THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM
Every critic or would-be critic has his own little theory of criticism, as every baby inUtopia Limitedhad its own ickle prospectus. This makes him an avid, but generally a recalcitrant, student of other people’s theories. He is naturally anxious, that is, to learn what the other people think about what inevitably occupies so much of his own thoughts; at the same time, as he cannot but have formed his own theory after his own temperament, consciously or not, he must experience a certain discomfort when he encounters other theories based on temperaments alien from his own. You have, in fact, the converse of Stendhal’s statement that every commendation fromconfrèretoconfrèreis a certificate of resemblance; every sign of unlikeness provokes the opposite of commendation. So I took up with somewhat mixed feelings an important leading article in theLiterary Supplementon “The Function of Criticism.” Important because its subject is, as Henry James said once in a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, among “the highest speculations that can engage the human mind.” (Oho! I should like to hear Mr. Bottles or any otherhomme sensuel moyenonthat!) Well, after reading the article, I have theprofoundest respect for the writer, whoever he may be; he knows what he is talking aboutau fond, and can talk admirably about it. But then comes in that inevitable recalcitrancy. It seems to me that if the writer is right, then most art and criticism are on the wrong tack. Maybe they are—the writer evidently thinks they are—but one cannot accept that uncomfortable conclusion offhand, and so one cannot but ask oneself whether the writerisright, after all.
He is certainly wrong about Croce. The ideal critic, he says, “will not accept from Croce the thesis that all expression is art; for he knows that if expression means anything it is by no means all art.” Now the very foundation-stone of the Crocean æsthetic is that art is the expression of intuitions; when you come to concepts, or the relations of intuitions, though the expression of them is art, the concepts themselves (what “expression means”) are not; you will have passed out of the region of art. Thus your historian, logician, or zoologist, say, has a style of his own; that side of him is art. But historical judgments, logic, or zoology are not. Croce discusses this distinction exhaustively, and, I should have thought, clearly. Yet here our leader-writer puts forward as a refutation of Croce a statement carefully made by Croce himself. But this is a detail which does not affect the writer’s main position. I only mention it as one of the many misrepresentations of Croce which students of thatphilosopher are, by this time, used to accepting as, apparently, inevitable.
Now, says the writer, the critic must have a philosophy and, what is more, a philosophy of a certain sort. That the critic must have a philosophy we should, I suppose, all agree; for the critic is a historian, and a historian without a theory of realities, a system of values,i.e., a philosophy, has no basis for his judgments—he is merely a chronicler. (And a chronicler, let me say in passing, is precisely what I should call the writer’s “historical critic”—who “essentially has no concern with the greater or less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces—their existence is alone sufficient for him.”) But what particular philosophy must the critic have? It must be, says the writer, “a humanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, and subject to an intimate, organic governance by an ideal of the good life.” Beware of confusing this ideal of good life with mere conventional morality. Art is autonomous and therefore independent of that. No; “an ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and the organic force of a true ideal,must inevitablybe æsthetic. There is no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or conceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms.” And so we get back to Plato and the Platonic ideas and, generally, to “the Greeks for the principles of art and criticism.” “The secret” of the humanistic philosophy “lies in Aristotle.”
But is not this attempt to distinguish between conventional morality and an ideal of the good life, æsthetically formed, rather specious? At any rate, the world at large, for a good many centuries, has applauded, or discountenanced, Greek criticism as essentially moralistic—as importing into the region of æsthetics the standards of ordinary, conventional morality. That is, surely, a commonplace about Aristotle. His ideal tragic hero is to be neither saint nor utter villain, but a character between these two extremes. Further, he must be illustrious, like Œdipus or Thyestes (Poetics, ed. Butcher, XIII. 3). Again, tragedy is an imitation of persons who are above the common level (XV. 8). It seems to me that the standards applied here are those of our ordinary, or conventional, morality, and I am only confused by the introduction of the mysterious “ideal of the good life.” It seems to me—that may be my stupidity—but it seemed so, also, to our forefathers, for it was this very moralism of Greek criticism that led men for so many centuries to demand “instruction” from art. And that is why it was such a feather in Dryden’s cap (Dryden, of whom our leader-writer has a poor opinion, as a critic without a philosophy) to have said the memorable and decisive thing: “delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights.”
This “ideal of good life” leads our leader-writerfar—away up into the clouds. Among the activities of the human spirit art takes “the place of sovereignty.” It “is the manifestation of the ideal in human life.” This attitude, of course, will not be altogether unfamiliar to students of æsthetics. Something not unlike it has been heard before from the “mystic” æstheticians of a century ago. It leaves me unconvinced. I cannot but think that that philosophy makes out a better case which assigns to art, as intuition-expression, not the “place of sovereignty” but the place of foundation in the human spirit; for which it is not flower nor fruit, but root. You see, Croce, like “cheerfulness” in Boswell’s story of the other philosopher, will come “breaking in.”