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 CREATIVE CRITICISM
 
 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 ESSAYS ON THE UNITY OF 
 GENIUS AND TASTE 
 
 BY 
 
 J. E. SPINGARN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1917
 
 Copyright, 191 7, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
 
 To my friend 
 
 BENEDETTO CROCE 
 
 the most original of all modern 
 thinkers on Art
 
 ?. n^c. 
 
 NOTE 
 
 Three of the four essays in this volume have 
 already appeared in print. The first, "The 
 New Criticism," was delivered as a lecture at 
 Columbia University in 1910, and was pub- 
 lished, under the title of "Literary Criticism," 
 in the Columbia University Lectures on Litera- 
 ture; "Dramatic Criticism and the Theatre" 
 was published in the fourth volume of Essays 
 and Studies by Members of the English Associa- 
 tion (Oxford: Clarendon Press); and "Creative 
 Connoisseurship" was written as a letter to an 
 artist friend and was printed in the New York 
 Evening Post. All of them have undergone 
 more or less alteration, and a few passages 
 taken from an article on "The Seven Arts and 
 the Seven Confusions" in the Seven Arts have 
 been added to them. The essays are now 
 gathered together in the hope that they may 
 stimulate interest in a province of aesthetic 
 theory which has been largely neglected by 
 the English-speaking world.
 
 "Who can doubt that Criticism, as well as Poetry, can 
 have wings?" 
 
 Barbey d'Aurevilly.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 3 
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM AND THE THEATRE. . . 47 
 
 PROSE AND VERSE 99 
 
 CREATIVE CONNOISSEURSHIP II7 
 
 APPENDIX: A NOTE ON GENIUS AND TASTE. I33
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 
 
 *' What droll creatures these college pro- 
 fessors are whenever they talk about art," 
 wrote Flaubert in one of his letters, and 
 voiced the world's opinion of academic 
 criticism. For the world shares the view 
 of the Italian poet that "monks and pro- 
 fessors cannot write the lives of poets," 
 and looks only to those rich in literary 
 experience for its opinions on literature. 
 But the poets themselves have had no 
 special grudge against academic criticism 
 that they have not felt equally for every 
 other kind. For the most part, they have 
 objected to all criticism, since what each 
 mainly seeks in his own case is not criti- 
 cism, but uncritical praise. "Kill the dog, 
 he is a reviewer," cried the young Goethe; 
 and in an age nearer our own William 
 Morris expressed his contempt for those
 
 4 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 who earn a livelihood by writing their 
 opinions of the works of others. Fortu- 
 nately for Criticism, it does not live by the 
 grace of poets, to whom it can be of small 
 service at its best, but by the grace of others 
 who have neither the poet's genius nor the 
 critic's insight. I hope to persuade you 
 this evening that the poets have been mis- 
 taken in their very conception of the critic's 
 craft, which lives by a power that poets and 
 critics share together. The secret of this 
 power has come to men slowly, and the 
 knowledge they have gained by it has 
 transformed their idea of Criticism. What 
 this secret is, and into what new paths 
 Criticism is being led by it, is the subject of 
 my lecture to-night. 
 
 At the end of the last century, France 
 once more occupied the center of that stage 
 whose auditors are the inheritors of Euro- 
 pean civilization. Once more all the world 
 listened while she talked and played, and
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 5 
 
 some of the most brilliant of her talk was 
 now on the question of the authority of 
 Criticism. It is not my purpose to tell you 
 (what you know already) with what sober 
 and vigorous learning the official critics of 
 the Revue des deux Mondes espoused the 
 cause of old gods with the new weapons of 
 science, and with what charm and tact, 
 with what grace and suppleness of thought, 
 Jules Lemaitre and Anatole France, to 
 mention no others, defended the free play 
 of the appreciative mind. Some of the 
 sparks that were beaten out on the anvil 
 of controversy have become fixed stars, 
 the classical utterances of Criticism, as 
 when Anatole France described the critic 
 not as a judge imposing sentence, but as a 
 sensitive soul detailing his "adventures 
 among masterpieces." 
 
 To have sensations in the presence of a 
 work of art and to express them, that is 
 the function of Criticism for the impres- 
 sionistic critic. His attitude he would ex- 
 press somewhat in this fashion: "Here is
 
 6 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 a beautiful poem, let us say Shelley's 
 Prometheus Unbound. To read it is for me 
 to experience a thrill of pleasure. My de- 
 light in it is itself a judgment, and what 
 better judgment is it possible for me to 
 give? All that I can do is to tell how it 
 affects me, what sensations it gives me. 
 Other men will derive other sensations from 
 it, and express them differently; they too 
 have the same right as I. Each of us, if 
 we are sensitive to impressions and express 
 ourselves well, will produce a new work of 
 art to replace the work which gave us our 
 sensations. That is the art of Criticism, 
 and beyond that Criticism cannot go." 
 
 We shall not begrudge this exquisite soul 
 the pleasure of his sensations or his cult of 
 them, nor would he be disconcerted if we 
 were to point out that the interest has been 
 shifted from the work of art to his own 
 impressions. Let us suppose that you say 
 to him: "We are not interested in you, but 
 in Prometheus Unbound. To describe the 
 state of your health is not to help us to
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 7 
 
 understand or to enjoy the poem. Your 
 criticism constantly tends to get away from 
 the work of art, and to center attention 
 on yourself and your feelings." 
 
 But his answer would not be difficult to 
 find: "What you say is true enough. My 
 criticism tends to get farther and farther 
 from the work of art and to cast a light 
 upon myself; but all criticism tends to get 
 away from the work of art and to substi- 
 tute something in its place. The impres- 
 sionist substitutes himself, but what other 
 form of criticism gets closer to Prometheus 
 Unbound? Historical criticism takes us 
 away from it in a search of the.-eiiYiron- 
 ment, the age, the race, the poetic school 
 of the artist; it tells us to read the history 
 of the French Revolution, Godwin's Polit- 
 ical Justice^ the Prometheus Bound of 
 ^schylus, and Calderon's Mdgico Prodi- 
 gioso. Psychological criticism takes me 
 away from the poem, and sets me to work 
 on the biography of the poet;[I wish to 
 enjoy Prometheus Unbound, and instead
 
 8 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 I am asked to become acquainted with 
 Shelley the man. Dogmatic criticism does 
 not get any closer to the work of art by 
 testing it according to rules and standards; 
 it sends me to the Greek dramatists, to 
 Shakespeare, to Aristotle's Poetics^ possibly 
 to Darwin's Origin of Species, in order that 
 I may see how far Shelley has failed to 
 give dramatic reality to his poem, or has 
 failed to observe the rules of his genre; 
 but that means the study of other works, 
 and not of Prometheus Unbound. -Esthe- 
 tics takes me still farther afield into specu- 
 lations on art and beauty. And so it is 
 with every form of Criticism. Do not 
 deceive yourself. All criticism tends to 
 shift the interest from the work of art to 
 something else. The other critics give us 
 history, politics, biography, erudition, met- 
 aphysics. As for m e, I re-dream the poet's 
 dream , and if I seem to write lightly, it is 
 because! have awakened, and smile to 
 think I have mistaken a dream for reality. 
 I at least strive to replace one work of art
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 9 
 
 by another, and art can only find Its alter 
 ego in art." 
 
 It would be idle to detail the arguments 
 with which the advocates of the opposing 
 forms of Criticism answered these ques- 
 tionings. Literary erudition and evolu- 
 tionary science were the chief weapons 
 used to fight this modern heresy, but the 
 one is an unwieldy and the other a useless 
 weapon in the field of aesthetic thought. 
 On some sides, at least, the position of the 
 impressionists was impregnable; but two 
 points of attack were open to their oppo- 
 nents. They could combat the notion 
 that taste is a substitute for learning, or 
 learning a substitute for taste, since both 
 are vital for Criticism; and they could 
 maintain that the relativity of taste does 
 not in any sense afi"ect its authority. In 
 this sense impressionistic Criticism erred 
 only less grievously than the "judicial" 
 Criticism which opposed it. 
 
 But these arguments are not my present 
 concern; what I wish to point out is that 
 
 \
 
 lo CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 the objective and dogmatic forms of Criti- 
 cism were fighting no new battle against 
 impressionistic Criticism in that decade of 
 controversy. It was a battle as old as the 
 earliest reflection on the subject of poetry, 
 if not as old as the sensitiveness of poets. 
 Modern literature begins with the same 
 doubts, with the same quarrel. In the 
 sixteenth century the Italians were formu- 
 lating that classical code which imposed 
 itself on Europe for two centuries, and 
 which, even in our generation, Brunetiere 
 has merely disguised under the trappings 
 of natural science. They evolved the 
 dramatic unities, and all those rules which 
 the poet Pope imagined to be "Nature 
 still but Nature methodized." But at the 
 very moment when their spokesman Sca- 
 liger was saying that "Aristotle is our 
 emperor, the perpetual dictator of all the 
 fine arts," another Italian, Pietro Aretino, 
 was insisting that there is no rule except 
 the whim of genius and no standard of 
 judgment beyond individual taste.
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM ii 
 
 The Italians passed on the torch to the 
 French of the seventeenth century, and 
 from that day to this the struggle between 
 the two schools has never ceased to agitate 
 the progress of Criticism in France. Boi- 
 leau against Saint-Evremond, Classicists 
 against Romanticists, dogmatists against 
 impressionists, — the antinomy is deep in 
 the French nature, indeed in the nature of 
 Criticism itself. Listen to this: "It is not 
 for the purpose of deciding on the merit 
 of this noble poet [Virgil], nor of harming 
 his reputation, that I have spoken so freely 
 concerning him. The world will continue 
 to think what it does of his beautiful verses; 
 and as for me, I judge nothing, I only say 
 what I think, and what effect each of these 
 things produces on my heart and mind." 
 Surely these words are from the lips of 
 Lemaitre himself! "I judge nothing; I 
 only say what I feel." But no, these are 
 the utterances of the Chevalier de Mere, 
 a wit of the age of Louis XIV, and he is 
 writing to the secretary of that stronghold
 
 12 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 of authority, the French Academy. For 
 some men, even in the age of Boileau, 
 criticism was nothing but an "adventure 
 among masterpieces." 
 
 No, it is no new battle; it is the perpetual 
 conflict of Criticism. In every age impres- 
 sionism (or enjoyment) and dogmatism (or 
 judgment) have grappled with one another. 
 They are the two sexes of Criticism; and 
 to say that they flourish in every age is tb 
 say that every age has its masculine as 
 well as its feminine criticism, — the mascu- 
 line criticism that may or may not force 
 its own standards on literature, but that 
 never at all events is dominated by the 
 object of its studies; and the feminine 
 criticism that responds to the lure of art 
 with a kind of passive ecstasy. In the age 
 of Boileau it was the masculine type which 
 gave the tone to Criticism; in our own, out- 
 side of the universities, it has certainly been 
 the feminine. But they continue to exist 
 side by side, ever falling short of their 
 highest powers, unless mystically mated,
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 13 
 
 — judgment erecting its edicts into arbi- 
 trary standards and conventions, enjoy- 
 ment lost in the mazes of its sensuous 
 indecision. 
 
 Yet if we examine these opposing forms 
 of Criticism in our own age, we shall find, 
 I think, that they are not wholly without 
 a common ground to meet on; that, in 
 fact, they are united in at least one pre- 
 possession which they do not share with 
 the varying forms of Criticism in any of 
 the earlier periods of its history. The 
 Greeks conceived of literature, not as an - 
 inevitable expression of creative power, but . 
 as a reasoned "imitation" or re-shaping 
 of the materials of life; for Aristotle, poetry 
 is the result of man's imitative instinct, 
 and differs from history and science in 
 that it deals with the probable or possible 
 rather than with the real. The Romans 
 conceived of literature as a noble art, 
 intended (though under the guise of pleas- 
 ure) to inspire men with high ideals of 
 life. The classicists of the sixteenth and
 
 14 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 seventeenth centuries accepted this view 
 in the main; for them, literature was a 
 kind of exercise, — a craft acquired by study 
 of the classics, and guided in the interpre- 
 tation of nature by the traditions of Greek 
 and Roman art. For these men literature 
 was as much a product of reason as science 
 or history. The eighteenth century com- 
 plicated the course of Criticism by the 
 introduction of vague and novel criteria, 
 such as "imagination," "sentiment," and 
 "taste," yet it was only in part able to 
 liberate itself from the older tradition. 
 
 But with the Romantic Movement there 
 developed the new idea which coordinates 
 all Criticism in the nineteenth century. 
 Very early in the century, Mme. de Stael 
 and others formulated the idea that lit- 
 erature is an "expression of society." 
 Victor Cousin founded the school of art 
 for art's sake, enunciating "the funda- 
 mental rule, that expression is the supreme 
 law of art." Later, Sainte-Beuve devel- 
 oped and illustrated his theory that lit-
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 15 
 
 erature is an expression of personality. 
 Still later, under the influence of natural 
 science, Taine took a hint from Hegel and 
 elaborated the idea that literature is an 
 expression of race, age, and environment. 
 The extreme impressionists prefer to think 
 of art as the exquisite expression of deli- 
 cate and fluctuating sensations or impres- 
 sions of life. But for all these critics and 
 theorists, literature is an expression of 
 something, of experience or emotion, of 
 the external or internal, of the man him- 
 self or something outside the man; yet it 
 is always conceived of as an art of expres- 
 sion. 
 
 The objective, the dogmatic, the impres- 
 sionistic critics of our day may set for 
 themselves very different tasks, but the 
 idea of expression is implicit in all they 
 write. They have, as it were, this bond of 
 blood: they are not merely man and 
 woman, but brother and sister; and their 
 father, or grandfather, was Sainte-Beuve. 
 The bitter but acute analysis of his talent
 
 i6 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 which Nietzsche has given us in the 
 Twilight of the Idols brings out very 
 clearly this dual side of his seminal power, 
 the feminine sensitiveness and the mascu- 
 line detachment. For Nietzsche, he is 
 "nothing of a man; he wanders about, 
 delicate, curious, tired, pumping people, 
 a female after all, with a woman's revenge- 
 fulness and a woman's sensuousness, a 
 critic without a standard, without firm- 
 ness, and without backbone." Here it is 
 the impressionist in Sainte-Beuve that 
 arouses the German's wrath. But in the 
 same breath we find Nietzsche blaming him 
 for "holding up objectivity as a mask;" 
 and it is on this objective side that Sainte- 
 Beuve becomes the source of all those 
 historical and psychological forms of criti- 
 cal study which have influenced the aca- 
 demic thought of our day, leading insen- 
 sibly, but inevitably, from empirical in- 
 vestigation to empirical law. The pedigree 
 of the two schools thereafter is not difficult 
 to trace: on the one side, from Sainte-
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 17 
 
 Beuve through Vart pour Vart to impres- 
 sionism, and on the other, from Sainte- 
 Beuve through Taine to Brunetiere and 
 his egregious kin. 
 
