_ XXIII. THE CRITIC AS DESTROYER
It has been said often enough that all good criticism is praise. Pater boldly called one of his volumes of critical essays _Appreciations_. There are, of course, not a few brilliant instances of hostility in criticism. The best-known of these in English is Macaulay's essay on Robert Montgomery. In recent years we have witnessed the much more significant assault by Tolstoy upon almost the whole army of the authors of the civilized world from AEschylus down to Mallarme. _What is Art?_ was unquestionably the most remarkable piece of sustained hostile criticism that was ever written. At the same time, it was less a denunciation of individual authors than an attack on the general tendencies of the literary art. Tolstoy quarrelled with Shakespeare not so much for being Shakespeare as for failing to write like the authors of the Gospels. Tolstoy would have made every book a Bible. He raged against men of letters because with them literature was a means not to more abundant life but to more abundant luxury. Like so many inexorable moralists, he was intolerant of all literature that did not serve as a sort of example of his own moral and social theories. That is why he was not a great critic, though he was immeasurably greater than a great critic. One would not turn to him for the perfect appreciation even of one of the authors he spared, like Hugo or Dickens. The good critic must in some way begin by accepting literature as it is, just as the good lyric poet must begin by accepting life as it is. He may be as full of revolutionary and reforming theories as he likes, but he must not allow any of these to come like a cloud between him and the sun, moon and stars of literature. The man who disparages the beauty of flowers and birds and love and laughter and courage will never be counted among the lyric poets; and the man who questions the beauty of the inhabited world the imaginative writers have made--a world as unreasonable in its loveliness as the world of nature--is not in the way of becoming a critic of literature.
Another argument which tells in favour of the theory that the best criticism is praise is the fact that almost all the memorable examples of critical folly have been denunciations. One remembers that Carlyle dismissed Herbert Spencer as a "never-ending ass." One remembers that Byron thought nothing of Keats--"Jack Ketch," as he called him. One remembers that the critics damned Wagner's operas as a new form of sin. One remembers that Ruskin denounced one of Whistler's nocturnes as a pot of paint flung in the face of the British public. In the world of science we have a thousand similar examples of new genius being hailed by the critics as folly and charlatanry. Only the other day a biographer of Lord Lister was reminding us how, at the British Association in 1869, Lister's antiseptic treatment was attacked as a "return to the dark ages of surgery," the "carbolic mania," and "a professional criminality." The history of science, art, music and literature is strewn with the wrecks of such hostile criticisms. It is an appalling spectacle for anyone interested in asserting the intelligence of the human race. So appalling is it, indeed, that most of us nowadays labour under such a terror of accidentally condemning something good that we have not the courage to condemn anything at all. We think of the way in which Browning was once taunted for his obscurity, and we cannot find it in our hearts to censure Mr. Doughty. We recall the ignorant attacks on Manet and Monet, and we will not risk an onslaught on the follies of Picasso and the worse-than-Picassos of contemporary art. We grow a monstrous and unhealthy plant of tolerance in our souls, and its branches drop colourless good words on the just and on the unjust--on everybody, indeed, except Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, and a few others whom we know to be second-rate because they have such big circulations. This is really a disastrous state of affairs for literature and the other arts. If criticism is, generally speaking, praise, it is, more definitely, praise of the right things. Praise for the sake of praise is as great an evil as blame for the sake of blame. Indiscriminate praise, in so far as it is the result of distrust of one's own judgment or of laziness or of insincerity, is one of the deadly sins in criticism. It is also one of the deadly dull sins. Its effect is to make criticism ever more unreadable, and in the end even the publishers, who love silly sentences to quote about their bad books, will open their eyes to the futility of it. They will realize that, when once criticism has become unreal and unreadable, people will no more be bothered with it than they will with drinking lukewarm water. I mention the publisher in especial, because there is no doubt that it is with the idea of putting the publishers in a good, open-handed humour that so many papers and reviews have turned criticism into a kind of stagnant pond. Publishers, fortunately, are coming more and more to see that this kind of criticism is of no use to them. Reviews in such-and-such a paper, they will tell you, do not sell books. And the papers to which they refer in such cases are always papers in which praise is disgustingly served out to everybody, like spoonfuls of treacle-and-brimstone to a mob of schoolchildren.
