after splendid adventures,
and of men who fared far to the east and to the west lured
by the voices of strange peoples. It is not the obvious
straight path that leads from height to height.
• As with the masters, so with what we have still to call
the movements. The Renaissance, in whose mode . we are
still, or have been till now, had its new wine and its nejv
136 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
vessels. The so-called classic and romantic movements
within it have theirs, each stage of each remembered by the
double gift of a master. The gift to literature of the writers
whom I count as of the Irish Modeputting this term of
mine in the place of that vague and illogical Celtic Note-
is likewise double. For the reasons which I here set forth,
I criticise as much the form of the work as the import,
though to me, of course, that import is its chief worth. I
make experimental studies to satisfy myself that this is at
least a mode, distinctive and apart.
The Renaissance, with the discoveries of Copernicus and
Galileo, the discoveries of Columbus and his followers; later
such things as the discovery of the law of gravitation, the
Cartesian philosophy, the French Revolution, Darwin's
theory of evolution: these have profoundly affected Eur-
opean literature. They have not similarly affected literature
in Ireland. This is not to say of course that in Ireland
writers are still likely to write of the earth as the centre
of the solar system, of epicycles and the rest. It is to say
that literature here has not had just that education which is
common to the other literatures of western Europe. Those
literatures have been, as I have said, up to these days, parts
of the Renaissance. In them the authority of the ancients
has held:
"And Boileau still in right of Horace sways.”
That word "authority” holds a world of meaning in this
matter. Another word of great content is "intellectual.”
Intellectualism is the Renaissance. When in the place of
that clear standard we set those pillars of cloud and of fire
known to the spiritual intuitions, the day of the Renaissance
is done; the forms of Renaissance literature decay.
In Ireland some literature has kept the old way familiar
to the Middle Age.
Let me not anticipate my conclusion. Let me make clear
my meaning of things I have said above.
In his sonnet, On first looking into Chapman's Homer,
Keats has set together the three great influences of Eliza-
bethan literature: the classic world, its art, its literature,
THOMAS MACDONAGH
137
its story, represented by Homer; the new astronomy that
raised adventure to the skies; the new discoveries that
opened to the view new seas and lands beyonds the peaks
of Darien. Keats himself, who might have lived long
enough for me a child to know him, owned the same in-
fluences. He touched in not too late a day the beautiful
mythology of Greece; yet he felt other influences too. La
Belle Dame sans Merci, though he may have disdained it,
shows that another wind blew on him at hours. So too
with the other arts in his time. They derived from Italy,
and through Italy from Greece. To our eyes even the Ro-
mantic era has a classic quality, a sense of repose almost,
compared with the disturbance now taking place in all the
arts. All the forms are suffering change. It would seem
that the mind (its outlook and its inlook, if one may say so)
is suffering change and demanding different forms of ex-
pression. This, since the establishment of Impressionism,
is more easily admitted in painting than in literature, as
indeed since Wagner it may be more easily admitted in music
too; but to anyone conversant with modern literature the
same change of order is evident here. Compare modern
poems and modern novels, the claim of which to serious
recognition cannot be denied, with similar works of the
previous ages and you will at once perceive that the differ-
ence here too is due to the introduction of Impressionism
and Wagnerism. To us as to the ancient Irish poets, the
half-said thing is dearest. The rhythm made by an emotion
informs the poem and so recreates the emotion. As to the
mystic, so to the lyric poet the unknown transcends the
known. The purely rational, purely intellectual way of ex-
pression does not lead from it and so to it. I am not writ-
ing here of European literature in general, or of English
literature in particular. I am introducing a movement that
is important to English literature, because it is in part a
revolt from it-because it has gone its own way, inde-
pendent of it, though using for its language English or a
dialect of English. I am treating it as a separate thing;
and all that I have said so far is said rather by way of com-
parison, to set it in its true light. It enters literature at a
138
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
period which seems to us who are of it as a period of dis-
turbance, of change. Its mode seems strange to the critics
and to the prosodists of the old order. Its mode is not that
of the Futurists or the writers of vers libres; but still, com-
ing with the work of these, it stands as another element of
disturbance, of revolution; it is comparatively free from the
old authority imposed by the Renaissance, while the other
elements in this disturbance are rebelling against that autho-
rity; it is the mode of a people to whom the ideal, the
spiritual, the mystic, are the true, while theirs is that of
people who seek, however blindly, for a truth beyond the
easy truth which is the beauty of the romantics, who will
not admit that this identification of a rational truth and a
rational beauty is all they know on earth or all they need
to know. Beyond this I would not urge the parallel; but
this it is necessary to note in order to understand the re-
ception given to the Irish Mode. It has come in its due
time. Mangan and Callanan in the first half of the nine-
teenth century tuned the harp that is now ringing in the
hands of many. Ears that in the older days would not have
listened to the rarest music of that harp are now attentive
to every tone. The poets of this mode have till now been
ignorant of the parallel movement; they have taken little
or no note of the new writers of free verse or of the futurists.
Yet their work to the coming age may appear one with the
work of these. And indeed there is a near kinship. The
freedom being sought now elsewhere has long been enjoyed
here. One might reasonably argue that Macpherson, SO
great an influence in the Romance, was the first of the free
verse men—that his work marks the beginning, not merely
of the Romantic Era of European literature, but of that
freedom of the new time set against the old Authority of
the Renaissance.
-Literature in Ireland.
JOHN COOPER POWYS
SUSPENDED JUDGMENT
THE conclusion of any critical essay must in large meas-
ure be lame and halting; must indeed be a whispered warn-
ing to the reader to take what has gone before, however
ardently expressed, with that wise pinch of true Attic salt
which mitigates even a relative finality in these high things.
One comes to feel more and more, as one reads many
books, that judicial decisions are laughable and useless in
this rare atmosphere, and that the mere utterance of such
platitudinous decrees sets the pronouncer of them outside
the inner and exclusive pale.
One comes to feel more and more that all that any of us
has a right to do is to set down as patiently and tenderly as
he may the particular response, here or there, from this side
or the other, as it chances to happen, that is aroused in his
own soul by those historic works of art, which, whatever
principle of selection it is that places them in our hands,
have fallen somehow across our path.
It might seem that a direct, natural and spontaneous re-
sponse, of the kind I have in my mind, to these famous
works, were easy enough of attainment. Nothing, on the
contrary, is more difficult to secure or more seldom secured.
One might almost hazard the paradox that the real art of
criticism only begins when we shake ourselves free of all
books and win access to that locked and sealed and uncut
volume which is the book of our own feelings.
The art of self-culture—one learns just that when youth's
outward-looking curiosity and passion begin to ebb—is the
art of freeing oneself from the influence of books so that
one may enjoy what one is destined to enjoy without
139
140 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
pedantry or scruple. And yet, by the profound law of the
system of things, when one has thus freed oneself from the
tyranny of literary catchwords and the dead weight of culti-
vated public opinion, one comes back to the world of books
with an added zest. It is then, and only then, that one
reads with real unscrupulousness, thinking solely of the
pleasure, and nothing of the rectitude or propriety or ade-
quacy of what we take up.
And it is then that the great figures of the master-writers
appear in their true light; the light—that is to say—in
which we, and not another have visualised them, felt them,
and reacted from them.
It is wonderful what thrilling pleasures there are in store
for us in literature when once we have cut ouselves adrift
from all this superfluity of cultured opinion, and have given
ourselves complete leave to love what we like and hate what
we like and be indifferent to what we like, as the world
swings round!
I think the secret of making an exquisite use of literature
so that it shall colour and penetrate our days is only a small
part of what the wisest epicureans among us are concerned
with attaining. I think it is one of the most precious bene-
fits conferred on us by every new writer that he flings us
back more deeply than ever upon ourselves. We draw out
of him his vision, his peculiar atmosphere, his especial
quality of mental and emotional tone. We savour this and
assimilate it and store it up, as something which we have
made our own and which is there to fall back upon when
we want it. But beyond our enjoyment of this new in-
crement to our treasury of feeling, we are driven inwards
once more in a kind of intellectual rivalry with the very
thing we have just acquired, and in precise proportion as
it has seemed to us exciting and original we are roused in
the depths of our mind to substitute something else for it;
and this something else is nothing less than the evocation
of our own originality, called up out of the hidden caverns
of our being to claim its own creative place in the com-
munion between our soul and the world.
I can only speak for myself; but my own preference
it has enths of our m else is nothip out of th
JOHN COOPER POWYS
141
· among writers will always be for those whose genius con-
sists rather in creating a certain mental atmosphere than in
hammering out isolated works of art, rounded and complete.
For a flawless work of art is a thing for a moment, while
that more penetrating projection of an original personality
which one calls a mental or æsthetic atmosphere, is a thing
that floats and flows and drifts and wavers, far beyond the
boundaries of any limited creation. Such an atmosphere,
such a vague intellectual music, in the air about us, is the
thing that really challenges the responsive spirit in our-
selves; challenges it and rouses it to take the part which it
has a right to take, the part which it alone can take, in re-
creating the world for us in accordance with our natural
fatality.
It is only by the process of gradual disillusionment that
we come at last to recognize what we ourselves—undis-
tracted now by any external authority-need and require
from the genius of the past. For my own part, looking
over the great names, I am at this moment drawn instinc-
tively only to two among them all to William Blake and
to Paul Verlaine; and this is an indication to me that what
my own soul requires is not philosophy or psychology or
wit or sublimity, but a certain delicate transmutation of the
little casual things that cross my way, and a certain faint,
low, sweet music, rumouring from indistinguishable hori-
zons, and bringing me vague rare thoughts, cool and quiet
and deep and magical, such as have no concern with the
clamour and brutality of the crowd. ...
Art and Literature are, after all, and there is little use
denying it, the last refuge and sanctuary, in a world ruled
by machinery and sentiment, of the free, wild, reckless,
irresponsible, anarchical imagination of such as refuse to
sacrifice their own dreams for the dreams-not less illusive
-of the general herd.
We have to face the fact-bitter and melancholy though
it may be that in our great bourgeois-dominated democ-
racies the majority of people would like to trample out the
flame of genius altogether; trample it out as something in-
imical to their peace.
142
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, were all completely
aware of this instinctive hatred with which the mob of men
regard what is exceptional and rare. The Hamlet-spirit of
the author of Coriolanus must chuckle bitterly in that grave
in Stratford-on-Avon when he learns that the new ideal is
the ideal of cosmopolitan literature expressing the soul of
the average man.
The clash is bound to come sooner or later between public
opinion, concerned to preserve the comfort of its illusions,
and the art of the individual artist playing, in noble ir-
responsibility, with all illusions.
It was his consciousness of this—of the natural antag-
onism of the mob and its leaders to all great literature that
made Goethe draw back so coldly and proudly from the
popular tendencies of his time, and seek refuge among the
great individualistic spirits of the classic civilisations. And
what Goethe--the good European-did in his hour, the
more classical among European writers of our own day
do still.
The great style the style which is like gold and bronze
in an age of clay and rubble-remains as the only sure
refuge we have from the howling vulgarities of our genera-
tion. If books were taken from us—the high, calm, beauti-
ful, ironical books of classic tradition-how, in this age,
could the more sensitive among us endure to live at all?
With brutality and insanity and ruffianism, with com-
placency and stupidity and sentimentalism, jostling us and
hustling us on all sides, how could we live, if it were not for
the great, calm, scornful anarchists of the soul, whose high
inviolable imaginations perpetually refresh and re-create the
world?
And we who find this refuge, we who have to win our
liberty every day anew by bathing in these classic streams,
we too will do well to remember that the most precious
things in life are the things that the world can neither give
nor take away.
We toomencouraged by these great individualists have
a right to fall back upon whatever individuality may have
been left to us; and, resting upon that, sinking into the
JOHN COOPER POWYS 143
soul of that, to defy all that public opinion and the voice
of the majority may be able to do.
And we shall be wise also if we recognise, before it is too
late, that what is more intrinsic and inalienable in ourselves
is just that very portion of us which has nothing to do with
our work in life, nothing to do with our duty to the com-
munity.
We shall be wise if we recognise, before it is too late,
that the thing most sacred in us is that strange margin of
unoccupied receptivity, upon which settle, in their flight
over land and sea, the beautiful wild birds of unsolicited
dreams.
We shall be wise if, before we die, we learn a little of the
art of suspending our judgment—the art of "waiting upon
the spirit.”
For it is only when we have suspended our judgment; it
is only when we have suspended our convictions, our prin-
ciples, our ideals, our moralities, that "the still small voice”
of the music of the universe, sad and sweet and terrible and
tender, drifts in upon us, over the face of the waters of the
soul.
The essence of us, the hidden reality of us, is too rare
and delicate a thing to bear the crude weight of these sturdy
opinions, these vigorous convictions, these social ardours,
without growing dulled and hardened. ....
It is only when we suspend our judgments and leave
arguing and criticising, that the quiet gods of the moonlit
shores of the world murmur their secrets in our ears.
suspend
the whicising
PART FOUR
JAMES HUNEKER
I
CONCERNING CRITICS
THE annual rotation of the earth brings to us at least
once during its period the threadbare, thriceworn, stale, flat,
and academic discussion of critic and artist. We believe
comparisons of creator and critic are unprofitable, being for
the most part a confounding of intellectual substances. The
painter paints, the composer makes music, the sculptor
models, and the poet sings. Like the industrious crow the
critic hops after these sowers of beauty, content to peck up
in the furrows the chance grains dropped by genius. This,
at least, is the popular notion. Balzac, and later Disraeli,
asked: “After all, what are the critics? Men who have
failed in literature and art.” And Mascagni, notwithstand-
ing the laurels he wore after his first success, cried aloud in
agony that a critic was compositore mancato. These be
pleasing quotations for them whose early opus has failed
to 'score. The trouble is that every one is a critic, your
gallery-god as well as the most stately practitioner of the
art severe. Balzac was an excellent critic when he saluted
Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme as a masterpiece; as was
Emerson when he wrote to Walt Whitman. What the mid-
century critics of the United States, what Sainte-Beuve,
master critic of France, did not see, Balzac and Emerson
saw and, better still, spoke out. In his light-hearted fash-
ion Oscar Wilde asserted that the critic was also a creator-
apart from his literary worth—and we confess that we know
147
148
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
of cases where the critic has created the artist. But that a
serious doubt can be entertained as to the relative value of
creator and critic is hardly worth denying.
Consider the painters. Time and time again you read or
hear the indignant denunciation of some artist whose can-
vas has been ripped-up in print. If the offender happens
to be a man who doesn't paint, then he is called an igno-
ramus; if he paints or etches, or even sketches in crayon,
he is well within the Balzac definition-poor, mierable im-
becile, he is only jealous of work that he could never have
achieved. As for literary critics, it may be set down once
and for all that they are “suspect.” They write, ergo, they
must be unjust. The dilemma has branching horns. Is
there no midway spot, no safety ground for that weary
Ishmael the professional critic to escape being gored? Nat-
urally any expression of personal feeling on his part is set
down to mental arrogance. He is permitted like the wind
to move over the face of the waters, but he must remain
unseen. We have always thought that the enthusiastic
Dublin man in the theatre gallery was after a critic when
he cried aloud at the sight of a toppling companion: "Don't
waste him. Kill a fiddler with him!” It seems more in con-
sonance with the Celtic character; besides, the Irish are
music-lovers.
