81 
 D7 
 
 UC-NRLF 
 
 SB 133 
 
 
OF eMMANUEL OOLLMGE, OAUBRDDGK 
 


 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN CRITICISM 
 
THE SPIRIT 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN CRITICISM 
 
 Hn i00a on SuMcfal Ipragmatiem 
 
 BY 
 
 C. M.jDRENNAN, M.A. (LONDON AND CAMBRIDGE) 
 
 SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF EMMANUEL .COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATER8RAND 
 
 SOUTH AFRICA 
 
 LONDON : W. B. CL1VE 
 
 uforiaf (press 
 
 HIGH ST., NEW OXFORD ST., W, 
 1922 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Is Modern Criticism mere Anarchy 9 If not^ what is the 
 philosophy which underlies it ? These are the questions that 
 I have endeavoured to answer in the essay which follows. 
 
 The subject seems to be one which calls for treatment. 
 Despite the fact that all Criticism must use material derived 
 from contemporaries and predecessors, I hope that my manner 
 of treating my material is sufficiently original to warrant my 
 claiming it as my own. I have endeavoured to make all my 
 debts plain and visible, either in the body of the text or in 
 the footnotes. 
 
 C. M. DRENNAN. 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND, 
 JOHANNESBURG. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER I. THE EEVIEWER AND THE CRITIC 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. THE IMPRESSIONIST EEVOLT IN CRITICISM 9 
 
 CHAPTER III. Is A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE? ... 19 
 
 CHAPTER IV. CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION ... ... 33 
 
 CHAPTER V. DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY ... 43 
 
 CHAPTER VI. THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM ... 58 
 
 CHAPTER VII. THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJEC- 
 TIONS ... ... ... ... ... 73 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. THE SUM OF THE MATTER ... ... 84 
 
 CHAPTER IX. PROSPECTS OF CRITICISM ... 107 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE KEVIEWEE AND THE CRITIC. 
 
 IN popular parlance the distinction between " reviewing" 
 and " criticising " is rarely observed. One hears far too fre- 
 quently of a review of Macaulay's, for example, spoken of as 
 criticism, which very often it is not. Even speakers usually 
 careful in the use of language will speak of having read a 
 " critique " of a play or a novel in their favourite newspaper, 
 when one of the words " review," " description," or even 
 " advertisement " should have been employed. A review 
 proper at its best does all the work of a judge who refuses to 
 take sides in a particular case, who sums up impartially the 
 evidence on both sides, and then turns to the jury and says, 
 " Gentlemen, you are the judges of fact : you have now heard 
 all the evidence, and it is for you to pronounce your verdict." 
 
 Criticism begins where reviewing leaves off. There are 
 judges who deem it their duty not only to lay all the relevant 
 facts before the jury but also to show them on which side 
 truth or the greater probability lies, to guide, in short, and 
 direct the jury to their verdict. Such judges are in literature 
 called critics. 
 
 A reviewer collects the evidence, a critic adjusts the scales 
 and weighs it. His theory of criticism is his balance and 
 without that he must not be called a critic. 
 
 As criticism is work that requires much time to bring rtf f ) 
 
 to maturity, and distance from the battle to ensure clearness 
 
 of vision, we look to the reviewer to fill the gap, and afford 
 
 material for the potential critic who sits in the breast of each 
 
 M. c. 1 
 
2 THE REVIEWER AND THE CRITIC. 
 
 of us to pronounce an interim judgment. Reviewing, then, is 
 of the highest interest, utility, and importance, and is perhaps 
 most valuable when the reviewer of contemporary work 
 exercises sufficient self-denial not to trespass into the confines 
 of criticism. An art product can hardly be criticised in the 
 week of its birth. Even Macaulay was sportsman enough to 
 observe the great law, " Fishes below a certain length must be 
 thrown back into the water," and so waited for the eleventh 
 edition of The Omnipresence of the Deity before damning 
 eternally " Satan " Montgomery. Critics who ignore this 
 rule, and there have been such, know their business as little 
 as would an accoucheur who should say to a patient exhausted 
 by travail, " Madam, you have wasted your time ! Your son 
 is doomed to be hanged ! " A good reviewer, on the other 
 hand, is like one of those kindly gossips who feel privileged 
 to be present at the ushering into the world of some new- 
 comer, and who will show you his features and the points of 
 resemblance to his father or his Aunt Jane, and who realise 
 with Wordsworth the truth : 
 
 " And you must love him, ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love." 
 
 A reviewer like Macaulay or the greatest of all reviewers, 
 Sainte-Beuve, may at times be a critic, and a critic of pro- 
 fession may act as reviewer, but it is always useful for the 
 reader to keep the distinction between criticism and review 
 clearly in mind. By a review he is invited implicitly to 
 become judge ; in a criticism he is asked to assent to a judg- 
 ment considered and delivered. 
 
 From this one would draw the inference that criticism is a 
 much rarer and harder thing than reviewing, and literary 
 history confirms the truth of the corollary. 
 
 THE MEANING AND USES OF CRITICISM AND CRITICS. 
 
 Literary criticism is the art of judging or appraising 
 beauty in literature. Beauty is the quality or combination of 
 
THE REVIEWER AND THE CRITIC. 3 
 
 qualities in an object which when perceived or in the perceiv- 
 ing stimulates the imagination and arouses a certain pleasur- 
 able emotion, hence called aesthetic pleasure. It is doubtful 
 if beauty can be analysed much farther as it is one of the 
 fundamental data of our consciousness. We all know what 
 beauty is, but cannot describe clearly the pleasure we derive 
 from it. It has plainly a lower and a higher element, the 
 former sensuous connected with the pleasurable stimulation of 
 our bodily organs, the latter intellectual : 
 
 " Sensations sweet, 
 
 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart ; 
 And passing even into my purer mind, 
 With tranquil restoration." 
 
 Each sense has its own proper pleasure, and we may speak, 
 if we choose, of a beautiful taste, smell, or touch, sound, or 
 sight. As there is less of the intellectual element in the 
 three former we try to restrict the term beauty to sounds, or 
 sights, or thoughts. The more we can depress the sensuous 
 element, the higher does the beauty appear to mount : 
 
 " That blessed mood, 
 In which the burthen of the mystery, 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world 
 Is lightened ; that serene and blessed mood, 
 In which the affections gently lead us on 
 Until the breath of this corporeal frame, 
 And even the motion of our human blood 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 In body and become a living soul ; 
 While with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
 We see into the life of things." 
 
 Intellectual and spiritual harmony, then, and the deep 
 power of joy are according to the teachings of Wordsworth, 
 that prophet and interpreter of the beautiful, a mark of 
 intense beauty. We may depress sensuous pleasure to such 
 an extent that an almost purely spiritual pleasure is felt with 
 
4 THE KEVIEWER AND THE CRITIC. 
 
 at first even pain on the sensuous side, till, as in the state 
 called ecstasy, sense-perception vanishes. This sublimated 
 beauty which causes ecstasy is known as the sublime. Keats 
 describes the beginning of the state : 
 
 " My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 
 My sense .... 
 Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 
 But being too happy in thy happiness." 
 
 Wordsworth has a similar thought in the poem from which we 
 have already quoted : 
 
 " That time is past, 
 
 And all its aching joys are now no more, 
 And all its dizzy raptures." 
 
 Of beauty there are two kinds, the one not made by man 
 or natural beauty,* the other made by man and called art. 
 The pleasures of the lower senses are ministered to by the art 
 of cooking and the art of the perfumer : tactile sensations 
 have no special art, but share in all. The ear has the arts of 
 music and song, the eye painting, architecture, and sculpture. 
 To represent its thoughts or feelings the mind uses other 
 symbols known as words, and the art of representation by 
 combination of words is what we call literature, and it appeals 
 principally to eye and ear. 
 
 Beauty in literature is then the symbolic quality which 
 words have of reproducing the pleasure aroused by the 
 things, whether external, or thoughts, desires, or memories,^ 
 symbolised. 
 
 Again, in literature the term aesthetic beauty is reserved 
 as a rule for pleasures of eye, ear, and mind. An advertise- 
 ment, for example, of a new brand of chocolates may make 
 our mouths water, but we should hardly say that it possessed 
 
 " The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon- 
 light or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape. . . . These 
 are the poetry of nature" (Coleridge.) 
 
THE REVIEWER AND THE CRITIC. 5 
 
 aesthetic beauty, whereas a collection of words which pro- 
 duced upon us the effect of a beautiful sight or of beautiful 
 music would be called beautiful. 
 
 However, by the laws of association or of contrast of 
 ideas, the description of a taste or an odour may evoke more 
 spiritual associations, and so a poet may use such a descrip- 
 tion to produce the emotion of the beautiful : 
 
 " It smelt so faint, and it smelt so sweet, 
 It made me creep, and it made me cold ! 
 Like the scent that steals from the crumbling sheet 
 Where a mummy is half unroll'd." 
 
 In the same way Milton, Keats, and other poets will use 
 descriptions of tactile sensations or of the taste of food or 
 drink to aid our imagination to create beauty : 
 
 " A table richly spread in regal mode, 
 With dishes piled and meats of noblest sort 
 And savour, beasts of chase, or fowl of game 
 In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, 
 Grisamber-steamed." 
 
 As literary artists are primarily concerned with the produc- 
 tion of the beautiful in literature and of re-creating in the 
 minds of hearers or readers their own emotions by means of 
 symbols, it might be urged that critics are unnecessary, being 
 but poor middlemen holding their farthing tapers to the sun. 
 This is sometimes, but not always, true. Yet we do need 
 critics, as we often need wise guides to beautiful scenery. 
 Such guides as are really wise are silent in the presence of the 
 sublime. But until the point of appreciation is reached they 
 can do great service in a toilsome mountain climb. They 
 point out the pitfalls, encourage the struggles up the great 
 heights. They know the best points of view, and are ready 
 to lend their more powerful glasses, for beauty is not always 
 near at hand, nor easy of access, nor on the surface. The 
 imagination must be trained to appreciate it, and greater 
 training will always lead to even greater appreciation. Al- 
 though it is true that when the sun rises we need no glasses to 
 
6 THE REVIEWER AND THE CRITIC. 
 
 see it, nor elder brother to nudge our elbow, yet that trained 
 critic, the astronomer, may help us to a fuller appreciation 
 even of the sun. Or, as Churton Collins once put it, " If the 
 poet is the interpreter of God to mankind, the critic is the Vx 
 interpreter of the poet to individual men." 
 
 Good critics are primarily connoisseurs of the beautiful 
 and in their own humble way play their part in its creation. / 
 They stimulate and prepare the way for the poet or literary (^ 
 artist. They help him in his work of giving sight to the 
 blind, music to the deaf, and souls to the dead. 
 
 Secondarily, they are scientists. They collect and classify 
 facts and search into general laws. They act as reviewers, 
 historians, at times the humble but necessary scavengers, at 
 times the astronomers of literature. Once the critic usurped 
 a position which was not his, and played the monarch and 
 gave laws to poets, just like some mad astronomer attempting 
 to patronise the stars or to issue edicts to the planets. 
 Criticism to-day has entered into itself and descended from 
 its mad tub of a throne and is humble, having cast dust and 
 ashes on its head for its eighteenth century midsummer mad- 
 ness. The ass's head has been removed from Bottom who 
 presumes no longer to give laws to Titania and the fairies. 
 And owing to his humility the true critic is exalted amongst 
 us. 
 
 Poets, too, have been in the ranks of professed literary 
 critics and have done good service, witness Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, and Shelley. But it seems probable that a poet 
 cannot spend his energies on other work such as criticism, oj 
 political controversy, or lecturing, or inspecting schools, with- 
 out some loss to his poetry. Poetry is a jealous mistress 
 and is apt to punish divided attentions. A star that turns 
 astronomer will forget to shine. 
 
 Finally the supreme gift of the critic is summed up in the 
 metaphorical phrase, good taste. Taste is a property common 
 to all of us. We taste our food and then pronounce judgment 
 upon its quality. Yet, even in this lower department of life, 
 
THE REVIEWER AND THE CRITIC. 7 
 
 men of a refined and experiencing taste are set apart from 
 their fellows to act as their intermediaries, and pronounce 
 judgments on goods intended for popular consumption. Thus 
 we have cheese-tasters, tea-tasters, wine-tasters. In the same 
 way publishers and editors employ book-tasters, such as was 
 George Meredith. A critic is then a book-taster, and he will 
 be a great critic if like' Hazlitt he has the true gusto for 
 great literature. And it should never be forgotten that it 
 takes a longer and harder apprenticeship to form the critical 
 palate for things of the mind than the sensual palate for wine 
 or tobacco. If this were always remembered, we should be 
 less often offended by the critical impertinences of some half- 
 baked critic recommending wares that are rotten or stale, 
 unripe or immature. But as all good critics know this, we 
 have a rough and ready test to distinguish the good of their 
 profession from the bad. Arrogance is a sure mark of a bad 
 critic, as a certain humble self - distrust never, however, 
 approaching the timid, hedging cowardice of the impostor 
 is a mark of the expert. The good critic will tell us, as 
 Anatole France expresses it, the adventures of his own soul 
 among books with the object of leading us to the adventures 
 which are worth the quest, of leading us away from Sloughs of 
 Despond. And we shall follow him as Dante followed Virgil ; 
 we shall heed so blessed a one as Dante heard Beatrice. 
 
 And the poets, whom we find and follow, will though dead 
 live in us again and will fare on our adventure with us. 
 
 " Questi, che guida in alto gli occhi miei 
 E quel Virgilio, dal qual tu togliesti 
 Forza a cantar degli uomini e de 1 del.' 1 
 
 (" For he who guides my pen 
 To things on high is Virgil, who of yore 
 Inspired thy soul to sing of gods and men.'') 
 
 Matthew Arnold, the poet-critic, in his Essay on the 
 Function of Criticism, that Apologia pro domo sua, tells us 
 of the debt that poets owe to critics. Simylus, a poet of the 
 fourth century B.C., anticipated him when in enumerating the 
 
8 THE REVIEWER AND THE CRITIC. 
 
 six things necessary to make a poet he includes with gratitude 
 " a critic able to seize what is said." For a poet singing to 
 a generation unprepared for his message is but a trumpeter in 
 the city of the deaf. 
 
 And knowing this, Wordsworth and Coleridge, finding no 
 other trumpeters ready for the work, seized themselves the 
 bugle of criticism and in due season overthrew the Jericho 
 which had been erected against them and their works. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN 
 CRITICISM. 
 
