CRITICISM AND FICTION

by William Dean Howells

The question of a final criterion for the appreciation of art is one that

perpetually recurs to those interested in any sort of aesthetic endeavor.

Mr. John Addington Symonds, in a chapter of 'The Renaissance in Italy'

treating of the Bolognese school of painting, which once had so great

cry, and was vaunted the supreme exemplar of the grand style, but which

he now believes fallen into lasting contempt for its emptiness and

soullessness, seeks to determine whether there can be an enduring

criterion or not; and his conclusion is applicable to literature as to

the other arts. "Our hope," he says, "with regard to the unity of taste

in the future then is, that all sentimental or academical seekings after

the ideal having been abandoned, momentary theories founded upon

idiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, and nothing accepted

but what is solid and positive, the scientific spirit shall make men

progressively more and more conscious of these 'bleibende Verhaltnisse,'

more and more capable of living in the whole; also, that in proportion as

we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come to

comprehend with more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, and

honest, welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit these

qualities. The perception of the enlightened man will then be the task

of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of

evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence of

work in any stage from immaturity to decadence by discerning what there

is of truth, sincerity, and natural vigor in it."

I

That is to say, as I understand, that moods and tastes and fashions

change; people fancy now this and now that; but what is unpretentious and

what is true is always beautiful and good, and nothing else is so. This

is not saying that fantastic and monstrous and artificial things do not

please; everybody knows that they do please immensely for a time, and

then, after the lapse of a much longer time, they have the charm of the

rococo. Nothing is more curious than the charm that fashion has.

Fashion in women's dress, almost every fashion, is somehow delightful,

else it would never have been the fashion; but if any one will look

through a collection of old fashion plates, he must own that most

fashions have been ugly. A few, which could be readily instanced, have

been very pretty, and even beautiful, but it is doubtful if these have

pleased the greatest number of people. The ugly delights as well as the

beautiful, and not merely because the ugly in fashion is associated with

the young loveliness of the women who wear the ugly fashions, and wins a

grace from them, not because the vast majority of mankind are tasteless,

but for some cause that is not perhaps ascertainable. It is quite as

likely to return in the fashions of our clothes and houses and furniture,

and poetry and fiction and painting, as the beautiful, and it may be from

an instinctive or a reasoned sense of this that some of the extreme

naturalists have refused to make the old discrimination against it, or to

regard the ugly as any less worthy of celebration in art than the

beautiful; some of them, in fact, seem to regard it as rather more

worthy, if anything. Possibly there is no absolutely ugly, no absolutely

beautiful; or possibly the ugly contains always an element of the

beautiful better adapted to the general appreciation than the more

perfectly beautiful. This is a somewhat discouraging conjecture, but I

offer it for no more than it is worth; and I do not pin my faith to the

saying of one whom I heard denying, the other day, that a thing of beauty

was a joy forever. He contended that Keats's line should have read,

"Some things of beauty are sometimes joys forever," and that any

assertion beyond this was too hazardous.

II

I should, indeed, prefer another line of Keats's, if I were to profess

any formulated creed, and should feel much safer with his "Beauty is

Truth, Truth Beauty," than even with my friend's reformation of the more

quoted verse. It brings us back to the solid ground taken by Mr.

Symonds, which is not essentially different from that taken in the great

Mr. Burke's Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful--a singularly modern

book, considering how long ago it was wrote (as the great Mr. Steele

would have written the participle a little longer ago), and full of a

certain well-mannered and agreeable instruction. In some things it is of

that droll little eighteenth-century world, when philosophy had got the

neat little universe into the hollow of its hand, and knew just what it

was, and what it was for; but it is quite without arrogance. "As for

those called critics," the author says, "they have generally sought

the rule of the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among poems,

pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings; but art can never give the

rules that make an art. This is, I believe, the reason why artists in

general, and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle;

they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature. Critics

follow them, and therefore can do little as guides. I can judge but

poorly of anything while I measure it by no other standard than itself.

The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easy

observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, in

nature will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and

industry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or,

what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights."

