The roving critic

Criticism ordinarily asks about literature one of three questions: “Is it good?” “Is it true?” “Is it beautiful?” Each of these questions, of course, permits the widest range in the critic. He may be so simple as to think a given work is not good when it fails to emphasize some truism or when it violates the sort of poetic justice which children in the nursery are mistaught to expect; he may be so complex as to demand from literature the subtlest casuistries concerning moral problems; he may be so perverse as to wince at the first symptom of any plain contrast between good and evil. If it be the true which exercises him, he may sink so low as to be worried over this or that surface error in his author—such as an anachronism or a blunder in botany or mechanics; he may rise so high as to discuss on an equal plane with a great authority the difficult questions what the nature of truth may be or whether there is after all any such thing as truth. Or, holding beauty uppermost in his mind, he may at the one extreme peck at a masterpiece because it departs from some traditional form or at the other extreme may view it under the light of an eternity of beauty and feel satisfied if he can perceive and identify the masterpiece’s peculiar reflection. Yet wide as these ranges are, they can all be reduced to the three questions and they mark what may be called the three dimensions of criticism.

There is, however, a fourth dimension—to continue the analogy—which comes into the account when a critic asks about literature: “Is it alive?” In a sense this query includes all the others and in a sense it transcends them. Odysseus is not good: he is adulterous and crafty; Faust is not good: he sells his soul for the sake of forbidden power; Gargantua is not good: he buffets and tumbles the decencies in all directions; Henry V is not good: he wastes his youth and wages unjust war; Huckleberry Finn is not good: he is a thief and a liar. The heroes, the demigods, the gods themselves occasionally step aside from the paths into which men counsel one another; there are at least as many great stories about gorgeous courtesans as about faithful wives. It is not the “goodness” of all such literature but the vividness that gives it its perennial impact. Better a lively rogue than a deadly saint.

To a different extent the same thing appears when truthfulness is concerned. There is a vitality which lies back both of naturalism and of romance and which communicates itself through books as dissimilar, say, as Madame Bovary and The Faerie Queene—one of them the most fastidious document and one of them the most spacious dream. The gods of Homer are not real; the history of Virgil will not bear scrutiny; Dante wanders in a maze of superstitions; Shakespeare lets his plots take him almost where they like; the machinery of a folk-tale is good enough for Goethe, as it was for the author of the Book of Job. How many cosmogonies, Bernard Shaw points out, have gone to the dust heap in spite of an accuracy superior to that which keeps Genesis alive through cynical centuries! The looser Molière is in the long run no less convincing than the tighter Ibsen. Swift and Voltaire and Lucian, twitting their worlds for their follies, dare every extravagance of invention without serious penalty. Ariosto with his whimsical paladins and Scott with his stately aristocrats and Dickens with his hearty democratic caricatures and Dostoevsky with his tortured souls—to find a common denominator of truth among them is so hard that the critics who attempt it are likely to end in partisanship for this or that one and to assign the others to a station outside the approved class. Yet an author may be killed a dozen times with the charge of untruthfulness and still live.

And concerning beauty the disagreement of the doctors is unending and unendable. Whitman is now called beautiful and now called ugly; so are Browning, and Hugo, and Tolstoi, and Nietzsche, and Lope de Vega, and Leopardi, and Catullus, and Aristophanes. Moreover, by any aesthetic standard which the judgment can arrive at, any one of these authors is sometimes beautiful and sometimes not. Nor does it finally matter, as it did not finally matter that Socrates had a thick body and a pug-face. The case of Socrates illustrates the whole argument. Was he good? There was so great a difference on this point among the critics of his time that the majority of them, translating their conclusion into action, put him to death as dangerous to the state. Was what he taught the truth? It is of course not easy to disentangle the actual Socrates from the more or less polemic versions of him which Xenophon and Plato furnish, but it seems clear that he had his share of unscientific notions and individual prejudices and mistaken doctrines. Was he beautiful? He confused Greek orthodoxy by being so uncomely and yet so great. But whatever his shortcomings in these regards, no one ever doubted that he was alive—alive in body and mind and character, alive in war and peace and friendship and controversy, alive in bed or at table. Life was concentrated in him; life spoke out of him.

So with literature, which collects, transmutes, and utters life. It may represent the good, may speak the truth, may use the modes of beauty—any one or all of these things. Call the good the bow which lends the power; call the truth the string which fixes the direction; call the beautiful the arrow which wings and stings. But there is still the arm in which the true life of the process lies. Or, to change the figure, one of those gods who in the mythologies model men out of clay may have good clay and a true purpose and may shape his figure beautifully; but there is still the indispensable task of breathing the breath of life into it before it will wake and go its own course and continue its breed to other generations. Life is obviously what makes the difference between human sculpture and divine creation; it is the same element which makes the difference between good literature and dead literature.