 Periodically during the world's silly seasons a debate 
 perhaps as old as man himself is raised : Is there such a thing 
 as progress ? or Are we better than our ancestors ? The 
 question must be old, because we find it in some form or 
 another in our oldest literature : it is ever living, because we 
 find it in every home where the old, as long as there have 
 been old people, unite in shaking their heads over the mental, 
 physical, and moral degeneration of the modern, while the 
 young protest more or less openly against the oldness of the 
 old, their attachment to etiquettes, regulations, forms and 
 ceremonies, as useless and meaningless as they are venerable. 
 The first literary genius of the Greeks crystallises the com- 
 plaint of the old in his Nestor. Horace knows all the points 
 of the debate. It forms the subject of a hot literary battle- 
 royal in the days of Louis XIV., the echoes of which are to 
 be found in the writings of our own Pope and Swift. In 
 modern times it is taken for granted that the evolution dogma 
 has settled the case for ever on the side of the young, although 
 philosophers have written and are writing learned books to 
 show that progress is not a necessity of evolution or is not an 
 historic fact. 
 
 The question luckily cannot be settled, and it will probably 
 fire the imaginations of our last descendants to linger on when 
 the sun is withdrawing from the universe its central heating. 
 Only Omniscience could answer a question as to progress 
 
 9 
 
10 THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN CRITICISM. 
 
 when there is an infinity of diverse movements in diverse 
 directions. And the question, too, is meaningless unless 
 one knows whence one started and whither one intends or is 
 intended to go. 
 
 With this eternal and insoluble question both the history 
 of politics and of literary criticism, of two sciences namely 
 which came to the birth together, have had much to do. In 
 the history of politics we can trace the long -slowly-ascending 
 curve of democracy, in literary criticism a parallel curve of 
 freedom in criticism, of revolution against tyrants and estab- 
 lished dynasties. When at any period the influence of a 
 strong central authority or oligarchy was at its highest, then 
 the verdict in the debate, the Ancient Spirit against the 
 Modern, would be given for the former : in the present age 
 of democracy the victory appears to be resting with the latter. 
 The function- of the modern critic is precisely what Matthew 
 Arnold held to be the function of the poet, the application of 
 modern ideas to life. 
 
 In the domain of literary criticism we can see, if we but 
 look bacMiward, that there are two divergent branches of the 
 main stream. These two tendencies do -not, as is sometimes 
 thought, diverge \on a question of law but upon a question of 
 fact. On what do we or are we to base our literary judg- 
 ments ? (On the object in itself or upon our own impressions 
 of it ?( It is clear that the tendency of the former will be 
 authoritarian and will be to lay stress upon the objectivity 
 of laws, while the latter will be freer and will be inclined to 
 place its emphasis upon change.\ Both sides will pay respect 
 to some sort of law, as the functions of a critic are to a 
 greater or less extent those of some sort of a judge ; and it 
 must be remembered that even a judge of so capricious a 
 thing as fashions judges according to some code. 
 
 It will be noticed further that, although in studying the 
 history of literary criticism both tendencies may be traced in 
 the same critic, yet upon the whole the general direction of 
 the curve of criticism has been towards freedom, and that our 
 
THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN CRITICISM. 11 
 
 modern criticism marks the apex of the impressionist revolt 
 against the authoritarian objective criticism which held almost 
 entire sway during the eighteenth century. 
 
 In spite of the teaching and writing of the half-century 
 that has elapsed since the publication of Matthew Arnold's 
 Essays in Criticism, of an age more distinguished in criticism 
 than in any other department of literature, many scholars, 
 to say nothing of the great mass of readers, are by no 
 means clear in their minds as to the- objects and aims of 
 modern literary criticism or as to the ideal which a sane critic 
 should set before him. It shall be then the task of this essay 
 to discuss such aims and ideals. 
 
 One of our latest and most interesting critics, Mr. T. S. 
 Eliot,* is pessimistic as to the critical accomplishment of the 
 present age and thinks that no conclusion is any more solidly 
 established than it was in 1865 the date of the publication 
 of the Essays in Criticism and that if Matthew Arnold were 
 alive he would have all his work to do again. Mr. Eliot finds 
 the fault to be the same as Arnold found it, the indifference 
 of the English-speaking public to questions of Jtrt, , their 
 apathy in part the cause, in part the effect of their crass 
 ignorance of art values. And like Arnold he looks for con- 
 solation to France, where such things are ordered better. 
 
 Granting (which we do not) the superiority of the Latin 
 races in general in appreciation of art, granting their keener 
 natural artistic sensibility, yet we must also, if Mr. Eliot's 
 indictment be true, blame our teachers as well as ourselves if 
 in fifty years' time no progress has been made amongst us. 
 What have our critics, the teachers, been doing ? Is it pos- 
 sible that they have been muddle-headed, blind leaders of the 
 blind, wandering round in circles and making no progress this 
 last half -century ? One would suspect that this must be in 
 whole or in part the case if we have not in reality progressed 
 beyond the halting-place of Matthew Arnold who, as Mr. 
 
 * The Sacred Wood (1920). 
 
12 THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN CRITICISM. 
 
 Eliot says rightly, was " a propagandist rather than a critic, 
 a popularizer rather than a creator." 
 
 Professor Vaughau,* on the other hand, is of opinion that 
 later critics have not advanced beyond Carlyle, in fact " can 
 hardly be said to have yet filled out the design that he laid." 
 
 This pessimism as to modern criticism may be due in the 
 case of Mr. Eliot to his failing to notice the full implica- 
 tion of his summary of Arnold's accomplishment as critic. 
 Matthew Arnold, much as he did to create an atmosphere, 
 did not succeed in forming a school and so with him we reach 
 a dead-end in criticism. There was no definite philosophy 
 underlying Arnold's critical work. His was the mind of a 
 classic who, born in a romantic age and under the spell of the 
 masters of that age, and especially in criticism of Wordsworth, 
 yet had a hankering after clear-cut logical definitions and 
 precise commandments, and so naturally looked to France and 
 Germany where self-contained philosophic systems were to be 
 found and practised. France, owing to the historic supre- 
 macy of its prose, will be the last Latin country to abandon 
 logic as the supreme arbiter in life and literature, although 
 the most powerful attack upon logical criticism has come in 
 our own days from that country, always the fruitful mother 
 of criticism. In Germany the logic of Hegel reigned supreme 
 and the dialectic of Hegel is simply Aristotle writ large. 
 
 Professor Vaughan seems to us to be right in ascribing the 
 dominating position in our modern criticism to Carlyle, but he 
 perhaps did not observe that our critics of to-day, who owe so 
 much to Carlyle, have behind them the support of a modern 
 philosophy and so are carrying on the work of Carlyle with 
 clearer ideas of their aims than had that great master. Car- 
 lyle is influenced everywhere by the idealism of Fichte, and 
 all idealisms carry within themselves the seed of pragmatism 
 just as surely as the idealism of Berkeley leads logically to 
 the scepticism of Hume. The work of Carlyle foreshadows 
 
 * English Literary Criticism (Blackie & Son). 
 
THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN CRITICISM. 13 
 
 our modern pragmatic criticism of literature just as truly as 
 it contains in itself in embryo the political philosophy of 
 Nietzsche. 
 
 Literary men, wrote Carlyle, show God's everlasting wis- 
 dom "in such particular form as their own particular times 
 require it in. For each age, by the law of its nature, is dif- 
 ferent from every other age, and demands a different repre- 
 sentation." To-day this is a commonplace, but not so at a 
 time when the phantom of a priori critical laws based upon an 
 a priori aesthetic still haunted the minds of men. 
 
 From this idea of varying changing forms all in their own 
 way right there is only a step to the modern pragmatic teach- 
 ing that each individual is a class in itself and cannot be 
 judged by any laws except the laws of its own being. 
 
 The spirit of modern criticism is to examine with tolerance * 
 each work as an individual manifestation apart from any 
 logical prejudices as to its class, recognising with the prag- 
 matist that classifying should be a secondary consideration, a 
 method of convenience rather than a first principle necessitated 
 by some eternal a priori categories. Logical classification for 
 the pragmatist has little to do with life, formal logic itself 
 being considered but a means of securing verbal consistency, \ 
 and as dealing primarily with words rather than with 
 things. 
 
 Although we can find foreshadowings of the generous 
 modern spirit right down the ages from Longinus to Dryden, 
 Goethe, and Carlyle, yet it is not improper to speak of modern 
 literary criticism as dating from 1888, the year which in 
 England witnessed the death of Matthew Arnold and the 
 commencement in France of the duel between Ferdinand 
 Brunetiere on the one side and Anatole France and later 
 Jules Lemaitre upon the other. 
 
 In La Vie LitUraire (1888, First Series) Anatole France 
 stoutly denied the existence of objective criticism or of objec- 
 tive art, holding that those who flatter themselves that they 
 put anything but themselves into their work are dupes of the 
 
14 THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN CRITICISM. 
 
 most fallacious illusion, one of the greatest miseries of the 
 world being that man cannot get out of himself. The good 
 critic is then the man who relates the adventures of his own 
 soul among masterpieces. 
 
 Ferdinand Brunetiere, the last and in some ways the 
 greatest of the French school of scientific objective critics, 
 attacked* these critical dicta as leading to pure anarchy. He 
 remarked that according to Anatole France nothing is sure. 
 On the contrary, he argued, the whole business of life consists 
 in escaping from our ego, and that otherwise there would be 
 no such thing as society or language, literature or art at all. 
 That as men we are such by the power we possess above all 
 of going out of ourselves to seek and find and recognise our 
 own selves in others. Brunetiere further asserted that the 
 agreement about certain writers which does exist proves the 
 objectivity of criticism. He quoted in support the well-known 
 dictum of Jules Lemaitre (a leader with Anatole France of 
 the impressionist school) in his Les Contemporains (1886-1889) 
 that it is an established fact among literary men that certain 
 authors exist. 
 
 Jules Lemaitre in the criticism from which Brunetiere 
 quoted was attacking the latter's main critical position and 
 showing that Brunetiere succeeded best as a critic, not when 
 or because he was applying his own principles of scientific 
 evolutionary criticism, but simply and subjectively when he 
 loved and was in sympathy with the authors whom he criti- 
 cised.t But he went on to show that the demand for sym- 
 pathy did not involve a childish ranking of all writers as of 
 the same value, that a clearing and a sorting took place 
 naturally and almost spontaneously ; that some books, although 
 
 Revue des Deux Mondes (1st January, 1891). 
 
 f Excellent examples of the truth of this position will be found on all 
 sides in our own literature. Witness the excellence of the peasant Car- 
 lyle's criticism of the work of the peasant Burns, with whom he could 
 sympathise, and his failure to appreciate Scott, with whom he had 
 fewer sympathies. 
 
THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN CRITICISM. 15 
 
 they might have passed through a number of editions, are 
 clearly not art products and so not subjects for the critic ; 
 that certain writers despite their oddities and faults exist, 
 while others palpably do not. Lemaitre, IP ^pp*vnfr' f> n fo 
 Brunetiere, maintained France's thesis, that there can be no 
 scientific laws of criticism, that there can be at best a method 
 proceeding subjectively by sympathy. That although a critic 
 will feel genuine pain because of the faults of a writer whom 
 he loves, yet he will feel that these faults are a necessary part 
 of the writer just as M. Brunetiere's austerity, rigidity, and 
 unco' goodness are all lovable faults of a great master of 
 criticism. Lemaitre would not, he says, have it otherwise, 
 for it all adds to the amusement and interest of life. What 
 in the last analysis is interesting in a work of art is the mind 
 of the artist. 
 
 " What one loves in you, madame, is you ! " What 
 pleases in even the severest article of M. Brunetiere is M. 
 Brunetiere. 
 
 Anatole France in his answer* to Brunetiere's attack con- 
 tinues to deny that criticism has any definite standards or can 
 have any such, everything in arts and literature depending 
 entirely upon the personal equation. He quotes Brunetiere 
 against himself : " To omit our contemporaries, to whom as 
 all admit we are too close to see properly, how many and how 
 diverse the judgments have not men, during the last three or 
 four centuries, delivered on a Corneille or a Shakespeare, or a 
 Cervantes, or a Rabelais, or a Raphael, or a Michael Angelo ! 
 Just as there is no opinion, however extravagant or absurd, 
 which some philosopher has not iipheld, so there is none, how- 
 ever scandalous or derogatory to great genius, which cannot 
 shelter itself under the authority of some critic's name." 
 Even if M. Lemaitre's two lists of writers who do and who 
 do not exist could be made out, no two critics would be found 
 to be in agreement even here. 
 
 \ * La Vie Litterairc, 3me serie, Preface. 
 
16 THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN CRITICISM. 
 
 As Dr. Richard G. Moulton says :* " Speaking broadly, 
 the whole history of criticism has been a triumph of authors 
 over critics. ... I believe that the ordinary reader, how- 
 ever familiar with notable blunders of criticism, has little idea 
 of that which is the essence of my argument the degree of 
 regularity, amounting to absolute law, with which criticism, 
 where it has set itself in opposition to freedom of authorship, 
 has been found in time to have pronounced upon the wrong 
 side." 
 
 Purely theoretically, a scientific method of criticism based 
 upon purely scientific grounds and partaking of the certainty 
 of science is, argues Anatole France, conceivable, but as a 
 practical fact we have it not, and it is doubtful if it would be 
 a great blessing, even if we possessed it. "Beauty, virtue, 
 and genius will forever guard their secret. Neither the charm 
 of Cleopatra, nor the sweetness of Saint Francis d'Assisi, nor 
 the poetry of Racine, will allow themselves to be reduced to 
 formulae. If these things are in any way related to science, 
 it is to a science which is blended with art, intuitive, restless, 
 forever unfinished. This science, or rather this art, exists. 
 It is philosophy, ethics, history, criticism in short, the whole 
 beautiful romance of humanity." 
 
