Chapter III: Part 3

But has not style a value in and of itself? As in the case of light, its value is in the revelation it makes. Its value is to conceal itself, to lose itself in the matter. If humility, or self-denial, or any of the virtues becomes conscious of itself and claims credit for its own sake, does it not that moment fall from grace? What incomparable style in the passage I have quoted from Whitman when we come to think of it, but how it effaces itself and is of no account for the sake of the idea it serves! The more a writer’s style humbles itself, the more it is exalted. There is nothing true in religion that is not equally true in art. Give yourself entirely. All selfish and secondary ends are of the devil. Our Calvinistic grandfathers, who fancied themselves willing to be damned for the glory of God, illustrate the devotion of the true artist to his ideal. “Consider the lilies of the field, ... they toil not, neither do they spin.” The style of the born poet or artist takes as little thought of itself, and is the spontaneous expression of the same indwelling grace and necessity.

III

I once overheard a lady say to a popular author, “What I most admire about your books is their fine style.” “But I never think about my style” was his reply. “I know you don’t,” said his admirer, “and that is why I like it so much.” But we may regard him as thinking about his style, when he fancied himself thinking only about his matter. In his case the style and the matter were one. When he was consciously occupied only with the substance and texture of his thought, he was occupied with his style. Every effort to make the idea flow clear and pure, to give it freshness and fillip, or to seize and embody in words a mental or emotional impression in all its integrity, without blur or confusion, is an effort in style. It is like taking the alloys and impurities out of a metal; the style or beauty of it is improved. The making of iron into steel is a process of purification. When Froude was questioned about his style, he confessed that he had never given any thought to the subject; his aim had been to say what he had to say in the most direct and simple way possible. He was conscious only of trying to see clearly and to speak truly. I suppose this is the case with all first-class minds, in our day at least: the main endeavor is directed toward the matter, and not toward the manner; or rather, it is to make the one identical with the other. In no page of Froude’s, nor in any writer of equal range and seriousness, are we conscious of the style as something apart and that claims our admiration on its own account, as we are in the case of Walter Pater, for example. Such men as Pater are enamored of style itself, and cultivate it for its own sake. They conceive of it as an independent grace and charm that may be imparted to any subject by dint of an effort directed to verbal arrangement and sequence alone.

IV

There is a good deal of wisdom in Voltaire’s saying that “all styles are good that are not tiresome.” Voltaire’s own style certainly had the merit of not tiring. Even in the English translation I never cease to marvel at its grace and buoyancy. In keeping with this dictum is the remark I heard concerning a certain living writer, namely, that he had the best style in literature to-day because one could read fifty pages of his and not know that one was reading at all; it was pure expression--offered no resistance.

This offering no resistance, this ease and limpidity--a getting rid of all friction in the written page--herein certainly lies the secret of much that is winsome in literature. How little friction the mind encounters in Addison, in Lamb, or in the best of our own prose writers; and how much in Meredith, and the later writings of Henry James! Is not friction to be got rid of as far as possible in all departments of life? One does not want his shoes to pinch, nor his coat to bind, neither does he want to waste any strength on involved sentences, or on cryptic language. Did you ever try to row a boat in water in which lay a sodden fleece of newly fallen snow? I find the reading of certain books like that. Some of Browning’s poems impede my mind in that way.

Force of impact--that is another matter; that warms and quickens the mind. Browning’s “How they brought the Good News from Ghent” makes the mind hot by its rush and power. There is no mere mechanical friction of elliptical sentences and obscure allusions here.

Yes, the style that does not tire us is better than the style that does. Thus Arnold’s style is better than Walter Pater’s, because it is easier to follow; it is not so conscious of itself; it is not so obviously studied. Pater studied words; Arnold studied ideas. Pater sacrificed the more familiar democratic traits of language--ease, simplicity, flexibility, transparency--to his passion for the more choice aristocratic features,--the perfumed, the academic, the highly wrought. Again, I find Arnold’s style less fatiguing than Lowell’s, because it has more current, more continuity of thought, and is freer from _concetti_ and mere surface sparkle. I find Swinburne’s prose more tiresome than that of any contemporary British critic, because of its inflated polysyllabic character, and his poetry more cloying than that of any other poet, because of its almost abnormal lilt and facility; it has a pathological fluidity; it seems as though, when he begins to write verse, his whole mental structure is in danger of melting down and running away in mere words. His heat is that of fever; his inspiration borders on delirium.

We never tire of Addison by reason of his style, or of Swift or of Lamb or of our own Irving or Hawthorne or Warner. It is probably as rare to find a French writer whose style tires the reader as it is to find a German whose style does not. As M. Brunetière well says, French literature is a social literature, German is philosophic, and English individualistic. It is the business of the first to be agreeable, of the second to be profound, of the third to be original. Who does not tire of Strauss sooner than of Renan, of Macaulay sooner than of Sainte-Beuve?

