IV

CRITICISM AND THE MAN

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 takesthe 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, andseek 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 doesnot 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 alwaysperfect 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 intangibleand 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 coloredor 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, andyou 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 highestvalue 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 speakshisword,—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.

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 ofpoetic 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 withengouement, 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 GermanGemeinheit, or commonness, stand up before the Frenchesprit? 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 streaminto 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 criticsabout 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 tosettle 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.

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 ofthe 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.

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 vitalin 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 thetrue, 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.

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 fromRuskin 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.

Criticism deals with both aspects. It is objective when it is directed upon objective or verifiable facts; it is subjective when it is directed upon subjective facts. It is an objective fact, for instance, that such a man as Shakespeare lived in such a country in such a time, that he wrote various plays of such and such a character, and that these plays were founded upon other plays or legends or histories. But the poetic truth, the poetic beauty of these plays, their covert meanings, the philosophy that lies back of them, are not in the same sense objective facts. In these respects no two persons read them just alike. Hamlet has been interpreted in many ways. Which Hamlet is the true one, Goethe’s, or Coleridge’s, or Hazlitt’s, or Kean’s, or Booth’s? Each is true, sofar as it expresses a real and vital conception begotten by the poet upon the critic’s or the actor’s mind. The beauty of a poem or any work of art is not an objective something patent to all; it is an experience of the mind which we each have in different degrees. In fact, the field of our æsthetic perceptions and enjoyments is no more fixed and definite than is the field of our religious perceptions and enjoyments, and we diverge from one another in the one case as much as in the other. This divergence is of course, in both cases, mainly superficial; it is in form and not in essence. Religions perish, but religion remains. Styles of art pass, but art abides. Go deep enough and we all agree, because human nature is fundamentally the same everywhere. All that I mean to say is that the outward expressions of art differ in different ages and among different races as much as do the outward expressions of religion. In all these matters the subjective element plays an important part. Is Browning a greater poet than Tennyson? Is Thackeray a greater novelist than Dickens? Has Newman a better style than Arnold? Is Poe our greatest poet, as many British critics think? These and all similar questions involve the personal equation of the critic, and his answer to them will be given more by his unconscious than by his conscious self. The appeal is not so much to his rational faculties as to his secret affinities or his æsthetic perceptions. You can move a man’s reason, but you cannot by any similar process change his taste or his faith. If weare not by nature committed to certain views, we are committed to a certain habit of mind, to a certain moral and spiritual attitude, which makes these views almost inevitable to us. “It is not given to all minds,” says Sainte-Beuve, “to feel and to relish equally the peculiar beauties and excellences of Massillon,” or, it may be added, of any other author, especially if he be of marked individuality.

We do not and cannot all have the same measure of appreciation of Emerson, or Wordsworth, or Ruskin, or Whitman, or Browning. To enjoy these men “sincerely and without weariness is a quality and almost a peculiarity of certain minds, which may serve to define them.” Sainte-Beuve himself was chiefly interested in an author’s character,—“in what was most individual in his personality.” He had no arbitrary rules, touchstones, or systems, but pressed each new work gently, almost caressingly, till it gave up its characteristic quality and flavor.

But the objective consideration of the merits of a man’s work does not and cannot preclude or measure the subjective attraction or repulsion or indifference which we do or do not feel toward that work. Something deeper and more potent than reason is at work here. Back of the most impartial literary judgment lies the fact that the critic is a person; that he is of a certain race, family, temperament, environment; that he is naturally cold or sympathetic, liberal or reactionary, tolerant or intolerant, and therefore has his individual likes and dislikes; that certain types attract him more than others;that, of two poets of equal power, the voice of one moves him more than that of the other. Something as subtle and vital and hard to analyze as the flavor of a fruit, and analogous to it, makes him prefer this poet to that. One may see clearly the superiority of Milton over Wordsworth, and yet cleave to the latter. How beautiful is “Lycidas,” yet it left Dr. Johnson cold and critical. There is much more of a cry—a real cry of the heart—in Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” One feels that the passion is real in one, and assumed in the other. Is “Lycidas” therefore less a creative work? The affirmative side of the question is not without support. Johnson undervalued some of Gray’s best work; the touch of sympathy was lacking. This touch of sympathy does not wait upon the critical judgment, but often underruns and outruns it. It is said that Miss Martineau found “Tom Jones” dull reading, that Charlotte Brontë cared not for Jane Austen, and that Thackeray placed Cooper above Scott,—all, no doubt, from a lack of the quickening touch of sympathy.

As a rule, we have more sympathy with the authors of our own country than with those of another. Few Englishmen can do justice to Victor Hugo, and even to some Frenchmen he is a “gigantic blusterer.” It is equally hard for a Frenchman to appreciate Carlyle, and how absurd seems Voltaire’s verdict upon Shakespeare,—“a drunken savage”!