 FrencKcTiticism has been leaning heavily 
 on the idea of expression for a century or 
 more, but no attempt has been made in 
 France to understand its aesthetic content, 
 except for a few vague echoes of German 
 thought. For the first to give philosophic 
 precision to the theory of expression, and 
 to found a method of Criticism based upon 
 it, were the Germans of the age that 
 stretches from Herder to Hegel. All the 
 forces of philosophical thought were fo- 
 cused on this central concept, while the 
 critics enriched themselves from out this 
 golden store. I suppose you all remember 
 the famous passage in which Carlyle de- 
 scribes the achievement of German criti- 
 cism in that age. "Criticism," says 
 Carlyle, "has assumed a new form in 
 Germany. It proceeds on other principles 
 and proposes to itself a higher aim. The
 
 18 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 main question is not now a question con- 
 cerning the qualities of diction, the co- 
 herence of metaphors, the fitness of senti- 
 ments, the general logical truth in a work 
 of art, as it was some half century ago 
 among most critics, neither is it a question 
 mainly of a psychological sort to be an- 
 swered by discovering and delineating the 
 peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry, 
 as is usual with the best of our own critics 
 at present; but it is, not indeed exclusively, 
 but inclusively, of its two other questions, 
 properly and ultimately a question of the 
 essence and peculiar life of the poetry it- 
 self. . . . The problem is not now to deter- 
 mine by what mechanism Addison com- 
 posed sentences and struck out similitudes, 
 but by what far finer and more mysterious 
 mechanism Shakespeare organized his dra- 
 mas and gave life and individuality to his 
 Ariel and his Hamlet. Wherein lies that 
 life; how have they attained that shape and 
 individuality? Whence comes that empy- 
 rean fire which irradiates their whole being,
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 19 
 
 and pierces, at least in starry gleams, like 
 a diviner thing, into all hearts? Are 
 these dramas of his not veri-similar only, 
 but true; nay, truer than reality itself, since 
 the essence of unmixed reality is bodied 
 forth in them under more expressive sim- 
 iles? What is this unity of pleasures; and 
 can our deeper inspection discern it to be in- 
 divisible and existing by necessity because 
 each work springs as it were from the gen- 
 eral elements of thought and grows up 
 therefrom into form and expansion by its 
 own growth? Not only who was the poet 
 and how did he compose, but what and how 
 was the poem, and why was it a poem and 
 not rhymed eloquence, creation and not 
 figured passion? These are the questions 
 for the critic. Criticism stands like an in- 
 terpreter between the inspired and the un- 
 inspired; between the prophet and those 
 who hear the melody of his words, and catch 
 some glimpse of their material meaning, but 
 understand not their deeper import." 
 I am afraid that no German critic wholly
 
 20 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 realized this ideal; but it was at least the 
 achievement of the Germans that they 
 enunciated the doctrine, even if they did 
 not always adequately illustrate it in prac- 
 tice. It was they who first realized that 
 art has performed its function when it has 
 expressed itself; it was they who first 
 conceived of Criticism as the study of 
 expression. "There is a destructive and a 
 creative or constructive criticism," said 
 Goethe; the first measures and tests litera- 
 ture according to mechanical standards, 
 the second answers the fundamental ques- 
 tions: "What has the writer proposed to 
 himself to do? and how far has he succeeded 
 in carrying out his own plan?" Carlyle, 
 in his essay on Goethe, almost uses 
 Goethe's own words, when he says that the 
 critic's first and foremost duty is to make 
 plain to himself "what the poet's aim really 
 and truly was, how the task he had to do 
 stood before his eye, and how far, with 
 such materials as were afforded him, he has 
 fulfilled it."
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 21 
 
 This has been the central problem, the 
 guiding star, of all modern criticism. 
 From Coleridge to Pater, from Sainte- 
 Beuve to Lemaitre, this is what critics 
 have been striving for, even when they 
 have not succeeded; yes, even when they 
 have been deceiving themselves into think- 
 ing that they were striving for something 
 else. This was not the ideal of the critics 
 of Aristotle's day, who, like so many of 
 their successors, censured a work of art 
 as "irrational, impossible, morally hurtful, 
 self-contradictory, or contrary to technical 
 correctness." This was not Boileau's 
 standard when he blamed Tasso for the 
 introduction of Christian rather than pa- 
 gan mythology into epic poetry; nor Addi- 
 son's, when he tested Paradise Lost accord- 
 ing to the rules of Le Bossu; nor Dr. 
 Johnson's, when he lamented the absence 
 of poetic justice in King Lear, or pro- 
 nounced dogmatically that the poet shouH 
 not "number the streaks of the tulip." 
 What has the poet tried to do, and how
 
 22 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 has he fulfilled his intention? What is he 
 striving to express and how has he ex- 
 pressed it? What impression does his work 
 make on me, and how can I best express 
 this impressioil? These are the questions 
 that modern critics have been taught to ask 
 when face to face with the work of a poet. 
 Only one caveat must be borne in mind 
 when attemptkig to answer them: the 
 poet's intentiofis' must be judged at the 
 moment of the creative act, as mirrored in 
 the work of art itself, and not by the 
 vague ambitions which he imagines to be 
 his real intentions -before or after the 
 creative act is achieved. 
 
 II 
 
 The theory of expression, the concept of 
 literature as an art of expression, is the 
 common ground on which critics have met 
 for a century or more. Yet how many 
 absurdities, how many complicated sys- 
 tems, how many confusions have been 
 superimposed on this fundamental idea;
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 23 
 
 and how slowly has its full significance 
 become the possession of critics! To ac- 
 cept the naked principle is to play havoc 
 with these confusions and complications; 
 and no one has seen this more clearly, or 
 driven home its inevitable consequences 
 with more intelligence and vigor, than an 
 Italian thinker and critic of our own day, 
 Benedetto Croce, who has been gaining 
 ground in the English-speaking world from 
 the day when Mr. Balfour, seven or eight 
 years ago, gave him a kind of official in- 
 troduction in his Romanes Lecture. But 
 I for one needed no introduction to his 
 work; under his banner I enrolled myself 
 long ago, and here re-enroll myself in what 
 I now say. He has led aesthetic thought 
 inevitably from the concept that art is 
 expression to the conclusion that all ex- 
 pression is art. Time does not permit, 
 nor reason ask, that we should follow this 
 argument through all its pros and cons. 
 If this theory of expression be once and for 
 all accepted, as indeed it has been partly
 
 24 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 though confusedly accepted by all modern 
 critics, the ground of Criticism is cleared 
 of its dead lumber and its weeds. I propose 
 now merely to point out this dead lumber 
 and these weeds. In other words, we shall 
 see to what conclusions the critical thought 
 and practice of a century have been in- 
 evitably converging, and what elements 
 of the old Criticism and the old literary 
 history are disappearing from the new. 
 
 In the first place, we have done with all 
 the old Rules. The very conception of 
 "rules" harks back to an age of magic, and 
 reminds the modern of those mysterious 
 words which the heroes of the fairy-tales 
 are without reason forbidden to utter; the 
 rules are a survival of the savage taboo. 
 We find few arbitrary rules in Aristotle,] 
 who limited himself to empirical induc- 
 tions from the experience of literature; 
 but they appear in the later Greek rhetori- 
 cians; and in the Romans, empirical in- 
 duction has been hardened into dogma. 
 Horace lays down the law to the pro-
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 25 
 
 spective playwright in this manner: "You 
 must never have more than three actors 
 on the stage at any one time; you must 
 never let your drama exceed five acts." 
 It is unnecessary to trace the history of 
 these rules, or to indicate how they in- 
 creased in number, how they were arranged 
 into a system by the classicists of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and 
 how they burdened the creative art of that 
 period. They were never without their 
 enemies. We have seen how Aretino was 
 pitted against Scaliger, Saint-Evremond 
 against Boileau; and in every age the poets 
 have astounded the critics by transgressing 
 rules without the sacrifice of beauty; but 
 it was not until the end of the eighteenth 
 century that the Romanticists banished 
 them from the province of Criticism. The 
 pedantry of our own day has borrowed 
 "conventions" from history and "tech- 
 nique" from science as substitutes for the 
 outworn formulae of the past; but these 
 are merely new names for the old mechan-
 
 26 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 ical rules; and they too will go, when Criti- 
 cism clearly recognizes in every work of 
 art a spiritual creation governed by its own 
 law. 
 
 We have done with the genres, or literary 
 kinds. Their history is inseparably bound 
 up with that of the classical rules. Cer- 
 tain works of literature have a general 
 resemblance and are loosely classed to- 
 gether (for the sake of convenience) as 
 lyric, comedy, tragedy, epic, pastoral, and 
 the like; the classicists made of each of 
 these divisions a fixed norm governed by 
 inviolable laws. The separation of the 
 genres was a consequence of this law of 
 classicism: comedy should not be mingled 
 with tragedy, nor epic with lyric. But no 
 sooner was the law enunciated than it was 
 broken by an artist impatient or ignorant 
 of its restraints, and the critics have been 
 obliged to explain away these violations 
 of their laws, or gradually to change the 
 laws themselves. But if art is organic 
 expression, and every work of art is to be
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 27 
 
 interrogated with the question, "What has 
 it expressed, and how completely?" there 
 is no place for the question whether it has 
 conformed to some convenient classifica- 
 tion of critics or to some law derived from 
 this classification. The lyric, the pastoral, 
 the epic, are abstractions without concrete 
 reality in the world of art. Poets do not 
 really write epics, pastorals, lyrics, how- 
 ever much they may be deceived by 
 these false abstractions; they express 
 themselves, and this expression is their 
 only form. There are not, therefore, only 
 three, or ten, or a hundred literary kinds; 
 there are as many kinds as there are in- 
 dividual poets. But it is in the field of 
 literary history that this error is most 
 obvious. Shakespeare wrote King Lear, 
 Fenus and Adonis, and a sequence of son- 
 nets. What becomes of Shakespeare, the 
 creative artist, when these three works 
 are separated from one another by the 
 historian of poetry; when they lose their 
 connection with his single creative soul.
 
 28 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 and are classified with other works with 
 which they have only a loose and vague 
 relation? To slice up the history of Eng- 
 lish literature into compartments marked 
 comedy, tragedy, lyric, and the like, is 
 to be guilty of a complete misunderstand- 
 ing of the meaning' of Criticism; and lit- 
 erary history becomes a logical absurdity 
 when its data are not organically related 
 but cut up into sections, and placed in 
 such compartments as these. Only in one 
 sense has any of these terms any profound 
 significance, and that is the use of the word 
 "lyric" to represent the free expressiveness 
 of art. All art is lyrical, — the Divine Com- 
 edy, King Lear, Rodin's "Thinker," the 
 Parthenon, a Corot landscape, a Bach 
 fugue, or Isadora Duncan's dancing, as 
 much as the songs of Heine or Shelley. 
 
 We have done with the comic, the tragic, 
 the sublime, and an army of vague ab- 
 stractions of their kind. These have grown 
 out of the generalizations of the Alexan- 
 drian critics, acquiring a new lease of life
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 29 
 
 in the eighteenth century. Gray and his 
 friend West corresponded with each other 
 on the subject of the sublime; later, Schiller 
 distinguished between the naive and the 
 sentimental; Jean Paul defined humor, 
 and Hegel defined the tragic. If these 
 terms represent the content of art, they 
 may be relegated to the same category as 
 joy, hate, sorrow, enthusiasm; and we 
 should speak of the comic in the same 
 general way in which we might speak of 
 the expression of joy in a poem. If, on 
 the other hand, these terms represent 
 abstract classifications of poetry, their use 
 in criticism sins against the very nature of 
 art. i Every poet re-expresses the universe 
 in his own way, and every poem is a new 
 and independent expressionT] The tragic 
 does not exist for Criticism, but only ^Es- 
 chylus and Calderon, Shakespeare and 
 Racine. There is no objection to the use 
 of the word tragic as a convenient label for 
 somewhat similar poems, but to find laws 
 for the tragic and to test creative artists
 
 30 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 by such laws as these is simply to give a 
 more abstract form to the outworn classical 
 conception of dramatic rules. 
 
 We have done with the theory of style, 
 with metaphor, simile, and all the para- 
 phernalia of Graeco-Roman rhetoric. 
 These owe their existence to the assump- 
 tion that style is separate from expres- 
 sion, that it is something which may be 
 added or subtracted at will from the work 
 of art, a flourish of the pen, an external 
 embellishment, instead of the poet's indi- 
 1 vidual vision of reality, " the music of his 
 -whole manner of being." But we know 
 that art is expression, that it is complete in 
 itself, that to alter it is to create another 
 expression and therefore to create another 
 work of art. If the poet, for example, says 
 of springtime that " 'Tis now the blood runs 
 gold," he has not employed a substitute for 
 something else, such as "the blood tingles 
 in our veins;" he has expressed his thought 
 in its completeness, and there is no equiva- 
 lent for his expression except itself.
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 31 
 
 "Each perfect in its place; and each content 
 With that perfection which its being meant." 
 
 Such expressions are still called metaphors 
 in the text-books; but metaphor, simile, 
 and all the old terms of classical rhetoric 
 are signs of the zodiac, magical incanta- 
 tions, astrological formulae, interesting only 
 to antiquarian curiosity. To Montaigne 
 they suggested "the prattle of chamber- 
 maids;" to me they suggest rather the 
 drone and singsong of many school- 
 mistresses. We still hear talk of the 
 "grand style," and essays on style con- 
 tinue to be written, like the old "arts of 
 poetry" of two centuries ago. But the 
 theory of styles has no longer a real place 
 in modern thought; we have learned that 
 it is no less impossible to study style as 
 separate from the work of art than to 
 study the comic as separate from the work 
 of the comic artist. 
 
 We have done with all moral judgment 
 of literature. Horace said that pleasure 
 and profit are the end of art, and for many
 
 32 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 centuries the critics quarreled over the 
 terms "pleasure" and "profit." Some 
 said that poetry was meant to instruct; 
 some, merely to please; some, to do both. 
 Romantic criticism first enunciated the 
 principle that art has no aim except ex- 
 pression; that its aim is complete when 
 expression is complete; that "beauty is its 
 own excuse for being." It is not the func- 
 tion of poetry to further any moral or so- 
 cial cause, any more than it is the function 
 of bridge-building to further the cause of 
 Esperanto. If the achievement of the 
 poet be to express any material he may 
 select, and to express it with a complete- 
 ness that we recognize as perfection, 
 obviously morals can play no part in the 
 judgment which Criticism may form of his 
 work. To say that poetry is moral or 
 immoral is as meaningless as to say that an 
 equilateral triangle is moral and an isos- 
 celes triangle immoral, or to speak of the 
 immorality of a musical chord or a Gothic 
 arch. It is onlv conceivable in a world
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 33 
 
 In which dinner table conversation runs 
 after this fashion: "This cauliflower would 
 be good if it had only been prepared in 
 accordance with international law." "Do 
 you know why my cook's pastry is so 
 good? Because he has never told a lie 
 or seduced a woman." We do not con- 
 cern ourselves with morals when we test 
 the engineer's bridge or the scientist's 
 researches; indeed we go farther, and say 
 that it is the moral duty of the scientist to 
 disregard any theory of morals in his 
 search for truth. Beauty's world is re- 
 mote from both these standards; she aims // 
 neither at morals nor at truth. Her 
 imaginary creations, by definition, make 
 no pretence to reality, and cannot be 
 judged by reality's tests. The poet's only 
 moral duty, as a poet, is to be true to his 
 art, and to express his vision of reality as 
 well as he can. If the ideals enunciated by 
 poets are not those which we admire most, 
 we must blame not the poets but ourselves: 
 in the world where morals count we have
 
 34 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 failed to give them the proper material 
 out of which to rear a nobler edifice. No 
 critic of authority now tests literature by 
 the standards of ethics. 
 