If this should happen to be true and it certainly commends itself to

acceptance--it might portend an immediate danger to the vested interests

of criticism, only that it was written a hundred years ago; and we shall

probably have the "sagacity and industry that slights the observation" of

nature long enough yet to allow most critics the time to learn some more

useful trade than criticism as they pursue it. Nevertheless, I am in

hopes that the communistic era in taste foreshadowed by Burke is

approaching, and that it will occur within the lives of men now overawed

by the foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but

the expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test than that

of their fidelity to it. The time is coming, I hope, when each new

author, each new artist, will be considered, not in his proportion to any

other author or artist, but in his relation to the human nature, known to

us all, which it is his privilege, his high duty, to interpret. "The

true standard of the artist is in every man's power" already, as Burke

says; Michelangelo's "light of the piazza," the glance of the common eye,

is and always was the best light on a statue; Goethe's "boys and

blackbirds" have in all ages been the real connoisseurs of berries; but

hitherto the mass of common men have been afraid to apply their own

simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the

beautiful. They have always cast about for the instruction of some one

who professed to know better, and who browbeat wholesome common-sense

into the self-distrust that ends in sophistication. They have fallen

generally to the worst of this bad species, and have been "amused and

misled" (how pretty that quaint old use of amuse is!) "by the false

lights" of critical vanity and self-righteousness. They have been taught

to compare what they see and what they read, not with the things that

they have observed and known, but with the things that some other artist

or writer has done. Especially if they have themselves the artistic

impulse in any direction they are taught to form themselves, not upon

life, but upon the masters who became masters only by forming themselves

upon life. The seeds of death are planted in them, and they can produce

only the still-born, the academic. They are not told to take their work

into the public square and see if it seems true to the chance passer, but

to test it by the work of the very men who refused and decried any other

test of their own work. The young writer who attempts to report the

phrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he has

heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something

low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how

Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or Thackeray's, or

Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's; he is instructed to idealize his

personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the

book-likeness into them. He is approached in the spirit of the pedantry

into which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws

itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imagined

superiority, and which would say with the same confidence to the

scientist: "I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you

have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it. Now

don't waste your time and sin against culture in that way. I've got a

grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and

expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it's a type. It's

made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional

tint, and it's perfectly indestructible. It isn't very much like a real

grasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, and it's served to represent

the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. You

may say that it's artificial. Well, it is artificial; but then it's

ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You'll

find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of

yours in any of them. The thing that you are proposing to do is

commonplace; but if you say that it isn't commonplace, for the very

reason that it hasn't been done before, you'll have to admit that it's

photographic."

As I said, I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the

common, average man, who always "has the standard of the arts in his

power," will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal

grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art,

because it is not "simple, natural, and honest," because it is not like a

real grasshopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off,

and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper,

the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted,

adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out

before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.

I am in no haste to compass the end of these good people, whom I find in

the mean time very amusing. It is delightful to meet one of them, either

in print or out of it--some sweet elderly lady or excellent gentleman

whose youth was pastured on the literature of thirty or forty years ago

--and to witness the confidence with which they preach their favorite

authors as all the law and the prophets. They have commonly read little

or nothing since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a standard

taken from these authors, and never dreamed of judging it by nature; they

are destitute of the documents in the case of the later writers; they

suppose that Balzac was the beginning of realism, and that Zola is its

wicked end; they are quite ignorant, but they are ready to talk you down,

if you differ from them, with an assumption of knowledge sufficient for

any occasion. The horror, the resentment, with which they receive any

question of their literary saints is genuine; you descend at once very

far in the moral and social scale, and anything short of offensive

personality is too good for you; it is expressed to you that you are one

to be avoided, and put down even a little lower than you have naturally

fallen.

These worthy persons are not to blame; it is part of their intellectual

mission to represent the petrifaction of taste, and to preserve an image

of a smaller and cruder and emptier world than we now live in, a world

which was feeling its way towards the simple, the natural, the honest,

but was a good deal "amused and misled" by lights now no longer

mistakable for heavenly luminaries. They belong to a time, just passing

away, when certain authors were considered authorities in certain kinds,

when they must be accepted entire and not questioned in any particular.