A writer with a pronounced, individualistic style--one full of mere mechanical difficulties, like Browning’s or Carlyle’s--runs great risk of wearying the reader and of being left behind. So far as his style degenerates into mannerism, so far is he handicapped in the race. Smoothness is not beauty, neither is roughness power; yet without a certain harmony and continuity there is neither beauty nor power. Herbert Spencer, in his essay on the Philosophy of Style, would have a writer avoid this danger of wearying his reader, by writing alternately in different styles. “To have a specific style,” he says, “is to be poor in speech.” “The perfect writer will express himself as Junius, when in the Junius frame of mind; when he feels as Lamb felt, will use a like familiar speech; and will fall into the ruggedness of Carlyle when in a Carlylean mood.” A man who should try to follow this advice would be pretty sure to be Jack-of-all-styles and master of none. What a piece of patchwork his composition would be! A “specific style” is not to be avoided; it is to be cultivated and practiced till every false note, every trace of crudeness and insincerity, is purged out of it.

The secret of good prose is a subtle quality or flavor, hard to define, like that of a good apple or a good melon, and it is as intimately bound up in the very substance and texture in the one case as in the other, and, we may add, is of as many varieties. We are sure always to get good prose from Mr. Howells and Colonel Higginson, but we are not always so sure of getting it from certain of our younger novelists.

Here is a sample of bad prose from a popular novel by a Southern writer:--

“The whole woods emerged from the divine bath of nature with the coolness, the freshness, the immortal purity of Diana united to the roseate glow and mortal tenderness of Venus, and haunted by two spirits: the chaste, unfading youth of Endymion and the dust-born warmth and eagerness of Dionysus.”

Yet the man who could permit himself the use of such inflated language as that, was capable of turning off such a passage as this:--

“Some women, in marrying, demand all and give all: with good men they are happy; with base men they are the broken-hearted. Some demand everything and give little: with weak men they are tyrants; with strong men they are the divorced. Some demand little and give all: with congenial souls they are already in heaven; with uncongenial they are soon in their graves. Some give little and demand little: they are the heartless, and they bring neither the joy of life nor the peace of death.”

That is sound prose; it is like a passage from a great classic.

When we advise the young writer to go honestly to work to say in the simplest manner what he really thinks and feels, one does not mean that by this course he is likely to write like the great prose masters, but that by this means alone can his work have the basic qualities of good literature,--directness, veracity, vitality, the beauty and reality of natural things. Genuineness first, grace and eloquence afterwards.

“The ugliest living face,” says Schopenhauer, “is better than a mask.” It is real, it is alive. So the simple, direct speech of a man in earnest is so much better than the perfunctory eloquence one is so often compelled to hear or to read. Reality, reality--nothing can make up for a want of reality.

Sainte-Beuve said, as I have already quoted, that the peasant always has style; the French peasant probably more often than any other. This is certainly so if we take such a character as Joan of Arc as a typical peasant. What adroitness, and at times, classic beauty in her answer to her judges! When they sought to entrap her with the question, “Do you know if you are in the grace of God?” she replied, “If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me.” Under pressure, the peasant mind, and indeed all other minds, are, at times, capable of these things. But usually the charm of rustic speech is in its plainness and simplicity, like that of other rural things, a bridge, a woodshed, a well-sweep, a log house,--no thought of style, thought of service only. But the beauty of what may be called the architectural style of the great prose masters,--Gibbon, Burke, Browne, Hooker, De Quincey,--like the beauty of a Greek temple or a Gothic cathedral, is quite another matter. What both have in common is the beauty of sincerity and reality.

The vernacular style of writers of the seventeenth century, like Walton, Fuller, Baxter, Jonson, is more in keeping with the taste of to-day than the rhetorical and highly wrought style of certain of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers.

Hence, when we ascribe style to simple, homely things, or to speech, we mean something quite different from style when applied to the great compositions either in literature, music, or architecture.

Milton could plan and build the lofty rhyme and attain beauty; Wordsworth attains beauty by his sincerity and simplicity, and his fervent love of rural things. He has not style in the Miltonic sense. One has classic beauty, the other, natural or naïve beauty. The monumental works of the ancients were planned and wrought like their architecture, and have a beauty that rivals nature. Shakespeare rarely attains anything like classic beauty, and has any poem since Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” struck the note firmly and surely?