 M. Brunetiere's affirmation that according to France 
 nothing is sure need not, thinks the latter, involve a charge 
 of absolute scepticism, as he has always believed in the 
 relativity of things and in the succession of phenomena. 
 " In fact, reality and appearance it is all one. To love 
 and to suffer in this world, images suffice : there is no need 
 for their objectivity to be demonstrated." Dealing with the 
 place of logic in literary criticism, Anatole France makes his 
 most amusing thrust : " For M. Ferdinand Brunetiere there 
 are simply two kinds of criticism : the subjective, which is 
 bad, and the objective, which is good. According to him, 
 M. Jules Lemaitre, M. Paul Desjardins, and myself are 
 tainted with subjectivity, and that is the worst of evils : for 
 Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (Third Edition, p. 8), 
 
THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN CRITICISM. 17 
 
 from subjectivity one falls into illusion, into sensuality, and 
 into concupiscence, and judges the works of man by the 
 pleasure they afford, which is an abomination. For one 
 ought not to be pleased with any product of the mind before 
 one knows whether one is right in being pleased ; for man 
 being a rational animal he ought first to use his reason ; for 
 to be right is necessary, but it is not necessary to find 
 pleasure ; because it is the .property (as logicians say) of 
 man to seek to instruct himself by the method of logic, which 
 is infallible ; and so one should always put a truth at the end 
 of a chain of reasoning, like a knot at the end of a plait ; for 
 otherwise the chain would not hold, and it has got to hold ; 
 and thus several syllogisms may be joined together in such a 
 way as to form an indestructible system which lasts ten or 
 eleven years. And this proves that objective criticism is the 
 only good criticism." 
 
 Anatole France sees that literary criticism depends upon 
 the fact that man is a social organism and not upon any 
 necessary laws of an a priori aesthetic. He admits, too, that 
 all things in the universe are inextricably intertwined, but 
 humorously complains that " the links of the chain are, in 
 places, so jumbled that the devil himself could not disentangle 
 them, although he is a logician." 
 
 Aesthetics has been founded by some upon ethics, by 
 others upon sociology. But, proceeds Anatole France, 
 despite Auguste Comte, neither of these sciences exists. 
 Nor is there any biology. When an exact biology has been 
 established perhaps in some millions of years, it may be 
 possible to establish after a great number of centuries a 
 sociology. Then alone will it be possible to create an 
 aesthetic science on solid foundations. By that time our 
 planet will be very old, and the sun will be all spots, and 
 " the last men, taking refuge in the depths of mines will be 
 less anxious to dispute about the nature of the beautiful than 
 to burn their last lump of coal before plunging into the ever- 
 lasting ice." 
 
 M.C. 2 
 
18 THE IMPRESSIONIST REVOLT IN CRITICISM. 
 
 The revolt then in modern times is against rigid self-con- 
 tained systems and fixed standards : in France against the 
 scientific school of Taine and Brunetiere, in England against 
 the attempt of Matthew Arnold, to thrust upon us an Academy 
 of Exactness. It must always be remembered about Matthew 
 Arnold, however, that in spite of much of his theory of 
 criticism, in practice he was more often than not a subjective 
 critic and did not apply the critical pocket-rule whose use he 
 urges upon others. 
 
 As in spite of twentieth century feeling and practice the 
 question is still a live one, we might now proceed to consider 
 briefly the possibility of a Science of Criticism. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 
 
 As the existence of greater or less skill in any profession 
 seems to imply a science in the background, it must be 
 supposed that there is such a thing as a Science of Criticism. 
 Anatole France, with all his insistence upon the subjective 
 side of criticism, would hardly deny that a good critic could 
 give reasons for the taste that is in him, and for his sub- 
 jective method. That, even if criticism in practice is no 
 more than recounting the adventures of the soul of the critic, 
 his literary excursions, there is a scientific mode of proceeding 
 upon adventures, and that an adventure need not be wholly 
 and purely a haphazard proceeding, nor an adventurer great 
 because he has no compass. As we have already seen, 
 M. France tacitly admits this position when he defends him- 
 self from the charge of literary scepticism, which would mean 
 anarchy in criticism. 
 
 The idealistic world of Berkeley or the purely subjective 
 world of M. France has still room for the Law of Gravity 
 and other laws of the succession of phenomena. To take the 
 great Frenchman's witty attack upon M. Brunetiere too 
 seriously would be to exaggerate what after all is not a plea 
 for anarchy, but for greater freedom, a protest against the 
 despotism of a Code Napoleon in Criticism, MM. Taine and 
 Brunetiere are true to their national sentiments or prejudices 
 in their love of logic and of rigid pigeon-hole classifications, 
 but no one, least of all an Englishman, can be angry with a 
 French critic who distrusts pigeon-holes in the world of the 
 spirit. The whole history of English poetry from Chaucer 
 to Browning shows that its great writers have been acclaimed 
 
 19 
 
20 IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 
 
 as geniuses, in so far as they have succeeded in freeing them- 
 selves most completely from the critical fetters of French 
 logic. The history of English prose, of course, has the oppo- 
 site tale to tell. 
 
 We may cheerfujly admit that criticism is not, most pro- 
 bably cannot be, an exact .science. As Aristotle said of 
 Politics, we are now dealing with a subject in which from the 
 very nature of the case there can be no certainty, but by a 
 judicious use of the genetic method we may arrive at greater 
 probabilities. The Science of Criticism, like the Science of 
 Politics or of Sociology, is still inchoate, and perhaps ever in 
 the making. As Aristotle put it, the certainty of mathe- 
 matics is not to be looked for in matters of this kind, but yet 
 we may use a scientific method in pronouncing an ethical 
 judgment or in our criticism of poetry. Even in mathematics 
 itself we have a scientific method of dealing with variables. 
 And the fact that criticism must be largely subjective, that 
 taste is a variable, need not detract from the value of a 
 scientific procedure any more than the necessity for eliminat- 
 ing the personal equation detracts from the value of scientific 
 observations in astronomy or physics. 
 
 As Mr. J. M. Robertson justly remarks : 
 Moral " science " and the " science " of ethics are phrases in 
 unchallenged use. It will appear that there is a sense in which 
 processes of literary and aesthetic judgment may be put under a 
 scientific treatment. The sense of right and wrong in conduct 
 is clearly as relative , as variable, as the sense of good and bad 
 in literature and art. It varies with periods, with countries, 
 
 with times of life It is the same with what we call 
 
 " critical " judgment the judgment of literary quality, of 
 merit in literature and in literary men. But if in the field of 
 ethical judgment there can be science, that is, ordered and con- 
 catenated reasoning, consistent inference, coherent explanation, 
 the same is possible in the field of literary judgment * 
 
 New Essays towards a Critical Method (1897), p. 7. 
 
IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 21 
 
 From the critical work extant of MM. Jules Lemaitre and 
 Anatole France we may be sure they would be the last to dis- 
 pute so modest a claim. 
 
 Criticism could not be, one would further agree, an exact 
 science, because it deals in the final analysis with Beauty, 
 which is a matter primarily of feeling, of intuiting, rather 
 than of knowing. 
 
 At first sight, however, it might seem that it ought to be 
 in its primary application an exact science because it has 
 primarily to deal with the concrete, with the embodiment of 
 the ideal and the spiritual, with the materialisation of the 
 Beautiful, with the functions of an artist as given in our 
 greatest artist's famous definition : 
 
 And as Imagination bodies forth 
 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
 Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
 A local habitation and a name. 
 
 And hence arises this doubt : Does not modern Experi- 
 mental Psychology show us that quantitative analysis may be 
 applied to some of our sensations, and might it not similarly 
 be possible to invent a machine able to register degrees of the 
 feeling of Beauty ? 
 
 It would be rash in these days to set limits to the possi- 
 bilities of Science, yet we already possess the nearest ap- 
 proach to such a machine in the sensitive mind of the trained 
 individual critic (such as Anatole France), who registers for 
 us his aesthetic impressions in the form of literary criticism. 
 We have had, and always will have, creative geniuses in 
 criticism, just as we have had in other branches of literature, 
 and like all geniuses they will proceed intuitively with little 
 or no explicit knowledge of the laws upon which they act. 
 So, in athletic exercises of the body, such as golf, we have 
 men we may call geniuses in their own art, who will drive 
 their ball unerringly to the mark with little knowledge of 
 laws anatomical or other, on which the accuracy of their aim 
 depends^ But with the modesty of true genius, while they 
 
22 IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 
 
 would be the first to proclaim their ignorance of such laws, 
 they would be the last to deny their existence. " It is just 
 knack," they would say. And " knack " means luck reduced 
 to law or habit. And so it is in criticism and literature at 
 large. A Shakespeare or a Dryden has the knack, and 
 would, one may feel sure, be supremely interested to hear the 
 literary anatomist explain how it was all done, and on what 
 scientific laws it depended. Nor in literary criticism need 
 the absence of such genius prevent men of talent from study- 
 ing and imitating the scientific methods discoverable in the 
 intuitions of the masters in whose footsteps they tread, any 
 more than in a game like golf should the player of ambition 
 refuse to acquire by laborious study the professional's intui- 
 tive " knack." And History tells us that in Literature as in 
 Golf, geniuses may be made as well as born. The truth per- 
 haps is that geniuses are always made and never born, a 
 Shakespeare just as much as a Stevenson, a Keats as well as 
 a Milton, a Homer as a Yirgil ; but that the former by the 
 rapidity of their movement seem to us purely intuitive, while 
 the formation of the latter is slower and more in evidence. 
 Although lightning defeats the clumsy measurements of our 
 stop watches, yet it is a measurable force all the same. 
 
 If the sensitised plate of the prepared critical mind 
 registers for us the aesthetic appreciations known as Literary 
 Criticism, it is to the wider register of History that we are to 
 look for a check upon the individual critic. Here is it true 
 that " Securus judicat orbis terrarum" for it is from History 
 that we may learn how to correct the bias of environment, 
 how to discount the present value of all criticism, how to 
 reduce our calculations to terms of sea-level. 
 
 We know that criticism, like all Literature, is a reflection 
 of the life, and depends on the thought and social conditions 
 of its period, so that its canons must be in the main purely 
 relative. Nation will differ from nation, tribe from tribe, 
 people from people, nay, the same people will differ at 
 different periods of their national life and social development. 
 
IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 23 
 
 The music that ravishes a Chinaman will be judged by an 
 Englishman a beastly noise ; the statue of Aphrodite Anadyo- 
 mene will arouse different sensations in the breast of a Parisian 
 artist, a Zulu, and an Elder of the Kirk. Though Beauty 
 itself is, we may suppose, a universal, a general idea, its 
 variations are infinite, innumerable the forms under which it 
 manifests itself, and so it is to the trained eye of the critic 
 that we look to detect Proteus under whatever form he choose 
 to lurk. And it is in this sense that the poet drunk with 
 Beauty meant us to take his famous " Beauty is Truth, Truth 
 Beauty." 
 
 Beauty as a Universal is One, Truth as a Universal is One, 
 and as Universals they are One, and as the mystic would add, 
 the One is God. 
 
 Beauty and Truth are but different aspects of the same 
 Harmony. Ugliness and Falsity do not exist in reality, they 
 merely subsist, being Beauty and Truth in a wrong -relation, 
 just as a discord is but a chord out of time, or, as the whole 
 philosophy of Browning teaches, Evil is but Good out of 
 place. 
 
 The Universal, however, is the business not of Literary 
 Criticism or of Politics, but of Aesthetic or of Ethics. And 
 for the practical purposes of Criticism History has to be our 
 final Court of Appeal, and it is to her that we must look for 
 guidance, procedure, and laws. Beyond her at present we 
 cannot go, for a Science of Aesthetic is as yet only a possi- 
 bility but not an established fact. We cheerfully recognise 
 that the philosophy which underlies the laws we thus obtain 
 ' is pragmatism. It is only in modern times that this truth 
 has been fully recognised, and this forms the great line of 
 demarcation between the older and the newer Eomantic Criti- 
 cism. 
 
 The Romantic movement in literature, which culminated in 
 the nineteenth century in the poetry of Keats and the criticism 
 of Shelley in England, and in France in the poetry and criticism 
 of Victor Hugo, gave Ancient Criticism its death-blow, but 
 
24 IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 
 
 in both countries a further step had to be taken. Although 
 the early Romantic Criticism was wide, free, and generous, 
 compared with the Dogmatic Criticism which it displaced, yet 
 it took some time for the critics to free themselves from the 
 mythological Aberglaube. Matthew Arnold, as we have seen, 
 had hankerings after the old classical gods, and, pleasing as 
 so much of his practice is, yet in his precepts he shows no 
 advance upon Dryden, Coleridge, Goethe, or Carlyle. In 
 France the doctrines of Evolution and the advance of bio- 
 logical science seemed to afford an opportunity for a new 
 critical dogmatism, and we have already seen how Anatole 
 France and Jules Lemaitre vindicate the liberties which had 
 been won by Victor Hugo. 
 
 In England the work of our youngest school of critics has 
 been profoundly influenced by that of the French Critical 
 Symbolists, to use the label affixed to French Pragmatic 
 Criticism by Lemaitre. In practice we may be no freer or 
 more untrammelled than such masters as Dryden, Coleridge, 
 and Carlyle in the past, but in theory we have outstripped 
 them and also Matthew Arnold, simply because we have found 
 the philosophy which underlies so inexact a science as ours, 
 that philosophy being what William James called Pragmatism. 
 And the first axiom of this Philosophy is, " What works must 
 be held true, as long as it works" This is the first axiom of 
 all sciences of expedience, such as Politics and the like. 
 This is the basis of the philosophy of Shakespeare's dramatic 
 art, which may be summed up in the formula : What I 
 can induce an audience to believe, that is dramatic truth. 
 This axiom again is the basic principle which underlies our 
 arch-pragmatist Aristotle's teaching concerning the Oi/ceia 
 'HSoi//? and which underlies all great criticism, such, for example, 
 as Coleridge's definition of poetic faith ("that willing suspen- 
 sion of disbelief for the moment ") or the best judgments in 
 Dr. Saintsbury's History of Criticism, or in Francis Thomp- 
 son's Essay on Shelley. 
 
 It is, one would say, a by no means difficult task to trace 
 
IS A SCIENCE OF CKITICISM POSSIBLE ? 25 
 
 the upward curve of the theory of criticism up to our own day. 
 The Evolution of Literary Criticism in England begins as it 
 began in France* with (i) Blind Acceptance of Classical 
 Models. Then, when Europe began to be flooded with clas- 
 sical works at the time of the Renaissance, the necessity arose 
 of dissecting these potential models in order to discover both 
 their comparative merit and if possible the secret of their 
 structure. This leads to works of Rhetoric rather than of 
 Literary Criticism properly so called, to discussion of tropes 
 and verbal beauty, and it is hopelessly hampered in any good 
 it may accomplish by coming too many centuries in advance 
 of the beginnings of Scientific Philology, (ii) The second 
 stage of Criticism is that of Comparative Anatomy, of 
 the Grammarians, of the Renaissance critics, in England 
 of the Elizabethan critics. (iii) The third stage is, now 
 that the models are established, to find out from them the 
 rules to which all good work in the various determined species 
 must conform. This is the so-called Classical Age of Criti- 
 cism, which honouring Horace and his laws gave us Boileau in 
 France, and Pope, Johnson, and our early nineteenth century 
 reviewers in England. The Edinburgh Review of October, 
 1802, commences, as all will remember, its review of Southey's 
 Thalaba with the common profession of faith of all Classical 
 Critics : 
 
 Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its stan- 
 dards were fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose authority 
 it is no longer lawful to call in question. 
 