Now we are beginning to see and to say that no author is an authority

except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature's lips and

caught her very accent. These moments are not continuous with any

authors in the past, and they are rare with all. Therefore I am not

afraid to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not at all

great, and that we can profit by them only when we hold them, like our

meanest contemporaries, to a strict accounting, and verify their work by

the standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the simple, the

natural, and the honest.

Those good people must always have a hero, an idol of some sort, and it

is droll to find Balzac, who suffered from their sort such bitter scorn

and hate for his realism while he was alive, now become a fetich in his

turn, to be shaken in the faces of those who will not blindly worship

him. But it is no new thing in the history of literature: whatever is

established is sacred with those who do not think. At the beginning of

the century, when romance was making the same fight against effete

classicism which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism, the

Italian poet Monti declared that "the romantic was the cold grave of the

Beautiful," just as the realistic is now supposed to be. The romantic of

that day and the real of this are in certain degree the same.

Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of

sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape

from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse;

and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and

probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative

literature. It is not a new theory, but it has never before universally

characterized literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself,

when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it,

realism will perish too. Every true realist instinctively knows this,

and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels

himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of

overmoralizing. In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for

destiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. He

cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy

of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material

world beneath the dignity of his inquiry. He feels in every nerve the

equality of things and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain

shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth

lives. In criticism it is his business to break the images of false gods

and misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly, toys that many grown

people would still like to play with. He cannot keep terms with "Jack

the Giant-killer" or "Puss-in-Boots," under any name or in any place,

even when they reappear as the convict Vautrec, or the Marquis de

Montrivaut, or the Sworn Thirteen Noblemen. He must say to himself that

Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Balzac, he was Dumas; he

was not realistic, he was romanticistic.

III

Such a critic will not respect Balzac's good work the less for contemning

his bad work. He will easily account for the bad work historically, and

when he has recognized it, will trouble himself no further with it. In

his view no living man is a type, but a character; now noble, now

ignoble; now grand, now little; complex, full of vicissitude. He will

not expect Balzac to be always Balzac, and will be perhaps even more

attracted to the study of him when he was trying to be Balzac than when

he had become so. In 'Cesar Birotteau,' for instance, he will be

interested to note how Balzac stood at the beginning of the great things

that have followed since in fiction. There is an interesting likeness

between his work in this and Nicolas Gogol's in 'Dead Souls,' which

serves to illustrate the simultaneity of the literary movement in men of

such widely separated civilizations and conditions. Both represent their

characters with the touch of exaggeration which typifies; but in bringing

his story to a close, Balzac employs a beneficence unknown to the

Russian, and almost as universal and as apt as that which smiles upon the

fortunes of the good in the Vicar of Wakefield. It is not enough to have

rehabilitated Birotteau pecuniarily and socially; he must make him die

triumphantly, spectacularly, of an opportune hemorrhage, in the midst of

the festivities which celebrate his restoration to his old home. Before

this happens, human nature has been laid under contribution right and

left for acts of generosity towards the righteous bankrupt; even the king

sends him six thousand francs. It is very pretty; it is touching, and

brings the lump into the reader's throat; but it is too much, and one

perceives that Balzac lived too soon to profit by Balzac. The later men,

especially the Russians, have known how to forbear the excesses of

analysis, to withhold the weakly recurring descriptive and caressing

epithets, to let the characters suffice for themselves. All this does

not mean that 'Cesar Birotteau' is not a beautiful and pathetic story,

full of shrewdly considered knowledge of men, and of a good art

struggling to free itself from self-consciousness. But it does mean that

Balzac, when he wrote it, was under the burden of the very traditions

which he has helped fiction to throw off. He felt obliged to construct a

mechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moralize openly and

baldly; he permitted himself to "sympathize" with certain of his people,

and to point out others for the abhorrence of his readers. This is not

so bad in him as it would be in a novelist of our day. It is simply

primitive and inevitable, and he is not to be judged by it.