V

I have often asked myself why it is that the interviewer will sometimes get so much more wisdom out of a man, and so many more fresh and entertaining statements--in short, so much better literature--than the man can get out of himself. Is it because one’s best and ripest thoughts rise to the surface, like the cream on the milk, and does the interviewer simply skim them off? Maybe, in writing, we often dip too deep, make too great an effort. Interviews are nearly always interesting,--much more so than a formal studied statement by the interviewed himself. Many a piece of sound, excellent literature has been got out of a man who had no skill at all with the pen. His spoken word is vital and real; but in a conscious literary effort the fire is quenched at once. Hence the charm of letters, of diaries, of the simple narrations and recitals of pioneers, farmers, workers, or persons who have no conscious literary equipment. Who would not rather read a bit of real experience of a soldier in battle, such as a clever interviewer could draw out of him, than to read his general’s studied account of the same engagement? “To elaborate is of no avail,” says Whitman. “Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.” Only the great artist can rival or surpass the sense of reality we often find in common speech. Set a man to writing out his views or his experience and the danger is that he will be too formal; he will get himself up for the occasion; there will be no ease or indifference in his manner; he will go to delving in his mind, and we shall miss the simple, direct self-expression that we are after.

In Dr. Johnson’s talk, as reported by Boswell, we touch the real man; in the “Rambler” you touch only his clothes or periwig. His more formal writing seems the product of some kind of artificial put-on faculty, like the Sunday sermons one hears or the newspaper editorials one reads. The sermon is in what may be called the surpliced style, the Rambler in the periwigged style. Emerson said of Alcott that his conversation was wonderful, but that when he sat down to write his inspiration left him. Most men are wiser in company than in the study. What is interesting in a man is what he himself has felt or seen or experienced. If you can tell us that, we shall listen eagerly. The uncultured man does not know this, but seeks the far-off or the deep down.

Our thoughts, our opinions, are like apples on the tree: they must take time to ripen; and when they are ripe, how easily they fall! A mere nudge brings them down. How easily the old man talks; how full he is of wisdom! Time was when his tongue was tied; he could not express himself; his thoughts were half formed and unripe; they clung tightly to the bough. Set him to writing, and with great labor he produced some crude, half-formed notions of his own, mixed with the riper opinions of the authors he had read. But now his fruit has matured and it has mellowed; it has color and flavor; and his conversation abounds in wisdom.

VI

The standard of style of the last century was more aristocratic than is the standard of to-day. The important words with Hume, Blair, Johnson, Bolingbroke, as applied to style, were elegance, harmony, ornament; and the chief of these was elegance: the composition must make the impression of elegance, as to-day we demand the impression of the vital and the real. Even the homely is more suited to the genius of democracy than is the elegant. Perhaps the word is distasteful to modern ears from its conventional associations or its appropriation by milliners and dressmakers. One would not care to write inelegantly, but would rather his page did not suggest the word at all, as he would have his home or his dress suggest the quieter, humbler, more serviceable virtues. In the old story of Bruce’s saying, the style may be said to be homely. “I doubt I have killed the comyn.” “Ye doubt?” replies Kirkpatrick; “I mak siccar.” Hume puts this into elegant language in this wise: “Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, one of Bruce’s friends, asking him soon after if the traitor was slain, ‘I believe so,’ replied Bruce. ‘And is that a matter,’ cried Kirkpatrick, ‘to be left to conjecture? I will secure him.’” This is polite prose, dressed-up prose, but its charm for us is gone.

VII

There are as many styles as there are moods and tempers in men. Words may be used so as to give us a sense of vigor, a sense of freshness, a sense of the choice and scholarly, or of the dainty and exclusive, or of the polished and elaborate, or of heat or cold, or of any other quality known to life. Every work of genius has its own physiognomy--sad, cheerful, frowning, yearning, determined, meditative. This book has the face of a saint; that of a scholar or a seer. Here is the feminine, there the masculine face. One has the clerical face, one the judicial. Each appeals to us according to our temperaments and mental predilections. Who shall say which style is the best? What can be better than the style of Huxley for his purpose,--sentences level and straight like a hurled lance; or than Emerson’s for his purpose,--electric sparks, the sudden, unexpected epithet or tense, audacious phrase, that gives the mind a wholesome shock; or than Gibbon’s for his purpose,--a style like solid masonry, every sentence cut four square, and his work, as Carlyle said to Emerson, a splendid bridge, connecting the ancient world with the modern; or than De Quincey’s for his purpose,--a discursive, roundabout style, herding his thoughts as a collie dog herds sheep; or than Arnold’s for his academic spirit,--a style like cut glass; or than Whitman’s for his continental spirit,--the processional, panoramic style that gives the sense of mass and multitude? Certain things we may demand of every man’s style,--that it shall do its work, that it shall touch the quick. To be colorless like Arnold is good, and to have color like Ruskin is good; to be lofty and austere like the old Latin and Greek authors is good, and to be playful and discursive like Dr. Holmes is good; to be condensed and epigrammatic like Bacon pleases, and to be flowing and copious like Macaulay pleases. Within certain limits the manner that is native to the man, the style that is a part of himself, is what wears best. What we do not want in any style is hardness, glitter, tumidity, superfetation, unreality.