If one could draw up the list of critical and creative men
in art the scale would not tip evenly. The number of
painters who have written of their art is not large, though
what they have said is always pregnant. Critics outnumber
them—though the battle is really a matter of quality, not
quantity. There is Da Vinci. For his complete writings
some of us would sacrifice miles of gawky pale and florid
mediæval paintings. What we have of him is wisdom, and
like true wisdom is prophetic. Then there is that immortal
gossip Vasari, a very biased critic and not too nice to his
contemporaries. He need not indulge in what is called the
woad argument; we shan't go back to the early Britons for
our authorities. Let us come to Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose
Discourses are invaluable and also to be taken well salted;
he was encrusted with fine old English prejudices. One of
JAMES HUNEKER
149
Ingresariesa pedagcoveries for
he wrote, peritics and
his magnificent sayings and one appreciated by the entire
artistic tribe was his ejaculation: "Damn paint!” Raphael
Mengs wrote. We wish that Velasquez had. What William
Blake said of great artists threw much light on William
Blake. Ingres uttered things, principally in a rage, about
his contemporaries. Delacroix was a thinker. He literally
anticipated Chevreul's discoveries in the law of simultane-
ous contrasts of colour. Furthermore, he wrote profoundly
of his art. He appreciated Chopin before many critics and
musicians which would have been an impossible thing for
Ingres, though he played the violinmand he was kind to
the younger men.
Need we say that Degas is a great wit, though not a
writer; a wit and a critic? Rousseau, the landscapist, made
notes, and Corot is often quoted. If Millet had never writ-
ten another sentence but "There is no isolated truth,” he
would still have been a critic. Constable with his "A good
thing is never done twice”; and Alfred Stevens' definition
of art, "Nature seen through the prism of an emotion,” fore-
stalled Zola's pompous pronouncement in The Experimen-
tal Novel. To jump over the stile to literature, Words-
worth wrote critical prefaces, and Shelley, too; Poe was a
critic; and what of Coleridge, who called painting "a middle
quality between a thought and a thing—the union of that
which is nature and that which is exclusively human"?
There are plenty of examples on the side of the angels.
Whistler! What a critic, wielding a finely chased rapier!
Thomas Couture wrote and discoursed much of his art. Sick
man as he was, I heard him talk of art at his country home,
Villiers-le-Bel, on the Northern Railway, near Paris. This
was in 1878. William M. Hunt's talks on art were fruitful.
So are John Lafarge's. The discreet Gigoux of Balzac
notoriety has an entertaining book to his credit; while Rodin
is often coaxed into utterances about his and other men's
work. There are many French, English, and American
artists who write and paint with equal facility. In New
York, Kenyon Cox is an instance. But the chiefest among
all the painters alive and dead, one who shines and will con-
tinue to shine when his canvases are faded—and they are
ch, equal the chiend w
150 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
fading“-is Eugène Fromentin, whose Maîtres d'autrefois is
a classic of criticism. Since his day two critics, who are
also painters, have essayed both crafts, George Clausen and
D. S. MacColl.
Professor Clausen is a temperate critic, MacColl a bril-
liant, revolutionary one. The critical temper in either man
is not dogmatic. Seurat, the French Neo-Impressionist, has
defended his theories; indeed, the number of talented
Frenchmen who paint well and write with style as well as
substance is amazing. Rossetti would no longer be a rare
bird in these days of piping painters, musicians who are
poets, and sculptors who are painters. The unfortunate
critic occasionally writes a play or an opera (particularly
in Paris), but as a rule he is content to echo that old Ger-
man who desperately exclaimed: "Even if I am nothing
else, I am at least a contemporary."
Let us now swing around the obverse side of the medal.
A good showing. You may begin with. Wincklemann or
Goethe-we refer entirely to critics of paint and painters-
or run down the line to Diderot, Blanc, Gautier, Baudelaire,
Zola, Goncourt, who introduced to Europe Japanese art;
Roger Marx, Geoffroy, Huysmans, Camille Mauclair,
Charles Morice, and Octave Mirbeau. Zola was not a
painter, but he praised Edouard Manet. These are a few
names hastily selected. In England, Ruskin too long ruled
the critical roast; full of thunder-words like Isaiah, his
vaticinations led a generation astray. He was a prophet,
not a critic, and he was a victim to his own abhorred "pa-
thetic fallacy." Henley was right in declaring that until
R. A. M. Stevenson appeared there was no great art criti-
cism in England or English. The “Velasquez" is a marking
stone in critical literature. It is the one big book by a big
temperament that may be opposed page by page to Fro-
mentin's critical masterpiece. Shall we further adduce the
names of Morelli, Sturge Moore, Roger Fry, Perkins, Cor-
tissoz, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Van Dyke, Mather, Be-
renson, Brownell, and George Moore—who said of Ruskin
that his uncritical blindness regarding Whistler will con-
stitute his passport to fame, "the lot of critics is to be re-
JAMES HUNEKER
151
membered by what they have failed to understand.” Walter
Pater wrote criticism that is beautiful literature. If Ruskin
missed Whistler, he is in good company, for Sainte-Beuve,
the prince of critics, missed Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and
to Victor Hugo was unfair. Yet, consider the Osrics em-
balmed in the amber of Sainte-Beuve's style. He, like many
another critic, was superior to his subject. And that is al-
ways fatal to the water-flies.
George III once asked in wonderment how the apples got
inside the dumplings. · How can a critic criticise a creator?
The man who looks on writings things about the man who
does things. But he criticises and artists owe him much.
Neither in "ink-horn terms” nor in an "upstart Asiatic
style” need the critic voice his opinions. He must be an
artist in temperament and he must have a credo. He need
not be a painter to write of painting, for his primary appeal
is to the public. He is the middle-man, the interpreter, the
vulgariser. The psycho-physiological processes need not
concern us. One thing is certain-a man writing in terms
of literature about painting, an art in two dimensions, can-
not interpret fully the meanings of the canvas, nor can he
be sure that his opinion, such as it is, when it reaches the
reader, will truthfully express either painter or critic. Such
are the limitations of one art when it comes to deal with
the ideas or material of another. Criticism is at two re-
moves from its theme. Therefore criticism is a make-shift.
Therefore, let critics be modest and allow criticism to be-
come an amiable art.
But where now is the painter critic and the professional
critic? "Stands Ulster where it did?" Yes, the written
and reported words of artists are precious alike to layman
and critic. That they prefer painting to writing is only
natural; so would the critic if he had the pictorial gift.
However, as art is art and not nature, criticism is criticism
and not art. It professes to interpret the artist's work, and
at best it mirrors his art mingled with the personal tempera-
ment (artistic training is, of course, an understood requi-
site), and when this is the case, God help the artist! As
the greater includes the lesser, the artist should permit the
152 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
critic to enter, with all due reverence, his sacred domain.
Without vanity the one, sympathetic the other. Then the
ideal collaboration ensues. Sainte-Beuve says that "criti-
cism by itself can do nothing. The best of it can act only
in concert with public feeling . . . we never find more than
half the article in print-the other half was written only in
the reader's mind.” And Professor Walter Raleigh would
further limit the "gentle art.” “Criticism, after all, is not
to legislate, nor to classify, but to raise the dead.” The
relations between the critic and his public open another
vista of the everlasting discussion. Let it be a negligible :
one now. That painters can get along without professional
criticism we know from history, but that they will them-
selves play the critic is doubtful. And are they any fairer
to young talent than official critics? It is an inquiry
fraught with significance. Great and small artists have sent
forth into the world their pupils. Have they always--as
befits honest critics-recognised the pupils of other men,
pupils and men both at the opposite pole of their own
theories? Recall what Velasquez is reported to have said
to Salvator Rosa, according to Boschini and Carl Justi.
Salvator had asked the incomparable Spaniard whether he
did not think Raphael the best of all the painters he had
seen in Italy. Velasquez answered: “Raphael, to be plain
with you, for I like to be candid and outspoken, does not
please me at all.” This purely temperamental judgment
does not make of Velasquez either a good or a bad critic.
It is interesting as showing us that even a master cannot
always render justice to another. Difference engenders
hatred, as Stendhal would say.
Can the record of criticism made by plastic artists show
a generous Robert Schumann? Schumann discovered many
composers from Chopin to Brahms and made their fortunes
by his enthusiastic writing about them. In Wagner he met
his Waterloo, but every critic has his limitations. There is
no Schumann, let the fact be emphasised, among the
painter-critics, though quite as much discrimination, ardour
of discovery, and acumen may be found among the writings
of the men whose names rank high in professional criticism.
JAMES HUNEKER
153
And this hedge, we humbly submit, is a rather stiff one to
vault for the adherents of criticism written by artists only.
Nevertheless, every day of his humble career must the critic
pen his apologia pro vita sua.
-Promenades of an Impressionist.
II
THE LAWBREAKER
LET us drop this old ästhetic rule of thumb and confess
that during the last century a new race of artists sprang up
from some strange element and, like flying-fish, revealed
to a wondering world their composite structures. Thus we
find Berlioz painting with his instrumentation; Franz Liszt,
Tschaikowsky, and Richard Strauss filling their symphonic
poems with drama and poetry, and Richard Wagner invent-
ing an art which he believed to embrace the seven arts. And
there is Ibsen, who used the dramatic form as a vehicle for
his anarchistic ideas; and Nietzsche, who was such a poet
that he was able to sing a mad philosophy into life; and
Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry that is pic-
torial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this
universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No
and Richard's instrumentatitures. Thus we
shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a
dynamic art-is it not? Let us observe the rules, though
we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarmé
attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished
in clay. His marbles do not represent but present emotion,
are the evocation of emotion itself; as in music, form and
substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé, arouse
"the silent thunder afloat in the leaves," he can summon
from the vasty deep the spirits of love, hate, pain, despair,
sin, beauty, ecstasy; above all, ecstasy. Now the primal
gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few. In our age Keats
had it, and Shelley; Byron, despite his passion, missed it,
and so did Wordsworth. We find it in Swinburne, he had
it from the first; but few French poets have it. Like the
"cold devils" of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the
154 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
blasts of hell about them, Charles Baudelaire can boast the
dangerous attribute. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy, and
Liszt also; Wagner was the master adept of his century.
Tschaikowsky followed him close! and in the tiny piano
scores of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned in a few bars, the soul
often rapt to heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has shown
a rare variation on the theme of ecstasy; voluptuousness
troubled by pain, the soul tormented by stranger nuances.
Rodin is of this tormented choir; he is master of its
psychology. It may be the decadence, as any art is in de-
cadence which stakes the parts against the whole. The
same was said of Beethoven by the followers of Haydn, and
the successors of Richard Strauss will be surely abused quite
as violently as the Wagnerites abuse Strauss to-day-em-
ploying against him the same critical artillery employed
against Wagner. That this ecstasy should be aroused by
pictures of love and death, as in the case of Poe and Baude-
laire, Wagner and Strauss, must not be adjudged as a black
crime. In the Far East they hypnotise neophytes with a
bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of art, as in the
Kingdom of Heaven, there are many mansions. Possibly
it was a relic of his early admiration and study of Baudelaire
that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by
images of death and love; and no doubt the temperament
which seeks such combinations—a temperament commoner
in mediæval days than ours—was inherent in Wagner. He
makes his Isolde sing mournfully and madly over a corpse
and, throwing herself upon the dead body of Tristan, die
shaken by the sweet cruel pains of love. Richard Strauss
closely patterns after Wagner in his Salome, there is the
head of a dead man, and there is the same dissolving ecstasy.
Both men play with similar counters—love and death, and
death and love. And so Rodin. In Pisa we may see (at-
tributed by Vasari) Orcagna's fresco of the Triumph of
Death. The sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh are
inextricably blended in Rodin's Gate of Hell. His prin-
cipal reading for forty years has been Dante and Baude-
laire. The Divine Comedy and Les Fleurs du Mal are the
key-notes in this white symphony of Auguste Rodin's. Love
JAMES HUNEKER
155
and life and bitterness and death rule the themes of his mar:
bles. Like Beethoven and Wagner he breaks the academic
laws of his art, but then he is Rodin, and where he achieves
magnificently lesser men would miserably perish. His large
tumultuous music is for his chisel alone to ring out and
sing.
-Promenades of an Impressionist.
JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN
I
ART AS EXPRESSION
WITH the Romantic Movement there developed the new
idea which coördinates all Criticism in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Very early in the century, Mme. de Staël and others
formulated the idea that literature is an "expression of so-
ciety.” Victor Cousin founded the school of art for art's
sake, enunciating "the fundamental rule, that expression is
the supreme law of art." Later, Sainte-Beuve developed
and illustrated his theory that literature is an expression of
personality. Still later, under the influence of natural sci-
ence, Taine took a hint from Hegel and elaborated the idea
that literature is an expression of race, age, and environ-
ment. The extreme impressionists prefer to think of art as
the exquisite expression of delicate and fluctuating sensa-
tions or impressions of life. But for all these critics and
theorists, literature is an expression of something, of experi-
ence or emotion, of the external or internal, of the man him-
self or something outside the man; yet it is always con-
ceived of as an art of expression.
The objective, the dogmatic, the impressionistic critics of
our day may set for themselves very different tasks, but the
idea of expression is implicit in all they write. They have,
as it were, this bond of blood: they are not merely man and
woman, but brother and sister; and their father, or grand-
father, was Sainte-Beuve. The bitter but acute analysis of
his talent which Nietzsche has given us in the Twilight of
the Idols brings out very clearly this dual side of his semi-
nal power, the feminine sensitiveness and the masculine de-
tachment. For Nietzsche, he is nothing of a man; he wan-
ders about, delicate, curious, tired, pumping people, a female
unonin
156
JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN
157
after all, with a woman's revengefulness and a woman's
sensuousness, a critic without a standard, without firmness,
and without backbone.” Here it is the impressionist in
Sainte-Beuve that arouses the German's wrath. But in the
same breath we find Nietzsche blaming him for "holding up
objectivity as a mask"; and it is on this objective side that
Sainte-Beuve becomes the source of all those historical and
psychological forms of critical study which have influenced
the academic thought of our day, leading insensibly, but
inevitably, from empirical investigation to empirical law.com
The pedigree of the two schools thereafter is not difficult
to trace; on the one side, from Sainte-Beuve through l'art
pour l'art to impressionism, and on the other from Sainte-
Beuve through Taine to Brunetière and his egregious kin.
French criticism has been leaning heavily on the idea of
expression for a century or more, but no attempt has been
made in France to understand its æsthetic content, except
for a few vague echoes of German thought. For the first to
give philosophic precision to the theory of expression, and
to found a method of Criticism based upon it, were the Ger-
mans of the age that stretches from Herder to Hegel. All
the forces of philosophical thought were focused on this
central concept, while the critics enriched themselves from
out this golden store. I suppose you all remember the
famous passage in which Carlyle describes the achievement
of German criticism in the age. "Criticism,” says Carlyle,
"has assumed a new form in Germany. It proceeds on
other principles and proposes to itself a higher aim. The
main question is not now a question concerning the qualities
of diction, the coherence of metaphors, the fitness of senti-
ments, the general logical truth in a work of art, as it was
some half century ago among most critics, neither is it a
question mainly of a psychological sort to be answered by
discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet
from his poetry, as is usual with the best of our own critics
at present; but it is, not indeed exclusively, but inclusively,
of its two other questions, properly and ultimately a ques-
tion of the essence and peculiar life of the poetry itself.