IV

In the beginning of any art even the most gifted worker must be crude in

his methods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we turn,

say, from the purblind worshippers of Scott to Scott himself, and

recognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and diffuse; that he was

tediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved

his characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary; that,

except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them talk as

seldom man and never woman talked; that he was tiresomely descriptive;

that on the simplest occasions he went about half a mile to express a

thought that could be uttered in ten paces across lots; and that he

trusted his readers' intuitions so little that he was apt to rub in his

appeals to them. He was probably right: the generation which he wrote

for was duller than this; slower-witted, aesthetically untrained, and in

maturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention as the children of

to-day. All this is not saying Scott was not a great man; he was a great

man, and a very great novelist as compared with the novelists who went

before him. He can still amuse young people, but they ought to be

instructed how false and how mistaken he often is, with his mediaeval

ideals, his blind Jacobitism, his intense devotion to aristocracy and

royalty; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble,

patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it were the law of

God; for all which, indeed, he is not to blame as he would be if he were

one of our contemporaries. Something of this is true of another master,

greater than Scott in being less romantic, and inferior in being more

German, namely, the great Goethe himself. He taught us, in novels

otherwise now antiquated, and always full of German clumsiness, that it

was false to good art--which is never anything but the reflection of

life--to pursue and round the career of the persons introduced, whom he

often allowed to appear and disappear in our knowledge as people in the

actual world do. This is a lesson which the writers able to profit by it

can never be too grateful for; and it is equally a benefaction to

readers; but there is very little else in the conduct of the Goethean

novels which is in advance of their time; this remains almost their sole

contribution to the science of fiction. They are very primitive in

certain characteristics, and unite with their calm, deep insight, an

amusing helplessness in dramatization. "Wilhelm retired to his room, and

indulged in the following reflections," is a mode of analysis which would

not be practised nowadays; and all that fancifulness of nomenclature in

Wilhelm Meister is very drolly sentimental and feeble. The adventures

with robbers seem as if dreamed out of books of chivalry, and the

tendency to allegorization affects one like an endeavor on the author's

part to escape from the unrealities which he must have felt harassingly,

German as he was. Mixed up with the shadows and illusions are honest,

wholesome, every-day people, who have the air of wandering homelessly

about among them, without definite direction; and the mists are full of a

luminosity which, in spite of them, we know for common-sense and poetry.

What is useful in any review of Goethe's methods is the recognition of

the fact, which it must bring, that the greatest master cannot produce a

masterpiece in a new kind. The novel was too recently invented in

Goethe's day not to be, even in his hands, full of the faults of

apprentice work.

V.

In fact, a great master may sin against the "modesty of nature" in many

ways, and I have felt this painfully in reading Balzac's romance--it is

not worthy the name of novel--'Le Pere Goriot,' which is full of a

malarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art. After that

exquisitely careful and truthful setting of his story in the shabby

boarding-house, he fills the scene with figures jerked about by the

exaggerated passions and motives of the stage. We cannot have a cynic

reasonably wicked, disagreeable, egoistic; we must have a lurid villain

of melodrama, a disguised convict, with a vast criminal organization at

his command, and

"So dyed double red"

indeed and purpose that he lights up the faces of the horrified

spectators with his glare. A father fond of unworthy children, and

leading a life of self-denial for their sake, as may probably and

pathetically be, is not enough; there must be an imbecile, trembling

dotard, willing to promote even the liaisons of his daughters to give

them happiness and to teach the sublimity of the paternal instinct.

The hero cannot sufficiently be a selfish young fellow, with alternating

impulses of greed and generosity; he must superfluously intend a career

of iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by nothing but the most

cataclysmal interpositions. It can be said that without such personages

the plot could not be transacted; but so much the worse for the plot.

Such a plot had no business to be; and while actions so unnatural are

imagined, no mastery can save fiction from contempt with those who really

think about it. To Balzac it can be forgiven, not only because in his

better mood he gave us such biographies as 'Eugenie Grandet,' but because

he wrote at a time when fiction was just beginning to verify the

externals of life, to portray faithfully the outside of men and things.

It was still held that in order to interest the reader the characters

must be moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to be taught that

"heroes" and "heroines" existed all around us, and that these abnormal

beings needed only to be discovered in their several humble disguises,

and then we should see every-day people actuated by the fine frenzy of

the creatures of the poets. How false that notion was, few but the

critics, who are apt to be rather belated, need now be told. Some of

these poor fellows, however, still contend that it ought to be done, and

that human feelings and motives, as God made them and as men know them,

are not good enough for novel-readers.