 We have done with the confusion be- 
 tween the drama and the theatre which has 
 permeated dramatic criticism for over half 
 a century. The theory that the drama 
 is not a creative art, but a mere prod- 
 uct of the physical exigencies of the 
 theatre, is as old as the sixteenth century. 
 An Italian scholar of that age was the 
 first to maintain that plays are intended 
 to be acted on a stage, under certain re- 
 stricted physical conditions, and before a 
 large and heterogeneous crowd; dramatic 
 performance has developed out of these 
 conditions, and the test of its excellence is 
 therefore the pleasure it gives to the mixed 
 audience that supports it. This idea was 
 taken hold of by some of the German ro- 
 manticists, for the purpose of justifying the 
 Shakespearean drama in its apparent 
 divergence from the classical "rules."
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 35 
 
 Shakespeare cannot be judged by the rules 
 of the Greek theatre (so ran their argu- 
 ment), for the drama Is an inevitable 
 product of theatrical conditions; these 
 conditions in Elizabethan England were 
 not the same as those of Periclean Athens; 
 and it is therefore absurd to judge Shake- 
 speare's practice by that of Sophocles. 
 Here at least the idea helped to bring 
 Shakespeare home to many new hearts by 
 ridding the age of mistaken prejudices, and 
 served a useful purpose, as a specious argu- 
 ment may persuade men to contribute to a 
 noble work, or a mad fanatic may rid the' 
 world of a tyrant. But with this achieve- 
 ment its usefulness but not its life was 
 ended. It has been developed into a sys- 
 tem, and become a dogma of dramatic 
 critics; it is our contemporary equivalent 
 for the ** rules" of seventeenth-century 
 pedantry. As a matter of fact, the dra- 
 matic artist is to be judged by no other 
 standard than that applied to any other 
 creative artist: what has he tried to ex-
 
 36 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 press, and how has he expressed it? It is 
 true that the theatre is not only an art but 
 a business, and the so-called "success" of a 
 play is of vital interest to the theatre in so 
 far as it is a commercial undertaking. 
 " The success may justify the playwright," 
 said an old French critic, " but it may 
 not be so easy to justify the success." The 
 test of "success" is an economic test, and 
 concerns not art or the criticism of art, 
 but political economy. Valuable contribu- 
 tions to economic and social history have 
 been made by students who have investi- 
 gated the changing conditions of the 
 theatre and the vicissitudes of taste on the 
 part of theatrical audiences; but these have 
 the same relation to Criticism, and to the 
 drama as an art, that a history of the pub- 
 lisher's trade and its influence on the 
 personal fortunes of poets would bear to 
 the history of poetry. 
 
 We have done with technique as separate 
 from art. It has been pointed out that 
 style cannot be disassociated from art; and
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 37 
 
 the false air of science which the term 
 "technique" seems to possess should not 
 blind us to the fact that it too involves the 
 same error. "Technique is really per- 
 sonality; that is the reason why the artist 
 cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot 
 learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can 
 understand it," says Oscar Wilde, in a 
 dialogue on "The Critic as Artist," which, 
 amid much perversity and paradox, is 
 illumined by many flashes of strange in- 
 sight. The technique of poetry cannot be 
 separated from its inner nature. Versifica- 
 tion cannot be studied by itself, except 
 loosely and for convenience; it remains 
 always an inherent quality of the single 
 poem. No two poets ever write in the 
 same metre. Milton's line: — 
 
 "These my sky-robes spun out of Iris' woof" 
 
 is called an iambic pentameter; but it is 
 not true that artistically it has something 
 in common with every other line possessing 
 the same succession of syllables and ac- 
 
 5 i) 4 S
 
 38 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 cents; in this sense it is not an iambic 
 pentameter; it is only one thing; it is the 
 line: — • 
 
 "These my sky-robes spun out of Iris' woof." 
 
 We have done with the history and crit- 
 icism of poetic themes. It is possible to 
 speak loosely of the handling of such a 
 theme as Prometheus by ^Eschylus and by 
 Shelley, of the story of Francesca da 
 Rimini, by Dante, Stephen Phillips, and 
 D'Annunzio, or the story of King Arthur 
 by Malory and Tennyson; but strictly 
 speaking, they are not employing the same 
 theme at all. Each artist is expressing a 
 certain material and labeling it with an his- 
 toric name. For Shelley Prometheus is 
 only a label; he is expressing his artistic 
 conception of life, not the history of a Greek 
 Titan. It is the vital flame he has breathed 
 into his work that makes it what it is, and 
 with this vital flame (and not with labels) 
 the critic should concern himself in the 
 works^of poets. The same answer must be
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 39 
 
 given to those critics who insist on the use 
 of contemporary material in poetry, and 
 praise the poets whose subjects are drawn 
 from the life of our own time. But even if 
 it were possible for critics to determine in 
 advance the subject-matter of poetry or to 
 impose subjects on poets, how can a poet 
 deal with anything but contemporary ma- 
 terial? How can a twentieth-century poet, 
 even when he imagines that he is concerned 
 with Greek or Egyptian life, deal with any 
 subject but the life of his own time, except 
 in the most external and superficial detail: 
 Cynics have said since the first outpourings 
 of men's hearts, "There is nothing new 
 in art; there are no new subjects." But 
 the very reverse is true. There arc no old 
 subjects; every subject is new as soon as it 
 has been transformed by the imagination 
 of the poet. 
 
 We have done with the race, the time, 
 the environment of a poet's work as an ele- 
 ment in Criticism. To study these phases 
 of a work of art is to treat it as an historic
 
 40 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 or social document, and the result is a con- 
 tribution to tiie history of culture or 
 civilization, with only a subsidiary interest 
 for the history of art, "Granted the times, 
 the environment, the race, the passions of 
 the poet, what has he done with his materi- 
 als, how has he converted poetry out of real- 
 ity?" To answer this question of the 
 Italian De Sanctis as it refers to each single 
 work of art is to perform what is truly the 
 critic's vital function; this is to interpret 
 "expression" in its rightful sense, and to 
 liberate aesthetic Criticism from the vassal- 
 age to Kulturgeschichte imposed on it by the 
 school of Taine. 
 
 We have done with the "evolution" of 
 literature. The concept of progress was 
 first applied to literature in the seven- 
 teenth century, but at the very outset 
 Pascal pointed out that a distinction must 
 here be made between science and art; 
 that science advances by accumulation of 
 knowledge, while the changes of art cannot 
 be reduced to any theory of progress. As a
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 41 
 
 matter of fact, the theory involves the 
 ranking of poets according to some ar- 
 bitrary conception of their value; and the 
 ranking of writers in order of merit has 
 become obsolete, except in the *' hundred 
 best books" of the last decade and the 
 "five-foot shelves" of yesterday. The 
 later nineteenth century gave a new air of 
 verisimilitude to this old theory by bor- 
 rowing the term "evolution" from science; 
 but this too involves a fundamental mis- 
 conception of the free and original move- 
 ment of art. A similar misconception is 
 involved in the study of the "origins" of 
 art; for art has no origin separate from 
 man's life. 
 
 "In climes beyond the solar road, 
 
 Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains 
 
 roam, 
 The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom"; 
 
 but though she wore savage raiment, she 
 was no less the Muse. Art is simple at 
 times, complex at others, but it is always 
 art. The simple art of early times may be
 
 42 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 studied with profit; but the researches of 
 anthropology have no vital significance for 
 Criticism, unless the anthropologist studies 
 the simplest forms of art in the same spirit 
 as its highest; that is, unless the anthro- 
 pologist is an aesthetic critic. 
 
 Finally, we have done with the old rup- 
 ture between genius and taste. When 
 Criticism first propounded as its real con- 
 cern the oft-repeated question: "What has 
 the poet tried to express and how has he 
 expressed it.'*" Criticism prescribed for 
 itself the only possible method. How can 
 the critic answer this question without be- 
 coming (if only for a moment of supreme 
 power) at one with the creator.'' That is to 
 say, taste must reproduce the work of art 
 within itself in order to understand and 
 judge it; and at that moment aesthetic 
 judgment becomes nothing more nor less 
 than creative art itself. The identity of 
 genius and taste is the final achievement 
 of modern thought on the subject of art, 
 and it means that fundamentally, in their
 
 THE NEW CRITICISM 43 
 
 most significant moments, the creative 
 and the critical instincts are one and the 
 same. From Goethe to Carlyle, from 
 Carlyle to Arnold, from Arnold to Symons, 
 there has been much talk of the "cre- 
 ative function" of Criticism. For each 
 of these men the phrase held a diflFer- 
 cnt content; for Arnold it meant merely 
 that Criticism creates the intellectual 
 atmosphere of the age, — a social function 
 of high importance, perhaps, yet wholly 
 independent of aesthetic significance. But 
 the ultimate truth toward which these 
 men were tending was more radical than 
 that, and plays havoc with all the old 
 platitudes about the sterility of taste. 
 Criticism at last can free itself of its age- 
 long self-contempt, now that it may realize 
 that aesthetic judgment and artistic crea- ,/ 
 tion are instinct with the same vital life. 
 This identity does not sum up the 
 whole life of the complex and difficult 
 art of Criticism, but without it, Criticism 
 would really be impossible. "Genius is to
 
 44 
 
 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 aesthetics what the ego is to philosophy, 
 the only supreme and absolute reality," 
 said Schelling; and without subduing the 
 mind to this transcendental system, it 
 remains true that what must always be 
 inexplicable to mere reflection is just what 
 gives power to poetry; that intellectual 
 curiosity may amuse itself by asking its 
 little questions of the silent sons of light, 
 but they vouchsafe no answer to art's 
 pale shadow, thought; the gods are kind 
 if they give up their secret in another work 
 of art, the art of Criticism, that serves as 
 some sort of mirror to the art of literature, 
 only because in their flashes of insight taste 
 and genius are one.
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 
 AND THE THEATRE
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 
 AND THE THEATRE 
 
 In one of the largest American Universi- 
 ties there is a room filled with theatrical 
 bric-a-brac which is called "The Dramatic 
 Museum." Actors, theatrical managers, 
 antiquarians, and millionaires have added 
 to a collection begun by the University au- 
 thorities; and the museum now contains 
 reproductions of the great theatres of the 
 ancient and modern world, masks, prompt- 
 books, playbills, and all the other acces- 
 sories of the stage. The room may or may 
 not contain collections of plays (for I have 
 never visited it); but in any event, they 
 are subsidiary to the main object of the 
 directors, which is to illustrate the chang- 
 ing conditions of the theatres of the world 
 as an essential introduction to the study of 
 the drama. 
 
 Now, there can be no legitimate objec-
 
 48 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 tion to the study of theatrical antiquities 
 as a thing in itself. Human curiosity finds 
 a natural satisfaction in searching the past 
 for every manifestation of man's activity 
 and ingenuity; and who shall say that the 
 antiquities of the theatre, that house 
 of a thousand wonders, may not be 
 studied with interest (and even with 
 intelligence) by those who are especially 
 attracted by the stage and its history? 
 Manuscripts, parchments, missals, bind- 
 ings, and typography are a legitimate 
 object of study for both those who are 
 interested and those who are not interested 
 in the contents of books; and the history 
 of the theatre may furnish amusement both 
 to those who love the drama and to those 
 who care nothing for what the drama really 
 has to offer the souls of men. The pro- 
 fessional printer may profitably spend his 
 spare hours in studying the history of 
 printing, without concerning himself with 
 the literature which the printed page gave 
 to the world; the actor may amuse himself
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 49 
 
 intelligently by ransacking stage memoirs 
 or studying theatrical antiquities, without 
 adding to his knowledge of dramatic 
 poetry; and who shall say them nay? 
 Both printer and actor become students of 
 Kulturgeschichie in the process, though, 
 like Monsieur Jourdain, they may not 
 know it; they are both exploring outlying 
 regions in the field of human culture. 
 But the fact is that the collection in the 
 American University has not been brought 
 together for this reason. It has a far more 
 pretentious purpose than this. It is called 
 a "dramatic" (not merely a theatrical) 
 museum, and those responsible for its 
 existence have brought together their 
 interesting collection because they believe 
 that these theatrical antiquities are an 
 essential instrument of dramatic criticism. 
 They believe that dramatic literature can- 
 not be intelligently studied without an 
 understanding of all that has gone on in 
 the playhouses of the world from the very 
 beginnings of the drama. The shape of
 
 50 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 the stage, the scenery, the audience and 
 its characteristics, the lighting of the 
 house, and many other things must be 
 considered and understood before the art 
 of the drama can be understood and 
 appreciated. This raises a serious ques- 
 tion of literary theory. For while we were 
 willing to follow the printer's studies in 
 the history of typography, with real inter- 
 est, and without a careful weighing of the 
 relative merits of printing and other arts 
 and crafts, the case would be quite differ- 
 ent if he insisted that we cannot under- 
 stand the history of literature without 
 studying the history of printing; and we 
 should be especially inclined to examine 
 the merits of his contention if we found 
 that it was accepted without question by a 
 considerable number of literary critics. 
 The thesis of the directors of the "dra- 
 matic museum" is a popular one in this 
 age; actors, playwrights, and dramatic 
 critics alike agree with them. What is 
 the history of this thesis, and what are its
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 51 
 
 merits? What authority in the past has 
 this theory that the criticism of dramatic 
 literature must rest on a knowledge of the 
 conditions of the theatre, and how weighty 
 and convincing does this authority appear? 
 These are the questions which this essay 
 attempts to answer. 
 