 This third stage is in strictness the First Age of an 
 Organic Criticism which until it takes this form is still only 
 embryonic. It bears the same relationship to the stage which 
 evolves from it, as Astrology does to Astronomy, the pseudo- 
 science having to come first to prepare the way for the science. 
 A pseudo-science is a science which is logical but is built upon 
 a fallacy. With regard to the Pseudo-Classical Criticism we 
 
 * See Brimetiere, L J Evolution de la Critique. 
 
26 IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 
 
 must remember that a serious fallacy lurked from the very 
 beginning in the words " critic " and " criticism," and as time 
 went on the fallacy grew and became crystallised from its 
 union with philosophy. 
 
 As the word " critic " implied a judge, it was assumed that 
 his functions consisted chiefly in the interpretation of pre- 
 existent laws and in decreeing the punishment of offenders. 
 This feeling survives to this day in the use of " critical " for 
 "fault-finding" and in such words as "hypercritical" and 
 the like. 
 
 It was altogether lost sight of that a judge need not sit in 
 a law-court and that there are other kinds of laws besides 
 those of a commonwealth. 
 
 In the eighteenth century the literary critic, like his learned 
 brother in the law-courts, was a hanging judge. He had his 
 code in the laws that his long line of predecessors had deduced 
 from the Classics, and it was a legal fiction that the Classics 
 had found them in Nature. The fact of a new kind of writer 
 appearing before him was in itself presumptive evidence of the 
 writer's guilt, just as to-day in France under the old unre- 
 formed judiciary code the man who attracts the attention of 
 the police is treated by the judge as a criminal, who must have 
 broken the law. Themis with bandaged eyes holding the 
 scales is an exact picture of the methods of the older criticism. 
 In the one pan went the new work and in the other the pre- 
 cedents of antiquity ; to all else Themis was blind, but she 
 could easily feel the upward kick of the pan. Occasionally a 
 good-natured judge like Addison would correct the iniquity of 
 judicial impartiality by a little pressure on the side opposed 
 to precedent, but for the most part novelties kicked the 
 beam. 
 
 From this arose the necessity of knowing what the laws 
 were, and so the eighteenth century codified and promulgated 
 them. A writer then followed the code or fashion and was 
 hailed as " correct," or disobeyed and was condemned as an 
 outlaw. 
 
TS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 27 
 
 Whenever general hardship is felt from the acts of 
 authority, authority is called upon sooner or later to produce 
 its title-deeds, and then spring up official defenders to prove 
 that the titles are valid. Thus, when in England subjects 
 were dissatisfied with the acts of their sovereign, philosophers 
 attempted to prove his right to their obedience on the ground 
 of the Social Contract. The defence is held valid until it occurs 
 to a new rebel to demand evidence for the Social Contract. 
 
 The same thing happened in Poetry. Rebels against con- 
 vention were arraigned on the charge of having broken the 
 fundamental Laws of Poetry. Their mutiny next took the 
 form of denying the cogency of these laws. The answer 
 promptly came that these laws were a tradition of the Ancients 
 and that obedience to them was the cause of the greatness of 
 the classic masterpieces. The rebels then asked if these laws 
 were anterior to the Classics. " Yes," they were told, " they 
 are laws a priori eternal, but discovered by the Great Masters 
 and by us derived from their practice, and by you infringed 
 at your peril." " This will never do ! " is the famous formula 
 in which the Edinburgh Reviewer pronounced the excom- 
 munication of Wordsworth's Excursion. 
 
 But in literature as in religion the blood of martyrs is the 
 seed of a church, and rough treatment seems to make some 
 plants grow stronger, (iv) In England we reach the fourth 
 stage in the Romantic Revolt, which in criticism is associated 
 with the names of Lamb, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt. 
 It coincided in time with the French Revolution and was 
 partly due to the new spirit of democracy which was in the 
 air. The change to the literary modern spirit was as catas- 
 trophic as the political upheaval which synchronised with it, 
 and which also swept away ancient landmarks and tore up 
 rooted traditions. In France the revolution in literature 
 comes later and centres in the great name of Victor Hugo ; 
 in England the reign of Victoria sees the reign of the new 
 criticism established, and the close of the reign witnesses a 
 strong reaction setting in against it. 
 
28 IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 
 
 Matthew Arnold, who flourished as critic between 1857 
 and 1888, felt ever more and more strongly that the English 
 love of freedom tended, at all events in literature, to become 
 licence. " Nor was he wrong" remarks Dr. Saintsbury,* 
 " in thinking that there is in the uncultivated and unregenerate 
 English mind a sort of rebelliousness to sound critical prin- 
 ciples" But where were these " sound critical principles " to 
 be found ? The Romantic Revolution had swept away the 
 old laws, and in England, at least, there was no critical Code 
 Napoleon. Matthew Arnold looked then with longing eyes 
 to France and to Germany, where critics were busily con- 
 structing new methods (as was Arnold's favourite Sainte- 
 Beuve), or new infallible systems founded on the new scientific 
 theories of Lamarck, Darwin, and Haeckel (as were Taine 
 and Brunetiere). 
 
 Arnold's method, like that of his great master Sainte- 
 Beuve, is a method of much charm, but is it strictly Literary 
 Criticism ? Is it not rather in its last analysis that very 
 necessary propaedeutic to criticism, namely, Reviewing, which 
 consists with Sainte-Beuve, the immortal model for reviewers, 
 in examining the book before him with tolerance and sym- 
 pathy, and in close connection with the author's life, in laying 
 before his readers the spirit of the author and the book, and 
 in leaving them to draw their own critical conclusions ? It is 
 everything which is praiseworthy and delightful, but one can 
 hardly call it Literary Criticism, though it may be much more 
 valuable, and was certainly more valuable than the Pro- 
 crustean method of Sainte-Beuve's compatriot and contem- 
 porary Taine. 
 
 Arnold felt this difficulty himself, the want of standards in 
 literary criticism in order to make it something of cogency, 
 something higher than reviewing. He proposed, therefore, 
 as the supreme test in Poetry a kind of literary thermometer 
 graduated by means of the grand style of the classics. But 
 
 * A History of English Criticism (p. 482). 
 
IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 29 
 
 no critic of the eighteenth century would have asked for more 
 or claimed more. So that in this respect, despite all his charm, 
 despite also the culture that his teaching diffused amongst the 
 Victorian Philistines who needed it so badly, Matthew Arnold 
 cannot be said to belong to the class of Literary Critics like 
 Dryden or Brunetiere, but to the class of great Reviewers 
 like Sainte-Beuve. Arnold's second great prepossession was 
 with the question of the connection between Morality and Art. 
 Here he was in opposition to the much subtler critic, the great 
 English stylist, Pater (1839-1894). Pater, the founder of 
 the Aesthetic School, had raised the banner " Art for Art's 
 sake," with the implication that bringing questions of morality 
 into criticism of art is the same as judging music by the sense 
 of smell. The question is still hotly debated and cannot be 
 said to be as yet decided. Matthew Arnold was on the side 
 of the angels, but, unlike Disraeli in his sympathies with 
 Wilberforce against Darwin, it will, we think, be found 
 eventually that here at least Arnold is right, unless we are to 
 think with Anatole France that there is no such thing as a 
 Science of Ethics. If there be such a science, then it will 
 embrace man and all his activities, so that if Art infringes its 
 precepts, it is infringing a higher law. In this region it may 
 be said, though there are many modern dissidents, that 
 Matthew Arnold performed his greatest service to Criticism. 
 The Romantic School, whether of Poetry or Criticism, had 
 also, it must be remembered, fallacies peculiarly its own. 
 Wordsworth, the Nature Poet, for example, would apply a 
 geometric axiom to things of the spirit, and would too con- 
 sistently forget that humanity, the part, contains Nature, the 
 whole, and here he marks his inferiority to the greatest poets, 
 such as Shakespeare or Dante or Homer, who never lose 
 sight of this spiritual axiom. In criticism, too, the Romantics 
 did not see clearly to what their revolution had logically com- 
 mitted them. Although they did see that literary art is 
 something higher and nobler than mere imitation of models, 
 yet they held the peculiarly romantic fallacy of universal 
 
30 IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 
 
 standards of beauty, and did not see that, though there may 
 be a Universal of Beauty (which is the province not of criti- 
 cism but of meta-criticism or Aesthetic), yet the human stan- 
 dard varies with time, place, and social conditions. They saw 
 clearly that the eighteenth century models were out of place 
 when thrust upon an age in which the social conditions were 
 wholly at variance with those under which the great classical 
 models were produced ; but they did not carry the logical 
 process a step further, and come to the conclusion that litera- 
 ture, being a purely social product, must be judged by the 
 social conditions of its place and age. Literature is a social 
 institution rather than something pertaining to the individual, 
 and it is only in logic that man is man before he is a social 
 unit. Fo<^d and drink are judged primarily by their power of 
 satisfying ^the animal wants of the individual animal man ; 
 Literature, on the other hand, like Cookery, is a product of 
 society, and is not primarily to be judged by its appeal to 
 individual man irrespective of social environment and condi- 
 tions of time and place. 
 
 This, the critics of to-day as a whole, do see more clearly 
 than did the general body of critics at any other preceding 
 literary epoch, and this is due to a large extent to the preach- 
 ing of an old philosophy of freedom under the new names of 
 Pragmatism, Modernism, Humanism, or Symbolism and by 
 such teachers as Pierce and William James in America, 
 Schiller in England, Anatole France, Jules Lemaitre, and 
 Bergson in France. The modern spirit is to look upon our 
 critics or judges of literature, as we look upon our judges 
 of wine, roses, and fair women, of blood horses and pedi- 
 gree dogs. We expect from them expert knowledge, 
 which means knowledge not of canons, if such exist, of a 
 possible Universal called Beauty, but of particular laws which 
 will serve as a rough rule-of-thumb method to judge a par- 
 ticular case. This knowledge by the force of habit has passed 
 into an intuition. In addition, we expect from such judges 
 the most tactful tolerance and the widest sympathies. 
 
IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 31 
 
 A man may be, for example, a competent judge, let us say, 
 of feminine beauty, yet need not desire that ugly women should 
 be decapitated. He would be the first to admit that his judg- 
 ments are purely pragmatic, and that his competence is cir- 
 cumscribed by the limits of his experience, and his education 
 in taste. Thus Paris of old would hardly be competent to 
 award the golden apple in a Hottentot beauty-show, although 
 he might admit that the beauty of a Hottentot maiden and of 
 the Idalian Venus may some day be brought under some 
 general law of Beauty. 
 
 The modern literary critic, while not absolutely denying 
 the possibility of such things as axiomatic a priori laws of 
 aesthetics, agrees so far with the Romantic critic that the code 
 of the so-called Classical criticism was crammed full of arbi- 
 trary conventions and superstitious followings of the ancients, 
 and that the sooner these were swept away the better. But 
 he goes a stage farther. As to anything worthy of the name 
 of " laws " that might remain, these must be looked upon as 
 modern science looks upon its " laws," z'.<?. as more or less 
 useful generalisations from experience, which are a greater or 
 less approximation to an absolute truth, which is postulated, 
 but which may or may not exist ; which are not juristic laws 
 in any sense ; which have only a relative value, and are to be 
 at once discarded, as soon as they have survived their utility, 
 or when a closer approximation is found. A closer approxi- 
 mation or new law is said to be found whenever it works 
 better, and this is all the test that we possess. 
 
 Tradition and history are witnesses as to how the law 
 worked in the past. If Homer and Virgil did not spoil their 
 epics by plunging in medias res, then to plunge in medias res 
 is the law for Homer and Virgil, or for any modern who 
 succeeds in writing an epic on those lines. But to deduce 
 that " plunging in medias res" is an eternal, a priori, axio- 
 matic law for Epic is either rank superstition, or insanity, or 
 at the very best a doubtful Induction based on too scanty 
 enumeration of instances. 
 
32 IS A SCIENCE OF CRITICISM POSSIBLE ? 
 
 The answer then to the question with which we started, 
 " Is a Science of Criticism Possible ? " is, Yes, provided that 
 Criticism makes no higher claims than do any modern sciences 
 connected with human activities, such, e.g. as political 
 economy. The philosophy which governs modern sciences is 
 pure Pragmatism, and this is a philosophy which conceives of 
 itself not as a Metaphysic (as to whose claims it is more or 
 less reverently agnostic), but as a temper or a method. 
 
 Furthermore, it seems to us, that if we look backwards we 
 shall find that all the great critics of the past have succeeded 
 wherever they have been free, empirical, and pragmatic, as 
 far as the necessary a priori limitations of form have per- 
 mitted. We might test this by considering briefly the history 
 of one branch of Criticism in English Literature, and choos- 
 ing the history of Translation as our test, since in Translation 
 form is not the primary consideration. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 
 
 It is a rare phenomenon to find literary criticism in the 
 earliest stages of a nation's culture or in the beginnings of a 
 literature. We do not in Old English possess anything, for 
 example, so early as the Icelandic Skaldskaparmal^ a kind of 
 Ars Poetica or Instruction on the meanings and uses of "ken- 
 nings," which, as it made for convention in poetry, did more 
 harm than good. 
 
 The Heroic Age in our literature is concerned with the 
 oral rather than with the written word, and the scop or singer 
 is concerned primarily with how to live rather than with the 
 laws which govern his song. Deor forgets in his resentment 
 to tell us how and why Heorrenda, his successful rival, sur- 
 passed him in favour with his former patron ; but Widsith, 
 another wandering minstrel, although he may never have heard 
 that " Poetry is criticism of life" does remind the great ones 
 of the earth to be kind to poets, inasmuch as their immortality 
 depends upon the humble bard. 
 
 In the historical times of our Anglo-Saxon literature, when 
 Christianity brought with it a new culture, translation rather 
 than original composition was of necessity the first considera- 
 tion. It is noteworthy, however, that King Alfred, our first 
 literary dictator, does proclaim the sound doctrine of freedom 
 and utters a protest against slavishness even in translation. 
 " I have translated," he tells us more than once, " sometimes 
 word for word, sometimes meaning for meaning, as I could 
 interpret it most clearly and intelligibly." 
 
