THE CULT OF DULLNESS
Many conflicting opinions were expressed on the occasion of the Keats centenary, but everybody appeared to be unanimous on at least one point—contempt for the critics who told Keats to go back to his gallipots. We took it for granted that they were a very unusual sort of critics, and that, if a Keats were born to-day, we should give him a different sort of welcome. It is as though we had forgotten the history of literary genius and of its first reception into a jealous world. Human beings have naturally a profound respect for the great man, but they respect him most when he is dead. A dead demigod is to them infinitely better than a living lion. Their self-respect suffers if they have to live in the same world with some young fellow that overtops them. They feel, unconsciously, that by bringing him down they are raising themselves up. The Greeks pretended that it was the gods, and not themselves, who were jealous of human greatness, and they called this jealousy Nemesis. I suspect,however, that it was human beings who first felt this passion for equality. It is not in this form a noble passion. It is a passion for being equal to the people above us, not for being equal to the people below. This is the passion that cannot forgive wit or beauty in a contemporary. Some men—the finest—are entirely without it. Further, most of us yield to facts and frankly recognise genius when there is no getting away from it. But there always remains a company of the dull and the crabbed who believe till the end that to disparage a good writer is to be, at least on this point, superior to him. They are afraid that if the world welcomes this wit and beauty it will have no welcome for their own dullness. That is the secret fear that is a cause of a great deal of the worst sort of bad criticism. There is a league of dullness constantly making war on wit and beauty. Its malice is not deliberate: it is scarcely intelligent enough to be deliberate. It is founded not on reason, but on the instinct of self-defence.
It is difficult, I admit, to say how far the disparagement of good writing is the result of mere stupidity and how far it is the result of malignity. The longer one lives, the more one is amazed at the incredible achievements of human stupidity.
Possibly, then, the critics who attempted todrag down Keats to the level of bad writers were merely ordinary stupid human beings—good men in the bosoms of their families, but fools anywhere else. They had, after all, standards to which Keats did not conform. They had either to abuse Keats or to trample on their standards—which would have been like trampling on themselves. Keats himself, by the vehemence of his attack on Pope and his followers, had provoked the controversial spirit. He was to them a blasphemer in the temple, who had to be punished at all costs. There is much the same reason, no doubt, for the virulence with which the dull have assailed the wits in all ages. Wit by its very nature is a declaration of war not only on dullness, but on the dull orthodoxies, and the dull and the orthodox return bite for blow. Molière brought great trouble on his head by being witty. He held the mirror up to fools, and in answer the fools baited him. He had not all the critics against him, but only all the stupid critics. That is a distinction that should always be remembered in any discussion on literary criticism. Many writers, wearied by the slings and arrows of outrageous critics, have settled down into the easy conviction that all criticism is a waste of words. Disraeli dismissed the whole brood of critics in the saying that critics are those who have failed inliterature. This, of course, is a libel on a reputable art. The success of such critics as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Gosse is literary success as desirable as that of most poets or novelists. At the same time, there is a half-truth in the saying of Disraeli. There is no critic who does more injury to the reputation of his art than the embittered failure—the man who has shouted in the world’s ear and has yet not made himself heard. To speak to a deaf man makes some people angry: to speak to a deaf world has the same effect on many writers. Nature is kind, and she enables writers of this sort to deceive themselves into thinking that their ill-natured egoism is a sort of divine anger on behalf of great art. Their self-righteousness masks itself as literary piety. Coleridge a hundred years ago noticed the irritability of minor poets—“men of undoubted talents but not of genius,” whose tempers are “rendered yet more irritable by their desire toappearmen of genius.” That is the irritation that is the cause of so much bad criticism. The critic who feels irritated should begin to suspect himself, and ask himself whether it is the excellences or the faults of the work he is criticising that have put him in a temper. We are often told in these days that criticism is too gentle. In a world in which such a mass of criticism is being written it is difficultto sum up the tendencies of the whole period in a phrase. There may be an excess of unintelligent praise, but there is also, it seems to me, an excess of unintelligent carping and ill-tempered denigration. The present age, like Coleridge’s, might be described as “this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail.”