 It is obvious at the outset that we shall 
 not have to concern ourselves with the gen- 
 eral effect of acting or representation on a 
 dramatic work. That professional actors 
 may interpret plays with verve and power 
 and insight beyond the skill of men un- 
 accustomed to visualize or portray human 
 passion and human action; that the actor's 
 art may in a sense vitalize the written word 
 and give it a new magic; that the theatre 
 may add a new and wonderful sensuous 
 beauty to the imagination of the poet, — 
 these are statements which it is wholly 
 unnecessary to contest. So when Voltaire, 
 dedicating his tragedy of Zulime to a popu- 
 lar actress of his time, tells her that "with- 
 out great actors, a play is without life;
 
 52 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 it is you who give it its soul; tragedy is 
 intended to be acted even more than to be 
 read," he is stating an opinion which is 
 beyond the scope of this discussion. It 
 would be a simple matter to collect, from 
 dedications and prologues and prefaces, 
 from Marston's Malcontent and Webster's 
 Devil's Law Case to the published plays 
 of our own day, the obiter dicta of practical 
 playwrights who have expressed themselves 
 as dissatisfied with the printed page as 
 the sole or the final medium of expression 
 for dramatic writing. We need not be 
 greatly impressed by these casual and un- 
 critical utterances, which tell us nothing 
 of the creative act that produced the work 
 of art, but merely echo the ambitions 
 which the artist cherishes for the children 
 of his brain after they are born. Indeed, 
 they do not differ fundamentally from 
 the whim of a poet who might maintain 
 that his verses could not be thoroughly 
 appreciated unless they were printed on 
 vellum, in beautiful type, and with wide
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 53 
 
 margins. But utterances of this kind do 
 not concern us here; for the idea in which 
 for the moment we have a special interest 
 is that the theatre and the drama are not 
 two distinct things, but only one; that the 
 actor and the theatre do not merely exter- 
 nalize the drama, or interpret it, or 
 heighten its effect, but that they are the 
 drama; that the drama, in a word, is not 
 so much a creative art born in the brain 
 of the playwright as an historic product 
 shaped by theatres and actors, and there- 
 fore not to be understood or studied with- 
 out reference to them. 
 
 Even in this form we find the problem 
 propounded at the very beginnings of 
 dramatic criticism. Aristotle, in the fourth 
 chapter of the Poetics, makes a distinction 
 between the consideration of tragedy in 
 itself and its consideration with reference 
 to theatrical representation; but the text 
 of the passage is so corrupt and confus- 
 ing that it is hardly possible to found a 
 theory, or even shape a clear antithesis,
 
 54 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 on the basis of this utterance. In several 
 other passages, however, he has clearly 
 enough stated his point of view. Tragedy, 
 he tells us, has six parts, plot, character, 
 diction, thought, song, and scenery. By 
 the last is meant the spectacle presented 
 by the play upon the stage, the scenery, 
 the mise en scene, or perhaps merely the 
 actors in their tragic costume; but at 
 all events the purely theatrical side of a 
 drama. This, he says in the sixth chapter, 
 
 "has an emotional attraction of its own, but of 
 all the parts it is the least artistic and con- 
 nected least with the art of poetry. For the 
 power of tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even 
 apart from representation and actors. Be- 
 sides, the production of spectacular effects 
 depends more on the art of the stage machinist 
 than on that of the poet." 
 
 This statement is repeated and re-enforced 
 with argument throughout the Poetics: — 
 in the seventh chapter, where we are told 
 that the length of a play must be de- 
 termined by an inner need, for
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 
 
 :):) 
 
 "the limit of length in relation to dramatic 
 competition and sensuous presentment is no 
 part of artistic theory"; 
 
 in the fourteenth chapter, where there is a 
 contrast between the superior poet who 
 arouses tragic pity and fear by means of 
 the inner structure of the piece, and the 
 inferior poet who does so by means of the 
 external spectacle of the theatre: 
 
 "for the plot ought to be so constructed that, 
 even without the aid of the eye, he who hears 
 the tale told will thrill with horror and melt 
 with pity at what takes place"; 
 
 and finally in the twenty-sixth chapter, 
 where Aristotle sharply distinguishes be- 
 tween the poetic and histrionic arts, and 
 tells us that 
 
 "tragedy, like epic poetry, produces its true 
 eflFect even without action; it reveals its power 
 by mere reading." 
 
 Casual references to the part played by 
 actors and the theatre in the make-up of a
 
 56 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 play may mislead moderns into thinking 
 that Aristotle is not wholly consistent in 
 this matter. But the fact is that he cannot 
 help thinking of plays in connection with 
 their theatrical representation, any more 
 than most of us can think of men and 
 women without clothes. They belong 
 together by long habit and use; they help 
 each other to be what we commonly think 
 them. But he does not make them identi- 
 cal or mutually inclusive. A play is a crea- 
 tive work of the imagination, and must be 
 considered as such always, and as such only. 
 From the later Italian Renaissance to the 
 end of the eighteenth century, the Poetics 
 found scores, indeed hundreds, of transla- 
 tors and commentators throughout Eu- 
 rope; and Aristotle's position was tamely 
 accepted by virtually every one of them. 
 That this should be so in the Italy of the 
 sixteenth century need excite no wonder, 
 since the traditions of the theatre were 
 still to be created for modern Europe. But 
 in the next century we find even Corneille,
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 57 
 
 in his three Discours, dismissing the whole 
 subject of stage decoration and scenery, 
 because Aristotle said they do not properly 
 concern the poet; and this despite his 
 own complaint that most dramatic critics 
 have discussed the drama as philosophers 
 and grammarians wholly lacking in all 
 experience of the theatre. So Dryden, 
 true to the ideals of his master Corneille, 
 tells us that it is his ambition as a play- 
 wright to be read: "that, I am sure, is the 
 more lasting and the nobler design." 
 So the great French scholar, Dacier, 
 at the end of the seventeenth century, 
 admits that while stage decoration adds to 
 the beauty of a play, it makes the piece 
 in itself neither better nor worse; and yet 
 he feels that it is valuable for the poet to 
 understand the theatre, in order that he 
 may know whether his play is well acted 
 and whether the scenery is proper to the 
 piece. So in the middle of the next cen- 
 tury, Voltaire, in the notes to the tragedy 
 of Olympie, says:
 
 58 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 "What has the stage decoration to do with the 
 merit of a poem? If the success depends on 
 what strikes the eyes, we might as well have 
 moving pictures!" 
 
 And so at the end of the same century, the 
 poet laureate Pye, if we may dare to dis- 
 inter his work in the face of Byron's and 
 the world's contempt, says in his com- 
 mentary on the Poetics : 
 
 "There are few good tragedies in which the 
 effect is not in general at least as forcible in the 
 closet as on the stage, even in the modern 
 theatre. In the strongly impassioned parts, 
 where every other consideration of effect is lost 
 in feeling, we are wonderfully moved by the 
 natural efforts of a Garrick or a Siddons; but 
 this is independent of the stage effect, and 
 would be as strong in a room as on the stage." 
 
 The first to challenge this theory of the 
 drama was a scholar and critic of the later 
 Renaissance, Lodovico Castelvetro, who 
 published an Italian version of Aristotle's 
 Poetics in 1570. The version is embedded, 
 one might almost say lost, in an elabo-
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 59 
 
 rate commentary of over three hundred 
 thousand words, which covers the whole 
 field of literary theory with remarkable 
 thoroughness and with even more remark- 
 able independence of mind. Indeed, this 
 independence of mind gained for him the 
 rancor of classicists in all the countries 
 of Europe for a century or more, and 
 several pages might be filled with the 
 protests of continental scholars and critics 
 against what seemed to them the pervers- 
 ity, the heretical doctrines, and the exces- 
 sive subtlety and acuteness of Castelvetro's 
 book. He was an aggressive controversial- 
 ist by temperament, belonging to those 
 "literary gladiators of the Renaissance" 
 (as Nisard calls them) who regarded schol- 
 arship as an instrument of logical disputa- 
 tion as much as (if not more than) a 
 means of uncovering buried truth. It is 
 easy for any shallowpate to disagree with 
 Aristotle now; but when we consider that 
 the theory of Aristotelian infallibility in 
 letters died hard even at the end of the
 
 6o CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 eighteenth century, and that even Lessing 
 thought the Poetics as infaUible in criticism 
 as Euclid in geometry, we must salute the 
 commentator who did not fear to take 
 direct issue with Aristotle at the end of the 
 sixteenth century. 
 
 Castelvetro certainly takes issue with 
 Aristotle on the question whether the 
 drama exhibits its real power in the study 
 or in the theatre. "Non e vero quello che 
 Aristotele dice," he says: it simply is not 
 true, what Aristotle says, that the value 
 of a play can be discovered by reading in 
 the same way as by theatrical representa- 
 tion, for the reason that a few highly 
 gifted and imaginative men might be able 
 to judge a play in this way, whereas every 
 one, the gifted and the ignorant alike, can 
 follow and appreciate a play when it is 
 acted. Nor is it true, he tells us elsewhere, 
 that the same pleasure is derived from the 
 reading of plays as from seeing them on 
 the stage; the pleasure is different in kind, 
 and the peculiar pleasure of a play is to
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 6i 
 
 be derived only from its representation 
 in the theatre. In order to understand 
 what the drama is, and what is the pecu- 
 liar pleasure that it affords to men, we must 
 examine the conditions of the physical 
 theatre, and realize exactly what is to be 
 found there. The fact that the drama is 
 intended for the stage, that it is to be 
 acted, must form the basis of every true 
 theory of tragedy or comedy. 
 
 A number of years ago I pointed out Cas- 
 telvetro's priority in stating this theory of 
 the theatre, and I can only repeat the sum- 
 mary that I gave of it then. What, ac- 
 cording to him, are the conditions of stage 
 representation.'' The theatre is a public 
 place, in which a play is presented before 
 a motley crowd — la moltitiidine rozza — 
 upon a circumscribed platform or stage, 
 within a limited space of time. To this 
 idea the whole of Castelvctro's dramatic 
 system is conformed. In the first place, 
 since the audience may be great in number, 
 the theatre must be large, and yet the
 
 62 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 audience must be able to hear the play; 
 hence verse Is added, not merely as a de- 
 lightful accompaniment, but also in order 
 that the actors may raise their voices 
 without inconvenience and without loss 
 of dignity. In the second place, the audi- 
 ence is not a select gathering of choice 
 spirits, but a motley crowd of people, 
 drawn to the theatre for the purpose of 
 pleasure or recreation; accordingly, ab- 
 struse themes, and in fact all technical 
 discussions, must be avoided by the play- 
 wright, who is limited, as we should say 
 to-day, to the elemental passions and 
 interests of men. In the third place, the 
 actors are required to move about on a 
 raised and narrow platform; and this is 
 the reason why deeds of violence, and many 
 other things which cannot be acted on such 
 a platform with convenience and dignity, 
 should not be represented in the drama. 
 And finally, the physical convenience of 
 the people in the audience, who cannot 
 comfortably remain in the theatre without
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 63 
 
 food and other physical necessities for an 
 indefinite period of time, limits the length 
 of the play to about three or four hours. 
 
 Many of Castelvetro's incidental conclu- 
 sions may seem hopelessly outworn to-day; 
 but the modernity of his system is self- 
 evident, if by modernity we mean agree- 
 ment with the theories that happen to be 
 most popular in our own time. Certainly, 
 for nearly two centuries, the path which 
 he blazed was not crowded with followers. 
 A few writers during the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries, a very few, echo 
 haltingly and intermittently some of his 
 ideas about the relations of the drama and 
 the actual theatre. But it was not until 
 the days of Diderot that they found again 
 systematic and intelligent discussion. In 
 several of Diderot's essays and dialogues, 
 — in his discourse on dramatic poetry, in 
 his famous Paradox of the Actor, but more 
 especially in his Entretiens sur le Fils Nat- 
 urel, — the accents of " modernity" are even 
 more apparent than in his Italian predeces-
 
 64 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 sor, and one or two notes are sounded that 
 are so much of our own time that it seems 
 difficult to believe they can be older than 
 yesterday. 
 
 Diderot's central idea in the Entretiens 
 is that the essential part of a play is not 
 created by the poet at all, but by the actor. 
 Gestures, inarticulate cries, facial expres- 
 sions, movements of the body, a few mon- 
 osyllables which escape from the lips at 
 intervals are what really move us in the 
 theatre; and to such an extent is this true, 
 that all that really belongs to the poet is 
 the scenario, while words, even ideas and 
 scenes, might be left to the actor to omit, 
 add to, or alter. He himself sketches the 
 scenario of a tragedy in monosyllables, 
 with an exclamation here, the commence- 
 ment of a phrase there, scarcely ever a con- 
 secutive discourse. "There is true trag- 
 edy," he cries; "but for works of this kind 
 we need authors, actors, a theatre, and 
 perhaps a whole people!" 
 
 Yes, obviously actors, even authors, but
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 65 
 
 why a theatre and a whole people for 
 drama like this? Because the mere pres- 
 ence of a large number of people assembled 
 together in a theatre has its own special 
 effect that must be considered in every 
 discussion of the drama. Here we meet, 
 although not for the first time, what is 
 now known as the theory of the "psychol- 
 ogy of the crowd." Bacon, in the De 
 Augmentis, had pointed out the won- 
 derful effectiveness of the theatre as an in- 
 strument of public m.orality, in the hands of 
 ancient playwrights, and explained this 
 effectiveness on the ground that it is a 
 "secret of nature" that men's minds arc 
 more open to passions and impressions 
 "congregate than solitary." Before him 
 Castelvetro had estimated the influence 
 of the theatrical audience in general on 
 the nature of the drama, finding it espe- 
 cially in the necessity imposed upon the 
 playwright of avoiding all themes and 
 ideas unintelligible to the miscellaneous 
 gathering at a theatrical performance.
 
 66 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 But Diderot finds a dual effect. Mobs and 
 popular revolts make it clear how conta- 
 gious is passion or excitement in a great 
 concourse of people; self-restraint and de- 
 cency have no meaning for thousands 
 gathered together, whatever may be the 
 temperament of each individual in the 
 crowd. The effect of the play is heightened 
 for each spectator because there are many 
 spectators to hear and see it together; but 
 the presence of the crowd has a kindred 
 influence on the playwright and the actor. 
 They, too, share the effect of the "psychol- 
 ogy of the crowd:" the actor has the crowd 
 before him in fact, the poet in imagination, 
 and both do their work differently than 
 if they were preparing a solitary en- 
 tertainment. Like the orator on the 
 public platform or the mountebank on 
 the street corner, the playwright must 
 suit his particular audience or he will 
 fail. 
 
 This, says Diderot, is the secret of the 
 failure of French tragedy in the eighteenth
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 67 
 
 century. The Greek drama is the product 
 of a vast amphitheatre, the enormous 
 crowds that frequented it, and the solemn 
 occasions that brought them together; 
 these explain its simplicity of plot, its 
 versification, its dignity and emphasis, all 
 proclaiming a discourse chanted in spacious 
 places and in noble surroundings. The 
 French drama, however, has imitated the 
 emphasis, the versification, the dignity of 
 the Greeks, but without the physical sur- 
 roundings that made the ancient drama 
 suited to its environment, and without 
 the simplicity of plot and thought that 
 its other methods justify. Simplify the 
 French play and beautify the French stage: 
 this is Diderot's recipe for restoring the 
 glory of Greek drama in the modern world; 
 a larger and more adequate theatre and 
 more beautiful stage decoration are the 
 first prerequisites of reform. It is Vol- 
 taire's recipe too: the elimination of petty 
 gallantry from the French drama and the 
 substitution of an adequate edifice for the
 
 68 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 "narrow miserable theatre with its poor 
 scenery." 
 
