COTERIE CRITICISM
A young critic was recently so obliging as to send me the proof of an article in the hope that I might find something in it to interest me. I did, but not, I imagine, what was expected. The article discussed a modern author of European reputation, and incidentally compared his mind and his style with that of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. These three, it appeared, were contemporary English novelists, and—here was the interesting thing to me in our young critic’s article—I had never heard of one of them. They were evidently “intellectuals”—the whole tenor of the article showed that—the idols of some young and naturally solemn critical “school,” familiar classics, I dare say, in Chelsea studios and Girton or Newnham rooms. One often wonders what these serious young people are reading, and here, it seemed, was a valuable light. They must be reading, at all events, Mr. X., and Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. Otherwise, our young critic would never have referred to them with such gravity and with so confident an assumption that his particular set of readers would know all about them. And yet the collocation of these three names, these coterieclassics, with that of the great European author, famous throughout the whole world of polite letters, struck one as infinitely grotesque. It showed so naïve a confusion of literary “values,” so queer a sense of proportion and congruity. It was, in short, coterie criticism.
There seems to be a good deal of that about just now. One sees innumerable reviews of innumerable poets, which one supposes to be written by other poets, so solemnly do the writers take their topic and their author and themselves. And for the most part this writing bears the mark of “green, unknowing youth”—the bland assumption that literature was invented yesterday, and that, since the Armistice, we cannot but require a brand-new set of literary canons, estimates, and evaluations. Evidently our young warriors have come back from the front with their spirit ofcamaraderiestill glowing within them. Well, youth will be served, and we must resign ourselves, with a helpless shrug, to a deluge of crude over-estimates, enthusiastic magnifications of the ephemeral, and solemn examinations of the novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. And we must be prepared to see the old reputations going down like a row of ninepins. We shall have to make a polite affectation of listening to the young gentlemen who dismiss Meredith as “pretentious” and tell us that Hardy “can’t write” and that Anatole France isvieux jeu. For if you are always adoring the new because it is new, then you may aswell make a complete thing of it by decrying the old because it is old. The breath you can spare from puffing the “Georgians” up you may as well use for puffing the “Victorians” out. And thus the world wags.
What is more, it is thus that the history of literature gets itself evolved. For it is time that I tried to see what good can be said of the coteries, as well as what ill, and this, I think, can be said for them—that they keep the ball rolling. It is they, with their foolish face of praise, who discover the new talents and begin the new movements. If you are always on the pounce for novelties you must occasionally “spot a winner” and find a novelty that the outer world ratifies into a permanency. The minor Elizabethan dramatists were once the darlings of a coterie, but Webster and one or two others still survive. The Lakists were once coterie poets, and, if Southey has petered out, Wordsworth remains. Of course they make awful “howlers.” A coterie started the vogue of that terribly tiresome “Jean Christophe,” of Romain Rolland, and where is it now? On the other hand, a coterie “discovered” Pater, and it was a real find; the world will not willingly let die “Marius” or the “Renaissance.” Henry James began as the idol of a coterie, and “The Golden Bowl” is not yet broken. It may be—who knows?—that the novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. will by and by range themselves proudly on our shelves alongside Fielding and Jane and Meredith and Hardy.
But while these young reputations are still to make in the great world, let us not, as Mrs. Gamp says, proticipate; let us keep our high estimate of them modestly to ourselves, and not stick them up on the classic shelf among the best bindings before their time. What makes it worse is that the coteries are apt to have no classic shelf. Their walls are lined and their boudoir tables littered with new books, and nothing but new books. Women are great offenders in this way, especially the women whom American journals call “Society Ladies”—who are accustomed, in the absence of contradiction and criticism and other correctives (tabooed as “bad form”), to mistake their wayward fancies for considered judgments. We want a modern Molière to write us anotherFemmes Savantes. (I present the idea to Mr. Bernard Shaw. They have dubbed him “the English Molière.” Well, here’s a chance for him to make good.) There is Lady Dulcibella. She is always recommending you a new book that nobody else has ever heard of. “Oh, how perfectly sweet of you to call on this horrid wet afternoon!Haveyou read ‘Mes Larmes’? It’s written by a Russian actress with such wonderful red hair, you can’t think, and they say she was a princess, until those dreadful Bolshevists, you know. We met her at Florence in the winter, and everybody said she was just like one of the Botticellis in the Accademia. Theydosay that Guido da Verona—or D’Annunzio, or somebody (don’t you think that horrid littleD’Annunzio is just like a frog?)—was quite mad about her. But ‘Mes Larmes’ is perfectlysweet, and don’t forget to order it. Two lumps or three?” And listen to the chatter of some of those wonderfully bedizened ladies who variegate, if they don’t exactly decorate, the stalls of one of our Sunday coterie theatres. The queer books they rave about! The odd Moldo-Wallachian or Syro-Phœnician dramatists they have discovered!
All this, it is only fair to remember, may leave our young critic inviolate. After all, he may belong to no coterie, or only to a coterie of one; he may have sound critical reasons for the faith that is in him about Mr. X., and Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. And even if he does represent a coterie, he might, I suppose, find a fairly effective retort to some of my observations. “You talk of our love of novelties for novelty’s sake. But you have admitted that, if we always go for the new, we must sometimes light on the true. What we really go for is life. The new is more lively than the old. The actual, the present, the world we are at this moment living in, has more to say to us in literature than the old dead world, the ‘sixty years since’ of your classic Scott. The classic, as Stendhal said, is what pleased our grandfathers; but I am out to please my grandfather’s grandson. And our coteries, I dare say, are often kept together by the mere docility of mind, the imitative instinct, of their members. But is there not a good deal of mere docility among the old fogeyparty, the people who reject the new because it is new and admire the old because it is old? Is not this mere imitative instinct at work also among the upholders of literary traditions and the approved classics? Absurdity for absurdity, the youthful coterie is no worse than the old fogey crowd.” To put all straight I will now go and read the novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z.