ON LITERARY CRITICISM
THE saddest thing about the trade of writing is that the writer can never know, nor hope to know, if he is a good workman. In literary criticism there are no criteria, no accepted standards of excellence by which to test the work. Sainte-Beuve says that the art of criticism consists in saying the first thing that comes into one’s head. Doubtless he was thinking of his own head, a fairly good one. There is a difference between the first thing that comes into one head and the first thing that comes into another; and it is not always the best kind of head that concerns itself with literary criticism.
Having no standards, criticism is an erring guide. Its pronouncements are more interesting than valuable, and interesting chiefly from the insight that they give into the mind, not of the writer criticised, but of the writer criticising. Hence the greater interest that they have when delivered by one of whomthe reader already knows something. So the newspapers are not altogether unwise when asking an eminent merchant to pass judgment on a new poet, or a distinguished soldier to “sit” in the case of a rising young novelist. We learn something about the merchant or the soldier, and that may amuse. As a guide to literary excellence even the most accomplished critic’s judgment on his contemporaries is of little value. Posterity more frequently reverses than affirms it.
The reason is not far to seek. An author’s work is usually the product of his environment. He collaborates with his era; his co-workers are time and place. All his neighbors and all the conditions in which they live have a hand in the work. His own individuality, unless uncommonly powerful and original, is “subdued to what it works in.” But this is true, too, of his critic, whose limitations are drawn by the same iron authority. Subject to the same influences, good and bad, following the same literary fashions, the critic who is contemporary with his author holds his court in the market-place and polls a fortuitous jury. In diagnosing the disorder of a person suspected of hydrophobia the physicianought not to have been bitten by the same dog.
The taste of the many being notoriously bad and that of the few dubious, what is the author to do for judgment on his work? He is to wait. In a few centuries, more or less, may arise a critic that we call Posterity. This fellow will have as many limitations, probably, as the other had—will bow the knee to as many literary Baäls and err as widely from the paths leading to the light. But his false gods will not be those of to-day, whose hideousness will disclose itself to his undevout vision, and in his deviations from the true trail he will cross and chart our tracks. Better than all, he will know and care little about the lives and characters, the personalities, of those of us whose work has lasted till his time. On that coign of vantage he will stand and deliver a juster judgment. It will enable him to judge our work with impartiality, as if it had fallen from the skies or sprung up from the ground without human agency.
One can hardly overrate the advantage to the critic of ignorance of his author. Biographies of men of action are well enough; the lives that such men live are all there isof them except themselves. But men of thought—that is different. You can not narrate thought, nor describe it, yet it is the only relevant thing in the life of an author. Anything else darkens counsel. We go to biography for side lights on an author’s work; to his work for side lights on his character. The result is confusion and disability, for personal character and literary character have little to say to each other, despite the fact that so tremendous a chap as Taine builded an entire and most unearthly biography of Shakspeare on no firmer foundation than the “internal evidence” of the plays and sonnets. Of all the influences that make for incapable criticism the biographer of authors is the most pernicious. One needs not be a friend to organized labor to wish that the fellow’s working hours might be reduced from twenty-four to eight.
Neither the judgment of the populace nor that of the critics being of value to an author concerned about his rank in the hierarchy of letters, and that of posterity being a trifle slow, he seems to be reduced to the expedient of taking his own word for it. And his opinion of himself may not be so far out ofthe way. Read Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann and see how accurately the great man appraised himself.
When scratched in a newspaper Heine said: “I am to be judged in the assizes of literature. I know who I am.”
About the shrine of every famous author awaits a cloud of critics to pay an orderly and decorous homage to his genius. There is no crowding: if one of them sees that he can not perform his prostration until after his saint shall have been forgotten along with the intellectual miracles he wrought, that patient worshiper turns aside to level his shins at another shrine. There are shrines enough for all, God knows!
The most mischievous, because the ablest, of all this sycophantic crew is Mr. Howells, who finds every month, and reads, two or three books—always novels—of high literary merit. As no man who has anything else to do can critically read more than two or three books in a month—and I will say for Mr. Howells that he is a conscientious reader—and as some hundreds are published in the same period, one is curious to know how many books of high literary merit he wouldfind if he could read them all. But Mr. Howells is no ordinary sycophant—not he. True, having by mischance read a book divinely bad, even when judged according to his own test, and having resolved to condemn nothing except in a general way—as the artillerists in the early days of the Civil War used to “shell the woods”—he does not purpose to lose his labor, and therefore commends the book along with the others; but as a rule he distributes the distinctions that he has to confer according to a system—to those, namely, whose work in fiction most nearly resembles his own. That is his way of propagating the Realistic faith which his poverty of imagination has compelled him to adopt and his necessities to defend. “Ah, yes, a beautiful animal,” said the camel of the horse—“if he only had a hump!”