This is more explicable than would appear at first glance. The critics

--and in speaking of them one always modestly leaves one's self out of

the count, for some reason--when they are not elders ossified in

tradition, are apt to be young people, and young people are necessarily

conservative in their tastes and theories. They have the tastes and

theories of their instructors, who perhaps caught the truth of their day,

but whose routine life has been alien to any other truth. There is

probably no chair of literature in this country from which the principles

now shaping the literary expression of every civilized people are not

denounced and confounded with certain objectionable French novels, or

which teaches young men anything of the universal impulse which has given

us the work, not only of Zola, but of Tourguenief and Tolstoy in Russia,

of Bjornson and Ibsen in Norway, of Valdes and Galdos in Spain, of Verga

in Italy. Till these younger critics have learned to think as well as to

write for themselves they will persist in heaving a sigh, more and more

perfunctory, for the truth as it was in Sir Walter, and as it was in

Dickens and in Hawthorne. Presently all will have been changed; they

will have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree; and when it

shall have become the old truth, they will perhaps see it all.

VI.

In the mean time the average of criticism is not wholly bad with us.

To be sure, the critic sometimes appears in the panoply of the savages

whom we have supplanted on this continent; and it is hard to believe that

his use of the tomahawk and the scalping-knife is a form of conservative

surgery. It is still his conception of his office that he should assail

those who differ with him in matters of taste or opinion; that he must be

rude with those he does not like. It is too largely his superstition

that because he likes a thing it is good, and because he dislikes a thing

it is bad; the reverse is quite possibly the case, but he is yet

indefinitely far from knowing that in affairs of taste his personal

preference enters very little. Commonly he has no principles, but only

an assortment of prepossessions for and against; and this otherwise very

perfect character is sometimes uncandid to the verge of dishonesty. He

seems not to mind misstating the position of any one he supposes himself

to disagree with, and then attacking him for what he never said, or even

implied; he thinks this is droll, and appears not to suspect that it is

immoral. He is not tolerant; he thinks it a virtue to be intolerant; it

is hard for him to understand that the same thing may be admirable at one

time and deplorable at another; and that it is really his business to

classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as the

naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or

blame them; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in his

trampling on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as in

the botanist's grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it

pretty. He does not conceive that it is his business rather to identify

the species and then explain how and where the specimen is imperfect and

irregular. If he could once acquire this simple idea of his duty he

would be much more agreeable company than he now is, and a more useful

member of society; though considering the hard conditions under which he

works, his necessity of writing hurriedly from an imperfect examination

of far more books, on a greater variety of subjects, than he can even

hope to read, the average American critic--the ordinary critic of

commerce, so to speak--is even now very, well indeed. Collectively he is

more than this; for the joint effect of our criticism is the pretty

thorough appreciation of any book submitted to it

VII.

The misfortune rather than the fault of our individual critic is that he

is the heir of the false theory and bad manners of the English school.

The theory of that school has apparently been that almost any person of

glib and lively expression is competent to write of almost any branch of

polite literature; its manners are what we know. The American, whom it

has largely formed, is by nature very glib and very lively, and commonly

his criticism, viewed as imaginative work, is more agreeable than that of

the Englishman; but it is, like the art of both countries, apt to be

amateurish. In some degree our authors have freed themselves from

English models; they have gained some notion of the more serious work of

the Continent: but it is still the ambition of the American critic to

write like the English critic, to show his wit if not his learning, to

strive to eclipse the author under review rather than illustrate him.

He has not yet caught on to the fact that it is really no part of his

business to display himself, but that it is altogether his duty to place

a book in such a light that the reader shall know its class, its

function, its character. The vast good-nature of our people preserves us

from the worst effects of this criticism without principles. Our critic,

at his lowest, is rarely malignant; and when he is rude or untruthful,

it is mostly without truculence; I suspect that he is often offensive

without knowing that he is so. Now and then he acts simply under

instruction from higher authority, and denounces because it is the

tradition of his publication to do so. In other cases the critic is

obliged to support his journal's repute for severity, or for wit, or for

morality, though he may himself be entirely amiable, dull, and wicked;

this necessity more or less warps his verdicts.