Criticism, then, is praise, but it is praise of literature. There is all the difference in the world between that and the praise of what pretends to be literature. True criticism is a search for beauty and truth and an announcement of them. It does not care twopence whether the method of their revelation is new or old, academic or futuristic. It only asks that the revelation shall be genuine. It is concerned with form, because beauty and truth demand perfect expression. But it is a mere heresy in aesthetics to say that perfect expression is the whole of art that matters. It is the spirit that breaks through the form that is the main interest of criticism. Form, we know, has a permanence of its own: so much so that it has again and again been worshipped by the idolators of art as being in itself more enduring than the thing which it embodies. Robert Burns, by his genius for perfect statement, can give immortality to the joys of being drunk with whiskey as the average hymn-writer cannot give immortality to the joys of being drunk with the love of God. Style, then, does seem actually to be a form of life. The critic may not ignore it any more than he may exaggerate its place in the arts. As a matter of fact, he could not ignore it if he would, for style and spirit have a way of corresponding to one another like health and sunlight.
It is to combat the stylelessness of many contemporary writers that the destructive kind of criticism is just now most necessary. For, dangerous as the heresy of style was forty or fifty years ago, the newer heresy of sylelessness is more dangerous still. It has become the custom even of men who write well to be as ashamed of their style as a schoolboy is of being caught in an obvious piece of goodness. They keep silent about it as though it were a kind of powdering or painting. They do not realize that it is merely a form of ordinary truthfulness--the truthfulness of the word about the thought. They forget that one has no more right to misuse words than to beat one's wife. Someone has said that in the last analysis style is a moral quality. It is a sincerity, a refusal to bow the knee to the superficial, a passion for justice in language. Stylelessness, where it is not, like colour-blindness, an accident of nature, is for the most part merely an echo of the commercial man's world of hustle. It is like the rushing to and fro of motor-buses which save minutes with great loss of life. It is like the swift making of furniture with unseasoned wood. It is a kind of introduction of the quick-lunch system into literature. One cannot altogether acquit Mr. Masefield of a hasty stylelessness in some of those long poems which the world has been raving about in the last year or two. His line in _The Everlasting Mercy:_
And yet men ask, "Are barmaids chaste?"
is a masterpiece of inexpertness. And the couplet:
The Bosun turned: "I'll give you a thick ear!
Do it? I didn't. Get to hell from here!"
is like a Sunday-school teacher's lame attempt to repeat a blasphemous story. Mr. Masefield, on the other hand, is, we always feel, wrestling with language. If he writes in a hurry, it is not because he is indifferent, but because his soul is full of something that he is eager to express. He does not gabble; he is, as it were, a man stammering out a vision. So vastly greater are his virtues than his faults as a poet, indeed, that the latter would only be worth the briefest mention if it were not for the danger of their infecting other writers who envy him his method but do not possess his conscience. One cannot contemplate with equanimity the prospect of a Masefield school of poetry with all Mr. Masefield's ineptitudes and none of his genius.