 Though it may be thought a small point to make, yet it is 
 gratifying to remember that in so early and so uncritical an 
 M. c. 33 3 
 
34 CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 
 
 age our greatest king and first great patron of literature did 
 sound a note, however slight, of freedom, and laid down what 
 is admitted to be the soundest maxim for a translator : " The 
 letter killeth, the spirit giveth life." The same principle is 
 attended by success when followed by that "grand transla- 
 teur, noble Geffroy Chancier" as his French contemporary 
 styles the Father of English Poetry. Chaucer, out of respect 
 to some poet whom he admires, will try to translate " word by 
 word," but with qualified success, for, as he tells us in the 
 Envoy to his Compleynt of Venus : 
 
 And eek to me hit is a great penaunce, 
 
 Sith rym in English hath swich scarsitee, 
 
 To f olowe word by word the curiositee 
 
 Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. 
 
 As the rhythm and rhyme are always integral parts of any 
 poem, close translation of verse into verse must be always 
 doomed to failure unless the two languages are closely akin. 
 The causes of the failure spring to the eye, or rather to the 
 ear, when we have a musical setting. Compare, for example, 
 the English translation of the libretto of some great Italian 
 opera with the original, and notice how the singer is forced 
 by the exigencies of music to emphasise the unimportant, 
 and neglect what the composer wishes to be stressed, often 
 with ludicrous results, if one thinks more of the meaning than 
 of the musical accompaniment. On the other hand, contrast 
 German with French verse translations of Shakespeare : the 
 former, on account of the kinship between English and 
 German, are passable, while the latter are failures. If the 
 languages are closely related, we see that close translation is 
 possible of verse into verse ; otherwise, the borrower must 
 write a descant, an imitation, a variation of the theme rather 
 than a translation. In prose, although rhythm is important, 
 it is not such an essential as in verse, except possibly in 
 rhetorical prose, which forms the boundary between the two 
 dominions. Here a prose translation of prose, especially into 
 
CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 35 
 
 a language not closely related to the original, must necessarily 
 be halting and fail to produce the same effect as the original. 
 Again, apart from sentence rhythm, a prose translation from 
 a language which possesses in right of its own genius some 
 peculiar properties such as, say, a certain sonorousness and 
 dignity or a wonderful concision and brevity of phrase, is 
 foredoomed to imperfect success. How can one translate 
 satisfactorily even into English prose the Virgilian " Sunt 
 lacrimae rerum" or anything of Horace, or of Dante, or such 
 prose as that of Tacitus, such phrases as " Capax imperil nisi 
 imper asset " ? And what utter failures are all our transla- 
 tions of the oratory of Cicero ! It is impertinent to say that 
 we get Cicero's meaning when we ought to know well that the 
 rhythm is half the meaning. And although criticism must be 
 chary of canons a priori, yet we may, I think, legitimately 
 indulge an a priori suspicion, at all events, that " Traditore 
 traduttore I " is true when applied to English translations of 
 Russian or Japanese authors. 
 
 Chaucer, the most perfect translator in the history of 
 English verse, discovered in the course of his long career as a 
 borrower of other men's goods, this important truth for him- 
 self, and gives us in his inspired moments a descant, a trans- 
 lation of spirit (Alfred's " andgiet of andgiete ") and not an 
 attempt at literal translation. Compare, for example, the 
 metre and spirit of his A B C with Deguileville's tame 
 original. Here he has succeeded too well, and has ceased to 
 be translator and has become an original poet. For it must 
 be remembered that a conscientious translator is bound under 
 pain of being guilty of originality to reproduce all the faults 
 of the writer he is interpreting, and to be as flat, banal, dull, 
 insipid, or even as indecent as his copy. Does not Chaucer 
 tell us so ? 
 
 Who-so shall telle a tale after a man, 
 
 He moot reherce, as ny as ever he can, 
 
 Everich a word, if it be in his charge, 
 
 Al speke he never so rudeliche and large ; 
 
 Or elles he moot telle his tale untrewe. 
 
36 CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 
 
 It is for the very same reason that our next "grand trans- 
 lateur" William Shakespeare, is, paradoxically, at the same 
 time the world's most original mind in drama and the greatest 
 borrower of his predecessors' work, translating not merely 
 verbally or line for line from Plutarch, but probably whole 
 plays from unknown predecessors. Just as in commerce we 
 call the thief of genius a Napoleon of finance, so in literature 
 translation ceases to be translation if only it is done on the 
 heroic scale by a Shakespeare, a Moliere, a Fitzgerald, or a 
 Chaucer. 
 
 In the Second Nuns Tale Chaucer shows us in 11. 36-51 
 (" Thou mayde and moder^ daughter of thy sone" etc.), how 
 Dante (Paradiso, xxxiii., 1-21, beginning " Vergine, madre^ 
 figlia del tuo Figlio ") should be turned into English. Al- 
 though he makes mistakes, he has caught the spirit, the 
 essence, of his original, whom here, as he has to do with one 
 of the world's greatest masters, and not a poor Deguileville, 
 he naturally falls short of, though not in every line. In one 
 particular place, however, The Monk's Tale (3597-3644), it 
 is open to question if he has not equalled the grandeur of 
 even Dante's Canto xxxiii. of the Inferno. For Matthew 
 Arnold is surely palpably wrong when he tells us* that " the 
 accent of such verse as In la sua volontade e nostra pace is 
 altogether beyond Chaucer's reach " ; Chaucer does attain 
 the accent constantly in single lines. Witness 
 
 The dores were all of adamant eterne, 
 
 of the temple of Mars ; or his unforgettable picture of an 
 assassin, 
 
 The smylere with the knyfe under the cloke, 
 or, 
 
 But Cristes loore, and his Apostles twelve, 
 He taughte, and first he folwed it hym selve, 
 
 of his Town Parson. 
 
 But it would take a man of genius other than Chaucer's, a 
 
 * Introduction to Vol. I. of Ward's English Poets. 
 
CKITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 37 
 
 poet like Milton, to sustain Dante's accent for a long flight 
 such as Chaucer managed once in The Monk's Tale. 
 
 No poet affords us a richer supply of models for learning 
 the Art and Practice of Verse Translation than does Geoffrey 
 Chaucer. And this not solely owing to his commanding 
 genius, but because his age was of necessity an age of trans- 
 lation. The necessity lasted till the full tide of the Renais- 
 sance had set in with the great Elizabethans, and gave us in 
 prose such models of free translation as Mandeville's Travels, 
 and especially Malory's Morte Darthur and Lord Berners' 
 Froissart. 
 
 We have seen that King Alfred, as well as Chaucer, was 
 on the side of freedom in translation, but, as every schoolboy 
 knows from painful experience of different masters, the con- 
 troversy is still one of living interest. 
 
 Sir John Denham (1615-1669) also voted for freedom : 
 
 The servile path thou nobly dost decline 
 
 Of tracing word by word and line by line, 
 
 Those are the laboured births of slavish brains, 
 
 Not the effect of poetry, but pains. 
 
 Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords, 
 
 No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words. 
 
 (To Fanshaw on his translation of 11 Pastor Fido.} 
 
 The Earl of Eoscommon (Wentworth Dillon) follows Den- 
 ham in his poetical Essay of Translated Verse (1681), which 
 is otherwise not noteworthy except for his advice " to seek an 
 author who your way does trend," and for the politeness of 
 Dryden's deference in citing it as the chief authority for his 
 Essay on Translation (1685). 
 
 As to the great Dryden's theory and practice, we may 
 quote Dr. Johnson's words : 
 
 Ben Jonson thought it necessary to copy Horace almost word by word ; 
 Feltham, his contemporary and adversary, considers it as indispensably 
 requisite in a translation to give line for line. ... Cowley saw that such 
 copiers were a servile race ; he asserted his liberty, and spread his wings 
 so boldly that he left his authors. It was reserved for Dryden to fix the 
 
38 CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 
 
 limits of poetical liberty, and give" us just rules and examples of transla- 
 tion. . . . 
 
 In the proper choice of style consists the resemblance which Dryden 
 principally exacts from the translator. He is to exhibit his author's 
 thoughts in such a dress of diction as the author would have given them 
 had his language been English. ... A translator is to be like his author ; 
 it is not his business to excel him. 
 
 Tradition in Dryden's day, owing to the bad example of Ben 
 Jonson's renderings of Horace, of George Sandys' of Ovid's 
 Metamorphoses, and Barten Holliday's of Juvenal and Persius, 
 was opposed to the freedom which Dryden vindicated, and in 
 which he followed the practice of Sir Richard Fanshawe's 
 Camoens, of the Virgilian translations of Sir John Denham 
 and Edmund Waller, and of Abraham Cowley's versions of 
 Horace and Martial. 
 
 Pope in the preface to his translation of the Iliad advocated 
 a middle way between literal translation and free paraphrase. 
 " It is certain," he wrote, " no literal translation can be just to 
 an excellent original in a superior language ; but it is a great 
 mistake to imagine (as many have done) that a rash para- 
 phrase can make amends for this general defect, which is no 
 less in danger to lose the spirit of an ancient by degenerating 
 into the modern manners of expression. If there be sometimes 
 a darkness, there is often a light, in antiquity, which nothing 
 better preserves than a version almost literal." 
 
 Perhaps the translations in English where this juste milieu 
 advocated by Pope can be seen best are our Authorised Ver- 
 sion of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. In the 
 former, while a simple, straightforward translation is aimed at, 
 an attempt is consistently made to reproduce in" the English 
 diction the rhythm of the original languages ; in the latter, 
 by the artful doubling of words and due balance of sentence, 
 with attention to the proper rounding off of the period, an 
 excellent imitation is produced of the majestic dignity and 
 sonorousness of the original Latin prayers. This last is a 
 veritable tour de force, and has never been rivalled in any 
 other translation of Latin in the English language. 
 
CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 39 
 
 Fitzgerald in his deservedly famous Rubaiydt has at times 
 departed so far from the spirit of the original that in such 
 places his work cannot be called a translation, but a perver- 
 sion. One would not quarrel with the first stanza, which is 
 merely introductory and contains nothing opposed to Omar's 
 teaching, but his vigorous Stanza 81 (fourth edition), 
 
 Oh, Thou, who Man of Baser Earth didst make, 
 And even with Paradise devise the Snake 
 
 For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man 
 
 Is blacken 1 d Man's forgiveness give and take ! 
 
 cannot be called a translation of Quatrain 236, which (says 
 Professor Cowell) runs in Nicolas's edition : 
 
 thou who knowest the secrets of everyone's mind, 
 
 Who graspest everyone's hand in the hour of weakness, 
 
 God, give me repentance and accept my excuses, 
 
 thou who givest repentance and acceptest the excuses of everyone. 
 
 So that, great as Fitzgerald's work is as a poem, it cannot be 
 called perfect as the translation which it professed to be, as 
 there must be limits even to the freedom of paraphrase. It 
 is not the business of a translator to correct his author. 
 
 A few years after the publication of the first edition of 
 Fitzgerald's poem Matthew Arnold discussed, in three lectures, 
 the question of translating, and took Francis Newman's ver- 
 sion of Homer as his text (1861-62). At the beginning of 
 the first lecture he spoke of the dispute as to closeness or free- 
 dom as being still unsettled. " Probably both sides would 
 agree that the translator's first duty is to be faithful ; but the 
 question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness con- 
 sists." Francis Newman condemned the theory "that the 
 reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, 
 and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original 
 work something original." Matthew Arnold, in a vigorous 
 though not always fair attack upon Newman's work, makes a 
 masterly plea for freedom in translation. Arnold endeavours 
 to establish the following canon : That a translator should 
 
40 CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 
 
 above all be penetrated by a sense of the qualities of his 
 author, and endeavour to reproduce these qualities as best he 
 may in his own language. 
 
 Homer, for example, is admittedly " rapid, plain and direct 
 in syntax and words, plain and direct in his matters and ideas, 
 and eminently noble." An adequate translation of Homer 
 must, therefore, contain each of those four qualities. Cow- 
 per's version is lacking in rapidity, Pope's in the second attri- 
 bute, Chapman's in the third, and Newman most conspicuously, 
 because he fails in nobleness. 
 
 Arnold in order to describe the union of the translator with 
 his original necessary for good translation borrows Coleridge's 
 description of the union of the soul with the divine essence, 
 and says that it takes place " when the mist which stands 
 between them the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking, 
 and feeling on the translator's part defecates to a pure trans- 
 parency and disappears." 
 
 This is plainly the highest ideal at which a translator can 
 aim, viz. to preserve his own independence and yet to make 
 it his aim never to sacrifice any of the essential qualities or 
 peculiarities of his author. " The right rule is, all the pecu- 
 liarities that belong to the author, none that belong merely to 
 his language ; and the best example of it is Jowett's Plato, 
 where not one ounce of Plato is lost, and not one ounce of 
 Greek retained " so writes a great modern critic, Mr. John 
 Bailey. That Arnold was in the right of it everyone to-day 
 would, I think, cheerfully admit, although very few would 
 deny that the examples of his own powers as translator as 
 quoted by himself in illustration fall far below his theory. 
 Better examples would be found in many stanzas of Fitz- 
 gerald's Rubdiydt or in William Cory's lonica. 
 
 The corollary from Arnold's canon is precisely the maxim 
 we have already quoted from Roscommon. Choose to trans- 
 late an author with whose spirit your own mind has much in 
 common, and then it will be all the easier for you to reproduce 
 his qualities in your own way. 
 
CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 41 
 
 There is one great fallacy which underlies one kind of 
 close translation, and which too often passes unnoticed, and 
 that is the sophistry contained in the apology for a poor 
 version that it has been, after all, " rendered in the metres of 
 the original." The point, of course, lies in the question : Do 
 the metres necessarily have the same effect in the two lan- 
 guages ? Do hexameters in English produce the same effect 
 as Greek or Latin hexameters ? Are sapphics in English the 
 same as the classical sapphic ? Or English alexandrines as 
 French ones, or does terza rima in English adequately repro- 
 duce the manner of Dante ? Surely not ; but the point is far 
 too often overlooked, and where a translator who understands 
 the original, but has no knack of writing verse, thinks he has 
 notably succeeded, is just where he has most egregiously failed: 
 the letter has killed where the spirit would have given life. 
 We might add that, by the irony of fate, this is why Matthew 
 Arnold's own translations of Homer into hexameters are such 
 palpable failures : Homer could never have recognised the 
 sound of them as true hexameters, though he might have 
 heard the similarity of Hawtrey's. But Arnold, that sharp- 
 sighted critic, was as poet deaf in one ear as his own verse so 
 often attests. Such imitations are only praiseworthy when 
 the translator has a musical ear for correspondences, other- 
 wise he will do best to stick to plain prose. 
 