... The problem is not now to determine by what mech-
158
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
anism Addison composed sentences and struck out simil-
itudes, but by what far finer and more mysterious mechan-
ism Shakespeare organized his dramas and gave life and in-
dividuality to his Ariel and his Hamlet. Wherein lies that
life; how have they attained that shape and individuality?
Whence comes that empyrean fire which irradiates their
whole being, and pierces, at least in starry gleams, like a
diviner thing, into all hearts? Are these dramas of his not
verisimilar only, but true; nay, truer than reality itself,
since the essence of unmixed reality is bodied forth in them
under more expressive similes? What is this unity of pleas-
ures; and can our deeper inspection discern it to be in-
divisible and existing by necessity because each work springs
as it were from the general elements of thought and grows
up therefrom into form and expansion by its own growth?
Not only who was the poet and how did he compose, but
what and how was the poem, and why was it a poem and not
rhymed eloquence, creation and not figured passion? These
are the questions for the critic. Criticism stands like an
interpreter between the inspired and the uninspired; be-
tween the prophet and those who hear the melody of his
words, and catch some glimpse of their material meaning,
but understand not their deeper import.”
I am afraid that no German critic wholly realized this
ideal; but it was at least the achievement of the Germans
that they enunciated the doctrine, even if they did not
always adequately illustrate it in practice. It was they who
first realized that art has performed its function when it
has expressed itself; it was they who first conceived of
Criticism as the study of expression. “There is a destruc-
tive and a creative or constructive criticism,” said Goethe;
the first measures and tests literature according to mechani-
cal standards, the second answers the fundamental ques-
tions: “What has the writer proposed to himself to do? and
how far has he succeeded in carrying out his own plan?"
Carlyle, in his essay on Goethe, almost uses Goethe's own
words, when he says that the critic's first and foremost
duty is to make plain to himself "what the poet's aim really
and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his
JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN
159
nicablamed Tassofory into epifpofto the rules
eye, and how far, with such materials as were afforded him,
he has fulfilled it."
This has been the central problem, the guiding star, of
all modern criticism. From Coleridge to Pater, from Sainte-
Beuve to Lemaître, this is what critics have been striving
for, even when they have not succeeded; yes, even when
they have been deceiving thmselves into thinking that they
were striving for something else. This was not the ideal
of the critics of Aristotle's day, who, like so many of their
successors, censured a work of art as "irrational, impossi-
ble, morally hurtful, self-contradictory, or contrary to tech-
nical correctness." This was not Boileau's standard when
he blamed Tasso for the introduction of Christian rather
than pagan mythology into epic poetry; nor Addison's when
he tested Paradise Lost according to the rules of Le Bossu;
nor Dr. Johnson's, when he lamented the absence of poetic
justice in King Lear, or pronounced dogmatically that the
poet should not "number the streaks of the tulip." What
has the poet tried to do, and how has he fulfilled his inten-
tion? What is he striving to express and how has he ex-
pressed it? What impression does his work make on me,
and how can I best express this impression? These are the
questions that modern critics have been taught to ask when
face to face with the work of a poet. Only one caveat
must be borne in mind when attempting to answer them;
the poet's intentions must be judged at the moment of the
creative act, as mirrored in the work of art itself, and not.
by the vague ambitions which he imagines to be his real
intentions before or after the creative act is achieved.
-Creative Criticism.
II
THE SEVEN ARTS AND THE SEVEN
CONFUSIONS
THERE are as many arts as there are artists—the num-
ber is not seven, but countless as the stars. We group
them in constellation for our convenience, not theirs; seven
160 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
units are more easily handled than a trillion. The con-
fusions in regard to them are countless too; the actual num-
ber is far greater; but they may also be gathered for our
convenience into seven groups, -"seven” has the perfume
of a mystic tradition kept fragrant by the superstition of
generations of men. So I begin with a roll-call of them all:
Poets write for money; poets are influenced by their environ-
ment; poets write in meters; poets write tragedies and
comedies; poets are moral or immoral; poets are demo-
cratic or aristocratic; poets use figures of speech. .
The first of the Seven Confusions, then, is this, that
"Poets write for money.” This is only one way of stating
a misconception of the nature of art that might be phrased
in a hundred different ways. The most common form to-
day is perhaps this: "Plays are written to be read, not
acted." We are not concerned with the fact (if it be a
fact) but with its implication for criticism.
The poet may find that a brisk walk stimulates his writ-
ing, or that he can write more easily when he has smoked a
cigarette. The walk or the cigarette has not produced the
poetry; it has simply served as a stimulus to the per-
sonality that creates the poetry. It opens the faucet, but
neither produces nor modifies the water that pours out.
Other poets find that they can not write easily without the
stimulus of imagined reward-money, the plaudits of the
crowd, the resplendent beauty of theatrical performance.
But men with the same ambitions write different poems or
plays, and in this difference lies the real secret of art. For
after all, whatever the imaginary stimulus, there is only
one real urge in the poet's soul, to express what is in him.
To trifle with the plumbing, after the faucet has been turned
on, instead of drinking the water, is hardly the function of
the critic or the lover of art. To say, therefore, that poets
write for money, that playwrights write for the stage, that
1: painters paint to be "hung,” is to confuse mere stimulus
with creative impulse.
The second confusion that "poets are the product of their
environment,” is a twisted corollary of the first. We need
not quarrel with the statement so long as it remains sus-
JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN
161
pended in the air, as a vague generalization that can do no
harm unless it carries with it the further implication that a
study of the environment helps us to understand the poetry.
Not what the poet's environment may have been, but what
he has made out of it, is what interests us in a poem. The
secret of a unique personality (if one may use the phrase
when personality means nothing but uniqueness) is what
the reader enjoys and the critic seeks to discover. Sociolo-
gists may trouble themselves about external and superficial
resemblance between artists or groups of artists; æsthetic
critics are concerned only with the unbridgeable differ- ,'
ences. To look for a poet's power outside of his work
rather than in it, to assume that his relation to his environ-
ment is of any concern whatever to a lover or critic of
poetry, is to confuse criticism and sociology.
The most deeply imbedded superstition in regard to art,
however, is concerned with its external form. The third
confusion, that "Poets write in meters," is therefore one of
the oldest of all the confusions. Aesthetic theorists have
waged a battle against it, from the days of Aristotle, who
said that poetry is distinguished from history by something
more essential than meter, and that the history of Herod-
otus would remain history even if written in verse, to our
own day, when Benedetto Croce, the only modern who may
be mentioned in the same breath with him, has left the old
confusion without any ground to stand on. The fact is
that there is no real distinction between prose and verse.
Out of the infinite varieties of rhythm in human speech, it is
possible, for convenience sake, to separate the more regular
from the more irregular, and to call one verse and the other
prose: to say where one ends and the other begins is impos-
sible. But to build a system on these empirical and con-
venient classifications is to confuse superficial likenesses
with the realities of creative art. For after all no two poets
write in the same meter. I may imagine that I am writing
an iambic pentameter, or a line with a certain succession of
beats and accents, but in reality I am creating a new line.
If that line is good it is because of some special virtue of
its own, and not because of some imaginary and purely
ence sake to call one versoegins is impos-
162
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
whened when and in
external resemblance to something else. Poets do not use
old meters, but each poet creates rhythms of his own.
What is true of meter is also true of language itself.
To speak of learning a language" is to risk the danger of
the same confusion; we do not learn language, we learn
how to create it. That is why it is so wide of the mark to
say, as Max Eastman does, that to "sail into a man" is or
is not a good expression because it means the same as the
Lantinism "to inveigh against a man." "Inveigh” may
etymologically mean "sail into”; but if language is a living
thing—a form of art, not to be torn from its context or
understood outside of it--the Latin words help to explain
the English as much as the disinterred skeleton of a thir-
teenth century English yeoman helps us to understand the
personality of Max Eastman. It is inconceivable that a
modern thinker should still adhere to abstract tests of good
expression, when it is obvious that we can only tell whether
it is good or bad when we see it in its natural context. Is
any word artistically bad in itself? Is not "ain't” an ex-
cellent expression when placed in the mouth of an illiterate
character in a play or story? To deal with abstract classi-
fication instead of the real thing-versification instead of
poetry, grammar instead of language, technique instead of
painting is to be guilty of confusing form as concrete
expression with form as a dead husk.
The fourth confusion may be summed up in the phrase:
"Poets writes tragedies or comedies.” It is true that poets
set out with the intention of writing them, although they
have only the vaguest idea of what they mean by the terms;
and it is equally true that their work may be impeded by
false conceptions of these literary forms. But fortunately
for us, their real achievement is independent of this con-
fused ambition. Tragedy, comedy, lyric, epic, and other
words of this sort, are simply convenient ways of classify-
ing works of art, just as books may be classified as tall or
small, cloth-bound or morocco-bound, for the purpose of
arrangement in libraries, or men may be classified as tall
or small for the purpose of arrangement in a company of
soldiers. We shall always find these terms useful, in poetry
JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN
163
no less than in libraries or regiments, and the confusion
arises only when it is implied (as is almost always implied)
that the classification is not merely a matter of convenience,
but a law of art by which poems are to be judged. For
example, a critic studies a number of poems having a certain
resemblance and called tragedies; out of this study he
evolves a "law of tragedy" and then attempts to impose it
on the first poet who writes another poem of somewhat the
same kind. “Sir," we hear him say throughout the ages,
"you have disregarded all the laws of good tragedy, and
your poem is therefore no good.” The poet's answer should
be a very simple one: "There are no laws of good tragedy;
there are only good or bad poems.” No rule, no theory,
no “law” coined by critics or scholars has any validity for
the poet in the creative act, and when that act is completed
and the poem achieved, the critic must make his theory of
tragedy chime with the new poet's poem, not the poem with
the theory. Only in one sense has any of these terms any
profound significance, and that is the use of the word "lyric"
to represent the free expressiveness of all art. The Divine
Comedy, Lear, Michaelangelo's David, a Corot landscape, or
a Bach fugue is as truly lyric as any of the scripts of Heine
or Shelley.
The fifth confusion that "Poets are moral or inmoral,"
is also world-old. We should no longer banish poets from..
an ideal Republic because of the immorality of their art, as
Plato did, but most of us still confuse art with morals. To
say that poetry is moral or immoral is as meaningless as
to say that an equilateral triangle is moral and an isosceles
triangle immoral. Surely we must realize the absurdity of
testing anything by a standard which does not belong to
it or a purpose for which it was not intended. Imagine
these whiffs of conversation at a dinner table: "This cauli-
flower would be excellent if it had only been prepared in
accordance with international law." "Do you know why
my cook's pastry is so good? He has never told a lie or
seduced a woman.” But why multiply obvious examples?
We do not concern ourselves with morals when we test the
engineer's bridge or the scientist's researches; indeed we
164
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
go farther, and say that it is the moral duty of the scientist
to disregard morals in his search for truth. As a man he
may be judged by moral standards, but the truth of his
conclusions can only be judged by the standard of science.
Beauty's world is remote from both these standards; she
aims neither at morals nor at truth. Her imaginary crea-
tions, by definition, make no pretense to reality, and cannot
be judged by reality's tests. Art is expression, and poets
succeed or fail by their success or failure in completely and
· perfectly expressing themselves. If the ideals they express
are not the ideals we admire most, we must blame not the
: poets but ourselves; in the world where morals count we
: have failed to give them the proper material out of which to
rear a nobler edifice. To separate art and morality is not
to destroy moral values but to augment them—to give
them increased powers and a new freedom in the realm in
which they have the right to reign.
In modern America it would be strange if our practical
hopes did not lead us into a sixth confusion—that “Poets
are democratic or aristocratic”—as if art were concerned
with the political program of the poet any more than with
his moral standards. It is easy to sneer at Shakespeare and
Dante as "reactionaries,” but it is difficult to see what this
has to do with the quality of their poetry, unless we are to
assume that only men of our own political or economic con-
victions can be good poets. It is as hard to write a good poem
on democracy as on aristocracy; also, it would seem even
harder, if we may judge from the experience of poets. To
find fault with the past because it is not exactly like the
present is as good a test as one needs of a shallow mind,
and to find fault with good poetry because it is not good
political science or good sociology is a fairly serviceable test
of the incompetent critic. It is not the purpose of poetry
to further the cause of demorcacy, or any other practical
"cause," any more than it is the purpose of bridge-building
to further the cause of Esperanto. If a poet consecrates
himself to the spread of democratic ideals, his work still re-
mains to be tested by the standards of art, not of politics.
Criticism is concerned with the question, "Has he written
JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN
165
a good poem?" and is not helped in its decision by the an-
swer to a wholly different and indifferent question: "Is he
a Democrat, a Conservative, a Socialist, or å psycho-
analyst?”
Somewhat similar is the attempt of critics to determine
the subject-matter of poetry, no less than the political con-
victions of poets. It is an old illusion: in the seventeenth
century, for example, Boileau belabored the poets who had
the temerity to prefer Christian to Greek mythology. To-
day the critics are insisting on the use of contemporary
material, and are praising the poets whose subjects are
drawn from the life of their own time. But even if it
were possible for critics to impose subjects on poets, how
can the poets deal with anything but contemporary ma-
terial? How can a twentieth century poet, even when he
imagines that he is concerned with early Greek or Egyptian
life, deal with any subject but the life of his own time, ex:
cept in the most external and superficial detail? Cynical
critics have said since the first outpouring of men's hearts,
"There is nothing new in art; there are no new subjects
for the poets." But the very reverse is true. There are no
old subjects; every subject is new as soon as it has been
transformed by the imagination of the poet.
Finally, there is the confusion which is represented by
the statement that “Poets write metaphors.” Poets write
a good many things, so many that it is hard to say what
they do write; frequently they even write nonsense; but
one thing we may be sure they do not write, and that is the
impossible. Metaphors are myths created by grammarians
which have no reality in the poet's world or any other. The ·
misconception involved in these "figures of speech" is that'.
style is something separate from the work of art and not
part and parcel of its inner being. It is conceived as an
ornament to be added to or substracted from expression
instead of as expression itself. If “lion-hearted” be only
another way of saying "brave," why use one rather than
the other? Or if they mean something different, however,
slight, why say that one is used for the other at all? We
have inherited these figures from the old Greek rhetoricians,
on write hat it ivrite and thar marianne
166 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
and in any theory of style as concrete expression they have
no place. Every phrase is a thing in itself, always inde-
finably new, wherever it may be, never representing any-
thing but itself in the exact context where it is found for
the first and only time. It can never be exactly the same,
even when it is used again in the same passage; and, it
has been well said that the word "love" in Dante's famous
line,
"Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,"
is not the same word thrice repeated, but must be con-
sidered artistically as three separate and distinct expres-
sions.
The misconception involved in all these “confusions” is
the same—it is to mistake anatomy for personality, the
husk for the core, the dead for the living, abstractions for
realities, non-art for art.
—“The Seven Arts.” (March, 1917.)
H. L. MENCKEN
THE HOMILETICS OF CRITICISM
EVERY now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily
endeavors falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Chris-
tendom turn to a somewhat sour and depressing considera-
tion of the nature and objects of their own craft. That is
to say, they turn to criticising criticism. What is it, in
plain words? What is its aim, exactly stated in legal terms?
How far can it go? What good can it do? What is its
normal effect upon the artist and the work of art?