Not that even men of genius have always been just to each other. Byron was unjust to Shakespeare and Keats: Keats was unjust to Pope. But we do not demand sound criticism as a right from a great poet, who may easily feel the partiality of a specialist. The meanness of the mean critic is of quite another sort. He is a fox without a tail, who could only feel important in a world of foxes without tails. He is always in search of a standard according to which even he will have a chance of seeming great. That is why in every generation good writers are attacked and dull writers are exalted by this sort of critic. The cult of the dull, of the mediocre, is necessary in order that he, too, may win some reverence. The whole thing is, it seems to me, a pathetic delusion. The critic may for a timeorganise fame for dull painters and dull writers, and he may win a year’s or ten years’ praise by doing so. But all the time he is losing that generous and disinterested spirit which is one of the most precious possessions of the artist. The ordinary writer sets out with the hope of qualifying for a place in the temple of fame: he ends too often by merely qualifying for a place in theDunciad. He may be a man of one talent, which would serve well enough if put to proper uses, but he prefers to hide it and to pretend that it is ten, railing all the while at others on the ground that they have only five. I used to think that it was un-Christian of the Founder of Christianity to give the man with one talent so poor a name compared to the man with five or the man with ten. But I have long since come to see that in doing so he spoke out of a profound knowledge of human nature. The man with one talent is the most likely of all to make no use of it. He does not see that even his poverty may be turned into riches, as is obvious when one remembers such Lilliputian and immortal poets as Lovelace. He is blinded by a sense of his insignificance. He has the false humility of the frog, which is not content to be a first-rate frog but must try to swell itself into a bull.
The spectacle of the bad critic would be matter for pity were it not that he has some influence on the immediate fate of good writers. He cannot prevent the recognition of a Keats, but he can delay it. “Mr. Hunt,” saidBlackwood’s, “is a small poet, but he is a clever man. Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities, which he has done everything in his power to spoil.... We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture £50 upon anything he can write.” The attacks on Keats, it has been contended, were animated by political rather than literary rivalry. But, whatever their origin, they were a crime against the spirit of disinterestedness, which is the holy spirit of criticism. Niggardliness with praise is as shabby a vice as niggardliness with money, and I have often noticed that the man who is a miser with the one is a miser with the other. It is the most unattractive form of selfishness. The critics, however, did not write down Keats: they succeeded only in writing down themselves. And yet, every now and then, we find someone clamouring for a return of the good old days ofBlackwood’sand theQuarterly. Are our own days, then, lacking in “foolish, trivial, almost ostentatiously dishonest” criticism? It would be pleasant to think so. ButI suspect that folly and dishonesty have not disappeared but have merely changed their style. What is needed in criticism to-day, as always, is the sympathetic imagination. A fool with a sledge-hammer is of no service to literature. We need the comic sense to laugh at folly, the moral sense to make war on cant. There is no need for wrath in criticism except in presence of pretentiousness. The pretentious is the grand enemy of literature as of religion. But in regard to the small sins of literature, we may as well cultivate the same tolerance that a good-natured man feels towards the small sins of life. To be tolerant is not to resign either one’s moral or artistic standards. The greatest moralists of the world have been the most tolerant. Intolerance, indeed, is only a part of the general cult of dullness. It would confine the arts to a coterie, and steal Shakespeare himself from the world at large, on the ground that the world cannot appreciate him. It would turn literature into a pedantic mystery, and make an end of it as a noble entertainment. But, alas, intolerance and dullness are immortal, and we shall always have a war between them, on the one hand, and the Keatses and the Molières on the other. And the Keatses and the Molières will go on writing, and it may be that they would not be so firmly rooted if it were not for the fiercewind of stupid words that so constantly assails them. All may be for the best. Without dullness to contend against, beauty and wit might succumb to Capua.