 The sum and substance of the whole question seems to be 
 that the matter of an author is easily translatable, but that to 
 mimic his manner requires extraordinary tact and talent. As 
 Montaigne, speaking of an essay in translation of his own, 
 tells us : " II faict bon traduire les aucteurs ou il n'y a gueres 
 que la mati^re a representer : mais ceux qui ont donne beau- 
 coup a la grace et a 1'elegance de langage ils sont dangereux 
 a entreprendre " (Essay r s, Book II., Chap. 12). 
 
 But Shelley finds not danger, but impossibility : " Hence 
 the vanity of translation ; it were as wise to cast a violet into 
 a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its 
 colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into 
 
42 CRITICISM AND TRANSLATION. 
 
 another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again 
 from its seed, or it will bear no flower and this is the burthen 
 of the curse of Babel " (A Defence of Poetry). 
 
 A good translation, then, must be a serious parody, and a 
 man who can write a good parody, such as Chaucer or Cal- 
 verley, will shine best as a translator, if he gives his mind 
 to it. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 
 
 There is one question which has always since it was first 
 raised divided critics, and which is as hotly debated to-day as 
 ever, and that is. What is poetry ? Is the antithesis prose, 
 or can prose be poetry ? At first blush it would seem that as 
 the dispute concerns a definition of a word, it is of merely verbal 
 importance and that one might pragmatically move the previous 
 question, What difference does it make ? and pass on. As, 
 however, this question is the first logically to meet us on the 
 very threshold of criticism, and, as the answer, which a critic 
 makes to it, will have an important effect upon his general 
 critical practice, it is impossible to leave it without discussion. 
 
 Two things are generally admitted. First, from Aristotle 
 downward, that verse is not necessarily poetry, that history in 
 verse, for example, need not (" cannot," according to Aris- 
 totle), nor need philosophy in verse, be poetry. Secondly, 
 from Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus to the present 
 day, that good prose has also a rhythm of its own. The 
 elimination of these preliminaries reduces the question to the 
 simpler form, Must poetry be metrical ? And metre, in this 
 question, is to be interpreted as a rhythmical or musical scheme 
 or pattern, whether simple or complex. " A good sentence 
 should have rhythm" says Aristotle in the Rhetoric, " but not 
 metre ; if it have metre it will be a poem." 
 
 The dispute is modern and in England was started by 
 Wordsworth as a corollary to the thesis contained in the Pre- 
 face to his Lyrical Ballads (1800) that there is no such thing 
 as purely poetic diction, " that there neither is, nor can be, 
 
 43 
 
44 DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 
 
 any essential difference between the language of prose and 
 metrical composition." In a footnote appended to the state- 
 ment : " Poetry sheds no tears ' such as angels weep/ but 
 natural and human tears," he writes, " I here use the word 
 ' poetry ' (though against my own judgment) as opposed to 
 the word c prose ' and synonymous with metrical composition. 
 But much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this 
 contradistinction of poetry and prose, instead of the more 
 philosophical one of poetry and matter of fact, or science. 
 The only strict antithesis to prose is metre ; nor is this, in 
 truth, a strict antithesis, because lines and passages of metre 
 so naturally occur in writing prose, that it would be scarcely 
 possible to avoid them, even were it desirable." 
 
 In the last sentence Wordsworth, unlike Aristotle, con- 
 fuses metre (the formal scheme or pattern) with rhythm (the 
 elements of metre) ; and he errs against the teaching and 
 practice of all good prose- writers in not seeing that a hybrid 
 is an insult to art as well as to Nature. He may be right in 
 teaching that prose may be poetry, but who will agree with 
 him in thinking that prose may be verse ? 
 
 Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817) examines 
 the critical tenets of Wordsworth, dissenting from the latter's 
 theories of poetic diction but apparently assenting at first to 
 the view that prose may be poetry : " The writings of Plato 
 and Bishop Taylor, and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet furnish 
 undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist 
 without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing 
 objects of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah (indeed a 
 very large proportion of the whole book) is poetry in the most 
 emphatic sense." 
 
 Here Coleridge flagrantly contradicts his own definition of 
 a poem (" that species of composition, which is opposed to 
 works of science, by proposing for its immediate object 
 pleasure, not truth"), as he himself sees, for he adds, "yet 
 it would be not less irrational than strange to assert, that 
 pleasure and not truth was the immediate object of the 
 
DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 45 
 
 prophet." Consequently he is forced to make a further 
 distinction between a " poem " and " poetry " and to say 
 " that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, 
 all poetry," whose soul, he continues to argue, is imagination 
 and fancy its drapery. The logical reader will agree that 
 Coleridge's second thought is better than his first, and will 
 probably see that the tangle in the argument is due to 
 Coleridge's failure to observe that it is quite possible for 
 a writer to propose for his immediate object pleasure as well 
 as truth. The writer of the Dies Irae, for example, surely 
 proposed both as immediate objects, and when a greater poet 
 than Coleridge said, " Truth is beauty, beauty truth," he 
 meant that they could not be separated in presentation. 
 
 Leigh Hunt's remark is far subtler than Coleridge's when 
 he says : " Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science 
 ceases to be merely such, and to exhibit a further truth " ; 
 and again, " Truth of every kind belongs to the poet, provided 
 it can bud into any Kind of beauty" In Chap, xviii. of the 
 Biographia, Coleridge finally recants and returns to the 
 orthodox tradition. ". . . The causes elsewhere assigned 
 which render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry 
 imperfect and defective without metre." 
 
 De Quincey follows Coleridge in dividing literature into 
 literature of power and literature of knowledge : the former 
 is to be called poetry whether it be verse or prose. 
 
 All our moderns, from Walt Whitman onwards, who 
 admire or who write vers libres or verses freed from what is 
 (traditionally) essential to verse are on the same side. In 
 that excellently edited book, Modern Poetry ,* Guy Pocock 
 puts the case admirably for the modern spirit of freedom, or 
 rather Bolshevism, in verse : " It is only because we are so 
 used to exact form, and metre, and rhyme, that we are pre- 
 disposed to think that verse that discards them is not poetry 
 at all. Yet this poetry new to some of us, though not really 
 
 * Kings' treasuries Series, 1920 : Dent & Sons. 
 
46 DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 
 
 new does depend on a certain mode of expression, and this 
 mode is called cadence," which, he proceeds to explain, is not 
 to be measured by feet or beats but by the whole strophe. 
 He selects E. V. Lucas's Jack as a model and adds, " Alter 
 the cadence in, say, verse 9 and the effect is gone." Verse 
 9 reads : 
 
 Jack was quite as much a part of the village as the church and spire ; 
 And if any of us lazied along by the river in the dusk of the evening 
 
 Waving aside nebulae of gnats, 
 
 Turning head quickly at the splash of a jumping fish, 
 Peering where the water chuckled over a vanishing water-rat 
 And saw not Jack's familiar form bending over his lines, 
 And smelt not his vile shag, 
 We should feel loneliness, a vague impression that something was wrong. 
 
 Here the only departures from modern prose form are 
 " and saw not," " and smelt not," and the poetical use of 
 " chuckled," together with the chopping up into lines with 
 capital letters at the beginning, for which it is hard to see 
 the necessity and which reminds us of fancy dress and 
 masquerade. No one will deny that verse 9' is good prose, 
 quite equal to this : 
 
 Let AB be a given straight line, 
 
 It is required to describe an equilateral triangle upon it ! 
 
 From centre A and radius AB describe the circle ABC. 
 
 Then from centre B and radius BA 
 
 Describe the circle BCD, 
 
 Cutting the circle ABC at the point C. 
 
 Join AC and CB, and then the triangle ABC 
 
 Is the equilateral triangle required ! 
 
 This, like many advertisements in our papers, has certainly 
 cadence, and to many minds affords pleasure as well as truth, 
 and, as Mr. Pocock asks, " After all, if a poet is not to 
 express himself in his own way, who is to lay down the law 
 and make rules, saying ' Thus far and no farther ' ? " (The 
 use of the word " poet," of course, neatly begging the 
 question.) I suppose that what is lacking is not imagination, 
 
DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 47 
 
 for that Euclid and our modern writers of advertisements do 
 possess in a high degree, but fancy and emotion, yet most of 
 us, I should say, would find those essentials also lacking in 
 " Waving aside nebulae of gnats " and the rest of the strophe, 
 which is surely as matter-of-fact as either Wordsworth's : 
 
 And still the more he works, the more 
 Do his weak ankles swell, 
 
 or Euclid's first proposition. Mr. Pocock is right that " vers 
 libre " is not really a new thing. After it had been buried in 
 the grave of the American Whitman, it was resuscitated as 
 an apt form for the headlines of American newspapers and to 
 advertise patent medicines. I for one cannot agree that if 
 you alter the cadence of such vers libres as the New Euclid's 
 or E. V. Lucas's that " the effect is gone." It seems to me 
 that you could alter them indefinitely and still produce the 
 same irritating effect, and that in short the only novelty in 
 them does not concern verse but punctuation. All prose 
 could be printed in this way, i.e. making each pause in 
 reading correspond with the end of a line, but such printing, 
 besides being too expensive except for wealthy advertisers, 
 would be intolerably annoying save, perhaps, for rhetoric, 
 which, forming, as it does, the borderland between prose and 
 poetry, uses the language of reason to appeal to our emo- 
 tions. 
 
 "Free" verse, however, is dying because no one reads it 
 except the " vers-libristes " themselves, and then chiefly 
 their own. Nothing, for example, is remembered of Walt 
 Whitman's except " Captain, my Captain," and one or 
 two other pieces which somewhat resemble metrical verse. 
 Besides the trick is so easy that anyone can do it, and 
 this is poetic democracy with JSL vengeance. But the 
 simplest of pragmatic tests should suffice to confute the 
 defenders of vers libres as poetry, and that is the question, 
 How is vers libre to be distinguished from prose, good or 
 bad ? For example, is the following a serious poem in 
 
48 DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 
 
 vers libre, or is it a concoction written in mockery by 
 the present writer ? 
 
 I wonder as I write, 
 
 If you can understand my words, 
 
 And that I would not have 
 
 You think I speak of things 
 
 That are not natural no ! 
 
 Nothing on earth 
 
 Or in the sky 
 
 Is weird, 
 
 All, 
 
 All things, 
 
 Mean naught but what 
 
 Our minds make them ; 
 
 Since matter is the husk 
 
 In which our Spirits hide, 
 
 And Pragmatists are right, 
 
 If what they mean is, things to you 
 
 Are different things to me. 
 
 There must be some way of telling ; it may, of course, be 
 a secret confined to a select circle of initiates, but there must 
 be some way. 
 
 Verse, furthermore, is, we believe, called " verse " just 
 because it is not free, hence " free verse " is as great an 
 absurdity as " a free strait-waistcoat." There have been no 
 complaints from the great players, such as Shakespeare, 
 Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth, of the hardship of having 
 rules for the game ; in fact, with the latter they have felt 
 'twas pastime to be bound. 
 
 Mr. Pocock is the first critic to have the courage of his 
 convictions and to include prose in an anthology of poetry, 
 but even he cannot find room for futurist poetry. He says 
 wisely : " All the same no thinking man can refuse to accept 
 their first proposition : that a great change in our emotional 
 life necessitates a change of expression. The whole question 
 is really this : Have we essentially changed ? " One, of course, 
 retorts the question to an advocate of vers libre, What need 
 
DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 49 
 
 is there for it ? Why should De Quincey or Dickens be 
 printed as verse ? 
 
 When a word is in such common use as " poetry " with a 
 connotation that has so many centuries of tradition behind it, 
 it is, we would argue, a profound mistake, a great waste of 
 time and energy to attempt to give it a new connotation in 
 the interests of a new science or philosophy, it being always 
 possible to coin a new term. It is as much a piece of pure 
 pedantry as the modern trick of spelling " Virgil," an English 
 form with a long literary history, with an e or as would be 
 spelling " Florence," " Firenze." 
 
 From time immemorial poetry has connoted words arranged 
 and adapted so as to be chanted or sung, as witness the time- 
 honoured phrase " as the poet sings." " That the holy 
 David's Psalms are a divine poem . . . even the name Psalms 
 will speak for me ; which being interpreted is nothing but 
 songs," says Sir Philip Sidney in his Defense of Poetry, and 
 later he will write but not inconsistently : " It is not rhyming 
 and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown 
 maketh an advocate." Both sides agree, of course, that verse 
 does not make poetry but poetry the verse. 
 
 Hazlitt, too, seems to hit the mark well when he writes* : 
 " Milton has told us his idea of poetry in a single line : 
 
 Thoughts that voluntary move 
 Harmonious numbers. 
 
 Poetry ... is the music of language answering to the music 
 of the mind, untying, as it were, ' the secret soul of harmony.' 
 ... As often as articulation passes naturally into intonation, 
 there poetry begins." 
 
 Yet Hazlitt, it is true, does later fall into the heresy that, 
 " The Iliad does not cease to be poetry in a literal translation," 
 which, if one remembers what he has just said so convincingly 
 about music, is surely sheer midsummer madness, for nothing 
 can sing less than a literal translation. Here Hazlitt moment- 
 
 In The English Poets. 
 M. c. 4 
 
50 DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 
 
 arily forgot what he had learnt from Dr. Johnson : " The 
 special faculty of the poet is that of joining music with 
 reason," or from his master Coleridge : " The man that hath 
 not music in his soul can indeed never be a genuine poet." 
 
 Finally, the whole trouble has, in fact, arisen from a defi- 
 ciency in language noticed first by Aristotle that we have no 
 general name which will include great expression of great 
 thought in prose or verse indifferently. Longinus will use for 
 this the Greek word which is sometimes translated " The 
 Sublime," but for which " Transport " or " Ecstasy " has 
 often been suggested as more fitting. As the word " verse " 
 already exists to describe metrical composition, many modern 
 critics have argued, as we have seen, that the term ''poetry 
 might be employed for the magic touch whether in prose or 
 verse which raises us out of ourselves into some other sphere. 
 As an eloquent critic* of to-day asks : " What shall we 
 require of poetry ? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a 
 world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experi- 
 ence, a glimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom ? 
 All these things all different, yet not all contradictory have 
 been required of poetry." 
 