Such a spell of self-searching has been in progress for
several years past, and the critics of various countries have
contributed theories of more or less lucidity and plausibility
to the discussion. Their views of their own art, it appears,
are quite as divergent as their views of the arts they more
commonly deal with. One group argues, partly by direct
statement and partly by attacking all other groups, that
the one defensible purpose of the critic is to encourage the
virtuous and oppose the sinful—in brief, to police the fine
arts and so hold them in tune with the moral order of the
world. Another group, repudiating this constabulary func-
tions, argues hotly that the arts have nothing to do with
morality whatsoever—that their concern is solely with pure
beauty. A third group holds that the chief aspect of a
work of art, particularly in the field of literature, is its
aspect as a psychological document—that if it doesn't help
men to know themselves it is nothing. A fourth group re-
duces the thing to an exact science, and sets up standards
that resemble algebraic formulæ—this is the group of
metrists, of contrapuntists and of those who gabble of
light-waves. And so, in order, follow groups five, six, seven,
eight, nine, ten, each with its theory and its proofs. ...
167
™168 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
The Spingarn-Croce-Carlyle-Goethe theory, for instance,
throws a heavy burden upon the critic. It presupposes that
he is a civilized and tolerant man, hospitable to all intel-
ligible ideas and capable of reading them as he runs. This
is a demand that at once rules out nine-tenths of the grown-
up sophomores who carry on the business of criticism in
America. Their trouble is simply that they lack the in-
tellectual resilience necessary for taking in ideas, and par-
ticularly new ideas. The only way they can ingest one is
by transforming it into the nearest related formula—usually
a harsh and devastating operation. This fact accounts for
their chronic inability to understand all that is most per-
sonal and original and hence most forceful and significant in
the emerging literature of the country. They can get down
what has been digested and redigested, and so brought into
forms that they know, and carefully labelled by predeces-
sors of their own sort-but they exhibit alarm immediately
they come into the presence of the extraordinary. Here we
have an explanation of Brownell's alarmed appeal for a
tightening of standards—i. e., a larger respect for prece-
dents, patterns, rubber-stamps and here we have an
explanation of Phelps's inability to comprehend the colossal
phenomenon of Dreiser, and of Boynton's childish nonsense
about realism, and of Sherman's effort to apply the Espion-
age Law to the arts, and of More's querulous enmity to ro-
manticism, and of all the fatuous pigeon-holing that passes
for criticism in the more solemn literary weeklies.
As practised by all such learned and diligent but essen-
tially ignorant and unimaginative meny criticism is little
more than a branch of homiletics. They judge a work of
art, not by its clarity and sincerity, not by the force and
charm of its ideas, not by the technical virtuosity of the
artist, not by his originality and artistic courage, but simply
and solely by his orthodoxy. If he is what is called a "right
thinker," if he devotes himself to advocating the transient
platitudes in a conventional manner, then he is worthy of
respect. But if he lets fall the slightest hint that he is in
doubt abouč any of them, or, worse still, that he is in-
different, then he is a scoundrel, and hence, by their theory,
e ange of standibber-stampiy to compres childish
H. L. MENCKEN
Ібо
a bad artist. Such pious piffle is horribly familiar among
us; I do not exaggerate its terms. You will find it running
through the critical writings of practically all the dull fel-
lows who combine criticism with tutoring; in the works of
many of them it is stated in the plainest way and defended
with much heat, theological and pedagogical. In its baldest
form it shows itself in the doctrine that it is scandalous
for an artist-say a dramatist or a novelist—to depict vice
as attractive. The fact that vice, more often than not, un-
doubtedly is attractive--else why should it ever gobble any
of us?—is disposed of with a lofty gesture. What of it?
say these birchmen. The artist is not a reporter, but a
Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world
as it is, but as it ought to be.
Against this notion American criticism makes but feeble
headway. We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists: every
third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up
his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion
is our national disease. Thus the moral Privatdozenten
have the crowd on their side, and it is difficult to shake
their authority, even the vicious are still in favor of crying
vice down. "Here is a novel,” says the artist. “Why
didn't you write a tract?” roars the professor- and down
the chute go novel and novelist. “This girl is pretty,” says
the painter. "But she has left off her undershirt,” protests
the head-master--and off goes the poor dauber's head. At :
its mildest, this balderdash takes the form of the late Hamil-
ton Wright Mabie's "White List of Books; at its worst, it
is comstockery, an idiotic and abominable thing. Genuine
criticism is as impossible to such inordinately narrow and
cocksure men as music is to a man who is stone-deaf. The
critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist,
must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must
feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative pas-
sion; as Spingarn says, "æsthetic judgment and artistic
creation are instinct with the same vital life.” This is why
all the best criticism of the world has been written by men
who have had within them not only the reflective and ana-
lytical faculty of critics but also the gusto of artists
write vel anne has goes.es the Bookble that madeal
170 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
Goethe, Carlyle, Lessing, Schlegel, Sainte-Beuve, and, to
drop a story or two, Hazlitt, Hermann Bahr, Georg Brandes
and James Huneker. Huneker, tackling "Also sprach Zara-
thustra,” revealed its content in illuminating flashes. But
tackled by Paul Elmer More, it became no more than a dull
student's exercise, ill-naturedly corrected. ...
-Prejudices.
I
THE CRITIC'S FUNCTION
CRITICISM, as humanly practised, must needs fall a good
deal short of the intuitive re-creation of beauty, and what
is more, it must go a good deal further. For one thing, it
must be interpretation in terms that are not only exact but
are also comprehensible to the vulgar, else it will leave the
original mystery as dark as before-and once interpreta-
tion comes in, paraphrase and transliteration comes in.
What is recondite must be made plainer; the transcendental,
to some extent at least, must be done into common modes of
thinking. Well, what are morality, trochaics, hexameters,
movements, historical principles, psychological maxims, the
dramatic unities—what are all these save common modes of
thinking, short cuts, rubber stamps, words of one syllable?
Moreover, beauty as we know it in this world is by no
means an apparition in vacuo. It has its social, its politi-
cal, even its moral implications. The finale of Beethoven's
C minor symphony is not only colossal as music; it is also
colossal as revolt and defiance; it says something against
something. Yet more, the springs of beauty are not with-
in itself alone, nor even in genius alone, but often in things
without. Brahms wrote his Deutsches Requiem, not only
because he was a great artist, but also because he was a
good German. And in Nietzsche there are times when the
divine afflatus takes a back seat, and the spirochaete have
the floor. ...
I think the best feasible practise of criticism at least in
America, is to be found in certain chapters of Huneker, a
critic of vastly more solid influence and of infinitely more
H. L. MENCKEN
171
value to the arts than all the prating pedagogues since
Rufus Griswold. Here, as in the case of Poe, a sensitive
and intelligent artist recreates the work of other artists,
but there also comes to the ceremony a man of the world,
and the things he has to say are apposite and instructive
too. To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce
a moral judgment. To dispute the categories is to set up a
new anti-categorical category. And to admire the work of
Shakespeare is to be interested in his handling of blank
verse, his social aspirations, his shot-gun marriage and his
frequent concessions to the bombastic frenzy of his actors,
and to have some curiosity about Mr. W. H. The really
competent critic must be an empiricist. He must conduct
his exploration with whatever means lie within the bounds
of his personal limitation. He must produce his effects
with whatever tools will work. If pills fail, he gets out his
saw. If the saw won't cut, he seizes a club....
The function of a genuine critic of the arts is to provoke
the reaction between the work of art and the spectator.
The spectator, untutored, stands unmoved; he sees the work
of art, but it fails to make any intelligible impression on
him; if he were spontaneously sensitive to it, there would be
no need for criticism. But now comes the critic with his
catalysis. He makes the work of art live for the spectator;
he makes the spectator live for the work of art. Out of
the process comes understanding, appreciation, intelligent
enjoyment-and that is precisely what the artist tried to
produce.
- Prejudices.
tools will wo he seizes & the arts i
of ele the Hands un intelligible, there waith his
III
THE PURITAN AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
THE American, save in moments of conscious and swiftly
lamented deviltry, casts up all ponderable values, including
even the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong. He
is beyond all things else, a judge and a policeman; he be-
lieves firmly that there is a mysterious power in law; he
172 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
supports and embellishes its operation with a fanatical vigil-
ance.
Naturally enough, this moral obsession has given a strong
colour to American literature. In truth, it has coloured it
so brilliantly that American literature is set off sharply from
all other literatures. In none other will you find so whole-
sale and ecstatic a sacrifice of æsthetic ideas, of all the fine
gusto of passion and beauty, to notions of what is meet,
proper and nice. From the books of grisly sermons that
were the first American contribution to letters down to that
amazing literature of "inspiration” which now flowers so
prodigiously, with two literary Presidents among its chief
virtuosi, one observes no relaxation of the moral pressure.
In the history of every other literature there have been
periods of what might be called moral innocence— periods
in which a naif joie de vivre has broken through all concepts
of duty and responsibility, and the wonder and glory of the
the universe have been hymned with unashamed zest. The
age of Shakespeare comes to mind at once: the violence of
the Puritan reaction offers a measure of the pendulum's
wild swing. But in America no such general rising of the
blood has ever been seen. The literature of the nation,
even the literature of the enlightened minority, has been
under harsh Puritan restraints from the beginning, and
despite a few stealthy efforts at revolt-usually quite without
artistic value or even common honesty, as in the case of the
cheap fiction magazines and that of smutty plays on Broad-
I way, and always very short-lived—it shows not the slight-
est sign of emancipating itself today. The American, try
as he will, can never imagine any work of the imagination
as wholly devoid of moral content. It must either tend
toward the promotion of virtue, or be suspect and abomina-
ble.
If any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the critical
articles in the newspapers and literary weeklies; you will
encounter enough proofs in a month's explorations to con-
vince you forever. A novel or a play is judged among us,
not by its dignity of conception, its artistic honesty, its
perfection of workmanship, but almost entirely by its ortho-
wild swintan reaction omies to mind at unashamed
H. L. MENCKEN
173
DA
doxy of doctrine, its platitudinousness, its usefulness as a
moral tract. A digest of the review of such a book as
David Graham Phillips' “Susan Lenox" or of such a play
as Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler” would make astounding reading
for a Continental European. Not only the childish incom-
petents who write for the daily press, but also most of our
critics of experience and reputation, seem quite unable to
estimate a piece of writing as a piece of writing, a work of
· art as a work of art; they almost inevitably drag in irrel-
evant gabble as to whether this or that personage in it is
respectable, or this or that situation in accordance with the
national notions of what is edifying and nice. Fully nine-
tenths of the reviews of Dreiser's "The Titan," without
question the best American novel of its year, were devoted
chiefly to indignant denunciations of the morals of Frank
Cowperwood, its central character. That the man was
superbly imagined and magnificently depicted, that he stood
out from the book in all the flashing vigour of life, that his
creation was an artistic achievement of a very high and
difficult order—these facts seem to have made no impres-
sion upon the reviewers whatever. They were Puritans writ-
ing for Puritans, and all they could see in Cowperwood was
an anti-Puritan, and in his creator another. It will remain
for Europeans, I daresay, to discover the true stature of
“The Titan," as it remained for Europeans to discover the
true stature of "Sister Carrie.”
-A Book of Prefaces.
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
LITERATURE AND LIFE
I
THE fact that verse, being easily remembered, commem-
orates more enduringly the high deeds of men, still seemed
to the most cultivated of the ancients the proper defense
of imaginative literature. They use the didactic argument,
of course, telling us that poetry teaches by exaniples and,
in a well-known but thoroughly artificial passage, Cicero
expresses his sense of the solace of humane studies for every
age and every condition of life. He strikes a deeper note,
however, when he speaks of the oblivion which, but for the
light of literature, would have overtaken the best and
noblest things “quae jacerent in tenebris omnia, nisi litter-
arum lumen accideret.” And Horace repeats that note in
well-known verses full of a tragic regret over those "un-
wept-for, unknown” heroes who are "weighed down by the
long night, because they lacked a sacred poet.” To per-
petuate the images of the brave and beautiful for whom
the brief sunlight was at an end, seemed to these Romans,
so modern in other ways, the gravest function of literature
and its most important relation to human life.
Christianity changed all that. It made life infinite in ex-
tent but perfectly rigid in character. It split up the life-
process into two elements at war and forced literature to
illustrate didactically the hierarchy of virtues and vices
which symbolized that eternal conflict. The poet of the
Christian ages wrote not to discover or interpret reality but
to illustrate a superimposed theory of right and holy living.
174
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
175
It is important to grasp this fact. A good deal of modern
imaginative literature still pursues the mediaeval method
of showing a specific hierarchy of virtues triumphant and
one of vices discomfited, and keeps its vision fixed upon a
theory of conduct rather than upon the facts of life. The
idealistic critic of to-day, Mr. P. E. More, for instance,
shielding himself with Plato, precisely as thoughtful men
did in the early Christian centuries, still insists with an
ancestral ardor that literature shall not grow out of the soil
of the homely earth, but shall be gathered like manna, from
the sky. . . . It is only in the great love stories of the
middle ages, the stories of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristran
and Iseult, Paolo and Francesca, that the human heart,
transcending the absolute moral dualism of Christianity,
affirms and, in some tragic or fantastic fashion, justifies it-
self.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the literature of
the renaissance discovered the concrete. Its criticism, on
the non-technical side, is a curious blend of ancient and
mediaeval didacticism. But it did acquire a very deep
sense of certain universal situations and emotions. It indi-
vidualized the universal tragedy of old age in "Lear,” of
jealousy in "Othello”; it realized with immense poignancy
the pathos of life's fleetingness, and expresses the Horatian
feeling concerning the "too brief flowers of the lovely rose
nimium breves flores amoence rosc”-in forms that range
from the murmuring cadences of Ronsard's sonnets to the
late and iron music of Andrew Marvel:
“But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near.”
Nearly all the lyrical motifs of the renaissance, in truth,
may be found in Catullus or Horace or Martial. While the
ballads of England and the folk songs of Germany were ob-
scure and despised, the conscious poets of the age gave
their individual expression of the universal emotions hinted
at in the poetry of the Romans. Rarely is the process re-
versed as in that single astonishing sonnet of Michael
176
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
Drayton where at last a poet, to use Hazlitt's stirring phrase,
"had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a
man."
The practice of the renaissance of individualizing univer-
sal experiences was raised into a dogma by the Enlight-
enment, the age of prose and reason. Literature deliberately
concerned itself for more than a century with the typical,
the general-with man, not with men. From La Bruyère
to Voltaire and from Congreve to Johnson it is busy with
the personification of moral qualities. And the neo-classi-
cists were almost as concerned with their conception of the
good-irrespective of experience as the writers of the thir-
teenth century had been. The voice of an intimate experi-
ence, as it is heard in Pope's “Epistle to Augustus,” sounds
in that age with a quality strangely moving, and Johnson's
dislike of Fielding symbolizes the classicist's aversion from
the fearlessly concrete in creative literature.
It was the French Revolution that set free the individual;
it was romanticism that shifted the center of literary expe-
rience from the species to the person and from the world of
abstract morality to the impassioned soul. It was the aim
of the romantic writer, as Hegel observed, "to utter his
intimate being to the world and to realize himself through
such utterance”; it was, as Alfred de Musset put it: "Eter-
niser peut-être un rêve d'un instant"; it was, in the preg-
nant saying of Novalis: “To be alone with all that one
loves" and thus, in Shelley's summing up, "to awaken in
others sensations like those which animate one's own bosom."