Criticism, however, it is to be feared, is a fight for a lost cause if it essays to prevent the founding of schools upon the faults of good writers. Criticism will never kill the copyist. Nothing but the end of the world can do that. Still, whatever the practical results of his work may be, it is the function of the critic to keep the standard of writing high--to insist that the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences are like torn strips of newspaper for commonness. He is the enemy of sloppiness in others--especially of that airy sloppiness which so often nowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel. It was amazing to find with what airiness a promising writer like Mr. Compton Mackenzie gave us some years ago _Sinister Street_, a novel containing thousands of sentences that only seemed to be there because he had not thought it worth his while to leave them out, and thousands of others that seemed to be mere hurried attempts to express realities upon which he was unable to spend more time. Here is a writer who began literature with a sense of words, and who is declining into a mere sense of wordiness. It is simply another instance of the ridiculous rush of writing that is going on all about us--a rush to satisfy a public which demands quantity rather than quality in its books. I do not say that Mr. Mackenzie consciously wrote down to the public, but the atmosphere obviously affected him. Otherwise he would hardly have let his book go out into the world till he had rewritten it--till he had separated his necessary from his unnecessary sentences and given his conversations the tones of reality.
There is no need, however, for criticism to lash out indiscriminately at all hurried writing. There are a multitude of books turned out every year which make no claim to be literature--the "thrillers," for example, of Mr. Phillips Oppenheim and of that capable firm of feuilletonists, Coralie Stanton and Heath Hosken. I do not think literature stands to gain anything, even though all the critics in Europe were suddenly to assail this kind of writing. It is a frankly commercial affair, and we have no more right to demand style from those who live by it than from the authors of the weather reports in the newspapers. Often, one notices, when the golden youth, fresh from college and the reading of Shelley and Anatole France, commences literary critic, he begins damning the sensational novelists as though it were their business to write like Jane Austen. This is a mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to what pretends to be literature. That is why one is often impelled to attack really excellent writers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch or Mr. Galsworthy, as one would never dream of attacking, say, Mr. William Le Queux. To attack Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is, indeed, a form of appreciation, for the only just criticism that can be levelled against him is that his later work does not seem to be written with that singleness of imagination and that deliberate rightness of phrase which made _Noughts and Crosses_ and _The Ship of Stars_ books to be kept beyond the end of the year. If one attacks Mr. Galsworthy, again, it is usually because one admires his best work so whole-heartedly that one is not willing to accept from him anything but the best. One cannot, however, be content to see the author of _The Man of Property_ dropping the platitudes and the false fancifulness of _The Inn of Tranquillity_. It is the false pretences in literature which criticism must seek to destroy. Recognizing Mr. Galsworthy's genius for the realistic representation of men and women, it must not be blinded by that genius to the essential second-rateness and sentimentality of much of his presentation of ideas. He is a man of genius in the black humility with which he confesses strength and weakness through the figures of men and women. He achieves too much of a pulpit complacency--therefore of condescendingness--therefore of falseness to the deep intimacy of good literature--when he begins to moralize about time and the universe. One finds the same complacency, the same condescendingness, in a far higher degree in the essays of Mr. A.C. Benson. Mr. Benson, I imagine, began writing with a considerable literary gift, but his later work seems to me to have little in it but a good man's pretentiousness. It has the air of going profoundly into the secrecies of love and joy and truth, but it contains hardly a sentence that would waken a ruffle on the surface of the shallowest spirit. It is not of the literature that awakens, indeed, but of the literature that puts to sleep, and that is always a danger unless it is properly labelled and recognizable. Sleeping-draughts may be useful to help a sick man through a bad night, but one does not recommend them as a cure for ordinary healthy thirst. Nor will Mr. Benson escape just criticism on the score of his manner of writing. He is an absolute master of the otiose word, the superfluous sentence. He pours out pages as easily as a bird sings, but, alas! it is a clockwork bird in this instance. He lacks the true innocent absorption in his task which makes happy writing and happy reading.