The critic who is aware of this fourth dimension of the art he studies saves himself the effort which critics less aware contrive to squander in trying to explain their art in terms merely of the three dimensions. He knows that life began before there were such things as good and evil; that it surges through both of them; that it will probably outlast any particular conception of either one or the other: he knows that it is not the moral of so naïve a tale as Uncle Tom’s Cabin which makes it moving but the life which was breathed into it by fiery passion. He knows that the amount of truth in poetry need not always be great and often indeed is much exaggerated; that a ruthless hand can find heaps of theological slag in Milton and corners full of metaphysical cobwebs in Plato and glittering excrescences of platitude in Shakespeare: he knows that these poets now live most in those parts of their work in the creating of which they were most alive. He knows that a powerful imagination may beget life even upon ugliness: he knows it because he has felt the vibrations of reality in Browning’s cranky grotesques and in Whitman’s long-drawn categories and in Rabelais’s great dung-cart piled high with every variety of insolence and wisdom. Not goodness alone nor truth alone nor beauty alone nor all of them in one of their rare fusions can be said to make great literature, though these are the tools of that hard trade. Great literature may be known by the sign that it communicates the sense of the vividness of life. And it communicates it because its creators were alive with it at the moment of creation.

There are many kinds of literature because there are many kinds of life. Pope felt one kind and Wordsworth another and Poe another—and so on and on. There are no universal poets, not even Homer and Shakespeare. Nor, of course, are there any universal critics, not even Lessing and Sainte-Beuve. Neither creator nor critic can make himself universal by barely taking thought about it; he is what he lives. The measure of the creator is the amount of life he puts into his work. The measure of the critic is the amount of life he finds there.

THE REVENGE OF THE BARDS

“The natural desire of every man,” says Peacock in The Four Ages of Poetry, “to engross to himself as much power and property as he can acquire by any of the means which might makes right, is accompanied by the no less natural desire of making known to as many people as possible the extent to which he has been a winner in this universal game. The successful warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief becomes a king; his next want is an organ to disseminate the fame of his achievements and the extent of his possessions; and this organ he finds in a bard, who is always ready to celebrate the strength of his arm, being duly inspired by that of his liquor. This is the origin of poetry.... The first rude songs of all nations ... tell us how many battles such an one has fought, how many helmets he has cleft, how many breastplates he has pierced, how many widows he has made, how much land he has appropriated, how many houses he has demolished for other people, what a large one he has built for himself, how much gold he has stowed away in it, and how liberally and plentifully he pays, feeds, and intoxicates the divine and immortal bards, the sons of Jupiter, but for whose everlasting songs the names of heroes would perish.” The bards meanwhile, according to Peacock, do not neglect their own status. “They are observing and thinking, while others are robbing and fighting: and though their object be nothing more than to secure a share of the spoil, yet they accomplish this end by intellectual, not by physical, power: their success excites emulation to the attainment of intellectual eminence: thus they sharpen their own wits and awaken those of others.... Their familiarity with the secret history of gods and genii obtains for them, without much difficulty, the reputation of inspiration ... being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity: building cities with a song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.”

This is the revenge of the bards: from singing of godlike men they come to feel themselves godlike; and in time they persuade a respectable portion of the community to take them at their own value. Now it is their turn to share—almost to usurp—the glory of the kings and warriors their former patrons. Homer takes as high a rank as Agamemnon and Achilles and Ulysses, who are remembered because Homer admitted them to his narrative. The bard establishes the canon of the memorable. May there not have been other men as wise as Moses or as patient as Job or as strong as Samson? There may have been, but as they lacked bards they dropped out of the race for perennial honor. That race, at least, is not for the swift alone. Socrates had a better bard than Pericles; he had Plato. Caesar had a better bard than Pompey: he had himself. If there were more Caesars, history might be different; certainly historiography would be. As it is, accident and art play an enormous part in fixing human fame.

The process continues to the present day, for the biographer who has succeeded to the bard has the bard’s habits in no very different degree. But he is no longer quite so dependent as his ancestor, no longer quite so official. Like will to like in biography as elsewhere. So long as the craft of making reputations is left to the guild of letters, so long will the guild impress it with its special prejudices. It will choose to write about those great men whose careers best conform to some classic type or fit some dramatic mode or flatter some literary sentiment. A great man who has been a conspicuous patron of the arts has ten times the chances at posterity that a mere man of power or money has; but so has a great man who has been eloquent or who has borne himself like Cato or who has had a fate in some way or other resembling Napoleon’s.

