CRITICISM AND CREATION
A play of Dryden’s has been successfully revived by the Phœnix Society. One or two others might be tried, but not many. For most of Dryden’s plays, as the curious may satisfy themselves by reading them, are as dead as a doornail. They bore us in the reading, and would simply drive us out of the theatre. Some of Dryden’s non-dramatic poems still permit themselves to be read, but the permission is rarely sought by modern readers, apart from candidates for some academic examination in English literature, who have no choice. Yet we all render him lip service as a great poet. How many are there to pay him proper homage as a great critic? For a great critic he was, and, moreover, our first dramatic critic in time as well as in importance. He discussed not the details of this or that play, but the fundamental principles of drama. He abounded in ideas, and expressed them with a conversational ease which, in his time, was an entirely new thing. But it would be impertinent to praise Dryden’s prose style after Johnson’s exhaustive eulogy and the delicate appreciations of Professor Ker. What I would point out is that all Dryden’s critical workcan still be read with pleasure, while most of his dramatic work cannot be read at all. And the humour of it is that I shall at once be told the dramatic work was “creative,” while the critical was not.
This distinction, an essentially false one, as I shall hope to show, is still a great favourite with our authors of fiction; they “create,” their critics do not. Authors who write, in Flaubert’s phrase, likecochers de fiacre, and who are particularly given to this contrast, it would be cruel to deprive of a comforting illusion; but authors of merit and repute also share it, and to them I would urge my modest plea for a reconsideration of the matter.
What does the dramatist, or writer of fiction in general, create? Actions and characters? Not so, for these are only created in real life, by the contending volitions of real men and the impact between their volitions and external reality. The author creates images of actions and characters, or, in other words, expresses his intuitions of life. When the intuition is vivid, when the image is a Falstaff, a Baron Hulot, a Don Quixote, a Colonel Newcome, we are apt to think of it as a real person. And they are, in truth, as real to us as anybody in the actual world whom we have never met but only know of. For the historic person, unmet, is, just like the imaginary person, only a bundle for us of our intuitions. Julius Cæsar was a real person, but we can only know of him, as we know of Mr. Pickwick,by hearsay. These vivid intuitions are what your author likes to call “creations.” So they are. That is the magic of art.
And because, to the vast majority of men, their intuitions (in the case of actual reality encountered, their perceptions) of other men and their actions are their most interesting experience, art is allowed without challenge to arrogate to itself this quality of “creation.” There is a biographical dictionary of Balzac’s personages—some 2,000, if I remember rightly—of whom a few are actual historical people. But, in fact, you make no distinction. The one set are as real to you as the others. In this way theComédie Humainedoes, as its author said, compete with theÉtat Civil. There are few ideas, speculations, judgments in Balzac that are worth a rap; when he tried abstract thought he was apt to achieve nonsense. But very few readers want abstract thought. They want “to know people,” “to see people.” Balzac makes “people,” tells you all about their families, their incomes, their loves and hates, “splendours and miseries,” their struggles, their orgies, their squalor, their death. That is “creative” art. Let us admire it. Let us revel in it. Let us be profoundly thankful for it.
But when, as so frequently happens, one hears some fourteenth-rate yarn-spinner, who also makes “people,” but people who were not worth making, people who are puppets or the mere phantoms of a greensick brain—when one hears this gentlemanclaiming kinship with Balzac or with my friend the distinguished novelist and real artist already mentioned, as a “creator” one is inclined to smile. “Creation” is a blessed word. But the thing created may be quite valueless.
And so it is, precisely, with criticism. For criticism is also “creative.” But it does not create images of people or their lives; it creates thought, ideas, concepts. That is, it builds up something new out of the artist’s intuitions and exhibits the relations between them. Here, in the conceptual world, we are in a different region from the intuitional world of the artist. Those who care to enter it, who feel at home in it, are comparatively few; the absence of personal interest, of “people,” makes it seem cold to the average, gregarious man. “People” are a natural, ideas an acquired, taste. But the one set are just as much a “creation” as the other. And in the one set just as in the other the thing created may not be worth creating. Ideas, expositions, illustrations in criticism have a distressing habit of being as poor and conventional and mechanical as many a novelist’s or playwright’s characters and life histories. There is not a pin to choose between them. For as the one thing that matters in art is the artist behind it, so the critic behind it is the one thing that matters in criticism.
These are elementary commonplaces. But they need restating from time to time. For the average man, with all his interest in life fixed on “people,”is always falling into the error that the novelist or playwright makes something, while the critic makes nothing. And your fourteenth-rate author, sharing the temperament of the average man, falls into the same error and seems, indeed, inordinately proud of it. He seems to say: “Why, you, good master critic, couldn’t even begin to do whatI, the ‘creative’ artist, do”; and he would probably be surprised by the answer that it is the critic’s very critical faculty, his endowment of judgment and taste, which makes the writing of bad plays or novels impossible, because repugnant to him. It is precisely because the critical faculty is so rare a thing that so many bad novels and plays get themselves written.
But enough of these sharp distinctions between the “creation” of images and the “creation” of concepts! Is not a union of the two, like the union of butler and lady’s-maid, as described by Mr. Crichton, “the happiest of all combinations”? Who does not feel how immensely the mere story part of “Tom Jones” gains by the critical chapter introductions? And, on the other hand, how the mere critical part of Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poesy” gains by the little touches of story, from the opening moment when “they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently” to the close at Somerset Stairs, where “they went up through a crowd of French people, who were merrily dancing in the open air”?