The worst is that he is personal, perhaps because it is so easy and so

natural to be personal, and so instantly attractive. In this respect our

criticism has not improved from the accession of numbers of ladies to its

ranks, though we still hope so much from women in our politics when they

shall come to vote. They have come to write, and with the effect to

increase the amount of little-digging, which rather superabounded in our

literary criticism before. They "know what they like"--that pernicious

maxim of those who do not know what they ought to like and they pass

readily from censuring an author's performance to censuring him. They

bring a stock of lively misapprehensions and prejudices to their work;

they would rather have heard about than known about a book; and they take

kindly to the public wish to be amused rather than edified. But neither

have they so much harm in them: they, too, are more ignorant than

malevolent.

VIII.

Our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the critic to learn

from an author, and his readiness to mistrust him. A writer passes his

whole life in fitting himself for a certain kind of performance; the

critic does not ask why, or whether the performance is good or bad, but

if he does not like the kind, he instructs the writer to go off and do

some other sort of thing--usually the sort that has been done already,

and done sufficiently. If he could once understand that a man who has

written the book he dislikes, probably knows infinitely more about its

kind and his own fitness for doing it than any one else, the critic might

learn something, and might help the reader to learn; but by putting

himself in a false position, a position of superiority, he is of no use.

He is not to suppose that an author has committed an offence against him

by writing the kind of book he does not like; he will be far more

profitably employed on behalf of the reader in finding out whether they

had better not both like it. Let him conceive of an author as not in any

wise on trial before him, but as a reflection of this or that aspect of

life, and he will not be tempted to browbeat him or bully him.

The critic need not be impolite even to the youngest and weakest author.

A little courtesy, or a good deal, a constant perception of the fact that

a book is not a misdemeanor, a decent self-respect that must forbid the

civilized man the savage pleasure of wounding, are what I would ask for

our criticism, as something which will add sensibly to its present

lustre.

IX.

I would have my fellow-critics consider what they are really in the world

for. The critic must perceive, if he will question himself more

carefully, that his office is mainly to ascertain facts and traits of

literature, not to invent or denounce them; to discover principles, not

to establish them; to report, not to create.

It is so much easier to say that you like this or dislike that, than to

tell why one thing is, or where another thing comes from, that many

flourishing critics will have to go out of business altogether if the

scientific method comes in, for then the critic will have to know

something besides his own mind. He will have to know something of the

laws of that mind, and of its generic history.

The history of all literature shows that even with the youngest and

weakest author criticism is quite powerless against his will to do his

own work in his own way; and if this is the case in the green wood, how

much more in the dry! It has been thought by the sentimentalist that

criticism, if it cannot cure, can at least kill, and Keats was long

alleged in proof of its efficacy in this sort. But criticism neither

cured nor killed Keats, as we all now very well know. It wounded, it

cruelly hurt him, no doubt; and it is always in the power of the critic

to give pain to the author--the meanest critic to the greatest author--

for no one can help feeling a rudeness. But every literary movement has

been violently opposed at the start, and yet never stayed in the least,

or arrested, by criticism; every author has been condemned for his

virtues, but in no wise changed by it. In the beginning he reads the

critics; but presently perceiving that he alone makes or mars himself,

and that they have no instruction for him, he mostly leaves off reading

them, though he is always glad of their kindness or grieved by their

harshness when he chances upon it. This, I believe, is the general

experience, modified, of course, by exceptions.

Then, are we critics of no use in the world? I should not like to think

that, though I am not quite ready to define our use. More than one sober

thinker is inclining at present to suspect that aesthetically or

specifically we are of no use, and that we are only useful historically;

that we may register laws, but not enact them. I am not quite prepared

to admit that aesthetic criticism is useless, though in view of its

futility in any given instance it is hard to deny that it is so.