Not only does the literary guild choose men of action on literary grounds to write about: it chooses disproportionately to write about its members. There are as many lives of thinkers and artists as of generals and monarchs. Philostratus wrote about the sophists and Eunapius and Diogenes Laertius about the philosophers and Suetonius about the grammarians; in the Middle Ages monks wrote particularly about monks who succeeded in their business and turned saints; Vasari in the Renaissance said less about even the princes who encouraged painters than about the painters themselves; Boswell chose not Burke nor Chatham but Johnson to stand as the centre of his society; Goethe’s Duke survives primarily in the various lives of Goethe; how many passionate, beautiful books there are about Poe and Keats and Byron and Heine and Hugo and Pushkin and Leopardi!

The situation has consequences. Though the king who can command a poet or the politician who can catch a biographer will always have one, few other persons outside the poet’s or the biographer’s own caste boast any such intercessors with the future. The most mighty man of business perishes from the public memory almost as speedily as the most petty trader. The artisan who has invented no matter how comfortable devices and the athlete who has been no matter how much on the tongues of men leave but short wakes of fame behind them. Now this may hint that those who do not survive actually merit oblivion, but it does not prove it. Rather, it proves that peoples have the best memories with regard to those men and women about whom there are voices to go on speaking. In any given generation rumour widens out in various ways: its heroes are pugilists and saints and misers and entertainers and generals and statesmen and orators and preachers and lovers and murderers and philanthropists and scholars and poets and humorists and musicians and detectives—all mingled in one vast confusion. But with posterity selection intervenes. A hundred fames grow dim because no one has a special reason for perpetuating them; word of mouth in general is not enough. Even particular professions in time forget those who once practised them eminently. Only of the men of letters—bards and biographers—is it the trade as well as the delight to keep old reputations burning. And it is only certain things that they remember: blood and glory and learning. Paul Revere gave a lifetime to a noble craft and a few hours all told to a midnight ride which any man might have made who was able to sit a horse and follow a dark road. Who now hears of Revere’s craft? He is merely a demigod and Longfellow is his prophet; the two of them symbolize the past, as most men see it, and the way of the bards with the past.

For it is clear, upon reflection, that just as the current world comes to the perceptions of mankind through the interpretations of artists or demagogues or prophets, so the past comes to them through the interpretations of its chroniclers. There lies the past, enormous and unformed; here are the men of pen and book who make the lenses through which it is perceived, who fix the frame of the picture, who choose what shall be looked at and what not. They are artists and the past is their material. Let a given chronicler be as honest as he can or will be; he is still a member of a limited class of men and he is interested in a limited range of life. Let all the chroniclers be honest, and they are still chroniclers: they will set down what interests their caste. They will shape their material in epic or dramatic form; they will find arguments for their favourite convictions; they will cherish or neglect in accordance with their dispositions. Sophisticate and complicate the matter as they will, they tend in all ages and the latest age to do what they did at first. They see the rulers of men sitting on their proper thrones and they sing in verse or say in prose how those rulers came there; they remember themselves and they pay natural honour to their fellows of the guild. In a sense, the plain man cannot feel that he has a past. He looks into histories and sees very little of the world he knows. That older world is much too full of kings and bards for him to feel at home.

CREATIVE READING

As surely as there is such a thing as creative writing there is such a thing as creative reading. That it is not very common appears from the universal demand for fiction, in which the creative process has already been applied to the material in hand, so that the reader is called upon to contribute very little himself. Indeed, if the writer of fiction is strong enough he can carry his more compliant readers to almost any distance from the world of their experience and can persuade them to accept as its equal or as its superior some merely invented region. To go so far with a romancer is not, as is often thought, a necessary sign that the reader is imaginative: he may be only limp or uncritical, unable to hold his own in the presence of a more powerful fancy. Children are regularly beguiled in this fashion, as are the credulous of all ages by travellers and politicians and priests who have a romantic turn of mind. The creative reader, however, begins to build the minute he begins to read. In varying degrees, of course, he leans upon his writer, but he takes profit from his book in proportion to the amount of creative energy he puts into it. Perhaps the simplest illustration of this is to be noted in the fact that one reads a book with different results at different times. A reader, for instance, who has never been in love cannot find in a play or poem, a novel or biography portraying the effects of love, more than a fraction of what he would find there if he had genuinely known the passion. Another who has thought the history of some foreign country dull may discover that it is fascinating after he has visited that country. And still another may suddenly perceive a large pertinence in ideas or speculations which heretofore have left him cold: he has in his own person caught up with them, and now greets them heartily for the first time though they have been there in the book all the time.