To show what literary criticism has accomplished in education of the public taste I beg to refer the reader to any number of almost any magazine. Here is one, for instance, containing a paper by one Bowker on contemporary English novelists—he novelists and she novelists—to the number of about forty. And only the “eminent” ones are mentioned.To most American readers some of the books of most of these authors are more or less familiar, and nine in ten of these readers will indubitably accept Mr. Bowker’s high estimate of the genius of the authors themselves. These have one good quality—they are industrious: most of them have published ten to forty novels each, the latter number being the favorite at this date and eliciting Mr. Bowker’s lively admiration. The customary rate of production is one a year, though two are not unusual, there being nothing in the law forbidding. Mr. Bowker has the goodness to tell us all he knows about these persons’ methods of work; that is to say, all that they have told him. The amount of patient research, profound thought and systematic planning that go to the making of one of their books is (naturally) astonishing. Unfortunately it falls just short of the amount that kills.
Add to the forty eminent English novelists another forty American, equally eminent—at least in their own country—and similarly industrious. We have then an average annual output of, say, eighty novels which have the right to expect to be widely read and enthusiasticallyreviewed. This in two countries, in one of which the art of novel writing is dead, in the other of which it has not been born. Truly this is an age of growing literary activity; our novelists are as lively and diligent as maggots in the carcass of a horse. There is a revival of baseball, too.
If our critics were wiser than their dupes could this mass of insufferable stuff be dumped upon the land? Could the little men and foolish women who write it command the persevering admiration of their fellow-creatures, who think it a difficult thing to do? I make no account here of the mere book-reporters of the newspapers, whose purpose and ambition are, not to guide the public taste but to follow it, and who are therefore in no sense critics. The persons whom I am considering are those ingenious gentlemen who in the magazines and reviews are expected to, and do, write of books with entire independence of their own market. Are there anywhere more than one, two or three like Percival Pollard, with “Gifford’s heavy hand” to “crush without remorse” the intolerable rout of commonplace men and women swarming innumerous upon the vacant seats of thedead giants and covering the slopes of Parnassus like a flock of crows?
Your critic of widest vogue and chief authority among us is he who is best skilled in reading between the lines; in interpreting an author’s purpose; in endowing him with a “problem” and noting his degree of skill in its solution. The author—stupid fellow!—did not write between the lines, had no purpose but to entertain, was unaware of a problem. So much the worse for him; so much the better for his expounder. Interlinear cipher, purpose, problem, are all the critic’s own, and he derives a lively satisfaction in his creation—looks upon it and pronounces it good. Nothing is more certain than that if a writer of genius should “bring to his task” of writing a book the purposes which the critics would surely trace in the completed work the book would remain forever unwritten, to the unspeakble advantage of letters and morals.
In illustration of these remarks and suggesting them, take these book reviews in a single number ofThe Atlantic. There we learn, concerning Mr. Cable, that his controlling purpose inThe Grandissimeswas thatof “presenting the problem of the reorganization of Southern society”—that “the book was in effect a parable”; that inDr. Sevierhe “essayed to work out through personal relations certain problems [always a problem or two] which vexed him regarding poverty and labor”; that inBonaventurehe “sets himself another task,” which is “to work out [always something to ‘work out’] the regeneration of man through knowledge”—a truly formidable “task.” Of the author ofQueen Money, we are told by the same expounder that she has “set herself no task beyond her power,” but “had it in mind to trace the influence of the greed for wealth upon a section of contemporaneous society.” Of Mr. Bellamy, author ofLooking Backward(the heroine of which is not Mrs. Lot) we are confidently assured in ailing metaphor that “he feels intensely the bitter inequalities of the present order” of things and “thinks he sees a remedy,”—our old friends again: the “problem” and the “solution”—both afterthoughts of Mr. Bellamy. The “task” which inMarzio’s CrucifixMarion Crawford “sets himself” is admirably simple—by a “characteristic outwardness” to protect us against “a toointimate and subtle corrosive of life.” As a savior of the world against this awful peril Crawford may justly have claimed a vote of thanks; but possibly he was content with that humbler advantage, the profit from the sale of his book. But (it may be protested) the critic who is to live by his trade must saysomething. True, but is it necessary that he live by his trade?