To these statements of the relation of literature to life little
that is vital has been added. The spirit of liberty has shifted
from the political to the economic and moral field: natural-
ism has applied the romantic's observation of himself to
his fellow-men. The fundamental distinction, profound in
import, infinite in implication, was established: "the litera-
ture of the historic past gives the individual artist's expres-
sion of a moral theory or a universal experience, modern lit-
erature his immediate vision of the personal and the con-
crete.
The spirit of modern literature cannot be rendered into
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
TYY
177
speech more justly than in Hazlitt's magnificent and neg-
lected passage on Montaigne: "He neither supposed that
he was bound to know all things, nor that all things were
bound to conform to what he had fancied or would have
them to be. In treating of men and manners, he spoke of
them as he found them, not according to preconceived no-
tions and abstract dogmas; and he began by teaching us
what he himself was. ... He wrote not to make converts
to established creeds and prejudices, but to satisfy his own
mind of the truth of things.” To the question what, in
such a view of literature, becomes of a universal appeal to
the spirit of mankind, the final answer is to be found in
Goethe's: “All that happens is a symbol and, by represent-
ing itself perfectly, it reveals the significance of all else.”
Thus the long contradiction between literature and experi-
ence tends to disappear. Art is no longer, like an outworn
moral system, superimposed upon experience, but grows out
of it, is part of it and becomes, as Hebbel said, "the highest
form of life.”
Thus the perfectlyt happens
-
-
-
I have set down these historical considerations in order
to make, I hope, a very vivid use of them, and to show their
burning importance to the society in which we live. We are
surrounded by great quantities of printed matter and there
are people who believe that literature flourishes in our midst.
Unhappily this mass of writing does not, except in the rarest
instances, touch our lives. Its method is either frankly
mediaeval, illustrating in temper and result a preconceived
system of moral.categories; or else it is written in the service
of that smug and hollow moral perfectionism which is the
most unpleasant quality of the eighteenth century. The first
of these two methods is found in nearly all our very popu-
lar fiction and plays and would be negligible if it did not
enjoy, as it does in no other country in the world, the
patronage of the formally educated. The second is all but
universally present in those more serious pieces of imagina-
tive writings—the novels of Winston Churchill, for example

178
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
.
S
—which are current among the cultured classes. Here the
harsh and tonic weather of reality is not always avoided
Life is permitted to crystallise itself in art. But before the
form is perfect, a hammer, half-didactic, half-emotional
shatters it in order that the reader may end on the note o
belief in the most perfect of democracies in the best of al
possible worlds. As that incorruptible and lamented spiri
Randolph Bourne wrote of William Allen White's "In the
Heart of a Fool": "After painting a long picture of com
munity superstition and ferocity that would disgrace a Cen
tral African village-riot and hatred and atrocious murde
-Mr. White takes the Great War, rubs it like an eraser
over the smutched and hideous page, and lo! all is fair and
clean again.”
The explanation for this state of affairs is to be sought, of
course, in the temper of the American reader. He is, like
the mediaevals, accustomed to facile edification and, like the
men of the Enlightenment, careless of history and robustly
optimistic. But he has neither the mystical passion of the
one, nor the other's superb reliance upon the power of the
reason. He is an absolutist in morals, rather tolerant of
defections that are not found out, and a pragmatist in busi
ness and politics. Since his methods in the latter seem to
have paid, he stamps them as truth and is thus fortified as
by triple steel against any literary or philosophical assault
But since he is, after all, very human, and since the inner
rigidness which is his pride and the price of his security is
found to be, often enough, at the mercy of gusts of wilder,
freer and nobler instincts, he insists—blandly, at best, with
coldly fierce intolerance, at worst-that art shall sustain
him in his security, minister to his prosperous self-content,
enforce the triple-plated armor about his all-too-human soul.
Thus it comes about that the average American business
man, the average American professional man, desires the
books and magazines of his leisure hours to be either as
frankly unrelated to life as vaudeville or baseball, or else to
illustrate the excellence and righteousness of his moral theory
and his political practice.
• The women are more sensitive and flexible and curious,
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
179
They have more leisure to cultivate their inner lives and
little opportunity to eliminate what they hold to be their
less worthy impulses through action. Hence little flames of
rebellion flicker among them here and there; in the co-
educational colleges they are the teacher's only consolation
and hope. But they are, quite naturally, intensely loyal
to their men on whom their economic and psychical depend-
ence is complete, and thus their playing with the ardors
and awakenings of art remains mere playing. In the sphere
of personal morality their absolutism is even more passion-
ate and intolerant on account of the unparallelled intensity
of their sense of possession in their men in the relations of
both motherhood and marriage. To exclude from literature
all searchings of the moral life is as necessary to their
comfortable optimism as the exclusion of economic and po-
litical truth is to that of their husbands. The wide-spread
prosperity among our middle classes, moreover, makes both
sexes always more eager to maintain in all things the status
quo; they have a profound sense of the inner coherence of
their system of life and the eternal and troubling veracities
of art are subtly connected, in their minds, with the loss of
money and motor-cars and with the manners of the prole-
tariat. The poverty of poets, legendary and real, dis-
credits their utterances before the tribunal of the respectable
mind. ...
To all these tendencies our universities, rich and power-
ful and supposedly free, should offer-a counterweight. In
their organization literature, especially the literature of the
native tongue, is not inadequately represented. But organi-
zations are also cages; the men who live in them contentedly
cannot help us. The winged creatures are silenced or
crushed. ... The American university professor has often
been represented as the dry-as-dust product of a foreign
method of scholarship. He is not that. Especially in the
departments of English the average man is usually a poor
scholar. The test and strain of profound research and
stringenti accuracy in a given field of knowledge which
belongs no less than love and prayer and need among the
major experiences of the human spirit—is precisely the
180 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
thing he has so often missed. Nor has he, as a university
professor once wrote to me with a touch of pharisaism, a
passion for literature. Thus his words and influences have
neither authority nor charm. He is usually a cultivated
gentleman with a taste for letters. He knows something of
the minor Elizabethans and regards the renaissance as the
proper field of study. He tends to be shy of the eighteenth
century with its inexpugnable virility of mood; he dwells,
among the romantics, on the innocent Keats and the old,
God-fearing Wordsworth, reads Lamb and neglects Hazlitt
and hastens to the Victorian haven of the mind. He is a
mighty man in the "philosophy” of Browning, a connoisseur
with fine pridemamong Meredith's fair women; he ad-
mires Tennyson as much for his sentiments as for the Ver-
gilian beauty of his verse. If our friend is under forty-five
he will be learned in the technique of Kipling's structure and
Stevenson's style; if he affects the breezy attitude of aca-
demic unbending, he is a great admirer of O. Henry.
Crushed as he commonly is by poverty, by obedience to the
administration and-unless married to a rich wife-by so-
cial subserviency, he relates none of his human sufferings
or impulses to literature, but remains a dealer in "rhetoric”
and "technique”; he is always a little deprecatory, in his
chosen field of study, of anything akin to that cry of the
heart which good form forbids him to utter or to the
nakedness of life's sorrows which he must decently drape to
insure the respect of his colleagues and the tolerance of his
administrative chiefs. Thus he, too, partly by nature and
partly by the force of circumstances, helps to deepen the
division between art and life and supports the common de-
lusion that literature is an amusement, an adornment or, at
best, a confirmation and illustration of the fixed principles
and usages of the social group in which he lives.
insure theative chiece of circuand suppo an adored
naministrative rest of his collhich he must utter or to
Not a few strong and ardent spirits, recognizing the liter-
·ary barrenness that surrounds us in the midst of apparent
plenty, have bravely labored for better things. Their efforts
LUDWIG TTT
181
w her dry ref will aval aina midoxy, pothe liter
LEWISOHN
have been almost vain for reasons which they have rarely
grasped. It is not one kind of technique rather than an-
other that will savé us; it matters little whether we write in
free verse or fixed. The fate and character of literature,
as the fate and character of all art, rests upon the relation
which it sustains to life in the consciousness of men. No
literary reforms can reform literature; no written programme
of protest will avail. Wherever the fundamental conception
of life is artificial and militantly rigid, wherever, in a word,
there is a dominant orthodoxy, political, moral and economic,
it follows that the free play of the literary intelligence will
be neglected or suppressed. In the Middle Ages an hetero-
dox book was placed upon the Index Expurgatorius or
burned by the common hangman. Among us it is declared
unmailable by the Post Office or destroyed by the Society
for the Suppression of Vice. In both cases the significance
of the suppression resides in its saddening conformity with
the immediate reactions of the average man. It is on this
point that the very young liberal is apt to be deceived. It
is useless to set books free until minds are set free. Ber-
trand Russell's "Justice in Wartime” inspires the same
contempt in your neighbor that it does in Mr. Burleson;
Dreiser's “Genius” arouses the same horror mixed with im-
potent envy in him that it does in the nerves of Anthony
Comstock's successor.
I have used the word rigid to describe the attitude to life
so hostile to literature. To that word the careful thinker
will always return. The common verbiage of the day has it,
to be sure, that the best type of American is, above all,
"progressive" and "forward-looking." But what that gen-
tleman means by progress is more and more of what he al-
ready has—bigger business, higher efficiency, tighter or-
ganization: what he looks forward to is wider control of
trade, more influence for the institutions that already engage
his interest. And as he realizes his ideal of progress more
and more, his inner rigidness and self-righteous intolerance
increase and he and all his tribe regard with a mounting dis-
like and lurking fear all books that do not glorify him and
his ways. The mediaeval oligarch believed in hell and knew
182 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
that the saints walked with God; his spiritual armor was
never wholly impenetrable to the poet's or the mystic's
warning cry. The progressive, American business man
knows that he himself walks blamelessly with patriotism and
prosperity and so the poet sinks to the level of the fool
who is whipped from the sunlight when his quips no longer
flatter and amuse.
Thus literature-since writers must live is forced to
deny its .soul. It must betray all life for one pitiful but
noisy form of life and restrict the range of its visions to
that of its public bread-givers. It becomes a worthless,
crippled and artificial thing—a timid homily or a mild
decoration. The rebellion of vivid personalities is futile.
The magazines cannot, in self-defence, startle and affront
their readers—one or two publishers will print the books of
the free spirit with a sad self-abnegation and an assurance
that the profits will be less than nothing. And, the world
being what it is, the seer and seeker after new forms of
life through art, watching the modest but very real pros-
perity of his brothers in every European country is galled
by the income of every swimmer with the turbid stream.
Our loss is incalculable. In every country of modern
Europe-even latterly in England—literature is felt, clearly
or obscurely, to be a part of that total life process which
strives toward an ever freer, more varied self-realization.
Every intelligent European, irrespective of class, seeks to
wring from the totality of his experience some view of the
world, some reaction toward the push of things that shall
give coherence to his personal life and inner harmony and
the power rationally to be and to endure. In that totality
of experience, literature plays a tremendous part. For it is
the record, irrespective of form and kind, of other and more
seeing souls concerned in the same conflict with themselves
and with circumstance in the same effort, whether it suc-
ceed or fail, to shape their personalities and re-create their
world. Thus men go to books not-Heaven forbid—for in-
struction, but for warmth and light, for a thousand new
perceptions that struggle inarticulately within themselves,
for the enlargement of their experience, the echo of their
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
183
discords and the companionship of beauty and berror for
their troubled souls.
In this view, apparently so closely personal, literature ex-
ercises its true social functions. For all personal things are,
in the finer sense, social things, if by society we mean a vol-
untary association of free men. Literature is anti-social
when it confirms the rigidness of moral and economic for-
mulæ, inflames the tribal passions and retards the process
of psychical differentiation among men. Thus the drama
which, from its very nature, must appeal to a crowd, finds
it always most difficult to be civilized and a country's living
stage-literature is a searching test of its people's intellectual
freedom.
To put the matter more plainly and broadly: a civilized
Aman reads books not to find in them the illustration of a
ready-made theory of living which has his antecedent ap-
proval, nor that shallow emotional stimulus to his public
morality which is known as "uplift”; nor, finally, the opti-
mism that comes from seeing things as they are not. He
goes to literature for life, for more life and keener life, for
life as it crystallizes into higher articulateness and deeper
significance. His own experience is limited and he desires
to enlarge it; it is turbid and he seeks to clarify it. The
enlargement and clarification of men's experience, that is,
so far as all formulation is not futile-the function of lit-
eraturo.
- Literature, so used, will not make men "better," that is,
more assiduous in the uncritical practice of a standardized
morality, nor more given to the emotions' deemed appropriate
on public and private occasions. But it will make them wiser
and, above all, deeper. For it will immeasurably heighten
their consciousness of their own selves and of the other
selves that fill the world. It opens the prison of the mind
in which so many spirits lie in the bonds and thongs of
ancient angers and in the delusions of hatred and of dread.
Its form, its varied beauty, contributes to the same end
because it springs from the same source. For substance
and form are in all vital work born together. Rhythmic
and verbal symbols—however worthy of study for their
184 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
own sake--are to this fundamental view but the voice of
that creative personality who speaks of his experience to us
in tones which the impact of that experience upon him has
itself brought forth. Art is one. The music of a poem is
of the very stuff of its meaning; the structure of a play the
very rhythm of life here symbolized and set down. There
is in art, as in any form of life, no outer or inner, neither
kernel nor husk but an infinite complexity moulded into dis-
soluble oneness.
4
It is the fashion to ask for "constructive” criticism. I can
hear the pleasant American formula: "If you have nothing
helpful to suggest, you had better hold your tongue.” Well,
understanding is itself helpful. Not many errors or delusions
survive a thorough intellectual grasp of them. To reflect
closely on any subject brings as its commonest reward that
inner clarification which does not resist change. Our active
share in producing the changes we desire is problematic
enough. Conservative or liberal, authoritarian or revolu-
tionary, we are ourselves the product of the forces we seek
to direct. "For want of us the world's course will not fail,"
and though to counsel passivity were unwise and is, happily,
useless, it may plainly be doubted whether hard thinking
is not often the most fruitful form of participation in the
world-process.
But from the very darkness of the moment in our Ameri-
can life even a mind not given to fatuous hope may infer
that a reaction is at hand. Of that darkness the educational
situation is a sign. The classics are being swept from our
schools and colleges with a hectic speed. The last university
strongholds collapsed but the other day. The war has
almost eliminated German both as an intellectual and a
cultural discipline. There remains, for the average pupil
or student, scraps of French easily acquired and forgotten
and scraps of Spanish vaguely connected in his mind with
"the South American trade." His contact with the ideals
of a humane culture is confined to the study of the native
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
185
tongue and literature with which, as a rule, he trifles both
arrogantly and lazily only to hasten to Zane Grey and Conan
Doyle. Science teaching is unrelated to philosophy, and
becomes a "base, mechanic exercise.” Thus the cultural
poverty of the rising generation is tragic.
The humane, the expansive things of life are threatened
on all sides. The driving forces of the day are seeking to
erect a world that shall be hygienic and uniform, sinless
and featureless, successful and dead. I shall make little
of the fact that a storm is sweeping over the earth even
though the breath of it is upon our faces. For the renewal
must come from within, and the instinct of self-preservation
in humanity of which Arnold spoke cannot be extinct in a
people so numerous, so powerful and, happily, so multiform
as ourselves. The day must come when a sufficient number
among us will awaken to our perils the peril of cutting our-
selves off from the historic culture of mankind, the deadly
peril of suppressing all the normal instincts of life except
business and baseball. It is inconceivable that the Ameri-
can of the future is to be a Puritanic savage, ignorant of
beauty, incapable of joy, building huge hives in which his
bustle multiplies sterile matter, achieving swifter transit on
the dreary road to business conventions and soda-water
counters. ...