In treating of nature or outdoor themes, let the style have limpidness, sweetness, freshness; in criticism let it have dignity, lucidity, penetration; in history let it have mass, sweep, comprehension; in all things let it have vitality, sincerity, and genuineness.

IV

CRITICISM AND THE MAN

I

It looks as though we were never to get to the end of the discussion about criticism--its scope, aims, functions, any more than we are likely to get to the end of the discussion of any real question in philosophy, ethics, or religion.

Is the aim of literary criticism judgment, or interpretation, or analysis, or description? May it not have all these aims? For myself, I am disposed to answer in the affirmative.

I doubt if there will ever be a critical method which all may apply. Every man will have his own method, as truly as he has his own manners. The French critic Schérer inclines to “the method which sets to work to comprehend rather than to class, to explain rather than to judge,” or which asks as the first step to possess itself of the author’s point of view. This is substantially Pope’s dictum that a work is to be read in the spirit in which it was written, and it accords with Heine’s saying that the critic is to ask, “What does the artist intend?” This is a part of, but does it sum up, the critical function?

A man’s writing upon the works of another takes the form of description and analysis--like the report of a naturalist upon a new species, which Mr. Howells thinks is the main function of criticism; or it may aim chiefly at interpretation, which a recent essayist emphasizes as the latest and highest phase of criticism; or it may aim at a judicial estimate, an authoritative verdict from the rules and standards, which is the more classic and academic phase of criticism.

Each phase is legitimate and leads to valuable results.

Of any considerable artistic work we want a description and an analysis, we want an interpretation and an exposition, and we want an appraisement according to the standard of the best that has been thought and done in the world,--not a comparison with the externals of the accepted models, but with the originality, the spontaneity, the sanity, the inner necessity and consistency of them--the truth to nature and to the laws of the human mind. Is it liberating, vitalizing, cheering? Is it ethically sound? Does it favor large and manly ideals? Does it go along with evolution and progress?

What, for instance, will criticism do with the work of such a man as Whitman, or Ibsen, or Tolstoi? It will describe it and analyze it, and name it as lyric, epic, dramatic, etc.; it will interpret it, or draw out and expound the ideas that lie back of it and out of which it sprang; it will seek to understand it and to get at the writer’s point of view; then it will judge it, try it by its own standards, and seek to estimate the value of these standards as they stand related to the best aims and achievements of the human mind.

We demand of these men what we demand of Browning, Tennyson, Hugo, and every other poet and writer of high claims,--genuineness, sincerity, power, inspiration, and that they awaken in us fresh and vivid currents of ideas and emotions. We shall not quarrel with their methods, or materials, or their form, or formlessness, but they must go to the quick. All our pleasure and profit in great art--painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry--is at last one, a new experience of the beauty and significance of nature and life. We are made to feel these emotions afresh and as if for the first time.

Here are the old eternal elements,--life, nature, the soul, man and woman, all in danger of becoming dull, commonplace, uninteresting to us. But the man with the creative touch gives us a new and lively sense of them, by presenting them to us in new combinations and under new lights. The only new thing added is himself,--the quality or flavor of his own genius.

A complete criticism will not limit itself to description or to interpretation; it will seek to estimate, to bring out the relative or absolute value of the thing. Mr. Howells in his trenchant little volume on “Criticism and Fiction,” says the critic has no more business to trample on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him, than the botanist has to grind a plant under his heel because he does not find it pretty. His business “is to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or blame them.”

To classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind is certainly one of the functions of criticism, and only one. The analogy Mr. Howells employs is misleading. We do not sit in judgment on natural specimens and products except as they stand related to human wants and utilities. We compare climates, seasons, soils, landscapes, with reference to racial and individual needs and well-being. If you bring me trees from the woods or stone from the quarry to build my house with, I am bound to sit in judgment upon them. And when my house is built, my neighbors will sit in judgment upon it. Of all artificial things, of all man’s works, we are bound to ask, are they well done? are they what they should be? are they the best of their kind? Shall we not ask these questions of the poem also, of the novel, the essay, the history?

Art has relations to life, and the critic is bound to consider what these relations are in any given work,--how true, how important; he is examining a human product, not a natural specimen, and is as competent to reject as to accept; he must compare, weigh, appraise, to the best of his ability.