Carlyle’s prophecy of a time when all literature should be one vast review is in process of fulfilment. Aubrey de Vere has written a critical analysis of poetry, chiefly that of Spenser and Wordsworth. AnAtlanticman writes a critical analysis of Aubrey de Vere’s critical analysis. Shall I not write a critical analysis of theAtlanticman’s critical analysis of Aubrey de Vere’s critical analysis of poetry? I can do so adequately in three words: It is nonsense.
Spenser, also, it appears, “set himself a task,” had his “problem,” “worked it out.” “The figures of his embroidered poem,” we are told, “are conceived and used in accordance with a comprehensive doctrine of the nature of humanity, which Spenser undoubtedly meant to enforce through the medium ofhis imagination.” That is to say, the author ofThe Faerie Queenedid not “sing because he could not choose but sing,” but because he was burdened with a doctrine. He had a nut to crack and, faith! he must crack it or he would be sick. “Resolved into its moral elements” (whether by Aubrey de Vere or theAtlanticman I can only guess without reading de Vere’s work in two volumes, which God forbid!) the glowing work of Spenser is a sermon which “teaches specifically how to attain self-control and how to meet attacks from without; or rather how to seek those many forms of error which do mischief in the world, and to overcome them for the world’s welfare.” Precisely: the animal is a pig and a bird; or rather it is a fish. So much for Spenser, whom his lovers may re-read if they like in the new light of this person’s critical analysis. It is rather hard that, being dead, he can not have the advantage of going over his work with so intelligent a guide as Aubrey de Vere. He would be astonished by his own profundity.
How literary reviewing may be acceptably done in Boston may be judged by the following passage from the BostonLiterary Review:
“When Miss Emma Frances Dawson wroteAn Itinerant Houseshe was plainly possessed of a desire to emulate Poe and turn out a collection of stories which, once read, the mention of them would make the blood curdle. There is no need to say that Poe’s position is still secure, but Miss Dawson has succeeded in writing some very creditable stories of their kind.”
The reviewer that can discern in Miss Dawson’s work “a desire to emulate Poe,” or can find in it even a faint suggestion of Poe, may justly boast himself accessible to any folly that comes his way. There is no more similarity between the work of the two writers than there is between that of Dickens and that of Macaulay, or that of Addison and that of Carlyle. Poe in his prose tales deals sometimes with the supernatural; Miss Dawson always. But hundreds of writers do the same; if that constitutes similarity and suggests intentional “emulation” what shall be said of those tales which resemble one another in that element’s omission? The truth probably is that the solemn gentleman who wrote that judgment had not read Poe since childhood, and did not read Miss Dawson at all. Moreover,no excellence in her work would have saved it from his disparaging comparison if he had read it. “Poe’s position” would still have been a “secure,” for to such minds as his it is unthinkable that an established fame (no matter how, when or where established) should not signify an unapproachable merit. If he had lived in Poe’s time how he would have sneered at that writer’s attempt to emulate Walpole! And had he been a contemporary of Walpole that ambitious person would have incurred a stinging rap on the head for aspiring to displace the immortal Gormley Hobb.
The fellow goes on:
“To one steeped in the gruesome weirdness of a master of the gentle art of blood-curdling the stories are not too impressive, but he who picks up the book fresh from a fairy tale is apt to become somewhat nervous in the reading. The tales allow Miss Dawson to weave in some very pretty verse.”
The implication that Miss Dawson’s tales are intended to be “gruesome,” “blood-curdling,” and so forth, is a foolish implication. Their supernaturalism is not of that kind. The blood that they could curdle is diseasedblood which it would be at once a kindly office and a high delight to shed. And fancy this inexpressible creature calling Miss Dawson’s verse “pretty”!—theballadeof “The Sea of Sleep” “pretty”! My compliments to him:
Dull spirit, few among us be your days,The bright to damn, the fatuous to praise;And God deny, your flesh when you unload,Your prayer to live as tenant of a toad,With powers direr than your present sort:Able the wights you jump on to bewart.