The awakening American mind will hardly turn to re-
ligion except in so far as, to quote Arnold again, its best
part is its unconscious poetry.” For religion is, of course,
thoroughly institutionalized among us and the Churches have
largely allied themselves with the brisk forces of ignorance
and moral repression. The religious instinct will itself have
to be born again in another and, I am tempted to say, a
more Pagan embodiment. It will, at least, have to go beyond
the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Anti-Saloon
League, the Lord's Day Association and the committee of
business men to raise funds, and approach the spirit of One
who forgave the woman taken in adultery, changed water
into wine, declared the Sabbath to be made for man and
drove the money-changers from the temple.
No, modern man, when he becomes aware of profound
186
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
perplexities, when he finds his will intolerably thwarted and
the disharmony between himself and his world painfully
acute, turns to books. And not to didactic books. It is
in imaginative literature that he seeks the clarification and
liberation that he needs. Even to-day the popularity of
such a writer as H. G. Wells points in the inevitable direc-
tion. For, whatever the ultimate value of his books will be
life, after exacter perceptions and freer moods of self-
recognition of the true relation of literature to life is too
eager, too conscious, too hard-won-but it is unfailing.
American books that are more than a decoration and a
jest will be written when our need of them becomes suf-
ficiently sharp and wide. Not except by a solitary martyr
in an eternal cause, until then. So long as we know what is
absolutely right and respectable and profitable and correct,
we shall produce an endless and ignoble line of scribblers
and melodramatists and our poets will take refuge in the
shifting colours of their superficial moods. The works of
the masters of modern literature, -of Dostoevsky and Ibsen
and Hauptmann, even of Shaw and Galsworthy-are answers
to a cry of spiritual need: the need for truth and liberation.
Not until that cry arises among us will a master appear.
—Literature and Life.
II
A NOTE ON TRAGEDY
IT HAS been said many times, and always with an air of
authority, that there is no tragedy in the modern drama.
And since tragedy, in the minds of most educated people, is
hazily but quite firmly connected with the mishaps of noble
and mythical personages, the statement has been widely ac-
cepted as true. Thus very tawdry Shakespearean revivals
are received with a traditional reverence for the sternest and
noblest of all the art-forms that is consciously withheld from
“Ghosts" or "Justice" or "The Weavers.” Placid people in
college towns consider these plays painful. They hasten to
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
187
pay their respects to awkward chantings of Gilbert Murray's
Swinburnian verses and approve the pleasant mildness of
the pity and terror native to the Attic stage. The very in-
nocuousness of these entertainments as well as the pain that
Ibsen and Hauptmann inflict should give them pause. Pity
and terror are strong words and stand for strong things.
But our public replies in the comfortable words of its most
respectable critics that tragedy has ceased to be written.
These critics reveal a noteworthy state of mind. They are
aware that tragedy cuts to the quick of life and springs from
the innermost depth of human thinking because it must al-
ways seek to deal in some intelligible way with the problem
of evil. But since it is most comfortable to believe that
problem to have been solved, they avert their faces from a
reopening of the eternal question and declare that the an-
swer of the Greeks and the Elizabethans is final. They are
also aware, though more dimly, that all tragedy involves
moral judgments. And since they are unaccustomed to make
such judgments, except by the light of standards quite rigid
and quite antecedent to experience, they are bewildered by
a type of tragic drama that transfers its crises from the
deeds of men to the very criteria of moral judgment, from
guilt under a law to the arraignment of the law itself.
"Macbeth” represents in art and life their favorite tragic
situation. They can understand a gross and open crime
meeting a violent punishment. When, as in "King Lear,"
the case is not so plain, they dwell long and emphatically
on the old man's weaknesses in order to find satisfaction in
his doom. In the presence of every tragic protagonist of
the modern drama they are tempted to play the part of
Job's comforters. They are eager to impute to him an ab-
soluteness of guilt which shall, by implication, justify their
own moral world and the doctrine of moral violence by :
which they live. The identical instinct which in war causes
men to blacken the enemy's character in order to justify
their tribal rage and hate, persuades the conventional critic
to deny the character of tragedy to every action in which
disaster does not follow upon crime. Yet, rightly looked
upon, man in every tragic situation is a Job, incapable and
188
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
unconscious of any degree of voluntary guilt that can justify
a suffering as sharp and constant as his own.
Thus modern tragedy does not deal with wrong and just
vengeance, which are both, if conceived absolutely, pure fic-
tions of our deep-rooted desire for superiority and violence.
It is inspired by compassion. But compassion without com-
placency is still, alas, a very rare emotion. And it seeks to
self-imposed compulsions, not from the sins, of men. The
central idea of “Ghosts,” for instance, is not concerned with
the sin of the father that is visited upon the son. It is con-
cerned, as Ibsen sought to make abundantly clear, with
Mrs. Alving's fatal conformity to a social tradition that did
not represent the pureness of her will. Her tragic mistake
arises from her failure to break the law. The ultimate and
absolute guilt is in the blind, collective lust of mankind for
the formulation and indiscriminate enforcement of external
laws.
To such a conception of the moral world, tragedy has but
recently attained. That both the critical and the public in-
telligence should lag far behind is inevitable. Every morn-
ing's paper proclaims a world whose moral pattern is formed
of terrible blacks and glaring whites. How should people
aladly endure the endless and pain-touched gray of modern
tragedy? They understand the Greek conception of men
who violated the inscrutable will of gods; they understand
the renaissance conception that a breach of the universal
moral law, sanctioned and set forth by God, needed to be
punished. They can even endure such situations as that of
Claudio and Isabella in the terrible third act of "Measure
for Measure." For that unhappy brother and sister never
question the right of the arbitrary power that caused so
cruel a dilemma, nor doubt the absolute validity of the
hearts and never at the bars of the monstrous cage that holds
them prisoner. Do they not, therefore, rise almost to the
dignity of symbols of that moral world in which the ma-
jority of men still live?
But it is precisely with the bars of the cage that modern
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
189
human absoluteurn, involves an
opretative the lurch would
tragedy is so largely and necessarily concerned. It cannot
deal with guilt in the older sense. For guilt involves an
absolute moral judgment. That, in its turn, involves an
absolute standard. And a literally absolute standard is uin-
thinkable without a super-human sanction. Even such a
sanction, however, would leave the flexible and enlightened
spirit in the lurch. For if it were not constantly self-inter-
pretative by some method of progressive and objectively
embodied revelation, its interpretation would again become
a mere matter of human opinion, and the absoluteness of
moral guilt would again be gravely jeopardized. Not only
must God have spoken; He would need to speak anew each
day. The war has overwhelmingly illustrated how infinitely
alien such obvious reflections still are to the temper of
humanity. We must have guilt. Else how, without utter
shame, could we endure punitive prisons and gibbets and
battles? Is it surprising that audiences are cold to Ibsen
and Hauptmann and Galsworthy, and that good critics who
are also righteous and angry men deny their plays the char-
acter of tragedy?
But the bars of the absolutist cage are not so bright and
firm as they were once. The conception of unrelieved guilt
and overwhelming vengeance has just played on the stage of
history a part so monstrous that its very name will ring to
future ages with immitigable contrition and grief. And thus
in the serener realm of art the modern idea of tragedy is very
sure to make its gradual appeal to the hearts of men. Guilt
and punishment will be definitely banished to melodrama,
where they belong. Tragedy will seek increasingly to under-
stand our failures and our sorrows. It will excite pity for
our common fate; the terror it inspires will be a terror lesí
we wrong our brother or violate his will, not lest we share
his guilt and incur his punishment. It will seek its final
note of reconciliation not by delivering another victim to
an outraged God or an angry tribe, but through a profound
sense of that community of human suffering which all force
deepens and all freedom assuages.
-The Nation. (Vol. CVIII, No. 2813.)
FRANCIS HACKETT
THE SICKBED OF CULTURE
THE newspaper made breakfast rosy. Oats were steady.
The coffee market had rallied. Linen was moving better.
Lard and ribs were easier. But in the late afternoon I
bought the Atlantic Monthly and thereupon came to be-
hold the seamy side of this, our mortal adventure. A reac-
tionary tendency, it appears, has developed in the realm of
the spirit. There is a sag in culture. Culture is slowly but
hideously being extirpated from our midst. The Extirpa-
tion of Culture is the very legend of the composition that
details our shame. As if it were a weed, a heresy, an ab-
normal growth, culture is being rooted out and destroyed.
Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Come, sweaty varlets, scriveners,
senators, vestrymen, chirurgeons, chymists, draymen, iron-
mongers and suchlike! Awake to the crisis. Attend to the
disgrace and peril of our state.
It is a woman who appears with bitten visage from the
sickbed of culture. Ordinarily she refrains from speaking
of these things to the gross multitude. She "habitually says
nothing to the professional optimists in the public square.”
But there is a time when the worst must be faced. And it
is in this mood of chilled yet passionate reproach that our
lady Agoraphobia fetches us to the shaded chamber of the
culture we are doing to death. Culture, poor dear, "contact
with the best that has been said and thought in the world,"
has had a time in the vulgar jostle of modernity. As an
image of this refinement (not as an image of this refine-
ment's defender), imagine a fragrant New Englander, a
reticule in one mitten, perhaps the odes of Sappho in the
other, conscious that she is the "disciplined and finished
creature,” conscious that she is “intellectually exclusive,”
190
FRANCIS HACKETT
191
conscious also that "culture is inherently snobbish," being
asked to fight her passage into a metropolitan subway.
"Step lively!” The imperative jars the lady. She gingerly
boards the train. On the platform there is contact, but it is
not precisely contact with the best that has been said and
thought in the world.” Do you wonder, seeing her chaste
bonnet somewhat tipsy, her lips compressed, an alarming
color tinging her marmoreal cheeks, that Barrett Wendell
emits a tiny squeal of pain, that Edith Wharton rolls an
eye to heaven, that the shades of Pater and Matthew Ar-
nold flutter unhappily? New England culture is laid be-
tween sheets, with nothing but the Atlantic for hot-water
bottle.
And who is to blame for this prostration of our precious
culture? The gross multitude. Once culture had seclusion.
The social scheme did not allow intrusive minions. "Still
less would the conception of the public intellect have ad-
mitted the notion. Every one was not supposed to be con-
genitally qualified for intimacy with the best that has been
said and thought in the world.” But now, mainly due to
"the increased hold of the democratic fallacy on the public
mind," the slums pour forth dreadful aspirants to culture,
encouraged by traitorous Brahmins; science contributes its
stinking acid-stained barbarians; pragmatic philosophers
take away the guardian standards of beauty and truth.
The angry daughter of the Brahmins descends to slang,
the expletive of the continent, in her rage at the invasion.
“Science is on top.” “The classics are back numbers." We
are "overrun by the hordes of ignorance and materialism."
Our children sip English from the founts defiled by the
poor, "an active and discontented majority, with hands that
pick and steal.”
Belonging to the upper classes, as she confesses, this
gifted prosecutor is certainly entitled to our sympathy. For
conceive, she is experiencing in her degree the loneliness of
God. Looking down on the inimical multitude she suffers
the pangs of isolation. "I begin to think,” she observes
sadly, "that our age does not really care about perfection.”
But since "culture must always be in the hands of an oli-
poor, children sip the hordes bis ics are back
conce. Looking clation.
I breally care a
192 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
garchy," perhaps a voice de profundis might be raised to
the heights. It is quite permissible, even if the monitor
herself is unfortunate enough to use the German word "kul-
tur” like an ignoramus, to be decidedly severe about the
bumptious ignorance of the masses. It is quite permissible
to argue that upper-class people are "apt” to arrive through
riches at the æsthetic truths. But a passion for exclusive-
ness, a belief in the restriction of cultural susceptibility to
the well-nurtured, is all to no purpose if she permits out-
siders to come up like flowers. The worst handicaps of the
neglected culture over which she wrings her fair hands is
not:"the materialism of all classes,” “the influx of a racially
and socially inferior population," "the idolatry of science."
It is its supersession by another culture to which orthodox
culture has not the clue.
To prevent this rivalry there should be a most vigilant
campaign against every new human expression. That is the
best way to keep the oligarchy entrenched. If the ignorant
foreigners "immigrants who bring no personal traditions,"
come from countries of oppression, she must decline to be-
lieve that they had a literature and a culture. There is
only one culture, our own. Perhaps in steerage you can
evoke noises from a Lithuanian that sound like human
speech. Yes, but soon that Lithuanian will have "the locu-
tions of the slum.” Beware of Lithuania. Do not pat the
strange dog. He might bite a piece out of your culture.
What if the young Jewess on the immigrant ship glows with
assent when, without Russian or Yiddish or German, you
query: Dostoevsky? Gogol? Tchekov? Lermontov? Tolstoy?
Schnitzler? Sudermann? Artzibashef? Ibsen? Strindberg?
It is not conversation. It is mere fraternal intercourse
through modernity's names. The suppression of such names
is the first great necessity of a pinhead conception of cul-
ture. And what of Poles and Spaniards and Italians and
Scandinavians? What of Constantine Meunier thrusting
Walloons into culture? And H. G. Wells with his counter-
jumpers and Bennett with his human inch-worms, merely
keeping the earth fertile, and Shaw with that dreadful win-
nowing fan in his head? These things must be stopped.
FRANCIS HACKETT
193
Upstairs in the Brahmin mansion there is a delicate lady,
disturbed by modernity. She hates pathology and economics. badan
She hates that science which “challenged the supereminence
of religion.” She honestly cared for things of the spirit, at-
tempted no royal road to salvation. For her comfort it is
required that democracy, science, industrialism, suspend their
evolutions. It is a good deal to ask, perhaps, but she asks in
the name of beauty and moral imagination. These, she
takes it, she has loved above all others. It is not her fault
if she insists with tight acidity. She hates crowds. She is
confined within. She cannot take the air.
-Horizons.
VAN WYCK BROOKS
AN EXTERNAL CIVILIZATION
we 2in 2. has e
I THINK we are driven to the conclusion that our life is,
on all its levels, in a state of arrested development, that it
has lost, if indeed it has ever possessed, the principle of
growth.
To the general sense of this many of the main documents
in our recent literature bear witness. Consider, for example,
those rast literary pyramids of Mr. Theodore Dreiser, those
prodigious piles of language built of the commonest rubble
and cohering, in the absence of any architectural design,
by sheer virtue of their weight and size. Mr. Dreiser's
Titans and Financiers and Geniuses are not even the approx-
imations of men in a world of men—they are monsters,
blindly effectuating themselves, or failing to effectuate them-
selves, in a primeval chaos; and the world wears them and
wearies them as it wears and wearies the beasts of the field,
leaving them as immature in age as it found them in youth.
Cowperwood, the financier, put in prison as a result of his
piratical machinations, weaves chair-bottoms and marks
time spiritually against the day of his release, when he snaps
back into his old self absolutely unaltered by reflection: and
of Eugene Witla, after he has passed through seven hundred
and thirty-four pages of soul-searing adventure, Mr.
Dreiser is able to enquire: "Was he not changed then? Not
much, no. Only hardened intellectually and emotionally,
tempered for life and work.” Puppets as they are of an in-
sensate force which has never been transmitted into those
194
VAN WYCK BROOKS
195
.