It certainly seems as useless against a book that strikes the popular

fancy, and prospers on in spite of condemnation by the best critics,

as it is against a book which does not generally please, and which no

critical favor can make acceptable. This is so common a phenomenon that

I wonder it has never hitherto suggested to criticism that its point of

view was altogether mistaken, and that it was really necessary to judge

books not as dead things, but as living things--things which have an

influence and a power irrespective of beauty and wisdom, and merely as

expressions of actuality in thought and feeling. Perhaps criticism has a

cumulative and final effect; perhaps it does some good we do not know of.

It apparently does not affect the author directly, but it may reach him

through the reader. It may in some cases enlarge or diminish his

audience for a while, until he has thoroughly measured and tested his own

powers. If criticism is to affect literature at all, it must be through

the writers who have newly left the starting-point, and are reasonably

uncertain of the race, not with those who have won it again and again in

their own way.

X.

Sometimes it has seemed to me that the crudest expression of any creative

art is better than the finest comment upon it. I have sometimes

suspected that more thinking, more feeling certainly, goes to the

creation of a poor novel than to the production of a brilliant criticism;

and if any novel of our time fails to live a hundred years, will any

censure of it live? Who can endure to read old reviews? One can hardly

read them if they are in praise of one's own books.

The author neglected or overlooked need not despair for that reason, if

he will reflect that criticism can neither make nor unmake authors; that

there have not been greater books since criticism became an art than

there were before; that in fact the greatest books seem to have come much

earlier.

That which criticism seems most certainly to have done is to have put a

literary consciousness into books unfelt in the early masterpieces,

but unfelt now only in the books of men whose lives have been passed in

activities, who have been used to employing language as they would have

employed any implement, to effect an object, who have regarded a thing to

be said as in no wise different from a thing to be done. In this sort I

have seen no modern book so unconscious as General Grant's 'Personal

Memoirs.' The author's one end and aim is to get the facts out in words.

He does not cast about for phrases, but takes the word, whatever it is,

that will best give his meaning, as if it were a man or a force of men

for the accomplishment of a feat of arms. There is not a moment wasted

in preening and prettifying, after the fashion of literary men; there is

no thought of style, and so the style is good as it is in the 'Book of

Chronicles,' as it is in the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' with a peculiar,

almost plebeian, plainness at times. There is no more attempt at

dramatic effect than there is at ceremonious pose; things happen in that

tale of a mighty war as they happened in the mighty war itself, without

setting, without artificial reliefs one after another, as if they were

all of one quality and degree. Judgments are delivered with the same

unimposing quiet; no awe surrounds the tribunal except that which comes

from the weight and justice of the opinions; it is always an unaffected,

unpretentious man who is talking; and throughout he prefers to wear the

uniform of a private, with nothing of the general about him but the

shoulder-straps, which he sometimes forgets.

XI.

Canon Fairfax,'s opinions of literary criticism are very much to my

liking, perhaps because when I read them I found them so like my own,

already delivered in print. He tells the critics that "they are in no

sense the legislators of literature, barely even its judges and police";

and he reminds them of Mr. Ruskin's saying that "a bad critic is probably

the most mischievous person in the world," though a sense of their

relative proportion to the whole of life would perhaps acquit the worst

among them of this extreme of culpability. A bad critic is as bad a

thing as can be, but, after all, his mischief does not carry very far.

Otherwise it would be mainly the conventional books and not the original

books which would survive; for the censor who imagines himself a law-

giver can give law only to the imitative and never to the creative mind.

Criticism has condemned whatever was, from time to time, fresh and vital

in literature; it has always fought the new good thing in behalf of the

old good thing; it has invariably fostered and encouraged the tame, the

trite, the negative. Yet upon the whole it is the native, the novel, the

positive that has survived in literature. Whereas, if bad criticism were

the most mischievous thing in the world, in the full implication of the

words, it must have been the tame, the trite, the negative, that

survived.