Dull spirit, few among us be your days,The bright to damn, the fatuous to praise;And God deny, your flesh when you unload,Your prayer to live as tenant of a toad,With powers direr than your present sort:Able the wights you jump on to bewart.
Dull spirit, few among us be your days,The bright to damn, the fatuous to praise;And God deny, your flesh when you unload,Your prayer to live as tenant of a toad,With powers direr than your present sort:Able the wights you jump on to bewart.
Dull spirit, few among us be your days,
The bright to damn, the fatuous to praise;
And God deny, your flesh when you unload,
Your prayer to live as tenant of a toad,
With powers direr than your present sort:
Able the wights you jump on to bewart.
The latest author of “uncanny” tales to suffer from the ready reckoner’s short cut to the solution of the problem of literary merit, the ever-serviceable comparison with Edgar Allan Poe, is Mr. W. C. Morrow. Doubtless he had hoped that this cup might pass by him—had implored the rosy goddess Psora, who enjoys the critic’s person and inspires his pen, to go off duty, but it was not to be; that diligent deity is never weary of ill doing and her devotees, pursuing the evil tenor of their way, have sounded the Scotch fiddle to the customary effect. Mr. Morrow’s admirable book,The Ape, the Idiot andOther People, is gravely ascribed to the paternity of Poe, as was Miss Dawson’s before it, and some of mine before that. And until Gabriel, with one foot upon the sea and the other upon the neck of the last living critic, shall swear that the time for doing this thing is up, every writer of stories a little out of the common must suffer the same sickening indignity. To the ordinary microcephalous bibliopomps—the book-butchers of the newspapers—criticism is merely a process of marking upon the supposed stature of an old writer the supposed stature of a new, without ever having taken the trouble to measure that of the old; they accept hearsay evidence for that. Does one write “gruesome stories”?—they invoke Poe; essays?—they out with their Addison; satirical verse?—they have at him with Pope—and so on, through the entire category of literary forms. Each has its dominant great name, learned usually in the district school, easily carried in memory and obedient to the call of need. And because these strabismic ataxiates, who fondly fancy themselves shepherding auctorial flocks upon the slopes of Parnassus, are unable to write of one writer without thinking of another, theynaturally assume that the writer of whom they write is affected with the same disability and has always in mind as a model the standard name dominating his chosen field—the impeccant hegemon of the province.
Mr. Hamlin Garland, writing with the corn-fed enthusiasm of the prairies, “hails the dawn of a new era” in literature—an era which is to be distinguished by dominance of the Western man. That a great new literature is to “come out of the West” because of broad prairies and wide rivers and big mountains and infrequent boundary lines—that is a conviction dear indeed to the Western mind which has discovered that marks can be made on paper with a pen. A few years ago the Eastern mind was waiting wide-eyed to “hail the dawn” of a literature that was to be “distinctively American,” for the Eastern mind in those days claimed a share in the broad prairies, the wide rivers and the big mountains, with all the competencies, suggestions, inspirations and other appurtenances thereunto belonging—a heritage which now Mr. Garland austerely denies to any one born and“raised” on the morning side of the Alleghanies. The “distinctively American literature” has not materialized, excepting in the works of Americans distinctively illiterate; and there are no visible signs of a distinctively Western one. Even the Californian sort, so long heralded by prophets blushing with conscious modesty in the foretelling, seems loth to leave off its damnable faces and begin. The best Californian, the best Western, the best American books have the least of geographical “distinctiveness,” and most closely conform to the universal and immutable laws of the art, as known to Aristotle and Longinus.
The effect of physical-geographical environment on literary production is mostly nil; racial and educational considerations only are of controlling importance. Despite Madame de Staël’s engaging dictum that “every Englishman is an island,” the natives of that scanty plot have produced a literature which in breadth of thought and largeness of method we sons of a continent, brothers to the broad prairies, wide rivers and big mountains, have not matched and give no promise of matching. It is all very fine to be a child o’ natur’ with a home in the settin’ sun, butwhen the child o’ natur’ with a knack at scribbling pays rent to Phœbus by renouncing the incomparable advantage of strict subjection to literary law he pays too dearly.