 The answer, I think, is contained in the reflection that 
 critics do not, like hermits, postulate a desert but rather an 
 audience of plain men of good will, and that therefore they 
 should, as far as they may, speak a language understanded of 
 the people. If the plain man believes and always has believed, 
 and always, I suppose, will believe, that poetry and prose are 
 contradictories, why not let it rest at that ? It is only con- 
 fusing issues to use poetry in a sense which only critics will 
 understand, and besides, as we could easily show by many 
 examples, such critics when off their guard use the words 
 poetry and prose just as do the rest of God's creation. Let 
 us remember with all our advocacy of free criticism in the 
 twentieth century that preciosity of this kind, or pedantry 
 
 J. Middleton Murry in Aspects of Literature (1920), p. 176. 
 
DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 51 
 
 of any kind, is opposed to liberty, and in this case leads to 
 anarchy, which is the worst foe of freedom. The father of 
 modern criticism, Thomas Carlyle, has perhaps in his Hero as 
 Poet said the last word : " For my own part, I find consider- 
 able meaning in the old vulgar distinction of poetry being 
 metrical^ having music in it, being a song. ... If your 
 delineation be authentically musical, musical not in word only, 
 but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts and utterances 
 of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be poetical ; if 
 not, not. Musical : how much lies in that ! A musical thought 
 is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost 
 heart of the thing ; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely 
 the melody that lies hidden in it. ... Who is there that, in 
 logical words, can express the effect music has on us ? A kind 
 of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge 
 of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that. . . . 
 Poetry, therefore, we will call musical thought"* 
 
 This is criticism that one can chew ! How much more 
 satisfying than Matthew Arnold's solemn tautology, that poetry 
 is " a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a 
 criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty." 
 
 The only addition one would care to make to Carlyle's 
 description would be Watts-Dun ton's definition. Welding 
 the two we obtain : " Poetry is the concrete and artistic ex- 
 pression of musical thought in emotional and rhythmical lan- 
 guage." This, our final definition, will be found to square 
 with the aesthetic teaching of Benedetto Croce that there is 
 no inherent difference between a poet's intuition and his 
 expression, that a poet expresses just as he intuits, and that 
 consequently form is not a mere decoration for the poet's 
 thought. What he expresses, therefore, in music he has in- 
 tuited as music. It agrees too with the sound popular feeling 
 that an artist who has no music in his soul should write prose 
 if he has got thoughts to express and that otherwise, unlike 
 the modern vers-libristes, he should remain silent. 
 
 Contrast Dryden's definition of music as "Inarticulate Poetry. 
 
52 DEFINITIONS OF VEKSE AND POETRY. 
 
 2 POETIC DICTION. 
 
 We may now return to the previous question mooted by 
 Wordsworth, viz. Has poetry a language of its own different 
 or differing from prose ? 
 
 As everyone knows, Wordsworth denied emphatically that 
 there could be any essential difference. It is generally believed 
 that Coleridge finally refuted this view in the Biographia 
 Literaria, but, as a matter of fact, Coleridge never really 
 touches the question at all. Coleridge discusses first Words- 
 worth's heresy about " rustic language " which is another 
 question, and one whose absurdity he easily shows ; and then 
 in Chap, xviii. when we expect him to deal with it, he discusses 
 instead style and composition, which again is another point, as 
 Wordsworth never argued that prose style and verse style 
 were the same. 
 
 As Wordsworth took the trouble to italicise the word 
 " essential," one cannot see how anyone can possibly quarrel 
 with so bare a truism. There can be no essential difference 
 in the language, for the fact that poets will use freely archaisms, 
 compound adjectives, tropes, figures, periphrases, etc., and 
 prose-writers less freely, is surely no essential difference. The 
 essential difference, as Coleridge really shows, lies in the form 
 of metrical composition. 
 
 Wordsworth here is flaunting a banner of defiance which his 
 foes, such as Pope, would have cheerfully accepted as their 
 own : Coleridge is valiantly attacking a position which no 
 one has ever defended ; so that on this part of the dispute 
 they are both victorious, as they never come into contact. 
 
 The question which Wordsworth should have asked and 
 denied from his standpoint was this, Are there any words 
 which are fit and proper in good prose but improper in poetry ? 
 
 Here is the true ground of debate for classical and romantic. 
 Dr. Johnson in No. 168 of The Rambler argued strenuously 
 for the affirmative. After admitting that " No word is naturally 
 
DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 53 
 
 or intrinsically meaner than another," he goes on to show that 
 words alter, become debased, and so may become unfit for the 
 dignity of high poetry. He accuses Shakespeare of impro- 
 priety in putting into the mouth of Macbeth in the terrible 
 moment of the murder scene such language as : 
 
 " Come, thick night, 
 
 And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, 
 j. hat my keen knife see not the wound it makes ; 
 Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, 
 To cry, Hold, hold!" 
 
 He says that the adjective " dun " suggests the stable ; that 
 "knife" is a vulgar word suggesting "butcher" or "cook" ; 
 and that "peeping through a blanket" is ludicrous. He admits, 
 however, that his argument will appeal less strongly to a 
 solitary academic than to a modish lady. 
 
 What Dr. Johnson says is true enough as far as it goes, 
 but he somewhat unaccountably fails to see that Shakespeare 
 is hardly to be blamed if the words he has used have become 
 debased in the age of his critic, and that to avoid such a fate 
 all writers would perforce have to write in a dead language. 
 Dr. Johnson should have shown that the language used would 
 have been held undignified or ludicrous in Shakespeare's own 
 day, which it was not, any more than it would be so held in 
 our own day again. It is quite possible, however, that-we do 
 tolerate "peep through the blanket of the dark" simply because 
 of the authority of Shakespeare's genius, just as we tolerate 
 expressions in the Authorised Version of the Bible which have 
 debased into vulgarisms to-day. : Genius creates its own lan- 
 guage and has the magic gift of transmitting what has seemed 
 foul, trivial, or ugly into the rare and beautiful. The poet, 
 Dr. Johnson forgot, is ever giving a living face to common 
 clay. 
 
 A modern critic would, one feels sure, side with Johnson 
 against Wordsworth, at least if Wordsworth held the position 
 that all words fit and proper in prose are everywhere fit and 
 proper in poetry. The test, of course, is no a priori one of 
 
54 DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 
 
 propriety or impropriety but of the effect that the writer him- 
 self intends to produce.- It is he who provides the criterion 
 and not the critic. If he fails of his effect, say in the pathetic, 
 through using a word or words which rouse laughter or anger, 
 then it would be eminently proper for the most tolerant of 
 twentieth century critics to point out that there is such a thing 
 as proper diction and that an expression which suits admirably 
 colloquial prose may spoil the effect of a prayer, let us say, or 
 of poetry. 
 
 If anyone thinks that a laugh at such eighteenth century 
 circumlocutions as "the leathern integuments of his legs," 
 where we should write in prose "leather breeches," settles the 
 question, let him attempt to write serious stanzas introducing 
 half-a-dozen words and phrases which modern usage associates 
 with business or which have developed strong colloquial or 
 slang meanings and yet manage to avoid the ridiculous. A 
 careful writer even of prose with any sense of humour will 
 avoid any phrase that owing to current slang may suggest a 
 ludicrous image. For example, no one to-day would compose 
 a prayer containing such a phrase as " Thou, the Almighty, 
 who sittest upon the cherubim," as it so ludicrously suggests to 
 us our colloquialism of " sitting upon " mischievous children. 
 Selection is the artist's primary duty, as Coleridge reminded 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 3 CLASSICAL METRES AND ENGLISH 
 VERSE. 
 
 Owing partly to the influence of the Renaissance in Eng- 
 land and the blind admiration for everything classical, and 
 partly owing to the poverty of the English language in 
 rhymes and the dearth of poetical models from the death of 
 Chaucer to the coming of Spenser, it became a fashion in the 
 days of the latter poet to decry rhyming as a barbarous 
 Gothic invention, and to advocate the use of quantitative 
 
DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 55 
 
 classical metres in English poetry. Spenser himself, under 
 the influence of Gabriel Harvey and his pedantic coterie of 
 Cambridge scholars, was for a time bitten with the craze, but 
 luckily for us abandoned it, and gave us instead the rhymes of 
 the Faerie Queene. 
 
 Spenser found out that, as English when spoken infringes 
 the classical laws of quantity, it cannot obey them when sung ? 
 without ceasing to be natural. In our pronunciation stress is 
 the most important feature and overrides quantity. Thus we 
 say " carpenter," for example, and would describe the first 
 syllable as stressed, the second as slightly stressed, and the 
 third as unstressed. We shift our stress according to the 
 meaning of the word, as in " subject " and " subject." Thus 
 in our verse or prose quantity is practically negligible. If 
 "carpenter" and "subject," on the other hand, were Latin 
 words, the second syllable would be long. Phrases follow the 
 same custom as single words : thus, " boil my egg " will take 
 strong stress on each of the words according to the meaning 
 emphasised. As no one, then, from the days of Spenser to 
 Robert Bridges has succeeded in writing quantitative English 
 verse to the satisfaction of any ear but his own, the question 
 is really dead and buried in a suicide's grave. 
 
 The case is otherwise with regard to the possibility of an 
 imitation of classical metres by using stressed and unstressed 
 syllables in the place of their quantitative longs and shorts, 
 cal^ag, for example, "happily" a dactyl, "bounding" a 
 trochee, " in the camp " an anapaest, and so on. We may in 
 this manner, if we are not too particular about minor stresses, 
 write verse that can be read naturally and is not unpleasing 
 (occasionally most pleasing) to the ear. It is difficult to sus- 
 tain this verse for long owing to our language being over- 
 loaded with monosyllables, and owing to the poet being com- 
 pelled to lay unnatural stress upon them from the exigencies 
 of his metre. The well-known lines : 
 
 In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column, 
 In the pentameter aye falling in melody back, 
 
56 DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 
 
 are beautiful enough, but perhaps most beautiful because there 
 are only two verses. Whereas in, 
 
 Benedict knew by the hob-nailed shoes it was Basil, the blacksmith, 
 And by her beating heart Evangeline knew who was with him, 
 
 we feel that the measure is forced, and thus such verses grate 
 upon the ear. As Longfellow wished the verse to grate along 
 with the hob-nailed shoes, this verse must be regarded as one 
 of his successes, but in too many instances the emphasis he 
 lays upon unimportant parts of speech like " and " causes 
 cacophony unintended. 
 
 Matthew Arnold, discussing the question in his essay " On 
 Translating Homer," comes to the same conclusion as would a 
 modern pragmatist : " Solvitur ambulando" The objection 
 against hexameters or other measures in the classical style in 
 English " can best be met by producing good English hex- 
 ameters " ; and he quotes with approbation some of Dr. 
 Hawtrey's in translation of Homer. And certainly if such 
 lines as these beautiful ones : 
 
 So said she they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing, 
 There, in their own dear land, their Fatherland, Lacedaemon, 
 
 or such poems as Charles Kingsley's Andromeda were common, 
 the question is solved pragmatically for ever. 
 
 As what suits the genius of one language or group of lan- 
 guages through some peculiarity which that language or group 
 possesses, is felt to be unidiomatic when transferred to another, 
 we would deduce that such imitations of classical metres are 
 adapted better for translations than for original work. In 
 translations if the writer has a musical ear they do give some 
 flavour of the manner of the classical poets, which has to be 
 omitted wholly from a prose translation, and which becomes 
 something entirely different in the measures that have been 
 found by long experience to suit best the genius of our own 
 language. Such measures are blank verse in iambic pent- 
 ameter, or rhyming verse. Any other sort of measure is un- 
 English, but may, all the more for that very reason, serve as a 
 
DEFINITIONS OF VERSE AND POETRY. 57 
 
 good vehicle of a foreign translation. By using hexameters, 
 pentameters, sapphics, and the like, the translator bespeaks 
 really our indulgence, and is telling us clearly that he is aim- 
 ing at no originality, but is giving us a translation ; and we 
 welcome the attempt, provided only that he does not boast 
 that he is giving us the same metre as the original. This 
 applies most of all to long poems. In a short poem the trans- 
 lator may do more than mere translation ; he may naturalise 
 the original so thoroughly that it may acquire the full rights 
 of a citizen. Thus Gary's Dante remains a metic, an Italian 
 in English garb, while Fitzgerald's Omar, and Gary's 
 Heraclitus are as much English as In Memoriam. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 
 
 The practice of Paris and the teachings of Anatole France, 
 that master of clear ironic prose, have had more influence upon 
 literary English prose-writers, reviewers, and critics of the 
 close of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth 
 century than have any home writers who do not derive from 
 the French Impressionist School. George Bernard Shaw, 
 George Moore, and G. K. Chesterton, to name but a few of 
 the strongest influences upon modern English prose, have 
 learnt much from Anatole France ; for instance, that peculiar 
 crispness of his, and that bland but deadly air of ironic 
 innocence with which he knows how to clothe his most discon- 
 certing thrusts. (This latter gift is not, of course, peculiar to 
 Anatole France, but he is the greatest master of it since the 
 days of its first great exponents, his masters, Rabelais and 
 Voltaire : in fact, it is a French rather than English 
 characteristic, although two great Englishmen, Chaucer and 
 Swift, both knew the trick and used it well.) 
 
 Systems of criticism have, however, never flourished in 
 England, but since E. S. Dallas in 1866 gallantly attempted 
 in The Gay Science to establish a system of scientific 
 criticism and, after writing two volumes, had to abandon his 
 purpose, we have had two writers who have laid the ground- 
 work for a method of free scientific criticism. These critics 
 are Dr. Richard G. Moulton in the Introduction to his 
 Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1st edition 1885), and 
 Mr. John M. Robertson in his Essays Towards a Critical 
 Method, and in " The Theory and Practice of Criticism " 
 contained in his New Essays (1897). Messrs. Moulton and 
 
THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 59 
 
 Robertson (who was writing criticism before 1885) are on the 
 side of the free spirit, and in some ways anticipate Jules 
 Lemaitre and Anatole France. Dr. Saintsbury, too, in all 
 his published critical work, and especially in his masterpiece, 
 A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, has 
 always vindicated against all comers a sane liberty, the deadly 
 foe of licence on the one side or of authoritative pedantry on 
 the other. Each of these writers has exercised influence upon 
 the present generation, but possibly less widely than he has 
 deserved. 
 
 Dr. Richard Moulton, while not denying all utility to 
 judicial criticism, pleads that it cannot be scientific. The 
 reason of the long reign of judicial criticism, which he finds 
 to be a reign of confusion and unnecessary strife, was 
 that it preceded the establishment of the spirit of modern 
 science. If criticism is to be a science at all, it will have to 
 be founded, as is every science (another name for " organised 
 thought "), upon inductive principles. Scientific criticism for 
 him, then, is inductive criticism, induction being the most 
 practical method of organisation, and using a priori methods 
 for side-lights only. The progress of all science is, therefore, 
 he argues, bound up in the inductive method. 
 