The specimens of natural history are perfect after their kind; the main question with them is, to which kind or species does a given specimen belong? But the poem or the history or the novel is not always perfect after its kind. Their kind is usually obvious at a glance, but their merits or demerits, their relation to the best that has been thought and done in the world, are not so obvious. Hence we praise or blame according as they come up to or fall short of their own ideal. The critic is not so much a botanist naming a new flower, as he is a brother gardener criticising your horticulture, or a brother lawyer criticising your brief. We are all critics in this sense one way or another every day of our lives; we try to get at the real value of whatever is offered us, whether it be lands, houses, goods, friends, stocks, bonds, news, pictures, or books; we criticise the men we deal with and employ in order to find out whom to trust; we must have our wits about us when we go to market or go shopping. The critical habit--sifting, testing, comparing, to get at the true value of things--goes with us through life, or else we come often to grief. The finer the product, or the higher the purpose it serves, the more careful is our investigation.

When we come to literature and art our worldly practical wisdom does not carry very far. It is not now a question of fact or of material values, but of ideal and æsthetic values; it is a question of truth to nature and to life, and of the largest, most vital truth. The mass of readers have little power of divining the good from the bad, the true from the false, in this field. Not the first best, but the second or third best will draw the multitude.

The literary value of a work is more intangible and elusive, harder to define and bring out, than its scientific or moral or other values. It resides in a certain vitality and genuineness of expression; we have a sense of having come face to face with something real and alive in the man, and not, as is so often the case; with something assumed or put on. There is always an original inherent quality and flavor, as in natural products. The language is not the mere garment of the thought, it is the very texture and substance. In all true literature something more than mind and erudition speak,--a man speaks; a vital personality is imminent,--a Charles Lamb, a Wordsworth, a Carlyle, a Huxley, an Emerson, a Thoreau, a Lowell,--all distinct types of intelligence speaking through character.

Self-expression within certain limits is as important in criticism as in any other form of literature.

The French critic Ferdinand Brunetière says that the truly personal way of seeing and feeling, which is a merit of the poet and the novelist, is a fault in the critic, because the critical function is mainly a judicial one.

In every man there is the common humanity, a measure of the pure reason which he shares with all; then there are the race traits, the family traits, the bias of his times, the bent given by his training and surroundings, and his own special stamp and make-up,--what we call his idiosyncrasy. All these things will play a part in his view of any matter. His success as a critic is when his humanity, his pure intelligence, furnishes the light which is only colored or refracted by its passage through these elements. But colored and refracted it will be, and it is this coloring and refraction or stamp of the personal equation that gives value and charm to the man’s work as literature. Reduce criticism to a science, or eliminate the element of impressionism, and the result is no longer literature. The reason may be convinced, but the emotions are untouched.

The one thing that distinguishes all modern literatures from the works of the ancient or classic period is their more permanent subjectivity, and the piercing lyrical note in them.

Self-expression has been the aim of the modern artist in a much fuller sense than it was with the artists of the pagan world. Our religion is a personal and subjective religion,--the kingdom of heaven is within. Christianity turned the thoughts of men upon themselves. Self-examination, self-criticism began. Man became conscious of himself, of his sins, and of his shortcomings, and learned to be more interested in the elements of his own character.

There is probably no greater delusion than that under which the critic labors when he thinks he is trying the new work by the standard of the best that has been thought and achieved in the world. He is trying it by his own conception of that standard; so much of it as is vital in his own mind he can apply, and no more. His own individual taste and judgment are, after all, his tests. The standard of the best is not some rule of thumb or of yardstick that every one can apply; only the best can apply the best.

Impressionism, therefore, is at the bottom of all criticism, in whatever field. The impression which the work makes upon your intelligence, your taste, your judgment, is all that you can finally give.

Criticism in France, where the art has been more assiduously cultivated than in any other country, seems divided between judicial critics like Brunetière and impressionist critics like Lemaître. The latter states in terms of his own likes and dislikes what the other aims to state in terms of the impersonal reason. But their conclusions are likely to differ only as their temperaments and innate affinities differ. Brunetière has the more dogmatic mind and the more violent antipathies. He could call Sainte-Beuve a rat,--a verdict that savors more of political and religious intolerance than of the impartial reason.

Are we not coming more and more to demand that in all literary and artistic productions, the producer be present in his work, not merely as mind, as pure intelligence, but also as a distinct personality, giving a flavor of his own to the principles he utters? Every vital creative work is the revelation of a man as well as of a mind, and this is true in criticism no less than in other forms of literature.

Suppose Brunetière’s criticism lacked that which makes it Brunetière’s, or Arnold’s lacked that which makes it Arnold’s, should we long care for it? Eliminate from the works of these men all that is individual, all that in each makes the impression of a new literary force, the accent of personality, and you take from the salt its savor. Dare we say that the most precious thing in literature is the individual and the specific? Is not a platitude a platitude because it lacks just these things? The vague and the general may be had in any quantity, at any time. The distinct and the characteristic are always rare. How many featureless novels, featureless poems, featureless discourses, how much savorless criticism of one kind and another, every community produces! Now and then we catch a distinct personal note, a new, penetrating voice, and this we remember and follow in criticism as readily as in poetry or fiction. Have we not here the secret of the greater interest we take in signed criticism over unsigned?