R
and legithat we all recogniz pical Americanto bear upor
finer initiatives that shed light on human destiny, they are
insulated against human values; love and art pass into and
out of their lives like things of so little meaning that any
glimmer of material opportunity outshines them; and there-
fore they are able to speak to us only of the vacuity of life,
telling us that human beings are as the flies of summer.
And then there is the Spoon River Anthology. The im-
mense and legitimate vogue of this book is due to its unerring
diagnosis of what we all recognize, when we are confronted
with it, as the inner life of the typical American community
when the criterion of humane values is brought to bear upon
it in place of the criterion of material values with which we
have traditionally pulled the wool over our eyes. It is quite
likely, of course, that Mr. Masters, with a reasonable pes-
simism, has exaggerated the suicidal and murderous tenden-
cies of the Spoon Riverites. But I know that he conveys
an extraordinarily just and logical impression. He pictures
a community of some thousands of souls every one of whom
lives in a spiritual isolation as absolute as that of any lone
farmer on the barren prairie, à community that has been
utterly unable to spin any sort of spiritual fabric common
to all, which has for so many generations cherished and
cultivated its animosity toward all those non-utilitarian ele-
ments in the human heart that retard the successful pur-
suit of the main chance that it has reduced itself to a spirit-
ual desert in which nothing humane is able to find rootage
and grow at all. And yet all the types that shed glory on
humankind have existed in that, as in every community!
They have existed, or at least they have been born. They
have put forth one green shoot only to wither and decay
because all the moisture has evaporated out of the atmos-
phere that envelops them. Poets, painters, philosophers,
men of science and religion, are all to be found, stunted,
starved, thwarted, embittered, prevented from taking even
the first step in self-development, in this amazing microcosm
of our society, a society that stagnates for want of leader-
ship, and at the same time, incurably suspicious of the very
idea of leadership, saps away all those vital elements that
produce the leader.
196 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
For that is the vicious circle in which we revolve. In
the absence both of an intellectual tradition and a sym-
pathetic soil, we who above all peoples need great men
and great ideals have been unable to develop the latent
greatness we possess and have lost an incalculable measure
of greatness that has, in spite of all, succeeded in developing
itself. For one thing, we have lost an army of gifted minds,
of whom Henry James and Whistler are only the most no-
torious examples, minds about which our intellectual life
could have rallied to its infinite advantage, as it always does
when born leaders are in the field.
But the loss, great and continuing as it is, of so many
talents that we have repelled and poured out, talents that
have been driven to an exotic development in other coun-
tries, is really nothing beside what we have lost in ways
that are perhaps less obvious. We are the victims of a sys-
tematic process of inverse selection so far as the civilizing
elements in the American nature are concerned. Our an-
cestral faith in the individual and what he is able to accom-
plish (or, in modern parlance, to "put over”') as the measure
of all things has despoiled us of that instinctive human
reverence for those divine reservoirs of collective experience,
religion, science, art, philosophy, the self-subordinating serv-
ice of which is almost the measure of the highest happiness.
In consequence of this our natural capacities have been dis-
sipated; they have become ego-centric and socially centrifu-
gal and they have hardened and become fixed in the most
anomalous forms. The religious energy of the race, instead
of being distilled and quintessentialized into the finer in-
spirations of human conduct, has escaped in a vast vapor
that is known under a hundred names. So also our scientific
energy has been diverted from the study of life to the im-
mediacies of practical invention, our philosophy, quite for-
getting that its function is to create values of life, has oscil-
lated between a static idealism and a justification of all the
anæmic tendencies of an anæmic age, and our art and liter-
ature, oblivious of the soul of man, have established them-
selves on a superficial and barren technique.
Of all this individualism is at once the cause and the
197
result. For it has prevented the formation of a collective
spiritual life in the absence of which the individual, having
nothing greater than himself to subordinate himself to, is
either driven into the blind alley of his appetites or rides
some hobby of his own invention until it falls to pieces from
sheer craziness. Think of the cranks we have produced!
Not the mere anonymous cranks one meets, six to a block,
in every American village, but the eminent cranks, and even
the preëminent cranks, the Thoreaus and Henry Georges,
men who might so immensely more have enriched our spirit-
ual heritage had we been capable of assimilating their
minds, nurturing and disciplining them out of their aberrant
individualism. For every member of the vast army of
American cranks has been the graveyard of some "happy
thought,” some thought happier than his neighbors have had
and which has turned sour in his brain because the only
world he has known has had no use for it. As for our litera-
ture, it is quite plain that there is nothing inherently
"greater in many of the writers whose work we import (and
rightly import) from abroad than in writers of a correspond-
ing order at home. The former simply have been able to
make a better use of their talents owing to the complicated
about them.
For only where art and thought and science organically
share in the vital essential programme of life can the artist
and the thinker and the scientist find the preliminary foot-
hold that enables them properly to undertake their task.
To state the case in its lowest terms, only under these con-
ditions are they able to receive an adequate, intensive train-
ing along non-utilitarian lines without hopelessly crippling
their chances of self-preservation; for under these condi-
tions they know that the social fabric is complicated enough
to employ all the faculties of their minds and that in fol-
lowing non-utilitarian interests they are fulfilling a recog-
nized need of society. It is this which breeds in them the
sense that they are serving something great, something so
generally felt to be great that society rewards them with a
pride calling forth their own pride, taking delight in setting
loized need they are great
198
A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
up the sort of obstacles that constantly put them on their
mettle.
Without these conditions we cannot have great leaders;
without leaders we cannot have a great society. If this
suggests the hope of a national culture” to come it is only
in order that America may be able in the future to give
something to the rest of the world that is better than what
the world too generally means by “Americanism." For two
generations the most sensitive minds in Europe-Renan,
Ruskin, Nietzsche, to name none more recent-have summed
up their mistrust of the future in that one word; and it is
because, altogether externalized ourselves, we have typified
the universally externalizing influences of modern indus-
trialism. The shame of this is a national shame, and one
that the war, with all the wealth it has brought us, has in-
finately accentuated. And it covers a national problem
the problem of creating objects of loyalty within the nation
by virtue of which the springs of our creative energy are
not only touched into play but so economized as to be able
to irrigate the entire subsoil of our national life.
-Letters and Leadership.
THE FEAR OF EXPERIENCE
How can our literature be anything but impotent? It is
inevitably so, since it springs from a national mind that
has been sealed against that experience from which litera-
ture derives all its values.
How true this is can be seen from almost any of its
enunciations of principle, especially on the popular, that is
to say the frankest, level. I open, for instance, one of our
so-called better-class magazines and fall upon a character-
sketch of William Gillette: "What a word! Forget! What
a feat! What a faculty! Lucky the man who can himself
forget. How gifted the one who can make others forget.
It is the triumph of the art of William Gillette that in the
magic of his spell an audience forgets.” Opening another
magazine I turn to a reported interview in which a well-
s
and fun insta.
set. Hchat a facillette: s
VAN WYCK BROOKS
199
known, popular poet expatiates on his craft. "Modern life,"
he tells us, "is full of problems, complex and difficult, and
the man who concentrates his mind on his problems all day
doesn't want to concentrate it on tediously obscure poetry
at night. The newspaper poets are forever preaching the
sanest optimism, designed for the people who really need
the influence of optimism--the breadwinners, the weary, the
heavy-laden. That's the kind of poetry the people want,
and the fact that they want it shows that their hearts and
heads are all right.”
Here are two typical pronouncements of the American
mind, one on the art of acting, one on the art of poetry,
and they unite in expressing a perfectly coherent doctrine.
This doctrine is that the function of art is to turn aside the
problems of life from the current of emotional experience
and create in its audience a condition of cheerfulness that is
not organically derived from experience but added from the
outside. It assumes that experience is not the stuff of life
but something essentially meaningless; and not merely
meaningless but an obstruction which retards and compli-
cates our real business of getting on in the world and getting
up in the world, and which must, therefore, be ignored and
forgotten and evaded and beaten down by every means in
our power.
What is true on the popular level is not less true on the
level of serious literature, in spite of everything our most.
conscientious artists have been able to do. Thirty years
ago an acute English critic remarked, apropos of a novel by
Mr. Howells, that our novelists seemed to regard the Civil
War as an occurrence that separated lovers, not as some-
thing that ought normally to have colored men's whole
thoughts on life. And it is true that if we did not know
how much literature has to be discounted, we could hardly
escape the impression, for all the documents which have
come down to us, that our grandfathers really did pass.
through the war without undergoing the purgation of soul
that is often said to justify the workings of tragic mischance
in 'numan affairs. Mr. Howells has himself given us the
comédie humaine of our post-bellum society, Mr. Howells
our otten anorld, anes of these
200 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
thiety is hittistic of peneld on this owthir
that the sketclas susceptiction; aleath it.
whose whole aim was to measure the human scope of that
society and who certainly far less than any other novelist
of his time falsified his vision of reality in the interests of
popular entertainment. Well, we know the sort of society
Mr. Howells pictured and how he pictured it. He has him-
self explicitly stated, in connection with certain Russian
novels, that Americans in general do not undergo the va-
rieties of experience that Russian fiction records, that "the
more smiling aspects of life" are "the more American,” and
that in being true to our well-to-do actualities” the Ameri-
can novelist does all that can be expected of him. Could
one ask for a more essential declaration of artistic bank-
ruptcy than that?
For what does it amount to, this declaration? It identi-
fies the reality of the artist's vision with what is accepted
as reality in the world about him. But every one knows
that the sketchiest, the most immature, the most trivial so-
ciety is just as susceptible as any other of the most pro-
found artistic reconstruction; all that is required is an
artist capable of penetrating beneath it. The great artist
floats the visible world on the sea of his imagination and
measures it not according to its own scale of values but ac-
cording to the values that he has himself derived from his
descent into the abysses of life. What, then, is amiss with
our writers? They are victims of the universal taboo which
the ideal of material success, of the acquisitive life, has
placed upon experience. It matters not at all that they have
no part or lot in this ideal, that they are men of the finest
artistic conscience. In the first place, from their earliest
childhood they are taught to repress everything that con-
flicts with the material welfare of their environment; in the
second place, their environment is itself so denatured, so
stripped of everything that might nourish the imagination,
that they do not so much mature at all as externalize them-
selves in a world of externalities. Unable to achieve a suf-
ficiently active consciousness of themselves to return upon
their environment and overthrow it and dissolve it and re-
create it in the terms of a personal vision, they gradually
come to accept it on its own terms. If Boston is their
VAN WYCK BROOKS
.: 20I
201
theme, they become Bostonian; if it is the Yukon, they be-
come "abysmal brutes”; if it is nature, nature becomes the
hero of their work; and if it is machinery, the machines
themselves become vocal and express their natural contempt
for a humanity that is incapable, either morally or artistic-
ally, of putting them in their place and keeping them there.
We know how this occurred with Mr. Howells. "It
seemed to me then, and for a good while afterward," he
writes in "Literary Friends and Acquaintances," apropos of
his first reception by the Boston Olympians of the sixties,
"that a person who had seen the men and had the things
said before him that I had in Boston, could not keep himself
too carefully in cotton; and this was what I did all the
following winter, though, of course, it was a secret between
me and me.” Never, assuredly, in any other society, has
literary hero-worship taken quite the complexion of that;
for the statement is accurately true. Such was the prestige
of Boston and the pundits of Boston that Mr. Howells,
having cast his anchor in its lee, never felt the necessity of
exploring, on his own account, beyond the spacious, quiet
harbor of life that presented itself to the cultivated New
England eye. The result can be seen in such novels as "A
Modern Instance," the tragedy of which is viewed not from
the angle of an experience that is wider and deeper, as the
experience of a great novelist always is, than that of any
character the novelist's imagination is able to conceive, but
from the angle of Ben Halleck, the epitome of Boston's best
concurs; and you close the book feeling that you have seen
life not through the eye of a free personality but of a highly
conventional community at a given epoch.
It is exactly the same, to ignore a thousand incidental
distinctions, in the work of Jack London. Between the
superman of European fiction and Jack London's superman
there is all the difference that separates an ideal achieved
outside him; all the difference, in short, that separates the
truth of art from the appearance of life. If these, there-
fore, among the freshest and most original talents our fiction
202A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
has known since Hawthorne's day, have been absorbed in
an atmosphere which no one has ever been able to condense,
is it remarkable that the rank and file have slipped and
fallen, that they have never learned to stand upright and
possess themselves? Is it remarkable that they sell them-
selves out at the first bid, that they dress out their souls
in the ready-made clothes the world offers them?
Such, in fact, is the deficiency of personal impulse, of
the creative will, in America, so overwhelming is the de-
mand laid upon Americans to serve ulterior and impersonal
ends, that it is as if the springs of spiritual action had al-
together evaporated. Launched in a society where individ-
uals and their faculties appear only to pass away, almost
wholly apart from and without acting upon one another,
our writers find themselves enveloped in an impalpable at-
mosphere that acts as a perpetual dissolvent to the whole
field of reality both within and without themselves, an
atmosphere that invades every sphere of life and takes its
discount from everything that they can do, an atmosphere
that prevents the formation of oases of reality in the uni-
versal chaos. Is it remarkable that they take refuge in the
abstract, the non-human, the impersonal, in the "bigness”
of the phenomenal world, in the surface values of "local
color," and in the "social conscience," which enables them
to do so much good by writing badly that they often come
to think of artistic truth itself as an enemy of progress?
—Letters and Leadership.
III
THE UNPRACTICAL CRITICS
It is certainly remarkable this apparently general deter-
mination not to be practical on the part of so many dis-
similar minds; and it is all the more remarkable because
criticism has ever been, in other countries, precisely the most
practical of the literary arts. Since the days when Socrates,
its august founder, sat in the market-place and played the
midwife to so many inarticulate minds, it has been the joy-
ous prerogative of criticism to be on the spot when thoughts
VAN WYCK BROOKS
203
lony was evena fighe doub
are being born. Not to mention any names that the most
academic of our critics can possibly gainsay, is it not the
glory of Lessing that he established a sort of norm of the
German character, descending into the thick of reality and
building, by creation and controversy alike, amid the shift-
ing sands of pedantry and exoticism, an impregnable base
for the superstructure of a civilization to come? As for
Sainte-Beuve, he lived in an age and a society that required
no such drastic re-statements of fundamental truth; he in-
herited and perpetuated that marvelous equilibrium of the
French temper which is the result of an organic culture
founded on the suffrages of the whole race; but Sainte-Beuve
lived and wrote in substantial harmony with the creative
life of his contemporaries, and he, too, was ever ready to
spring to the defence of new-born thoughts and fight for
their just rights of passage into the French mind. No doubt
in the France of Sainte-Beuve there were more new-born
thoughts worth fighting for, strictly as thoughts, than there
are in the America of to-day. But no one denies that at
present in this country an immense amount of creative en-
ergy has at least conclusively turned itself toward the field
of the arts. If it does not in many instances come rightly
and fully to a head, if it fails very often to eventuate in
thoughts in themselves vitally important, does it not all the
more behoove criticism to condense the vapors that confuse
this creative energy and to spring loyally to the support of
groping minds that bear the mark of sincerity and promise?
As for our critics, what birth out of life have any of them
ever defended with that heavy artillery they so enjoy train-
ing upon those popular American fallacies many of which,
quite plainly, are the result of their own immoral absentee-
mindedness? Have they ever been at pains to grasp the
contemporary American mind and its problems, to discover
what the contemporary American mind is, and what it is
capable of, and how it can best be approached, and whether
it is able to assimilate the whole culture of the world before
it has formed any personal conception of what culture is?