 The world will never cease to seek ex- 
 ternal cures for inner deficiencies of the hu- 
 man spirit; and yet every age must protest 
 against this form of quackery in its own 
 way. In this case it was left to Lessing to 
 point out Diderot's and Voltaire's more 
 obvious errors. Lessing's Hamburgische 
 Dramaturgic was a product of actual con- 
 tact with the theatre; it is, at least ap- 
 parently, a discussion of one play after 
 another as Lessing saw them acted on the 
 stage. But out of this accidental succes- 
 sion of theatrical performances he formu- 
 lates a more or less consistent programme 
 for the development of a new and more 
 vital dramatic literature in his own coun- 
 try; not, however, by means of an im- 
 proved theatre or more elaborate stage 
 decorations, but by a new and creative 
 impulse in the plays themselves. In the 
 eightieth number of the Dramaturgie he 
 answers the theatrical arguments of Vol-
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 69 
 
 taire and Diderot by an appeal to history. 
 The Shakespearean drama, considered in 
 connection with the poverty of Elizabethan 
 stage decoration, proves conclusively for 
 him that there is no real relation between 
 elaborate scenery or splendid theatrical 
 edifices and great drama itself. Docs 
 every tragedy need pomp and display, or 
 should the poet arrange his play so that it 
 will produce its effect without these ex- 
 ternal aids.' Lessing's answer to these 
 questions is identical with Aristotle's. 
 Indeed, he forestalls Lamb's theory that 
 a great play cannot be properly acted at 
 all: "A masterpiece is rarely as well repre- 
 sented as it is written; mediocrity always 
 fares better with the actors." 
 
 Still there must lurk a doubt in regard to 
 his consistency. "To what end the hard 
 work of the dramatic form.'"' he asks; 
 "Why build a theatre, disguise men and 
 women, torture their memories, invite the 
 whole town to assemble at one place, if 
 I intend to produce nothing more with my
 
 70 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 work and its representation than some of 
 those emotions that would be produced by 
 any good story that every one could read 
 by his chimney-corner at home?" We 
 may well ask ourselves what Lessing really 
 means by this question. There never was 
 a thing written, lyric, ballad, epic, drama, 
 or what not, that was not strengthened in 
 the impression it makes, by having a noble 
 voice or an exquisite art express it for us. 
 Of course the trained actor gives a new 
 fire and flavor to the drama; of course 
 attendance at a theatre adds pleasures to 
 those derived merely by reading a play in 
 solitude; of course when we have recourse 
 to sound and sight, to music and archi- 
 tecture and painting, in the theatre, we are 
 adding complicated sensations to those 
 that properly spring from the nature of the 
 drama itself. If Lessing means to ask 
 whether these added sensations are worth 
 the cost of building theatres and training 
 actors, who will answer no.'' But if he 
 means to imply that it would not be worth
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 71 
 
 building theatres and training actors un- 
 less the drama were a vie manquee without 
 them, then we can only answer his question 
 by asking some of our own. Why build 
 libraries, train librarians, perfect systems 
 of library administration and bibliography, 
 if we get nothing out of a book in a library 
 that we could not get out of it in our study 
 at home? Why develop the arts of typog- 
 raphy and binding, if we can get as much 
 pleasure out of a volume in manuscript as 
 out of a printed book; or why have beauti- 
 ful type and rich bindings, if we can find 
 the real soul of a book in the cheapest and 
 ugliest of types and bindings? These 
 questions bring with them their own 
 reductio ad absurdum; for obviously we 
 build libraries, and develop the arts of 
 typography and binding, for quite other 
 reasons than that books are not books 
 without them, or that the critic must con- 
 sider any of the three when he is criticizing 
 the content of a book. 
 
 Forty years of historical research, of aes-
 
 72 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 thetic theory, and of wider acquaintance 
 with the literatures of the world inter- 
 vened between the Hamburgische Dra- 
 tnaturgie and Schlegel's Lectures on Dra- 
 matic Art and Literature; and in these 
 the methods inaugurated by Castelvetro 
 were applied, if not for the first time, at 
 least with the largest amount of consist- 
 ency, to the actual history of the drama. 
 In Schlegel's first two lectures we find all 
 the theories we have already met, as 
 well as others of kindred intention. The 
 drama is dialogue, but dialogue with con- 
 flict and change, and without personal 
 explanation of this conflict or change on 
 the part of the playwright. There is only 
 one way in which this can be done: by 
 having men and women actually represent 
 the characters, imitate their voices and 
 temperaments, and carry on the discourse 
 in surroundings that have some similarity 
 to those imagined by the playwright. 
 Without this help (and this is Schlegel's 
 central idea) dramatic dialogue would de-
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 7.^ 
 
 mand personal explanation on the part of 
 the playwright to make his meaning clear; 
 that is forbidden by the very idea of drama ; 
 and so the theatre is implicit in the nature 
 of drama itself. In the theatre, "where 
 the magic of many combined arts can be 
 displayed," these all help the playwright 
 in "producing an impression on an as- 
 sembled multitude." Here we are once 
 more faced by the theory of the "psy- 
 chology of the crowd." According to 
 Schlegel, the main object of the drama is 
 to "produce an impression on an assembled 
 crowd, to gain their attention, and to ex- 
 cite in them interest and participation." 
 The impression is intensified by reason of 
 the numbers that share it: "The effect 
 produced by seeing a number of others 
 share in the same emotions ... is aston- 
 ishingly powerful." 
 
 For Schlegel, the theatrical and the dra- 
 matic are bound together, not only in their 
 very nature, but, as a consequence, in 
 their history. Acting and theatrical per-
 
 74 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 formances of greater or lesser complexity- 
 are to be found in various primitive ages 
 and among various primitive peoples, and 
 mimicry is innate in man's nature. On 
 these assumptions Schlegel sketches the 
 earlier history of the stage, as indeed 
 Aristotle had done for Greek tragedy, and 
 carries on this history throughout his dis- 
 cussion of the modern drama. The Eliza- 
 bethan theatre's paucity of stage scenery 
 is cited as proof of the glory of Shake- 
 speare, inasmuch as he was able to give the 
 air of reality, to produce complete illusion, 
 without such adventitious aid. And so 
 Schlegel proceeds in the case of each 
 period of dramatic poetry; indicating the 
 condition of the theatre almost always, but 
 never quite arriving at the more modern 
 conception by which the shape of the 
 theatre or of the stage is regarded as having 
 actually determined the nature of the 
 drama in each age. 
 
 The Austrian playwright, Grillparzer, 
 whose prose works abound in critical
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 75 
 
 acuteness, came to regard Schlegel's lec- 
 tures as "dangerous;" but the ideas they 
 contained, so far as the relations of drama 
 and theatre are concerned, had a germinal 
 influence on his own dramatic criticism. 
 He was the most aggressive opponent of 
 the "closet-drama" that had yet appeared; 
 and he was relentless in his contempt for 
 all fine writing, soliloquies, and mere 
 poetry that do not contribute to the "ac- 
 tion" of a play. He goes so far as to say 
 that the distinction between theatrical 
 and dramatic is false; whatever is one must 
 inevitably be the other. If time and space 
 permitted, it would be interesting to dis- 
 cuss in detail Grillparzer's theories of the 
 drama, especially as they have been neg- 
 lected by English critics. But the fact is 
 that intellectual hegemony in these mat- 
 ters had already passed to France while 
 Grillparzer was still writing, and we 
 cannot remain longer in the company 
 of German theorists, although many of 
 them have contributed largely, if not al-
 
 76 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 ways wisely, to the subject under discus- 
 sion. 
 
 There still remains one period of dram- 
 atic theory to consider, the period of theat- 
 ricalism rampant. The French have been 
 the masters of this form of dramatic 
 criticism, and since the middle of the 
 nineteenth century their footsteps have 
 been followed with little or no protest by 
 the critics of the world. Critics like Mr. 
 A. B. Walkley and Mr. William Archer, not 
 to mention their noisy but negligible echoes 
 in our own country, have little enough to 
 add to what Frenchmen had already said be- 
 fore them on this subject. The extremist in 
 this movement, and indeed in some senses 
 a pioneer, is Francisque Sarcey; and no one 
 has gone further in the direction of making 
 drama and theatre mutually interchange- 
 able terms than he. Doubtless it was of 
 him and his kind that Flaubert was think- 
 ing when he wrote to George Sand over 
 forty years ago: "One of the most comical 
 things of our time is this newfangled
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 77 
 
 theatrical mystery {r arcane thedtral). They 
 tell us that the art of the theatre Is be- 
 yond the limits of human intelligence, and 
 that it is a mystery reserved for men who 
 write like cab-drivers. The question of 
 success surpasses all others. It is the school 
 of demoralization." Two years after this 
 was written Sarcey summed up his code 
 in extenso in an Essai dUine Esthetique de 
 Theatre, which still remains the clearest 
 and most extreme expression of this form 
 of dramatic materialism. 
 
 Sarcey assumes three fundamental hy- 
 potheses: first, that the only purpose of a 
 play is to please a definite body of men 
 and women assembled in a theatre; sec- 
 ondly, that in order to do this, the play- 
 wright is limited, or if you will, aided, by 
 certain tricks and conventions of the 
 theatre; and finally, some of these conven- 
 tions change from age to age or from 
 country to country, while others are in- 
 evitable and eternal. On the basis of these 
 assumptions, he frames this pretty defini-
 
 78 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 tion of the drama: "Dramatic art is the 
 ensemble of conventions, universal or local, 
 eternal or temporary, by the aid of which 
 the playwright, representing human life 
 in a theatre, gives to the audience an 
 illusion of truth." Foild done! Here is 
 the greatness of Hamlet and Oedipus most 
 simply set down. Here is a definition that 
 makes it an easy matter to understand the 
 greatness of all the great plays of the past! 
 Like nearly all his predecessors from the 
 time of Castelvetro, of whom Sarcey had 
 doubtlessnever heard, our aesthetician of the 
 theatre places the idea of an audience first. 
 When you think of the theatre, he says, you 
 think of the presence of the public; when 
 you think of a play, you think in the same 
 instant of the public come to hear it. You 
 can omit every other requirement, but you 
 cannot omit the audience. It is the inevi- 
 table, the fatal sine qua no7i. To it dramatic 
 art must accommodate all its organs, and 
 from it can be drawn, without a single 
 exception, all the laws of the theatre.
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 79 
 
 This is Sarccy's fundamental condition 
 in 1876; and it is still fundamental with 
 most of the dramatic critics of to-day. Mr. 
 Walkley, for instance, in a half-solemn, half- 
 facetious review of my lecture on "The 
 New Criticism" which he did me the honor 
 to write for the London Times a few years 
 ago, asserts that the dramatic critic can 
 only appraise a play "by an evaluation 
 of the aesthetic pleasure received," and 
 that in order to do this, he must " take into 
 account the peculiar conditions" under 
 which the dramatist works. These pecu- 
 liar conditions are of course the audience of 
 Sarcey (Mr. Walkley calls it the "peculiar 
 psychology of the crowd he is addressing") 
 and Sarcey's conventions of the theatre 
 (although Mr. Walkley limits them to "the 
 conformation of the stage"). The critic 
 of the Times has studied and considered, 
 perhaps more carefully than any of his pred- 
 ecessors, the various vicissitudes of this 
 "conformation of the stage." I have no 
 reason to doubt his authority in the field of
 
 So CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 stage history; but his authority ceases in the 
 field of aesthetic theory. A writer who has 
 sense enough to understand that the dra- 
 matic critic must "sit tight" against the 
 prejudices and opinions of theatrical au- 
 diences, preserving at all hazards his own 
 judgment (I am paraphrasing a lecture 
 of Mr. Walkley on Dramatic Criticism), 
 and who in the very next breath tells us 
 that the playwright must be judged by 
 his effect on "the peculiar psychology of 
 the crowd he is addressing," has evidently 
 not mastered the elements of aesthetic 
 logic. As for Francisque Sarcey, who is 
 responsible for so much of this cheap 
 materialism of contemporary dramatic 
 criticism, he seems to me as shallow a 
 dogmatist as ever wrote criticisms of 
 plays for the press; and decent invective 
 can hardly go farther than that. 
 
 Now, what is meant by this idea, by no 
 means modern, but in our day more per- 
 sistent than ever, that the peculiar char- 
 acteristic of dramatic literature is that it is
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 8i 
 
 intended for an assembled crowd? Ob- 
 viously not merely that men are more 
 impressionable in crowds than when alone, 
 and that the dramatist has an advantage 
 over most other writers in that he may 
 make his appeal to men when they are 
 most impressionable. This may be Ba- 
 con's thought, but it is far from being 
 Diderot's or Schlegel's or Mr. Walkley's. 
 What these men assert is that the crowd is 
 inherent in the very idea of a play, and 
 that this crowd has a peculiar psychology 
 different in kind from that of any in- 
 dividual composing it. Indeed, I believe 
 I have read some flighty utterances of late 
 to the effect that so far from remaining 
 civilized beings, we all revert to our primi- 
 tive savage state when we become part of a 
 crowd, and that the drama must therefore 
 always appeal to what is primitive and 
 savage in our natures more than any other 
 form of literature. Well, the fact is that all 
 of us are primitive men in spots, and that 
 the theatre may appeal to what is primitive
 
 82 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 in us if it chooses; but so does fire, so does 
 shipwreck or drowning, whether we choose 
 or not; and for that matter, to get as far 
 from the crowd as possible, so does soli- 
 tude. If anything is certain in regard to 
 that strange creature man, it is that in 
 solitudes, what we call civilization is most 
 likely to fall from him; and we might with 
 at least equal truth argue that lyric or 
 didactic poetry, intended to be read in the 
 quiet of a man's study, must appeal to the 
 most primitive instincts in him, and that 
 therefore all lyric or didactic poetry must 
 of necessity deal with more primitive and 
 savage themes than any other forms of 
 literature. But the inner logic of art is 
 independent of these incidental and extran- 
 eous classifications of artistic form. All 
 literature makes its appeal to the same 
 spiritual side of man's nature, and the 
 appeal is not altered by any abstract clas- 
 sification, lyric, didactic, dramatic, or what 
 not, which has no higher function than con- 
 venience of discussion.
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 83 
 
 Not only is the crowd different from its 
 constituent individualities, and more prim- 
 itive in instinct than they (I am of course 
 summarizing the virtues of the imaginary 
 crowd created by modern psychologists 
 and dramatic critics), but it is also in- 
 attentive, engrossed in itself, difficult to 
 interest, and the first object of the play- 
 wright must be to compel its attention. 
 But the fact is that most men and women 
 (whether in a crowd or by themselves) are 
 without the faculty of intellectual con- 
 centration. Great art ignores this and 
 other like frailties of men, in the theatre 
 and out of it; while mediocre art focuses its 
 attention on them, in the novel, in song, 
 ballad, lyric, essay, no less than in drama. 
 A great Italian critic, indeed one of the 
 greatest critics of the modern world, Fran- 
 cesco de Sanctis, gave this famous advice 
 to a young poet anxious to know how he 
 could best serve the higher morals in 
 poetry: "Don't think about morals; that is 
 the best way of serving them in art." In
 
 84 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 much the same way, we might say to the 
 playwright: "Don't think about your 
 audience; that is the best way of serving it 
 in the drama." 
 