The notion that unhappy men and women employ reading as an anodyne is not quite accurate. With them reading furnishes more than a substitute for thought; it furnishes them the occasion to set going in their minds a dance of images, a sequence of ideas, a march of memories which run parallel to the matter of the book, and to which the book, indeed, may be but the exciting cause. Neither is it quite accurate to say that inveterate readers, happy or unhappy, lead their lives within the pages of this volume or that for want of the more robust outlet which action affords those who do not care to read, or at least to read so much. Rather, such readers may be full of creative impulses which they prefer to exercise in a purer and more plastic universe than they have found elsewhere. There happens to be no standard by which to measure the relative value of the forces which are released by action and of those which are released by contemplation. If the man of action is associated in his career with other active persons, why may not the man of contemplation be equally associated in his with others whose society he enjoys through the medium of printed words? As there are men of action who drive blindly forward, without thought, to some goal which they hardly see though their instincts urge them in that general direction, so there are men of contemplation who drift with the tide of some—or any—poet or historian or philosopher without critical resistance; but the creative reader challenges, disputes, denies, fights his way through his book, and he emerges to some extent always another person. He has been a creator while he seemed to be merely passive and recipient.

To take another easy illustration, a scholar engaged in actual research may wade through rivers and climb mountains of books while in the pursuit of proofs for his thesis, and may yet at every step be full of creative fire, throwing aside what he does not need and choosing what he does as emphatically as if he were a soldier on the most difficult campaign. The researcher is but a common type of creative reader, his process and his aim being more readily comprehensible than those of the other types but not essentially unlike them. All creative readers have at any given moment some conscious or unconscious thesis which they are seeking to prove, some conscious or unconscious picture they desire to complete, some conscious or unconscious point they mean to reach if they can. By it they are sustained through what would be unendurable labour to another, or even to them at an earlier or a later day. It gives them resoluteness, it gives them form. More potent than has been ordinarily recognized, it belongs with that faculty whereby the mind arranges its impressions in some sort of order and comes to some kind of conclusion without always consulting the will or even inviting the consciousness to be aware of what is going on.

The token by which the creative reader can best be known is his lack of the pedantic expectation with which many readers of considerable taste begin to read. For instance, there was that professorial critic, for whom no pillory can be too high or naked or windy, who declared he could not approve of The Playboy of the Western World because it was neither tragedy nor comedy nor tragi-comedy. He did not create as he read; he could not even follow a free representation of human life; he was tied brain and mood to a prejudice which shut him in from any liberation by novel wit or beauty. Like many better men, he was a victim of an obsession for the classics into which creative readers never allow themselves to fall. They may have formed their literary principles upon the strictest canon and they may be richly responsive to the great traditions of style and structure; but they have not been made timid by their training and they know that the heartiest reader, like the heartiest spectator of human affairs, must occasionally have his fling outside narrow circles or must begin to stifle. It is as snobbish to feel at home only among the “best” books as to feel at home only among the “best” people. After all, the best books have been made up out of diverse elements, transmuted by some creative spirit from the raw materials which lay around. The reader who in some degree can share that spirit’s vision can share also its delight in the same sort of original stuff. Imagine, for example, the state of mind of a person who can argue that it is a weakness, if not a literary impropriety, to prefer Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann at times to Faust.

There are very proper moods which the noblest work of art cannot satisfy as well as some casual memoir, some quaint history or book of travel, some halting speculation, some mere array of facts. Who has not preferred the nasturtiums or turnips of his own garden to more sumptuous flowers or vegetables from the open market? The pleasant odours of many mornings and the colour of many fine sunsets cling about the blossoms which he has tended; the plain roots from his soil have in them the savour of honest sweat and the contour of agreeable hopes. So the creative reader likes frequently to shape his own designs and make his own conclusions out of raw materials which no other hand—however better he may know it is—has worked with. In fact, it is now and then hard for a reader in the full strength of some creative impulse to keep himself as aware of the positive aesthetic merit of what he is reading as perhaps he should. If the matter of life is there in large abundance he may overlook the lack of form and proportion and interpretation because he is himself able to supply them. It is for this reason that generous spirits like Sir Walter Scott, and even more rigid critics, seem often to have gone too far in their praise of this or that book which has not survived or pleased as much as they expected; they were misled by finding in the book an element of creation which they had contributed but which colder readers do not find there. If criticism, professional or amateur, were an exact science, practised in a vacuum, the creative reader by his vagaries might deserve the accusation of being a sort of astrologer among the scientists; but it is not, and so his more creative vagaries must be classed less with the winds of bad doctrine than with the breath of life.