The pure, disinterested, impersonal reason is a fine thing to contemplate. Who would flout it or deny it? One might as well throw stones at the sun. But as the pure white light of the sun is broken up into a thousand hues and shades as it comes back to us from the living world, so the light of reason comes to us from literature in a thousand blended tints and colors, or as modified by the varying moods and temperaments of the individual writers. Whether or not we want or have a right to expect this pure white light in criticism, what we get is the light as it is reduced or colored by the critic’s personality,--the media of his time, his race, his personal equation. It must render accurately the objects, form and feature; but the hue, the atmosphere, the sentiment of it all, the highest value of it all, will be the contribution of the critic’s most private and radical self.

Every eminent writer has his way of looking at things, gives his own coloring to general truths, and it is this that endears him to us. Is the word he speaks _his_ word,--is it inevitable, the verdict of his character, the outcome of that which is most vital and characteristic in him? Or is it something he has learned, or the result of fashion, convention, imitation?

See how the old elements of the air, soil, water, forever recombine under the touch of that mysterious something we call life, and produce new herbage, new flowers, new fruit, new men, new women,--forever and yet never the same. So do the forces of man’s spirit recombine with the old facts and truisms, and produce new art and new literature.

II

Is it not equally true that the value of criticism as a guide to the judgment or the taste, teaching us what to admire and what to condemn, is less than its value as an intellectual pleasure and stimulus, its power to awaken ideas? Judgment is good, but inspiration is better. How rarely we make the judgments of the greatest critics our own! We are pleased when they confirm our own, but is not our main interest and profit in what the critic gives us out of himself? We do not, for instance, care very much for Carlyle’s literary judgments, but for Carlyle’s quality of mind, his flashes of poetic insight, his burden of conscience, his power of portraiture, his heroic moral fibre, we care a great deal. Arnold thought Carlyle’s criticism less sound than Johnson’s,--more tainted with _engouement_, with passion and appetite, as it probably is; but how much more incentive, how much more quickening power, how much more of the stuff of which life is made, do we get from Carlyle than from Johnson or from Arnold himself!

That the criticism is sound is not enough,--it must also warm and stimulate the mind; and if it do this we shall not trouble ourselves very much about its conclusions. Even M. Brunetière says that there are masterpieces in the history of literature and art whose authors were downright fools, as there are, on the other hand, mediocre works from the hands of men of vast intelligence. Very many readers, I fancy, will not rest in the main conclusions at which Tolstoi arrives in his recent discussion of the question “What is art?” but who can fail to feel that here is a large, sincere, helpful soul, whose conception of life and of art is of great value? If we were to estimate Ruskin by the soundness of his judgments alone, we should miss the most important part of him. It is as a prophet of life as well as a critic of art that we value him. Would he be a better critic were he less a prophet?

Or take a more purely critical mind, such as Matthew Arnold’s. Do we care very much even for his literary judgments? Do we not care much more for his qualities as a writer,--his lucidity, his centrality, his style, his continuity of thought, his turns of expression, his particular interpretation of literature and life? His opinions may be sound, but this is not the secret of his power; it resides in something more intimate and personal to himself. The late Principal Shairp was probably as sound a critic as was Arnold, but his work is of much less interest, because it does not contain the same vital expression of a new and distinct type of mind. Arnold was a better critic of literature than of life and history. There were other values than literary ones that were not so clearly within his range. In 1870 he thought the Germans would stand a poor chance in the war with France. How could the German _Gemeinheit_, or commonness, stand up before the French _esprit_? In our civil war, he expected the South to win. Did not the South have distinction? But distinction counts for more in style than in war. Arnold’s criticism has the great merit of being a clear and forcible expression of a fine-bred, high-toned, particular type of man, and that type a pure and noble one. There was no bungling, no crudeness, no straining, no confusion, no snap judgment, and apparently no bias. He was as steady as a clock. His ideas were continuous and homogeneous; they run like living currents all through his works, and give them unity and definitiveness. He is not to be effaced or overthrown; he is only to be matched and appraised. His word is not final, but it is fit and challenges your common sense. His contribution flows into the current of English criticism like a clear stream into a turbid one; it is not deep, but pellucid,--a tributary that improves the quality of the whole. It gives us that refreshment and satisfaction that we always get from the words of a man who speaks in his own right and from ample grounds of personal conviction.

Positive judgments in literature or in art, or in any matters of taste, are dangerous things. The crying want always is for new, fresh power to break up the old verdicts and opinions, and set all afloat again. “We must learn under the master how to destroy him.” The great critic gives us courage to reverse his judgments. Dr. Johnson said that Dryden was the writer who first taught us to determine the merit of composition upon principle; but criticism has been just as much at variance with itself since Dryden’s time as it was before. It is an art, and not a science,--one of the forms of literary art, wherein, as in all other forms of art, the man, and not the principle, is the chief factor.