Our critics, if they are in touch with European life, must
be aware that the relation in which they stand to the life of
204 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
their own country is quite unique. But far even from con-
sidering the idea that the living forces about them deserve
a little sympathetic and discreet attention they seem to be
persuaded that the younger generation presents a united
front against everything that mankind has tried and found
worthy, and that it has formed a sort of conspiracy to
propagate falsehood at whatever cost. "What Matthew Ar-
nold would call 'the elephantine main body,'” says Mr. Bab-
bitt, "seems more convinced than ever that man, to become
perfect, has only to continue indefinitely the programme
of the nineteenth century—that is, to engage in miscel-
laneous expansion and back it up if need be with noisy
revolt against all the forms of the past." To which Mr.
Brownell subjoins the following: "Every one who sympa-
thetically belongs to [the age] feels himself stanchly sup-
ported by the consensus of all it esteems. ... The mili-
tancy of the age therefore finds itself not only in possession
of a perfectly definite—if mainly destructive-credo, but
of a practically united and enthusiastic army.”
To us who are so much in the thick of things that we
cannot see the forest for the trees, statements of this kind
are all but unintelligible. They seem to us like anathemas
delivered in some half-forgotten sacred language to a people
that has begun to stammer in a vernacular of its own. We
are so conscious of our own differences, of the hundred and
one programmes that we are pursuing precisely not in com-
mon, that while we are prepared for body-blows from Mr.
Babbitt (to whose vigorous intellect, by the way, many of
us are greatly indebted), we scarcely know what to make
of Mr. Brownell's rather more graciously delivered thrusts.
But we may be very sure that if, to the older generation, we
appear to be a "practically united and enthusiastic army”
we must be so in some sense in which the older generation
is not. To what that sense is our critics themselves in a gen-
eral way have given us the clue. They say that we are
emotional, and they give to their accusation an air of plausi-
bility by adding that we are over-emotional, as indeed we
are; but what they really object to is that we are emotional
at all, the strength of their own case resting wholly on the
appeatust be so at that sens the clue
VAN WYCK BROOKS
205
assumption that literature ought to spring not from the
emotions but from the intellect. This we deny, and I sup-
pose that our denial is so unanimous that it does, in a way,
neutralize our intellectual differences. But why do we deny
it? Partly because our reaction upon life, on the one hand,
and our reading of the history of literature, on the other,
lead us to believe that it is false; and partly because we
have witnessed the failure and breakdown of intellectualism
itself.
Letters and Leadership.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
A LITERARY RADICAL
... THE older critics had long since disavowed the in-
tention of discriminating among current writers. These
men, who had to have an Academy to protect them, lumped
the younger writers of verse and prose together as "anar-
chic” and “naturalistic," and had become, in these latter
days, merely peevish and querulous, protesting in favor of
standards that no longer represented our best values. Every
one, in Miro's time, bemoaned the lack of critics, but the
older critics seemed to have lost all sense of hospitality and
to have become tired and a little spitefully disconsolate,
while the newer ones were too intent on their crusades
against puritanism and philistinism to have time for a con-
structive pointing of the way.
Miro had a very real sense of standing at the end of an
era. He and his friends had lived down both their old
orthodoxies of the classics and their new orthodoxies of
propaganda. Gone were the priggishness and self-conscious-
ness which had marked their teachers. The new culture,
would be more personal than the old, but it would not be
held as a personal property. It would be democratic in the
sense that it would represent each person's honest sponta-
neous taste. The old attitude was only speciously demo-
cratic. The assumption was that if you pressed your mate-
rial long enough and winningly enough upon your culturable
public, they would acquire it. But the material was some-
thing handed down, not grown in the garden of their own
appreciations. Under these conditions the critic and ap-
preciator became a mere impersonal register of orthodox
opinion. The cultivated person, in conforming his judg-
ments to what was authoritatively taught him, was really a
206
RANDOLPH BOURNE
207
..
.
.
.
......
..
.
member of the herda cultivated herd, it is true, but still
a herd. It was the mass that spoke through the critic and
not his own discrimination. These authoritative judgments
might, of course, have come probably have come to the
herd through discerning critics, but in Miro's time judgment
in the schools had petrified. One believed not because one
felt the original discernment, but beause one was impressed
by the weight and reputability of opinion. At least so it
seemed to Miro.
Now just as the artists had become tired of conventions
and were breaking through into new and personal forms,
50 Miro saw the younger critics breaking through these cul-
tural conventions. To the elders the result would seem
mere anarchy. But Miro's attitude did not want to destroy,
it merely wanted to rearrange the materials. He wanted
no more second-hand appreciations. No one's cultural store
was to include anything that one could not be enthusiastic
about. One's acquaintance with the best that had been said
and thought should be encouragedin Miro's ideal school-
to follow the lines of one's temperament. Miro, having
thrown out the old gods, found them slowly and properly
coming back to him. Some would always repel him, others
he hoped to understand eventually. But if it took wisdom
to write the great books, did it not also take wisdom to
understand them? Even the Latin writers he hoped to re-
cover, with the aid of translations. But why bother with
Greek when you could get Euripides in the marvellous verse
of Gilbert Murray? · Miro was willing to believe that no
education was complete without at least an inoculation of
the virus of the two orthodoxies that he was transcending.
As Miro looked around the American scene, he wondered
where the critics were to come from. He saw, on the one
aand, Mr. Mencken and Mr. Dreiser and their friends,
going heavily forth to battle with the Philistines, glorying in
pachydermous vulgarisms that hurt the polite and cultivated
young men of the old school. And he saw these violent
Critics, in their rage against puritanism, becoming them-
selves moralists, with the same bigotry and tastelessness as
their enemies. No, these would never do. On the other
.
.
.
.
-
.
S
SO

208 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
hand, he saw Mr. Stuart P. Sherman, in his youthful if
somewhat belated ardor, revolting so conscientiously against
the "naturalism” and crude expression of current efforts
that, in his defense of belles-lettres, of the fine traditions
of literary art, he himself became a moralist of the intensest
brand, and as critic plumped for Arnold Bennett, because
that clever man had a feeling for the proprieties of human
conduct. No, Mr. Sherman would do even less adequately.
His fine sympathies were as much out of the current as was
the specious classicism of Professor Shorey. He would have
to look for the critic among the young men who had an
abounding sense of life, as well as a feeling for literary form.
They would be men who had not been content to live on
their cultural inheritance, but had gone out into the modern
world and amassed a fresh fortune of their own. They
would be men who were not squeamish, who did not feel the
delicate differences between “animal” and “human” con-
duct, who were enthusiastic about Mark Twain and Gorky
as well as Romain Rolland, and at the same time were
thrilled by Copeau's theatre.
Where was a better programme for culture, for any kind
of literary art? Culture as a living effort, a driving attempt
both at sincere expression and at the comprehension of sin-
cere expression wherever it was found! Appreciation to be
as far removed from the “I know what I like!” as from the
text-book impeccability of taste! If each mind sought its
own along these lines, would not many find themselves
agreed? Miro insisted on liking Amy Lowell's attempt to
outline the tendencies in American poetry in a form which
made clear the struggles of contemporary men and women
with the tradition and against "every affectation of the
mind.” He began to see in the new class-consciousness of
poets the ending of that old division which “culture” made
between the chosen people and the gentiles. We were now
to form little pools of workers and appreciators of similar
temperaments and tastes. The little magazines that were
starting up became voices for these new communities of|
sentiment. Miro thought that perhaps at first it was right
to adopt a tentative superciliousness towards the rest of
RANDOLPH BOURNE
209
the world, so that both Mr. Mencken with his shudders at
the vulgar Demos and Mr. Sherman with his obsession with
the sanely and wholesomely American might be shut out
from influence. Instead of fighting the Philistine in the
name of freedom, or fighting the vulgar iconoclast in the
name of wholesome human notions, it might be better to
write for one's own band of comprehenders, in order that
one might have something genuine with which to appeal to
both the mob of the "bourgeois” and the ferocious vandals
who have been dividing the field among them. Far better
a quarrel among these intensely self-conscious groups than
the issues that have filled the Atlantic with their dreary
obsolescence. Far better for the mind that aspired toward
"culture" to be told not to conform or worship, but to
search out its group, its own temperamental community of
sentiment, and there deepen appreciations through sympa-
thetic contact.
It was no longer a question of being hospitable toward
the work of other countries. Miro found the whole world
open to him, in these days, through the enterprise of pub-
lishers. He and his friends felt more sympathetic with cer-
tain groups in France and Russia than they did with the
variegated "prominent authors” of their own land. Winston
Churchill as a novelist came to seem more of an alien than
Artzybachev. The fact of culture being international had
been followed by a sense of its being. The old cultural
attitude had been hospitable enough but it imported its
alien culture in the form of "comparative literature.” It
was hospitable only in trying to mould its own taste to the
orthodox canons abroad. The older American critic was
mostly interested in getting the proper rank and reverence
for what he borrowed. The new critic will take what suits
his community of sentiment. He will want to link up not
with the foreign canon but with that group which is nearest
in spirit with the effort he and his friends are making. The
American has to work to interpret and portray the life he
knows. He cannot be international in the sense that any-
thing but the life in which he is soaked with its questions
and its colors, can be the material for his art. But he can
2:0 A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISM
be international—and must be—in the sense that he works
with a certain hopeful vision of a young world,” and with
certain ideal values upon which the younger men, stained
and revolted by war, in all countries are agreeing.
Miro wonders sometimes whether the direction in which
he is tending will not bring him around the circle again to
a new classicism. The last stage in the history of the man
of culture will be that "classic" which he did not understand
and which his mind spent its youth in overthrowing. But it
will be a classicism far different from that which was so
unintelligently handed down to him in the American world.
It will be something worked out and lived into. Looking
into the future he will have to do what Van Wyck Brooks
calls "invent a usable past." Finding little in the American
tradition that is not tainted with sweetness and light and
burdened with the terrible patronage of bourgeois society,
the new classicist will yet rescue Thoreau and Whitman and
Mark Twain and try to tap through them a certain eternal,
human tradition of abounding vitality and moral freedom,
and so build out the future. If the classic means power with
restraint, vitality with harmony, a fusion of intellect and
feeling, and a keen sense of the artistic 'conscience, then the
revolutionary world is coming out into the classic. When
Miro sees behind the minds of “The Masses" group a de-
sire for form and for expressive beauty, and sees the radicals
following Jacques Copeau and reading Chekov, he smiles
at the thought of the American critics, young and old, who
do not know yet that they are dead.

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A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISMS (81) Edited with ati
Iritroduction by LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD (1876-
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ANDREYEV, LEONID (1871- )
The Seven That Were Hanged and The Red Laugh (45)
Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER
ATHERTON, GERTRUDE (1859- )
Rezanov (71) Introduction by WILLIAM MARION REEDY
BALZAC, HONORE DE (1799-1850)
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BUTLER, SAMUEL (1835-1902)
The Way of All Flesh (13)
CARPENTER, EDWARD (1844- )
Love's Coming of Age (51)
CHEKHOV, ANTON (1860-1904)
Rothschild's Fiddle and Thirteen Other Stories (31)
CHESTERTON, G. K. (1874-
The Man Who Was Thursday (35)
CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE (99)
Edited with an Introduction by Dr. BENJ. HARROW
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D'ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE (1864- )
The Flame of Life (65)
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DAUDET, ALPHONSE (1840-1897)
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DUNSANY, LORD (Edward John Plunkett) (1878- .)
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Confessions of a Young Man (16) Introduction by
FLOYD DELL
MORRISON, ARTHUR (1863- )
Tales of Mean Streets (100) Introduction by H. L.
MENCKEN
1
Modern Library of the World's Best Books
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844-1900)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (9) Introduction by FRAU
FOERSTER-NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil (20) Introduction by WILLARD
HUNTINGTON WRIGHT
Genealogy of Morals (62
NORRIS, FRANK (1870-1902)
McTeague (60) Introduction by HENRY S. PANCOAST
O'NEILL, EUGENE (1888- )
The Moon of the Carribbees and Six Other Plays of the
Sea (111) Introduction by George Jean Nathan
PAINE, THOMAS (1737-1809)
Selections from the Writings of Thomas Paine (108)
Edited with an Introduction by CARL VAN DOREN
PATER, WALTER (1839-1894)
Marius the Epicurean (90)
The Renaissance (86) Introduction by ARTHUR SYMONS
PEPYS', SAMUEL; DIARY (103)
Condensed. Introduction by RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
PREVOST, ANTOINE FRANCOIS (1697-1763)
Manon Lescaut (85) In same volume with Daudet's Sapho
RODIN, THE ART OF (1840-1917)
64 Black and White Reproductions (41) Introduction by
LOUIS WEINBERG
SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR (1862- ).
Anatol, Living Hours, The Green Cockatoo (32)
Introduction by ASHLEY DUKES
Bertha Garlan (39)
SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788-1860)
Studies in Pessimism (12) Introduction by T. B.
SAUNDERS :
SHAW, G. B. (1856- )
An Unsocial Socialist (15)
SINCLAIR, MAY
The Belfry (68)
STEPHENS, JAMES
Mary, Mary (30) Introduction by PADRIAC COLUM
STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850-1894)
Treasure Island (4)
STIRNER, MAX (Johann Caspar Schmidt) (1806-1859)
The Ego and His Own (49)
STRINDBERG, AUGUST (1849-1912)
Married (2) Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER
Miss Julie, The Creditor, The Stronger Woman, Motherly
Love, Paria, Simoon.(52)
Modern Library of the World's Best Books
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SUDERMANN, HERMANN (1857- )
Dame Care (33)
SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES (1837-1909)
Poems (23) Introduction by ERNEST RHYS
THOMPSON, FRANCIS (1859-1907)
Complete Poems (38)
TOLSTOY, LEO (1828-1910)
Redemption and Two Other Plays (77) Introduction by
ARTHUR HOPKINS
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and Four Other Stories (64)
TURGENEV, IVAN ( 1818-1883)
Fathers and Sons (21) Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER
Smoke (80) Introduction by JOHN REED
VAN LOON, HENDRIK WILLEM (1882- )
Ancient Man (105)
VILLON, FRANCOIS (1431-1461)
Poems (58) Introduction by JOHN PAYNE
VOLTAIRE, (FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET) (1694-1778)
Candide (47) Introduction by PHILIP LITTELL
WELLS, H. G. (1866- )
Ann Veronica (27)
The War in the Air (5) New Preface by H. G. Vells for
this edition
WHITMAN,WALT (1819- )
Poems (97) Introduction by CARL SANDBURG
WILDE, OSCAR (1859-1900)
An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance (84);
Dorian Gray (1)
Fairy Tales and Poems in Prose (61)
Intentions (96)
Poems (19)
Salome, The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Winder.
mere's Fan (83) Introduction by EDGAR SALTUS
WILSON, WOODROW (1856- )
Selected Addresses and Public Papers (55) Edited with
an introduction by ALBERT BUSHNELL HART
WOMAN QUESTION, THE (59)
A Symposium, including Essays by Ellen Key, Havelock
Ellis, G. Lowes Dickinson, etc. Edited by T. R. SMITH
YEATS, W. B. (1865- )
Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (44)

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