 It will be remembered that Pye, in com- 
 menting on Aristotle, pointed out that 
 Garrick or Siddons reciting a dramatic 
 poem in a room might affect us with the 
 same pleasure as if they were acting in the 
 theatre. Now, if we do not prefer rather to 
 err with Mr. Walkley than shine with Pye, 
 we may go a step farther, and assume that 
 the audience of Garrick or Siddons in that 
 little room has been reduced to a single 
 spectator. Will there be any diminution 
 in the power of Garrick or Siddons over 
 him because of the absence of a crowd? 
 Or even assuming that Garrick or Siddons 
 might find a stimulus to added passion in 
 the presence of a large audience, or that 
 our single auditor would feel stimulated 
 also by the crowd in the theatre, how can 
 we for a moment believe that the pleasure 
 he receives in the room is different in its
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 85 
 
 nature from the pleasure received from the 
 recitation in the crowded theatre? So 
 that even histrionic art, not to mention 
 dramatic art, speaks with the same voice 
 in solitude as in crowds; and all the more 
 then will the drama itself, "even apart 
 from representation and actors", as old 
 Aristotle puts it, speak with its highest 
 power to the imagination fitted to under- 
 stand and receive it. 
 
 No, Mr. Walkley and Brunetiere and 
 others like them are right when they say 
 that the dramatic critic must "sit tight" 
 against the prejudices of the crowd, must 
 preserve his own judgment; which is only 
 another way of saying that the critic must 
 be an artist like the dramatist he is crit- 
 icizing; and this in turn is another way of 
 saying that a play must be judged by its 
 effect on an individual temperament, and 
 not by "the peculiar psychology of the 
 crowd." But unfortunately the demorali- 
 zation which forty years ago Flaubert 
 foresaw in all this arcane thedtral, all this
 
 86 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 pedantry of "dramatic technique," of 
 "dramaturgic skill," of scenes a faire, of 
 the conditions of the theatre, the influence 
 of the audience, and the conformation of 
 the stage, this demoralization, I say, has 
 overwhelmed the criticism of the drama. 
 What the unities, decorum, liaison des 
 scenes^ and kindred petty limitations and 
 restrictions were to dramatic theory in 
 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
 these things are to criticism in the nine- 
 teenth and twentieth. They constitute 
 the new pedantry, against which all 
 aesthetic criticism, as well as all creative 
 literature, must wage a battle for life. 
 How deeply this pedantry has permeated 
 the criticism of our age becomes even 
 more obvious when we examine the work 
 of the aesthetic critics themselves. They 
 cannot wholly subdue their minds to so me- 
 chanical a theory, but its phrases and for- 
 mulae they repeat in a sort of parrot-like 
 fashion, even when in the next breath their 
 truer understanding of poetry makes them
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 87 
 
 deny its truth. So Mr. Arthur Symons, for 
 example, tells us that "a play is written to 
 be acted, and it will not be literature 
 merely because its sentences are nicely 
 written; it will be literature, dramatic 
 literature, if in addition to being nicely 
 written, it has qualities which make a 
 stage-play a good stage-play." And yet 
 in the same book, dealing with a particular 
 play, he says that "the piece was con- 
 structed entirely with a view to effective- 
 ness, superficial effectiveness on the stage, 
 and not according to the variable but 
 quite capturable logic of human na- 
 ture; ... as a thing to be acted, not as 
 life, not as drama." This final jumble 
 may be capped by a sentence of Mr. Lau- 
 rence Binyon's, which might well serve 
 as a minute master-piece of confused 
 aesthetic thinking: "If poets mean to 
 serve the stage, their dramas must be 
 dramatic." What can this mean except 
 that if poets wish to make the theatre 
 successful, they must write plays that
 
 88 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 will make the theatre successful? Or if it 
 does not mean that, what else can it 
 mean that is not equally meaningless? 
 But to serve the theatre in any practical 
 sense is not an aesthetic aim, and can never 
 be the aim of a poet; there is only one way 
 in which he can serve it well, and that is 
 to express the best there is in him, and 
 that only. The answer to Mr. Symons 
 at his worst may well come from Mr. 
 Symons at his best. No one has ex- 
 pressed that answer more clearly than he: 
 "To you, as to me, whatever has been 
 beautifully wrought, by whatever crafts- 
 man, and in whatever manner of working, 
 if only he has been true to himself, to his 
 own way of realizing the things he sees, 
 that, to you as to me, is a work of art." 
 
 Regarding the theatre, therefore, not as a 
 place of amusement (although in that too 
 it has of course its justification as much as 
 golf or tennis), not as a business under- 
 taking (in which case we should have to 
 consider the box-office receipts as the test
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 89 
 
 of a play's excellence), not as an instru- 
 ment of public morality (since our concern 
 here is not with ethics or sociology), but 
 regarding it solely as the home or the 
 cradle of a great art, what do we find its 
 relations to dramatic criticism? Merely 
 this, that for aesthetic criticism the theatre 
 simply does not exist. For criticism, a 
 theatre means only the appearance at any 
 one time or in any one country, as Croce 
 puts it, of a "series of artistic souls." 
 When these artistic souls appear, theatres 
 will spring up like mushrooms to house 
 them, and the humblest garret will serve 
 as an eyrie for their art. But all these 
 external conditions are merely dead mate- 
 rial which has no aesthetic significance out- 
 side of the poet's soul; and only in the 
 poet's art should we seek to find them. 
 
 No misconception of art is so persistent 
 as this confusion between inner impulse 
 and outer influence. A poet, let us say, 
 finds that a brisk walk stimulates his 
 writing, or that he can write more easily
 
 90 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 when he has smoked a cigarette. The 
 walk or the cigarette has not produced 
 the poetry; it has simply served as a stimu- 
 lus to the personality that creates the 
 poetry. It opens the faucet, but who 
 would be so foolish as to maintain that it 
 produces or alters the water that gushes 
 forth.? Other poets find that they cannot 
 write easily without the stimulus of imag- 
 ined reward, — money, the plaudits of the 
 crowd, the resplendent beauty of theatri- 
 cal performance. But men with the same 
 ambitions write different poems or plays, 
 and in this difference lies the real secret 
 of art. For after all, whatever the imagi- 
 nary stimulus, there is only one real urge 
 in the poet's soul, to express what is in 
 him, to body forth his own vision of real- 
 ity as well as he can. To say, therefore, 
 that playwrights write for the stage, that 
 poets write for money, that painters paint 
 to be "hung," is to confuse mere stimulus 
 with creative impulse. 
 
 For Mr. William Archer this distinction,
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 91 
 
 one of the most fundamental of all dis- 
 tinctions in criticism, is a mere dispute 
 between Tweedledum and Tweedledee; 
 and so it may well seem to a connoisseur 
 of stale platitudes, angered and confused 
 by the thought of a new age impatient 
 at his commonplaces. For him the rela- 
 tion of the drama to the theatre is exactly 
 the same as that of a ship to the sea. A 
 play is "a ship destined to be launched 
 in a given element, the theatre. Here," 
 he adds, "Mr. Spingarn will at once inter- 
 rupt, and say that many plays are not 
 so destined." But Mr. Spingarn says 
 nothing of the kind. What he really says 
 is that, rightly considered, 710 plays are so 
 destined. Every poet in the world may or 
 may not have written poems for money; 
 it is a problem for the young and not too 
 discreet tyro in the economic interpreta- 
 tion of history; but what concern is it of 
 the critic.'' For him no poem is written 
 for money. When we find that Mr. 
 Archer simply cannot understand what this
 
 92 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 means, — when we find that he cannot 
 comprehend the distinction between util- 
 ity and beauty, between stimulus and 
 creative impulse, between the mechanical 
 science of ship-building and the spiritual 
 act of artistic creation, — what can we 
 say to him? What is it possible to say 
 except that such a critic needs, not refuta- 
 tion, but a new education? 
 
 So after wandering through the centuries 
 we return at last to the collection of 
 theatrical antiquities in the American 
 University. What has aesthetic specula- 
 tion from Aristotle to Croce to tell us 
 about this so-called "dramatic museum"? 
 Why, that it contains either too little or too 
 much. Too much, from the standpoint 
 of dramatic criticism, which is con- 
 cerned with externals, including the thea- 
 tre, only in so far as they appear in dra- 
 matic literature itself. Too little, from the 
 standpoint of the history of culture, be- 
 cause the theatre is only one, and a very 
 insignificant one, of all the influences that
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 93 
 
 have gone to make up dramatic litera- 
 ture. 
 
 If we examine the life of any dramatist 
 from -^schylus to Andreyev, or any play 
 from Sakuntala to the Playboy of the West- 
 ern World, we shall find a thousand influ- 
 ences affecting in some measure the artist 
 and his work. Hamlet, for instance, is the 
 work of a man whose father (let us say) was a 
 butcher, and whose mother a gentlewoman; 
 obviously, to understand a man of this sort, 
 we should study the effect of his early 
 visits to the butcher's shop on his later 
 work, the influence of gentle birth on 
 character, and the general problem of 
 heredity. Our dramatic museum will be 
 incomplete unless it contain books covering 
 all these topics. The play is written by an 
 Englishman, and who can tell what in- 
 fluence this fact may have had on the 
 nature of the play.-* Surely the museum 
 should provide us with histories of Eng- 
 land, Warwickshire, Stratford, London, 
 and with every conceivable book on the
 
 94 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 life and habits of the English people. 
 Hamlet is the son of a king, and we should, 
 of course, understand the ideals of royalty 
 and of government in general in order to 
 appreciate the ideas influencing Shake- 
 speare in writing the play; we need a whole 
 library of political science. Moral ideas 
 are discussed throughout the play; where 
 did they come from? The museum should 
 furnish us with a library on the history of 
 ethics. Hamlet is rather coarse in his 
 language to Ophelia, and in numerous 
 other ways reflects the Renaissance concep- 
 tion of woman and the position of women; 
 so we realize that our museum would be in- 
 complete without a whole library on woman, 
 on social usages and customs, on dress, and 
 heaven only knows what else. 
 
 But why continue.? If the museum 
 wishes to furnish us with the external mate- 
 rial which influenced dramatic literature, it 
 should furnish us with all the books, all 
 the men, all the things, that have existed 
 side by side with the drama from the be-
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM 95 
 
 ginning of its history and before; for all of 
 these men, or books, or things may have 
 had a larger and deeper influence than the 
 physical theatre. But this, after all, is a 
 problem of the history of culture and not 
 of criticism. If we wish to understand 
 dramatic literature itself, we must seek 
 understanding in the great plays and 
 not in the dead material out of which plays 
 are made. 
 
 A collection of theatrical bric-a-brac may 
 interest and enlighten many men, — ac- 
 tors, impresarios, stage-managers, play- 
 wrights, antiquaries, dilettanti of all sorts, 
 even University teachers of dramatic 
 literature, and who shall say how many 
 others.'' This essay challenges, not the 
 museum's usefulness, still less its right to 
 existence, but only the theory of which it is 
 a concrete expression; and from this point 
 of view it may well serve another useful 
 purpose, of which its founders perhaps took 
 no thought, — as a sort of literary "chamber 
 of horrors,"a permanent symbol of the false
 
 96 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 theories which have encumbered the dra- 
 matic criticism of our time. For the true 
 dramatic critic will transfer his interest 
 from the drama itself to the "laws of the 
 theatre" or the ''conditions of the theatre" 
 only when the lover studies the "laws of 
 love" and the "conditions of love" in- 
 stead of his lady's beauty and his own soul.
 
 PROSE AND VERSE
 
 PROSE AND VERSE 
 
 Nothing could more completely prove 
 the poverty of American criticism, its de- 
 pendence on the decayed and genteel tra- 
 ditions of Victorian England, and its hope- 
 less chaos in the face of new realities of 
 art, than the recent discussions of the freer 
 forms of verse. Both the friends and the 
 enemies of vers libres have confined them- 
 selves within the limits of this narrow 
 tradition; and the loudest advocates of 
 modernity have defended their taste with 
 the same stale platitudes as its foes. It is 
 only because criticism always follows in 
 this timid and halting way the new paths 
 marked by the footsteps of poets, that 
 we need not assume it to be a national 
 trait rather than a universal failing. 
 
 It would be useless to take cognizance of 
 all these outworn arguments, or to con- 
 cern ourselves with the merely external
 
 loo CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 history of these freer forms, from the days 
 when Commodianus was accused of play- 
 ing havoc with the traditional music of 
 the Latin hexameter. But one of the most 
 extraneous arguments must be dismissed 
 at the outset. The admirers of vers lihres 
 have praised them because they are "demo- 
 cratic," while some of their enemies have 
 actually found fault with them because 
 they are "undemocratic," because they 
 lack the regular beats which the true 
 poetry of the people has always employed 
 for communal effort. But democracy is 
 a political ideal, and since when has a 
 political ideal acquired the right to be re- 
 garded as a touchstone for poets ^ Dante's 
 Roman Imperialism, Shakespeare's aristoc- 
 racy, Carducci's republicanism, Shelley's 
 democracy, all prove that one political ideal 
 is as good as another as material for poetry, 
 and that the problem for criticism to 
 attack is not the political ideals of the 
 poet but the poetry which he has made out 
 of them. To go still farther, and to make
 
 PROSE AND VERSE loi 
 
 politics a touchstone of rhythm and metre, 
 is to leave the world of criticism and to 
 enter that of Alice in Wonderland, where 
 we might expect the talent of a poet to be 
 tested by his opinions on the canals in 
 Mars, or by his ability to eat as many 
 oysters as the Walrus and the Carpenter. 
 Only in a world where commas are Budd- 
 hist and exclamation points Mohamme- 
 dan will it be reasonable to ask whether 
 iambs and trochees are democratic or the re- 
 verse. How can poetry, or any form in 
 which it expresses itself, whose very right 
 to existence depends on its life, its reality, 
 its imaginative power, be judged by a mere 
 abstraction? It is the ever recurring mal- 
 ady of critics, — to formulate new abstrac- 
 tions on the basis of a dead art, and to 
 "wish them" on the artists of a day still 
 living. 
 