III

When one thinks of it, how diverse and contradictory have been the judgments of even the best critics! Behold how Macaulay’s verdicts differ from Carlyle’s, Carlyle’s from Arnold’s, Arnold’s from Frederic Harrison’s or Morley’s or Stephen’s or Swinburne’s; how Taine and Sainte-Beuve diverge upon Balzac; how Renan and Arnold diverge upon Hugo; how Lowell and Emerson diverge upon Whitman; and how wide apart are contemporary critics about the merits of Browning, Ibsen, Tolstoi. Landor could not tolerate Dante, and even the great Goethe told Eckermann that Dante was one of the authors he was forbidden to read. In Byron’s judgment, Griffiths and Rogers were greater poets than Wordsworth and Coleridge. The German Professor Grimm sees in Goethe “the greatest poet of all times and all people,” which makes Matthew Arnold smile. Chateaubriand considered Racine as much superior to Shakespeare as the Apollo Belvidere is superior to an uncouth Egyptian statue. Every nation, says a French critic, has its chords of sensibility that are utterly incomprehensible to another. “Many and diverse,” says Arnold, “must be the judgments passed upon every great poet, upon every considerable writer.” And it seems that the greater the writer or poet, the more diverse and contradictory will be the judgments upon him. The small men are easily disposed of,--there is no dispute about them; but the great ones baffle and try us. It is around their names, as Sainte-Beuve somewhere remarks, that there goes on a perpetual critical tournament.

It would seem that the nearer we are, in point of time, to an event, a man, a book, a work of art, the less likely we are to estimate them rightly, especially if they are out of the usual and involve great questions and points. Such a poet as Dante or Victor Hugo or Whitman, or such a character as Napoleon or Cromwell or John Brown, or such an artist as Angelo or Turner or Millet, will require time to settle his claim. In literature, the men of the highest order, to be understood, must undoubtedly, in a measure, wait for the growth of the taste of themselves, or until their own ideals have become at home in men’s minds. With every great innovation, in whatever field, every year that passes finds our minds better adjusted to it and more keenly alive to its merits. Contemporary criticism is bound to be contradictory. Men take opposite views of current questions; they are too near them to see all their bearings. How different the aspect the slavery question wears at this distance, and the civil war that grew out of it, from the face they wore a generation or two ago! It is only the few great minds that see to-day what the masses will see to-morrow. They occupy a vantage ground of character and principle that is like an eminence in a landscape, commanding a wide view. Sainte-Beuve certainly did injustice to Balzac, and Schérer to Béranger. Theirs were contemporary judgments, and personal antipathy played a large part in them. Sainte-Beuve says that when two good intellects pass totally different judgments on the same author, it is because they are not fixing their thoughts, for the moment, on the same object; they have not the whole of him before their eyes; their view does not take him in entirely. That is just it: we each look for different values; we are more keenly alive to some merits than to others; what one critic misses another sees. We are more or less like chemical elements, that unite eagerly with some of their fellows, and not with others. The elective affinities are at work everywhere,--where is the critical genius that is a universal solvent? Probably Sainte-Beuve himself comes as near it as anybody who has lived.

IV

It is not truth alone that makes literature; it is truth plus a man. Readers fancy they are interested in the birds and flowers they find in the pages of the poets; but no, it is the poets themselves that they are interested in. There are the same birds and flowers in the fields and woods,--do they care for them? In many of the authors of whom Sainte-Beuve writes I have no interest, but I am always interested in Sainte-Beuve’s view of them, in the play of his intelligence and imagination over and around them. After reading his discussion of Cowper, or Fénelon, or Massillon, or Pascal, it is not the flavor of these writers that remains in my mind, but the flavor of the critic himself. I am under his spell, and not that of his subject. Is not this equally true of the criticism of Goethe, or Carlyle, or Macaulay, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Coleridge, or any other? The pages of these writers are no more a transparent medium, through which we see the subject as in itself it is, than are those of any other creative artist. Science shows us, or aims to show us, the thing as it is; but art shows it to us tinged by the prismatic rays of the human spirit. Criticism that warms and interests is perpetual creation, as Sainte-Beuve suggested. It is a constant combination of the subject with the thought of the critic. When Mr. James writes upon Sainte-Beuve we are under his spell; it is Mr. James that absorbs and delights us now. We get the truth about his subject, of course, but it is always in combination with the truth about Mr. James. The same is true when Macaulay writes about Milton, and Carlyle about Burns or Johnson, and Emerson about Montaigne or Plato, and Lowell about Thoreau or Wordsworth,--the critic reveals himself in and through his subject.