The French mind is preëminently a critical mind, yet in France there are and have been as many schools of criticism as of poetry or philosophy or romance.Different types of mind, individual idiosyncrasy, opposing theories and methods, stand out just as clearly in this branch as in any other branch of mental activity. From Madame de Staël down through Barante, Villemain, Nisard, Sainte-Beuve, to Brunetière and the critics of our own day, criticism has been individualistic, and has reflected as many types of mind and points of view as there have been critics. Where shall we look for the final criticism? First it is classicism that rules, then it is romanticism, then naturalism, and next, we are told, it is to be idealism. Whichever it is, it is true enough when uttered by vital and earnest minds, and serves its purpose. There are many excellences, but where is the supreme excellence? The naturalism of Sainte-Beuve is excellent, the positivism of Nisard is excellent, the classicism of Brunetière is excellent, and the determinism of Taine yields interesting results; but all are relative, all are experimental, all are subject to revision. It is given to no man to have a monopoly of truth. It is given to no poet to have a monopoly of beauty. There is one beauty of Milton, another of Wordsworth, another of Burns, another of Tennyson. To seize upon and draw out the characteristic beauty of each, and give his reader a lively sense of it, is the business of the critic.

VIII

Our reading is a search for the excellent, for the vital and characteristic, which may assume as many and diverse forms in art and literature as it doesin life and nature. The savant, the scientist, the moralist, the philosopher, may have pleasure in a work that gives little or no pleasure to the literary artist. Criticism may be looked upon as a search for these various values or various phases of truth, which the critic expresses in terms of his own taste, knowledge, insight, etc., for scientific values, philosophical values, literary and poetic values, or moral and religious values, according to the subject upon which the critical mind is directed. No two men look for exactly the same values, nor have the same measure of appreciation of them. Emerson and Lowell, for instance, make quite different demands and form different estimates of the poets they read. Lowell lays the emphasis upon the conventional literary values, Emerson more upon spiritual and religious values. An Englishman will find values in the poets of his own country that a Frenchman does not find, and a Frenchman, values in his poets that an Englishman does not find. See how Schérer and Taine handled Milton. Milton’s great epic has poetic and literary value, often of a high order, but ad philosophy or religion it is grotesque.

Yet let me not seem to underrate the value of what is called judicial criticism. Criticism as an act of judgment, as a disinterested endeavor to see the thing as it is in itself and as it stands related to other things, is justly jealous of our personal tastes and preferences. These tastes and preferences may blindus to the truth. Can we admire above them, or even against them? To cherish no writers but those of our own stripe or mental complexion is the way of the half cultured. Can we rise to a disinterested view? The danger of individualism in letters is caprice, bias, partial views; the danger of intellectualism is the cold, the colorless, the formal.

The ideal critic will blend the two; he will be disinterested and yet sympathetic, individual and yet escape caprice and bias, warm with interest and yet cool with judgment; surrendering himself to his subject and yet not losing himself in it, upholding tradition and yet welcoming new talent, giving the personal equation free play without blurring the light of the impersonal intelligence. From the point of view of intellectualism, criticism seeks to eliminate the personal equation, that which is private and peculiar to us as individuals, and to base criticism upon something like universal principles. What we crave, what our minds literally feed upon, may blind us to the truly excellent. Ourwantsare personal; what we should aim at is an excellence that is impersonal. When we rise to the sphere of the disinterested, we lose sight of our individual tastes and predilections. The question then is, not what we want, not what we have a taste for, but what we are capable of appreciating. Can we appreciate the best? Can we share the universal mind to the extent of delighting in the best that has been known and thought in the world? Emerson said he was always glad to meet people who saw the superiority of Shakespeareto all other poets. If we prefer Pope to Shakespeare, as we are apt to at a certain age, we may know by that that there is an excellence beyond our reach. It is certain that the mass of readers will not appreciate the best literature, but only the second or third best. A man’s æsthetic perceptions may be broadened and educated as well as his intellectual. An unread man feels little interest beyond his own neighborhood,—the personal doings of the men and women he sees and knows. Educate him a little, give him his county paper, and the sphere of his interests is widened; a little more, and he takes an interest in his State; more still, and he broadens out to his whole country; still more, and the whole world is within his sympathy and ken. So in the aesthetic sphere; he gets beyond his personal tastes and wants into the great world currents of literature and art. He can appreciate works written in other ages and lands, and that are quite foreign to his own temperament and outlook. This is to be disinterested. To emancipate the taste is as much as to emancipate the intellect; to rise above one’s personal affinities is as much as to rise above one’s personal prejudices and superstitions. The boy of a certain stamp has an affinity for the dime novel; if we can lift him to an appreciation of Scott, or Thackeray, or Hawthorne, how have we emancipated his taste! So that Brunetière was right in saying that, in art and literature, the beginning of wisdom is to distrust what we like.Distrust, not repudiate. Let us examine first and see upon what grounds we like it,—see if weoughtto likeit; see if it is akin to that which is of permanent value in the world’s best thought. A French critic tells a story of a man who sat cool and unmoved under a sermon that made the people about him shed torrents of tears, and who excused himself by saying, “I do not belong to this parish.” One’s tastes must be broader than one’s parish. I suppose any of our religious brethren would feel a little shy of weeping in the church of a religious denomination not his own. Our religion is no more emancipated than are our tastes. Lowell says there are born Popists and born Wordsworthians; but the more these types can get out of their limitations and appreciate one another, the more they are emancipated.

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