 No, if we wish to understand the ever 
 changing forms of art, we must subdue our 
 minds to every new expression, before wc 
 can hope to rise above it, and explain, in
 
 I02 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 ever new and changing syntheses, its real 
 meaning and the secret of its power. The 
 direction which this new synthesis must 
 take in the case of vers libres may best be 
 understood after analyzing and explaining 
 some older and outworn ones. 
 
 Over two thousand years ago the question 
 of the relationship of poetry and prose was 
 opened for discussion by the Greeks, and 
 the problem, as they stated it, is still 
 agitating the minds of men to-day. The 
 weightiest of Greek arguments amounts 
 to this : that the test of poetry is not the use 
 of prose or verse, but imaginative power, 
 for if metre were the real test, a rhymed 
 treatise on law or medicine would be poetry 
 and a tragedy in prose would not. This is 
 Aristotle's thesis, and no critic or thinker 
 in these two thousand years has been able 
 to reason it away. But neither Aristotle 
 nor any of his successors through the 
 centuries has ever doubted the separate 
 existence of prose and verse; those who 
 admit his argument and those who deny
 
 PROSE AND VERSE 103 
 
 it alike agree in conceiving of prose and 
 verse as separate and distinct entities, 
 each with its own characteristics and its 
 own Hfe. Poetry and verse may or may 
 not be identical terms for them, but for 
 all of them prose and verse are different 
 and distinct. But are prose and verse 
 different and distinct? Modern thinking 
 has something new to say on this subject, 
 and something that leads us to a new 
 attitude toward the whole question of 
 versification. 
 
 It is always safest to attack a problem 
 first on its most external and superficial 
 side; and so we may begin by examining 
 some examples of the infinite variety of 
 rhythm in human speech. Here is a coup- 
 let from Pope's early Pastorals: 
 
 "Let vernal airs through osiers play, 
 And Albion's cliflFs resound the lay." 
 
 Regularity in rhythm could hardly go 
 farther; there is an almost mathematical 
 succession of beats or accents. But in
 
 I04 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 these lines from a blank verse play of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher there is less reg- 
 ularity : 
 
 " I'll look thee out a knight shall make thee a 
 
 lady too, 
 A lusty knight, and one that shall be ruled by 
 
 thee; 
 And add to these, I'll make 'em good. No 
 
 mincing, 
 No ducking out of nicety, good lady, 
 But do it home." 
 
 We can follow the faint shadow of regular 
 metre through these lines, but they cer- 
 tainly do not follow the accepted concep- 
 tion of blank verse. The Spoon River 
 Anthology goes a step farther: 
 
 "Over and over they used to ask me, 
 
 While buying the wine or the beer, 
 
 In Peoria first, and later in Chicago, 
 
 Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived, 
 
 How I happened to live the life, 
 
 And what was the start of it." 
 
 Some haunting sense of metre is here too, 
 not the regular succession of classical tra-
 
 PROSE AND VERSE 105 
 
 dition, but still some pattern of music in 
 the mind of the artist that we can search 
 for and discover. Shall we say that there 
 is no sense of regular rhythm, fainter but 
 still present, in this passage from Dc 
 Quincey's prose: 
 
 "The case / was the same / precisely / as 
 when / Ricardo announced / beforehand / that 
 we should neglect / the variations / in the 
 value / of money. / What could be / the 
 use / of stating / every / proposition / as to 
 price / three times over; / first, / in the 
 contingency / of money / remaining / station- 
 ary; / secondly, / in the contingency / of its 
 rising; / thirdly, / in the contingency / of its 
 falling.'' / Such / an eternal fugue / of itera- 
 tions, / such / a Welsh triad of cases, / 
 would treble / the labor / of writer / and 
 reader, / without doing / the slightest / ser- 
 vice / to either. / " 
 
 These four examples illustrate, as well 
 perhaps as a thousand, the variations and 
 gradations of rhythm used by men in 
 expressing their thoughts. They differ 
 in the degree of their regularity of rhythm,
 
 io6 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 but there is no place where we can sharply 
 divide them in respect to their essential 
 nature, and say that here verse ends and 
 here prose begins. All we can say is 
 that out of the infinite variations of 
 rhythm, we may conveniently classify the 
 more irregular as prose and the more regu- 
 lar as verse. 
 
 We may go still further and take two lines 
 in which two poets appear to aim at the 
 same succession of beats or accents, — 
 where they have apparently used the same 
 "metre." Compare this line of Shake- 
 speare: 
 
 "In his study of imagination" 
 
 with this of Milton: 
 
 "Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and 
 shades of death." 
 
 In theory these lines conform to the same 
 metrical arrangement. Both are in blank 
 verse, with the same traditional succession 
 of five accented feet; yet who can fail to
 
 PROSE AND VERSE 107 
 
 see that they differ from each other as 
 widely as Pope's verse from DeQuincey's 
 prose? But we need not go to two dif- 
 ferent poets; if we take any two succeed- 
 ing lines from the same poet, in the same 
 poem, and in what would be convention- 
 ally called the same metre, though the 
 difference may not be so striking, we are 
 forced to the same conclusion: 
 
 "Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised) 
 Linking our England to his Italy." 
 
 So that not only is there no sharp line 
 dividing prose and verse, but whatever dis- 
 tinction exists between words in metre 
 and words without it exists in exactly the 
 same way between verses written in the 
 same metre. 
 
 But the problem is, after all, far more 
 fundamental than that. It has been 
 touched only on its most external, indeed 
 on a wholly negligible, side, and the ques- 
 tions that go to the heart of the whole 
 matter have not yet been asked: In what
 
 io8 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 sense can we say that verses written in the 
 same metre, — the four just quoted, or any 
 others that might possibly be quoted, — 
 have anything in common merely because 
 there is a somewhat similar succession of 
 syllables and accents? In what sense does 
 this purely external resemblance help to 
 explain their music, their meaning, or their 
 power? When we are concerned with this 
 external resemblance, however great we 
 may admit the resemblance to be, are we 
 not occupied with quite another problem 
 than the one which is the real concern of 
 criticism, the problem of the special and 
 unique quality of a poet's work? 
 
 To answer these questions is to lift the 
 discussion out of the arid field of versifica- 
 tion into the realm where it rightly be- 
 longs, that of aesthetic criticism and 
 aesthetic thought. This is where the dis- 
 cussion has of late been lifted by a group 
 of modern thinkers, and this is where 
 it must hereafter remain. For they 
 have made clear the fundamental dis-
 
 PROSE AND VERSE 109 
 
 tinction between the mechanical whirr 
 of machinery, or the ticking of a clock, 
 and the inner or spiritual rhythm of human 
 speech. They have made clear that only 
 physical things can be measured, and that 
 what can be so measured in a poet's verse, 
 or in any work of art, is without artistic 
 value, and a matter of complete indif- 
 ference for all true criticism. They have 
 made it clear, in a word, that rhythm 
 and metre must be regarded as aesthetically 
 identical with style, as style is identical 
 with artistic form, and form in its turn is 
 the work of art in its spiritual and in- 
 divisible self. Only those who regard 
 style, or form, as something that can be 
 added to, or subtracted from, a work of 
 art, will ever again conceive of metre as 
 something separate from the life of the 
 poem itself, as a poet's dainty trills or 
 coloratura instead of the music of his 
 whole manner of being. 
 
 Yet poetry is not unlike all the other facts 
 of life; it is possible to approach it from
 
 no CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 many angles, to study it from many points 
 of view. You love a friend; you admire 
 his charm of manner, his frankness or his 
 courtesy, his honor or honesty, his in- 
 telligence, his taste, his buoyant spirits, his 
 handsome face, even his glowing health; 
 but ultimately you love him for the person- 
 ality that makes him himself, the personal- 
 ity that is compounded of all these qualities 
 yet is independent of them all. But you 
 recognize that it is possible and proper to 
 consider him in any one of these ways by 
 itself, and even in others. He is a human 
 being, and the anatomist or physiologist 
 can tell you secrets of his bones and blood 
 that are hidden from you. You do not 
 doubt the value of anatomy or physiology, 
 in its own field, when you say that it can 
 tell you nothing to explain why you loved 
 this particular friend so naturally and so 
 well. 
 
 Poetry, too, can be studied as a dead 
 thing no less than as a living and breath- 
 ing power. The words and syllables of
 
 PROSE AND VERSE iii 
 
 which it is compounded may be counted, 
 tabulated, and analyzed; the succession of 
 its external accents may be enumerated 
 and compared; the history of each word 
 traced back to some ancient source. 
 Etymology, versification, syntax are re- 
 spectable sciences, and have their proper 
 place in the wide field of human knowledge. 
 They are the anatomy or physiology of 
 poetry. But they do not help us to under- 
 stand the secret of poetic power, for the 
 simple reason that poetic power is inde- 
 pendent of accidental and external resem- 
 blances. The fact that two lines have the 
 same external succession of beats or ac- 
 cents, conform or do not conform to the 
 same "metre," follow or do not follow some 
 traditional system of versification, tells 
 us no more about their intrinsic quality 
 as poetry than the fact that two men have 
 the same bones or the same lymphatic 
 system tells us about their special quali- 
 ties as statesmen, as friends, or as 
 men.
 
 112 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 What Is true of metre is also aesthetically 
 true of language itself. To speak of " learn- 
 ing a language" is to risk the danger of 
 the same confusion, for we do not learn 
 language, we learn how to create it. That 
 is why it is so wide of the mark to explain 
 English words in terms of their continental 
 antecedents, or to justify modern slang 
 on the ground of its similarity to some 
 foreign or classical usage. It has recently 
 been urged, for example, that "to sail 
 into a man" is a vivid and powerful 
 phrase, because (of all reasons!) the Latin- 
 ism "to inveigh against a man" means 
 the same thing. But the Latinism in this 
 case helps to explain the English phrase 
 as much as the disinterred skeleton of a 
 thirteenth century English yeoman helps 
 to explain the personality of John Mase- 
 field. To deal with abstract classifications 
 instead of artistic realities, — versification 
 instead of poetry, grammar instead of 
 language, technique instead of painting, 
 — is to confuse form as concrete expres-
 
 PROSE AND VERSE 113 
 
 sion with form as an ornament or a dead 
 husk. 
 
 The essential truth, then, is this, — 
 that poets are forever creating new 
 rhythms, not reproducing old ones, a feat 
 only possible for the phonograph. It will 
 always be convenient and proper to iden- 
 tify and classify the new rhythms by their 
 superficial resemblance to the old ones; 
 and so we shall continue to speak of 
 "anapaests," "trochees," "heroic coup- 
 lets," or "blank verse," at least until 
 better terms are invented, just as we 
 speak of tall men and short men, large 
 books and small books, without assum- 
 ing that the adjectives imply fundamen- 
 tal distinctions of quality or character. 
 But a classification intended merely for 
 convenience can never furnish a vital 
 basis for criticism; and for criticism the 
 question of versification, as something 
 separate from the inner texture of poetry, 
 simply does not exist.
 
 CREATIVE CONNOISSEUR 
 SHIP
 
 CREATIVE CONNOISSEUR- 
 SHIP 
 
 (Letter to an Artist on the International Exhi- 
 bition, February, 1913) 
 
 ' To enjoy is, as it were, to create; to under- 
 stand is a form of equality, and the full use 
 of taste is an act of genius." — John La Farge's 
 Considerations on Painting. 
 
 The opening night of the International 
 Exhibition seemed to me one of the most 
 exciting adventures I have experienced, 
 and this sense of excitement was shared 
 by almost every one who was present. It 
 was not merely the stimulus of color, or 
 the riot of sensuous appeal, or the elation 
 that is born of a successful venture, or 
 the feeling that one had shared, however 
 humbly, in an historical occasion. For 
 my own part, and I can only speak for 
 myself, what moved me so strongly was
 
 ii8 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 this: I felt for the first time that art was 
 recapturing its own essential madness at 
 last, and that the modern painter and 
 sculptor had won for himself a title of 
 courage that was lacking in all the other 
 fields of art. 
 
 For after all, though it needs repeating 
 in every civilization, madness and courage 
 are the very life of all art. From the days 
 of Plato and Aristotle, who both shared 
 the Greek conception of genius as a form 
 of madness, to the Elizabethan poet who 
 said of Marlowe: 
 
 "For that fine madness still he did retain 
 Which rightly should possess a poet's brain"; 
 
 and from the sturdy and robust Dryden, 
 with his 
 
 "Great wits are sure to madness near allied," 
 
 to the living poet who writes 
 
 "He ate the laurel and is mad,"
 
 CONNOISSEURS HIP 119 
 
 all who have given any real thought to 
 art or beauty have recognized this essen- 
 tial truth, — seeing in the poet's "mad- 
 ness" not something for the physician to 
 diagnose, but fancy's eternal contrast with 
 the common sense of a practical world. 
 "Sense, sense, nothing but sense!" cried 
 the German poet; "as if poetry in contrast 
 with prose were not always a kind of 
 nonsense." The virtue of an industrial 
 society is that it is always more or less 
 sane. The virtue of all art is that it is 
 always more or less mad. All the greater is 
 our American need of art's tonic loveliness, 
 and all the more difficult is it for us to 
 recapture the inherent madness without 
 which she cannot speak or breathe. 
 
 You, I know, will not confuse this 
 theory of poetic madness, to which poets 
 themselves have given their faith, with 
 the pseudo-scientific theories, current not 
 many years ago, which pictured poets as 
 "degenerate," "neurotic," or "mentally 
 unbalanced." You will not confuse spirit-
 
 I20 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 ual exaltation with physical disease. For 
 the madness of poets is nothing more or 
 less than unhampered freedom of self- 
 expression. Those of us for whom self- 
 expression is checked by inner or outer 
 inhibitions must always look with some- 
 thing of amazement at those who can and 
 do express themselves freely. For us they 
 must always seem "mad." To let one's 
 self go — that is what art is always aim- 
 ing at, and American art needs most of all. 
 It is in this sense that America needs the 
 tonic madness of poets. 
 
 But here was the poet's madness, and 
 here was courage that did not fear to be 
 mad. I confess that when I left the ex- 
 hibition my feeling was not merely one 
 of excitement, but mingled with it was 
 a real depression at the thought that no 
 other artists shared this courage of the 
 painters of our time. How timid seemed 
 our poetry and our drama and our prose 
 fiction; how conventional and pusillani- 
 mous our literary and dramatic criticism;
 
 CONNOISSEURSHIP 121 
 
 how faded, and academic, and anaemic 
 every other form of artistic expression. 
 But these painters and sculptors had 
 really dared to express themselves. Wrong- 
 headed, mistaken, capricious, some of them 
 may be; but at least they have the sine qua 
 non of art, the courage to express them- 
 selves without equivocating with their 
 souls. Some of them may have forgotten 
 that the imagination is governed by an 
 inner logic of its own, and not by unreason- 
 able caprice; but even caprice is better than 
 tameness, even caprice is better than the 
 lifeless logic of the schools. 
 