Bad criticism is mischievous enough, however; and I think that much if

not most current criticism as practised among the English and Americans

is bad, is falsely principled, and is conditioned in evil. It is falsely

principled because it is unprincipled, or without principles; and it is

conditioned in evil because it is almost wholly anonymous. At the best

its opinions are not conclusions from certain easily verifiable

principles, but are effects from the worship of certain models. They are

in so far quite worthless, for it is the very nature of things that the

original mind cannot conform to models; it has its norm within itself; it

can work only in its own way, and by its self-given laws. Criticism does

not inquire whether a work is true to life, but tacitly or explicitly

compares it with models, and tests it by them. If literary art travelled

by any such road as criticism would have it go, it would travel in a

vicious circle, and would arrive only at the point of departure. Yet

this is the course that criticism must always prescribe when it attempts

to give laws. Being itself artificial, it cannot conceive of the

original except as the abnormal. It must altogether reconceive its

office before it can be of use to literature. It must reduce this to the

business of observing, recording, and comparing; to analyzing the

material before it, and then synthetizing its impressions. Even then, it

is not too much to say that literature as an art could get on perfectly

well without it. Just as many good novels, poems, plays, essays,

sketches, would be written if there were no such thing as criticism in

the literary world, and no more bad ones.

But it will be long before criticism ceases to imagine itself a

controlling force, to give itself airs of sovereignty, and to issue

decrees. As it exists it is mostly a mischief, though not the greatest

mischief; but it may be greatly ameliorated in character and softened in

manner by the total abolition of anonymity.

I think it would be safe to say that in no other relation of life is so

much brutality permitted by civilized society as in the criticism of

literature and the arts. Canon Farrar is quite right in reproaching

literary criticism with the uncandor of judging an author without

reference to his aims; with pursuing certain writers from spite and

prejudice, and mere habit; with misrepresenting a book by quoting a

phrase or passage apart from the context; with magnifying misprints and

careless expressions into important faults; with abusing an author for

his opinions; with base and personal motives.

Every writer of experience knows that certain critical journals will

condemn his work without regard to its quality, even if it has never been

his fortune to learn, as one author did from a repentent reviewer, that

in a journal pretending to literary taste his books were given out for

review with the caution, "Remember that the Clarion is opposed to Mr.

Blank's books."

The final conclusion appears to be that the man, or even the young lady,

who is given a gun, and told to shoot at some passer from behind a hedge,

is placed in circumstances of temptation almost too strong for human

nature.

XII.

As I have already intimated, I doubt the more lasting effects of unjust

criticism. It is no part of my belief that Keats's fame was long delayed

by it, or Wordsworth's, or Browning's. Something unwonted, unexpected,

in the quality of each delayed his recognition; each was not only a poet,

he was a revolution, a new order of things, to which the critical

perceptions and habitudes had painfully to adjust themselves: But I have

no question of the gross and stupid injustice with which these great men

were used, and of the barbarization of the public mind by the sight of

the wrong inflicted on them with impunity. This savage condition still

persists in the toleration of anonymous criticism, an abuse that ought to

be as extinct as the torture of witnesses. It is hard enough to treat a

fellow-author with respect even when one has to address him, name to

name, upon the same level, in plain day; swooping down upon him in the

dark, panoplied in the authority of a great journal, it is impossible.

Every now and then some idealist comes forward and declares that you

should say nothing in criticism of a man's book which you would not say

of it to his face. But I am afraid this is asking too much. I am afraid

it would put an end to all criticism; and that if it were practised

literature would be left to purify itself. I have no doubt literature

would do this; but in such a state of things there would be no provision

for the critics. We ought not to destroy critics, we ought to reform

them, or rather transform them, or turn them from the assumption of

authority to a realization of their true function in the civilized state.

They are no worse at heart, probably, than many others, and there are

probably good husbands and tender fathers, loving daughters and careful

mothers, among them.

It is evident to any student of human nature that the critic who is

obliged to sign his review will be more careful of an author's feelings

than he would if he could intangibly and invisibly deal with him as the

representative of a great journal. He will be loath to have his name

connected with those perversions and misstatements of an author's meaning

in which the critic now indulges without danger of being turned out of

honest company. He will be in some degree forced to be fair and just

with a book he dislikes; he will not wish to misrepresent it when his sin

can be traced directly to him in person; he will not be willing to voice

the prejudice of a journal which is "opposed to the books" of this or

that author; and the journal itself, when it is no longer responsible for<