Nothing new is to be learned in any of the great arts—the ancients looted the whole field. Nor do first-rate minds seek anything new. They are assured of primacy under the conditions of their art as they find it—under any conditions. It is the lower order of intelligence that is ingenious, inventive, alert for original methods and new forms. Napoleon added nothing to the art of war, in either strategy or tactics. Shakspeare tried no new meters, did nothing that had not been done before—merely did better what had been done. In the Parthenon was no new architectural device, and in the Sistine Madonna all the effects were got by methods as familiar as speech. The only way in which it is worth while to differ from others is in point of superior excellence. Be “original,” ambitious Westerner—always as original as you please. But know, or if you already know remember, that originality strikes and dazzles only when displayed within the limiting lines of form. Above all, remember that the mostineffective thing in literature is that quality, whatever in any case it may be, which is best designated in terms of geographical classification. The work of whose form and methods one naturally thinks as—not “English”; that is a racial word, but—“American” or “Australian” or (in this country) “Eastern,” “Mid-Western,” “Southern” or “Californian” is worthless. The writer who knows no better than to make or try to make his work “racy of the soil” knows nothing of his art worth knowing.
Charles A. Dana held that California could not rightly claim the glory of such literature as she had, for none of her writers of distinction—such distinction as they had—was born there. We were austerely reminded that “even the sheen of gold is less attractive than the lustre of intellectual genius.” “California!” cried this severe but not uncompassionate critic—“California! how musical is the word. And again we cry out, California! Give us the letters of high thought: give us philosophy and romance and poetry and art. Give us the soul!”
How many men and women who scorn delights and live laborious days to glorify our metropolis with “the letters of high thought” are on Fame’s muster-roll as natives of Manhattan island? Doubtless the state of New York, as also the city of that name, can make an honorable showing in the matter of native authors, but it has certain considerable advantages that California lacks. In the first place, there are many more births in New York, supplying a strong numerical presumption that more geniuses will turn up there. Second, it has (I hope) enjoyed that advantage for many, many years; whereas California was “settled” (and by the non-genius-bearing sex) a good deal later. In this competition the native Californian author is handicapped by the onerous condition that in order to have his nose counted he must have been born in the pre-Woman period or acquired enough of reputation for the rumor of his merit to have reached New York’s ears, and for the noise of it to have roused her from the contemplation of herself, before he has arrived at middle age. This is not an “impossible” condition; it is only an exceedingly hard one. How hard it is a little reflection on facts willshow. The rule is, the world over, that the literary army of the “metropolis” is recruited in the “provinces,” or, more accurately,fromthe provinces. The difference denoted by the prepositions is important: for every provincial writer who, like Bret Harte, achieves at home enough distinction to be sought out and lured to a “literary metropolis,” ten unknown ones go there of their own motion, like Rudyard Kipling, and become distinguished afterward. They wrote equally well where they were, but they might have continued to write there until dead of age, and but for some lucky accident or fortuitous concurrence of favoring circumstances they would never have been heard of in the “literary metropolis.”
We may call it so, but New York is not a literary metropolis, nor is London, nor is Paris. In letters there is no metropolis. The literary capital is not a mother-city, founding colonies; it is the creature of its geographical environment, giving out nothing, taking in everything. If not constantly fed with fresh brains from beyond and about, its chance of primacy and domination would be merely proportional to its population. This centripetaltendency—this converging movement of provincial writers upon the literary capital, is itself the strongest possible testimony to the disadvantages which they suffer at home; for in nearly every instance it is made—commonly at a great sacrifice—in pursuit of recognition. The motive may not be a very creditable one; I think myself it is ridiculous, as is all ambition, not to excel, but to be known to excel; but such is the motive. If the provincial writer could as easily obtain recognition at home he would stay there.
For my part, I freely admit that “the Golden State can not ‘boast’ of any native literary celebrities of the first rank,” for I do not consider the incident of a literary celebrity of the first rank having been born in one place instead of another a thing to boast of. If there is an idler and more barren work than the rating of writers according to merit it is their classification according to birthplace. A racial classification is interesting because it corresponds to something in nature, but among authors of the same race—and that race the restless Americans, who are about as likely to be born in a railway car as anywhere, and whose first instinct is to get away fromhome—this classification is without meaning. If it is ever otherwise than capitally impudent in the people of a political or geographical division to be proud of a great writer (as George the Third was of an abundant harvest) it is least impudent in those of the one in which he did his worthiest work, most so in those of the one in which he was born.