It is not always the authors, on the other hand, whose pretences it is the work of criticism to destroy. It is frequently the wild claims of the partisans of an author that must be put to the test. This sort of pretentiousness often happens during "booms," when some author is talked of as though he were the only man who had ever written well. How many of these booms have we had in recent years--booms of Wilde, of Synge, of Donne, of Dostoevsky! On the whole, no doubt, they do more good than harm. They create a vivid enthusiasm for literature that affects many people who might not otherwise know that to read a fine book is as exciting an experience as going to a horse-race. Hundreds of people would not have the courage to sit down to read a book like _The Brothers Karamazov_ unless they were compelled to do so as a matter of fashionable duty. On the other hand, booms more than anything else make for false estimates. It seems impossible with many people to praise Dostoevsky without saying that he is greater than Tolstoy or Turgenev. Oscar Wilde enthusiasts, again, invite us to rejoice, not only over that pearl of triviality, _The Importance of Being Earnest_, but over a blaze of paste jewelry like _Salome_. Similarly, Donne worshippers are not content to ask us to praise Donne's gifts of fancy, analysis and idiosyncratic music. They insist that we shall also admit that he knew the human heart better than Shakespeare. It may be all we like sheep have gone astray in this kind of literary riot. And so long as the exaggeration of a good writer's genius is an honest personal affair, one resents it no more than one resents the large nose or the bandy legs of a friend. It is when men begin to exaggerate in herds--to repeat like a lesson learned the enthusiasm of others--that the boom becomes offensive. It is as if men who had not large noses were to begin to pretend that they had, or as if men whose legs were not bandy were to pretend that they were, for fashion's sake. Insincerity is the one entirely hideous artistic sin--whether in the creation or in the appreciation of art. The man who enjoys reading _The Family Herald_, and admits it, is nearer a true artistic sense than the man who is bored by Henry James and denies it: though, perhaps, hypocrisy is a kind of homage paid to art as well as to virtue. Still, the affectation of literary rapture offends like every other affectation. It was the chorus of imitative rapture over Synge a few years ago that helped most to bring about a speedy reaction against him. Synge was undoubtedly a man of fine genius--the genius of gloomy comedy and ironic tragedy. His mind delved for strangenesses in speech and imagination among people whom the new age had hardly touched, and his discoveries were sufficiently magnificent to make the eyes of any lover of language brighten. His work showed less of the mastery of life, however, than of the mastery of a theme. It was a curious by-world of literature, a little literature of death's-heads, and, therefore, no more to be mentioned with the work of the greatest than the stories of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Unfortunately, some disturbances in Dublin at the first production of _The Playboy_ turned the play into a battle-cry, and the artists, headed by Mr. Yeats, used Synge to belabour the Philistinism of the mob. In the excitement of the fight they were soon talking about Synge as though Dublin had rejected a Shakespeare. Mr. Yeats even used the word "Homeric" about him--surely the most inappropriate word it would be possible to imagine. Before long Mr. Yeats's enthusiasm had spread to England, where people who ignored the real magic of Synge's work, as it is to be found in _Riders to the Sea_, _In the Shadow of the Glen_, and _The Well of the Saints_, went into ecstasies over the inferior _Playboy_. Such a boom meant not the appreciation of Synge but a glorification of his more negligible work. It was almost as if we were to boom Swinburne on the score of his later political poetry. Criticism makes for the destruction of such booms. I do not mean that the critic has not the right to fling about superlatives like any other man. Criticism, in one aspect, is the art of flinging about superlatives finely. But they must be personal superlatives, not boom superlatives. Even when they are showered on an author who is the just victim of a boom--and, on a reasonable estimate, at least fifty per cent of the booms have some justification--they are as unbeautiful as rotten apples unless they have this personal kind of honesty.
It may be thought that an attitude of criticism like this may easily sink into Pharisaism--a sort of "superior-person" aloofness from other people. And no doubt the critic, like other people, needs to beat his breast and pray, "God be merciful to me, a--critic." On the whole, however, the critic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimes imagined. He is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He is not concerned with getting rid of the dross except in so far as it hides the gold. In other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a subsidiary affair. None of the best critics have been men of destructive minds. They are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowers than with the weeds. If I may change the metaphor, the whole truth about criticism is contained in the Eastern proverb which declares that "Love is the net of Truth." It is as a lover that the critic, like the lyric poet and the mystic, will be most excellently symbolized. _