We do not demand that Arnold get the real Arnold out of the way and merge himself into general humanity (this he cannot do in any case), but only that he put aside the conscious exterior Arnold, so to speak,--Arnold the supercilious, the contemptuous, the hater of dissent, the teaser of the Philistine. The critic must escape from the local and accidental. We would have Macaulay cease to be a Whig, Johnson cease to be a Tory, Schérer forget his theological training, and Brunetière escape from his Catholic bias.

V

No matter how much truth the critic tells us, if his work does not itself rise to the dignity of good literature, if he does not use language in a vital and imaginative way, we shall not care for him. Literary and artistic truth is not something that can be seized and repeated indifferently by this man and by that, like the truths of science: it must be reproduced or recreated by the critic; it must be as vital in his page as in that of his author. The truths of science are static; the truths of art are dynamic. If a mediocre mind writes about Shakespeare, the result is mediocre, no matter how much bare truth he tells us.

What, then, do we mean by a great critic? We mean a great mind that finds complete self-expression in and through the works of other men. Arnold found more complete self-expression through literary criticism than through any other channel: hence he is greatest here; his theological and religious criticism shows him to less advantage. Sainte-Beuve tried poetry and fiction, but did not find a complete outlet for his talent till he tried criticism. Not a profound or original mind, but a wonderfully flexible, tolerant, sympathetic, engaging one; a climbing plant, one might say, that needed some support to display itself to the best advantage. We say of the French mind generally that it is more truly a critical mind than the English; it finds in criticism a better field for the display of its special gifts--taste, clearness, brevity, flexibility, judgment--than does the more original and profoundly emotional English. French criticism is rarely profound, but it is always light, apt, graceful, delicate, lucid, felicitous,--clear sense and good taste marvelously blended.

Criticism in its scientific aspects or as a purely intellectual effort--a search for the exact truth, a sifting of evidence, weighing and comparing data, disentangling testimony, separating the false from the true, as with the lawyer, the doctor, the man of science, the critic of old texts and documents--is one thing. Criticism of literature and art, involving questions of taste, style, poetic and artistic values, is quite another, and demands quite other powers. In the former case it is mainly judicial, dispassionate, impersonal; in the latter case the sympathies and special predilections are more involved. We seek more or less to interpret the imaginative writer, to draw out and emphasize his special quality and stimulus, to fuse him and restate him in other terms; and in doing this we give ourselves more freely. We cannot fully interpret what we do not love, and love has eyes the judgment knows not of. What a man was born to say, what he speaks out of his most radical selfhood,--that the same fate and power in you can alone fully estimate and interpret.

VI

One’s search after the truth in subjective matters is more or less a search after one’s self, after what is agreeable to one’s constitutional bias or innate partialities. We do not see the thing as it is in itself so much as we see it as it stands related to our individual fragment of existence. The lesson we are slowest to learn and to act upon is the relativity of truth in all these matters, or that it is what we make it. It is a product of the mind, as the apple is of the tree. We get one kind of truth from Renan, another from Taine, still another from Ruskin or Carlyle or Arnold. The quality differs according as the minds or spirits differ whence the truth proceeds. Do we expect all the apples in the orchard to be alike? In general qualities, but not in particular flavors; and in literature it is the particular flavor that is most precious. It is the quality imparted to the truth by the conceiving mind that we prize.

It is a long while before we rise to the perception that opposites are true, that contrary types equally serve. “One supreme does not contradict another supreme,” says Whitman, “any more than one eyesight contravenes another eyesight, or one hearing contravenes another hearing.” Great men have been radical and great men have been conservative; great men have been orthodox and they have been heterodox; they have been forces of expansion and they have been forces of contraction. In literature, it is good to be a realist, and it is good to be a romanticist; it is good to be a Dumas, and it is good to be a Zola; it is good to be a Carlyle, and it is good to be a Mazzini,--always provided that one is so from the inside and not from without, from original conviction and not from hearsay or conformity.

A man makes his way in the world amid opposing forces; he becomes something only by overcoming something; there is always a struggle for survival, and always merit in that which survives. Let each be perfect after its kind. We do not object to the Gothic type of mind because it is not the classic, nor to the Englishman because he is not the Frenchman. We look for the measure of nature or natural force and authority in these types. Nature is of all types; she is of to-day as well as of yesterday; she is of this century as well as of the first; she was with Burns as well as with Pindar. Because the Greek was natural, shall we say therefore nature is Greek? She is Asiatic, Icelandic, Saxon, Celtic, American, as well. She is all things to all men; and without her nothing is that is.

VII

Truth is both subjective and objective. The former is what is agreeable to one’s constitution and point of view, or mental and spiritual make-up. Objective truth is verifiable truth, or what agrees with outward facts and conditions.