 And this leads me to what is really the 
 inspiring cause of this letter, to the ques- 
 tion that must occur to every mind: What 
 have the patrons of art, the great Ameri- 
 can collectors, who are the envy and target 
 of the world, what have they done for this 
 exhibition, or for the artists who give it 
 its flavor and power, and especially for 
 the younger American artists who had the 
 imagination and skill to bring it together?
 
 122 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 Did the masters of our national sanity 
 encourage any of this divine madness; did 
 they grapple with the pioneer work that 
 you men are doing; or have they preferred 
 to make timid but solid investments in 
 the art whose original madness has been 
 tamed, and placed beyond all question, 
 by time? 
 
 We have heard altogether too much of 
 the service which has been rendered by 
 these "fake Lorenzo de' Medicis" of our 
 time. I am tired of hearing that they have 
 despoiled Europe and Asia of their treas- 
 ures, and have filled not only their own 
 homes, but public museums and libraries, 
 with models of older beauty. I have lived 
 many hours in that Renaissance of which 
 Lorenzo was one of the flowers; and when 
 I come back to my own country I find 
 nothing that gives me less hope for its 
 future than these very patrons and col- 
 lectors who would ape his glory. For the 
 very essence of his power is hidden from 
 them. The soul of his purpose is at war
 
 CONNOISSEURSHIP 123 
 
 with theirs. Theirs is at bottom acquis- 
 itiveness, his at bottom creativeness. For 
 (it cannot be repeated too often) to enjoy 
 and understand a work of art is to own 
 it, in the only sense in which art takes 
 cognizance of ownership; there is no other 
 way to possess it except to Hve again 
 the vision which the artist creates. But 
 under all the garments that hide their pur- 
 pose and make it fair, the desire to "shop", 
 the hunger for other forms of property 
 beside real estate and stocks and bonds, 
 remain their real and unmistakable mo- 
 tives. His motive was as different from 
 theirs as the sexual passion, creating life 
 even without knowing it, is different from 
 the desire to own slaves. 
 
 For look at Lorenzo's palace. Political 
 and financial intrigue as real as any in the 
 offices of the "interests" was harbored 
 there. But inside the same palace lived 
 poets and scholars, philosophers and paint- 
 ers, architects and engineers. All the 
 world knows his architect Brunelleschi,
 
 124 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 his philosophers Ficino and Landino, his 
 poets Poliziano and Luigi Pulci, his schol- 
 ars Pico della Mirandola and Barbaro, 
 not to mention the horde of painters and 
 craftsmen who haunted his city and his 
 house. Poliziano, one of the loveliest of 
 all Italian poets, seems almost the product 
 of his patronage, if it is proper to speak 
 of a beautiful flower as the "product" of 
 the gardener who waters it and gives it a 
 fruitful soil. He did not merely load 
 his rooms with the dead weight of dead 
 centuries; he created, and fostered crea- 
 tion in others. And yet this was a mer- 
 chant prince, like our own merchant 
 princes; the inheritor of no greater power 
 than theirs, the holder of no official posi- 
 tion in the State that the prestige of his 
 family did not earn for itself in the democ- 
 racy of Florence. 
 
 But where is Morgan's Poliziano, where 
 is Widener's Ficino.'' Where are the poems 
 they have themselves written, as Lorenzo 
 wrote his own Ambra, his own lovely
 
 CONNOISSEURSHIP 125 
 
 Nencia da Barbarino? Where are the 
 pageants and dramas they have composed 
 or fostered, where the popular Muse (out of 
 the mouths of the very rabble) that they 
 have encouraged and refined? Where are 
 the painters and scholars, poets and 
 philosophers, dreamers and craftsmen of 
 all kinds, who haunt their houses in the 
 real intimacy that the old Renaissance 
 fostered between prince and genius ? While 
 the Medicis made all Florence fertile with 
 artistic life, these Americans, these fake 
 Medicis, — so full of a power that seems 
 dynamic and creative in the field of ac- 
 tion, so colorless and timid in the field of 
 taste, — have merely hung cold treasures 
 in coy corners of remote aloofness that are 
 now their graves as well as their homes. 
 
 But connoisseurship has its living as well 
 as its dead side. If we were merely con- 
 cerned with a craft that, in the presence 
 of beautiful pictures, asked nothing but 
 their age, their genuineness, their previous 
 ownership, the meaning of their symbols
 
 126 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 and signatures, we might dismiss it without 
 ado from our thoughts. For these are all 
 problems with little or no aesthetic signifi- 
 cance, and have hardly more importance 
 than the question of commercial values. 
 But it is on a wholly different side that 
 connoisseurship may become dynamic and 
 creative. The collector, the patron, the 
 critic have their common meeting ground 
 in the realm of taste. To understand and 
 enjoy beauty is their common bond; to 
 re-create in their own souls the artist's 
 vision of reality is at once their triumph 
 and their joy. If they really express their 
 own taste, instead of aping the taste 
 of others, the work they do may be said 
 to be creative like the artist's. Only this 
 creative flowering of their own personali- 
 ties may be called taste in any real sense; 
 only this creative taste has a value for 
 themselves or others. 
 
 For after all, patrons and collectors, prizes 
 and rewards, boards and foundations have 
 no significance for the artist, but only for
 
 CONNOISSEURSHIP 127 
 
 the society which they represent. For 
 art is not a flower that needs only watering 
 and a fruitful soil to make it flourish; the 
 gardener's kindly help is just as likely to 
 kill it as to give it a new vigor. The para- 
 ble of the poet who withers in a gilded 
 chamber is the perennial symbol of art. 
 Nothing outside of it seems really to help 
 or to hinder; out of its own life it musters 
 the mysterious power that helps it to 
 speak or to be silent. So it is for their 
 own sake, and not for the artist's, that the 
 patron and the collector should cultivate 
 the madness of poets. They may enrich 
 the life and culture of the society of which 
 they are a part, even though they can 
 render no service to art. This is true of 
 democracies as well as aristocracies: 
 whether the patrons and collectors be 
 few or many, whether they be rich or 
 poor, whether they belong to a narrow 
 circle to which the countersign is an heir- 
 loom from the past or include the whole 
 wide range of human life, the problem re-
 
 128 CREATIVE CRITICISM 
 
 mains exactly the same. Sympathy for 
 self-expression, and the power to under- 
 stand and enjoy it, are independent of gov- 
 ernment in its varying forms; they are 
 spiritual realities, and live in a world in 
 which political abstractions and adminis- 
 trative details are merely shadows. That is 
 why the flowering of taste remains always a 
 symbol of the higher life of every age and 
 every civilization. 
 
 So our patrons and collectors, our 
 amateurs and dilettanti, and all who wish 
 to share the artist's vision of reality, can 
 do something for America, and still more 
 for themselves, without waiting for to- 
 morrow. They can attend the Interna- 
 tional Exhibition; they can learn its les- 
 sons and enjoy or buy its pictures. They 
 can share the artist's "madness," if only 
 for a few heightened moments, and by their 
 oneness with him in spirit once more justify 
 the essential equality of genius and taste. 
 They can help to make collecting itself a 
 creative art, instead of a miser's hoarding
 
 CONNOISSEURSHIP 129 
 
 lust. It is a choice between artistic life 
 and artistic stagnation or death; and if 
 you and your colleagues had done nothing 
 more than to make possible, for us to-day, 
 this ideal of creative collecting, the time 
 and energy and insight you have spent on 
 this work would be more than worth while.
 
 APPENDIX
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 A NOTE ON GENIUS AND TASTE 
 
 Some time ago, Mr. John Galsworthy took 
 issue with the theory, advanced in "The New 
 Criticism," in regard to the identity of genius 
 and taste. He found "the 'new critic's' point 
 of view most interesting," but he felt that it 
 expressed "something that is not quite the 
 truth." For him there is no fundamental re- 
 semblance between the critic and the creator, 
 and he sums up the difference between them 
 by saying that the critic "is absolutely tied 
 to the terms of the work that he is interpreting, 
 whereas the very essence of creation is that 
 roving, gathering, discovering process of mind 
 and spirit which goes before the commence- 
 ment of a work of art. This process is un- 
 trammelled by anything except the limits 
 of the artist's own personality. The real 
 creative artist is in these words of brusquer 
 stuff." 
 
 This is a very pretty distinction; but even 
 if it did not involve a serious misconception ot 
 the function of aesthetic criticism, it would
 
 134 APPENDIX 
 
 certainly eliminate some very great works of 
 art from the category of "creation." In what 
 sense, for instance, is the portrait painter less 
 trammelled by his subject than the critic by 
 his books or pictures? The painter re-creates 
 the men and women who are sitting before 
 him, he does not merely reproduce them; but 
 criticism, if it performs its true function, re- 
 creates in the same way the work of art which 
 is the subject of its interpretation. Mr. Gals- 
 worthy would hardly say that the portrait 
 painter is not a creator, because he is tram- 
 melled or limited by something beside his own 
 personality, at least to the same extent as the 
 critic, — because his own personality cannot 
 wholly escape from the fate imposed upon it by 
 the likeness of the sitter. Who would dare to 
 say that Velasquez's portrait of Philip IV, 
 Raphael's Castiglione, Rembrandt's portrait 
 of himself, Manet's Zola, and Renoir's Daugh- 
 ters of Catulle Mendes, or the superb Chinese 
 portraits of the T'ang and Sung periods that 
 antedate yet equal them all, are not works of 
 art, are criticism and not creation, merely be- 
 cause the " roving, gathering, discovering proc- 
 ess of mind" is not so obvious in them as in 
 some other forms of art? 
 
 But Mr. Galsworthy has answered that ques- 
 tion himself. The very work of art which 
 he cites as "the finest piece of creative painting
 
 APPENDIX 135 
 
 in the world," La Gioconda, is the portrait of a 
 Neapolitan lady, Monna Lisa, wife of Zanobi 
 del Giocondo. Heaven forbid that we should 
 say that it is merely a portrait, as Mr. Gals- 
 worthy seems to think the critic's "portrait" 
 of Shakespeare or Shelley is merely a portrait! 
 But if Mr. Galsworthy must seek his supreme 
 work of art from the very form which is most 
 trammelled and least "roving" or "gather- 
 ing," he has destroyed his own argument; and 
 he seems to have recognized this himself, for 
 in developing the same thought since, in the 
 Inn of Tranquillity, he has sought security 
 by omitting all his earlier illustrations. Some 
 forms of art are more "roving" and "gather- 
 ing" than others, but limitations or tram- 
 mels of this sort have nothing to do with the 
 vital essence that distinguishes art from non- 
 art. When the critic's vision reaches beyond 
 the single artist to the artists of a whole period 
 or a whole nation, and aims at a series of por- 
 traits embodying the artistic life of a people 
 in a single framework, the possibilities of selec- 
 tion and discovery are as great as in any novel. 
 Only those familiar with a supreme work 
 of criticism like the history of Italian litera- 
 ture by Francesco de Sanctis can realize the 
 wide range of selective skill and imaginative 
 power possible for criticism at its amplest and 
 best.
 
 136 APPENDIX 
 
 Neither do Mr. Galsworthy's other illustra- 
 tions bear out his theories. Contrast, he says, 
 a creative work like Leonardo's picture with a 
 critical work like Pater's essay about the pic- 
 ture, and you will discover that the picture and 
 the essay illustrate two types of temperament, 
 the creative and the critical; one is of brusquer 
 stuff than the other. But to me this proves 
 little except the difference between two widely 
 different personalities. It needs little argu- 
 ment to prove that the "universal man" of 
 the Renaissance is made of brusquer stuff than 
 the Victorian "don." Leonardo and Michel- 
 angelo are of brusquer stuff than Millais and 
 Leighton. The Renaissance critics whom 
 Nisard has called "literary gladiators" are of 
 brusquer stuff than Raphael and Correggio. 
 But this does not touch the problem of the 
 two arts, and it would not be difficult, I think, 
 to point out that the art of Leonardo and the 
 art of Pater are not so wide apart as Mr. Gals- 
 worthy appears to believe; that both are 
 trammelled by their subject-matter in the 
 same way, but that both are alike really un- 
 trammelled, for both works re-create their 
 "subjects" through the personality of the 
 artist, and both are, in their different ways, 
 creative works of art. 
 
 But if the discussion must be limited to exter- 
 nals, suppose that instead of Leonardo and
 
 APPENDIX 137 
 
 Pater, I select Goethe's critique of Hamlet in 
 Wilhelm Meister and Matthew Arnold's poem 
 of Obermann. Which of these is made of brus- 
 quer stuff? Which exhibits "curiosity" and 
 the other characteristics of Mr. Galsworthy's 
 creator, and which the "ruminative introspec- 
 tion, the necessary egoism" which he selects as 
 the earmarks of the critic? In what sense is 
 Goethe's "temperament" here distinctly criti- 
 cal in Mr. Galsworthy's sense, and Arnold's dis- 
 tinctly creative? Surely Goethe's critique 
 ("the very poetry of criticism," as Carlyle, 
 echoing Schlegel, calls it) has all the char- 
 acteristics of the conventional "creator," 
 Arnold's poem all those of the conventional 
 "critic." This, I take it, explains Mr. Gals- 
 worthy's position: he has in mind a conventional 
 conception of the critic and another conven- 
 tional conception of the creator, and he has 
 selected two artists, more or less at random, 
 because they seem to illustrate this conven- 
 tional antithesis. But it must be clear that 
 the problem is not so simple as all this, and a 
 mind so "roving, gathering, discovering" as 
 Mr. Galsworthy's cannot long remain con- 
 tented with an arbitrary and outworn theory 
 of art. 
 
 Genius and taste no longer mean for us what 
 they meant to the poets and critics of the 
 Romantic period. Their halo, their mystery.
 
 138 APPENDIX 
 
 their power are gone. By genius is now merely 
 meant the creative faculty, the power of self- 
 expression, which we all share in varying de- 
 grees. By taste is meant the power to see and 
 understand and enjoy the self-expression of 
 others, a power which all of us must in some 
 measure share or no art would be intelligible; 
 all of us have something at least of what 
 Sainte-Beuve calls "that faculty of semi- 
 metamorphosis, which is at once the play and 
 the triumph of criticism." We are all geniuses; 
 we are all possessed of taste. To say that 
 the two faculties are in their essence one is 
 not, however, to say that criticism and crea- 
 tion are without difference; it is merely to 
 recognize the element of fundamental kin- 
 ship, j For it still remains true that the aesthetic 
 critic, in his moments of highest power, rises 
 to heights where he is at one with the creator 
 whom he is interpreting. At that moment 
 criticism and "creation" are one.j That the 
 critic does not always live on this high level 
 of taste and feeling need not be disputed; 
 even Homer nods, even the greatest creators 
 of the world sink to levels of less than crea- 
 tive power. But that is their function, that 
 is their goal; and it is only from this point of 
 vantage that the great critic can understand 
 and interpret the great "creator."
 
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