 This, of course, is true, but it is not a complete statement 
 of the whole truth, unless we ever keep in mind that the 
 deductive method is the necessary complement of induction 
 which is left hanging in the air, and necessarily incomplete 
 without the services of its older sister. We may collect as 
 many instances and examples as we can, and classify them as 
 much as we like, but we cannot go a step forward or reach a 
 temporary halting-place or conclusion without the aid of 
 deduction. All modern sciences start with induction for the 
 inquiry, and end with deduction for their teaching. 
 
 Dr. Moulton next dismisses the idea of " value " from his 
 inductive criticism which knows nothing about " higher " or 
 u lower," as such terminology of value lies outside the domain 
 of science. Here, I fancy. Dr. Saintsbury would agree, and 
 
60 THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 
 
 Mr. Robertson would disagree. Dr. Moulton's pronounce- 
 ment contains, of course, a valuable caveat, and is illustrated 
 by a contrast between the judicial and the inductive methods 
 respectively of discussing Ben Jonson's work as of " lower " 
 value than Shakespeare's, and as being responsible for the 
 " decay " of the drama. But is the pronouncement true for 
 all sciences ? We can see that for the geologist a diamond is 
 a geological specimen of no higher value than a piece of coal, 
 but what about the political economist ? For the chemist the 
 stomach of a fly is not lower in value than that of a man, but 
 to a biologist do not the terms " lower " and " higher " con- 
 vey scientific meaning ? Once the idea of " life " or " de- 
 velopment " comes into a science, then, it would seem, the 
 idea of " value," of "lower" or "higher" also enters. We 
 see this in ethics where, even in the most empirical system, the 
 ideas of "higher" and "lower" have to be used. As 
 Mr. Robertson puts it : If the proposition be " Flaubert is a 
 greater artist than Feydeau " ... we are approaching a kind 
 of proposition of which it may be scientifically said that its 
 acceptance or rejection is to be explained in terms of gr-eater or 
 less psychological development or culture. That is, a higher or 
 a lower value. 
 
 In Mr. Robertson's pregnant phrase just quoted we have, I 
 think, the solution to the chief objection brought to bear 
 against subjective criticism. The subjective critic is asked, 
 As everything with you is purely relative and, as tastes 
 notoriously differ at all times and in all places, what is to be 
 your criterion of high value or low value, some value or no 
 
 value ? 
 
 Now, who shall arbitrate ? 
 Ten men love what I hate, 
 Shun what I follow, slight what I receive ; 
 Ten, who in ears and eyes 
 Match me : we all surmise, 
 They, this thing, and I that ; whom shall my soul believe ? 
 
 Browning had no difficulty in answering the ethical riddle ; 
 and the subjective critic would answer the critical riddle in a 
 
THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 61 
 
 similar way by indicating the higher curve that sociology 
 traces to mark progress in thought and culture : 
 
 Look not thou down but up 
 To uses of a cup ! 
 
 A South-Sea Islander may find beauty in what would be 
 for us an uncouth image, but our circle of beauty contains his 
 circle and much more, because our thoughts and our culture 
 have progressed beyond his stage and contain it and much 
 more. Not that there is continuous progress in civilisation or 
 aesthetic appreciation, but the higher curve wherever found in 
 whatever place or age contains the lower in its sweep. 
 
 The next point of importance made by Dr. Moulton is that 
 the judicial method is defended, and wrongly defended, on the 
 score that it relies on taste or " condensed experience." 
 
 As our critic finds room for the judicial method alongside 
 his inductive system, we can see no reason why a believer in 
 the subjectivity of criticism should reject a judicial system 
 founded not upon a priori canons but upon that taste which 
 results from " condensed experience." But Dr. Moulton finds 
 a flaw in the reasoning. He says that " it omits to take into 
 account that the judicial attitude of mind is itself a barrier to 
 appreciation, as being opposed to that delicacy of receptiveness 
 which is a first condition of sensibility to impressions of litera- 
 ture and art." 
 
 A modern will agree wholeheartedly with the majority of 
 the positions in Prof. Moulton's truly admirable book, but yet 
 may be pardoned for thinking that his chain of reasoning has 
 here got into a sorry tangle. 
 
 " A judicial frame of mind " is surely the best possible frame 
 of mind for any appreciation that is worth the name. For an 
 inductive method a judicial frame of mind, one would think, 
 would be a primary qualification. Although a judge may be 
 forced to condemn a criminal, yet, if he has the truly judicial 
 frame of mind he will be the first to recognise the merit of an 
 act of bravery or self-sacrifice. A judicial frame of mind 
 implies attentiveness and knowledge of what is before one : 
 
62 THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 
 
 a non-judicial frame of mind too often implies inattentiveness, 
 slackness, sleepiness. A listener half-asleep at a concert and 
 not quite certain that he was not in a spinning-mill would we 
 submit possess the non-judicial frame of mind, but would not 
 the more on that account be a sympathetic inductive critic of 
 the music at the concert. 
 
 But argues Dr. Moulton : " Now a judicial attitude of mind 
 is highly unreceptive, for it necessarily implies a restraint of 
 sympathy : Everyone, remarks Hogarth, is a judge of paint- 
 ing except the connoisseur. The judicial mind has an appear- 
 ance of receptiveness, because it seeks to shut out prejudice ; 
 but what if the idea of judging be itself a prejudice ? " 
 
 Here again we would dispute the question-begging adverb 
 "necessarily." A judicial attitude of mind is not inconsistent 
 with sympathy of which any humanity worth the name can 
 rarely divest itself even when it puts on the judicial robes. 
 
 Perhaps, as Dr. Saintsbury has already so wisely said, too 
 great emphasis has been laid in late years by writers of 
 criticism upon the idea of " sympathy." Unless the connota- 
 tion of the term be limited so as to exclude the flabby melting 
 mood its use is harmful to criticism. Dr. Johnson, for instance, 
 is not an example of an unsympathetic critic, but he could not 
 abide what he thought to be clotted nonsense, and even where 
 we may think he thought wrong, how can we condemn him ? 
 Dr. Saintsbury draws attention to " the popularity in late years 
 of the singularly uncritical words ' sympathetic ' and ' unsym- 
 pathetic ' in describing criticism," and adds in true Dryden 
 style : " It would seem impossible for a large number of 
 persons to ' like ' otherwise than ' grossly ' in Dryden's sense, 
 or to imagine that anyone else can like delicately, with 
 discrimination, in the old sense ' nicely.' A ' sympathetic ' 
 notice or criticism is one which pours unmixed cataracts of 
 what the cooks call oiled butter all over the patient ; a notice 
 that questions this part of him, rejects that, but gives due 
 value to the gold and silver and the precious stones, while dis- 
 carding the hay and the stubble ^is 'unsympathetic.' ' 
 
THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 63 
 
 But Dr. Moulton's chief fallacy is, I think, that he will 
 insist in going to the law-courts for his judge and his judicial 
 frame of mind, where a judge of tobacco or of wine would, as 
 we have seen in a previous chapter, give us a better analogy. 
 What greater sympathy and what more judicial frame of mind 
 would Dr. Moulton require than that of his rustic compat iot 
 famed in legend, who pronounced that reasoned and induc- 
 tive judgment, " All whiskies are good I Some are better than 
 others ! " 
 
 As for Hogarth's obiter dictum, I wonder if there is any- 
 thing in it after all, or if it is not just a momentary lapse into 
 stupidity of a great man Aliquando bonus dormitat Hogar- 
 thius. If " connoisseur " means " a competent judge " (and 
 it has that connotation for Pope), Hogarth made the curious 
 statement that everyone is a judge except a competent judge. 
 But the truth is that Hogarth was one of the greatest of 
 literary artists, though not with the pen. 
 
 And finally, " if the idea of judging be itself a prejudice," 
 then we must not be allowed even to choose between giving our 
 time and attention to one work of art rather than to another, 
 nor to exercise as much choice as we would for a country walk. 
 Here again Dr. Moulton is in the name of liberty more rigid 
 than the systems which he condemns. 
 
 In the next part of his Essay he shows, taking examples 
 from the history of our own literature, the failure of critics in 
 the past. His task is an easy one, as the history of all naviga- 
 tion is strewn with wrecks, although vessels have navigated 
 rich freights into port. We do not think that our critic has 
 given sufficient emphasis to the latter picture. In fact, he goes 
 so far as to write, " As a set-off in the opposite scale only one 
 considerable achievement is to be noted," and that the quench- 
 ing by Macaulay of the light of Robert Montgomery. His 
 conclusion is that critical works where inductive retain their 
 force, and where judicial are obsolete. He instances the im- 
 mortality of Aristotle's criticism where inductive, the success 
 of Dr. Johnson's criticism of metaphysical poetry, and of 
 
64 THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 
 
 Addison's of Paradise Lost. This seems true but not to be 
 the whole truth. 
 
 I am inclined to suspect that one or two fallacies lurk here. 
 In the first place Dr. Moulton seems to lack the sympathy, 
 which he deems requisite for the critic, in his own criticism 
 of the judicial critics of the past. He does, it is true, atone 
 for it later, but one seems to find it missing here. Dr. Saints- 
 bury is always generous, and if in his great work we are told 
 with sorrow of the wrecks, we also find most ungrudging 
 appreciation of the noble cargoes which many goodly vessels 
 did bring to port. Contrast, for example, Saintsbury's 
 generous dealings* with the great Cham of judicial criticism 
 and the more grudging methods both of Matthew Arnold and 
 Dr. Moulton : " On the whole, it may be safely said that, 
 however widely a man may differ from Johnson's critical 
 theory, he will, provided that he possesses some real tincture 
 of the critical spirit himself, think more and more highly of 
 the Lives of the Poets the more he reads them, and the more 
 he compares them with the greater classics of critical literature." 
 And Saintsbury then proceeds* to write three glorious pages 
 of criticism upon Johnson, in which the latter's greatness 
 receives true homage, and the success rather than the failure 
 of his judicial criticism is emphasised. If, as Moulton postu- 
 lates, sympathy makes the critic, then, owing to the great 
 number of such sympathetic judgments, Dr. George Saintsbury 
 is the greatest of modern English critics. I do not doubt that 
 he is, but it is owing to the blending in him, the judicious 
 seasoning of the oil of sympathy with a good dash of the 
 vinegar of homely common-sense. 
 
 Secondly, Dr. Moulton never seems to suspect that the 
 judicial criticism which has erred in the past, or which seems 
 to have erred, has proceeded quite as often on inductive 
 principles as otherwise. An inductive method may lead to 
 
 See his History of English Criticism, p. 226, seq. 
 
THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 65 
 
 right results, to wrong results, to mixed results, to no results. 
 Induction is as old as the human race, in fact older, as other 
 animals use with greater or less success processes of induction 
 and still remain other animals and imperfect critics. An in- 
 ductive astrologer again is not necessarily more scientific 
 than a deductive one. No one has ever argued on purely 
 deductive a priori principles that a sonnet must have exactly 
 fourteen lines, though a lunatic of genius might yet do so : 
 an argument of such a kind would to-day be of inductive 
 form, and whether a complete or incomplete induction is a 
 matter of taste and definition. It has been argued deductively 
 from considerations of balance that a play requires three or 
 five divisions to possess completeness of form (the beginning, 
 middle, and end, that Aristotle postulates for every work of 
 art). The argument being deductive is stronger than the 
 purely empirical inductive argument would be, and is far 
 more useful, as it would lead us to suspect that a play, 
 which did not contain the triple division (Desis, Climax, 
 Lusis) or the quintuple (Introduction, Desis, Climax, Lusis, 
 Catastrophe) which is really the same, is a torso and not a 
 complete art product. In the same way, if we could show by 
 deduction the necessity for caesura in verse, our minds would 
 be more content than they are with the purely empirical and 
 pragmatic induction that caesura pays. 
 
 As we have said, the inductive method may lead of itself 
 to results as displeasing to Dr. Moulton and all right-minded 
 moderns as the most judicial of deductions. Let us take, for 
 example, any of the " horrid examples " of the early reviewers' 
 treatment of Keats and of Shelley, or of the Lake School. 
 Take the Edinburgh Review for October, 1802, with its 
 ominous opening, " Poetry has this much in common with 
 religion that its standards were fixed long ago, etc." This 
 at first sight, with its preposterous axiom in the forefront of 
 its offending, would seem to promise a furious cannonade con- 
 ducted on lines of purely judicial criticism, especially as the 
 reviewer continues to talk of Mr, Southey's having " been 
 M.C. 5 
 
66 THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 
 
 brought before us for judgment," and of " our inquisitorial 
 office." But our " conscientious inquisitor " like the majority 
 of conscientious inquisitors proceeds on purely inductive and 
 scientific lines. He first enumerates the sources from which 
 the Lakists derive their materials : (1) The anti-social prin- 
 ciples of Rousseau ; (2) the simplicity and energy of Kotzebue 
 and Schiller ; (3) the homeliness and harshness of Cowper 
 interchanged occasionally with the innocence of Ambrose 
 Philips, or the quaintness of Quarles and Dr. Donne. 
 
 There is not much that is unscientific about the procedure, 
 and as, at this distance, we, too, can see the faults of the 
 romantic school as clearly as they saw the faults of their 
 predecessors, our poetic withers are unwrung when the writer 
 proceeds to damn Thalaba. 
 
 We, too, damn Thalaba, but in a gentler, more dis- 
 criminating manner as becomes our less boisterous age : we 
 damn it with faint praise, but it remains damned. 
 
 The reviewer continues, using the inductive method as freely 
 as the judicial, to attack the views of Wordsworth upon poetic 
 diction and the poetic effusions and wicked revolutionary 
 teachings of Southey and .his friends. Much of the criticism 
 is admittedly ludicrous and false, the tone is everywhere 
 detestable, and although much of the criticism hits the target 
 if not always in the gold, yet we cannot find either here or in 
 the similar reviews of the period the truth of Prof. Moulton's 
 dictum that " Critical works where inductive retain their force, 
 where judicial have become obsolete" (p. 16). 
 
 On the contrary again, many judicial reviews even when 
 harsh in tone deserve to live on account of their essential 
 justness, and the good service which they rendered to the 
 poets criticised. Our strong modern prejudices in favour of 
 Keats make us resent, and rightly, the cruelty of the tone of 
 the adverse reviewers, but worshipping Keats this side of 
 idolatry we admit that many of the strictures upon Endymion 
 and his earlier and weaker verse were just, and not sub- 
 stantially different from views expressed by Shelley, Byron, 
 
THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 67 
 
 or even by Keats himself, and that the poet benefited from 
 them, as his later work clearly shows. In the same way 
 Christopher North's rough handling of Tennyson, although 
 it lacked urbanity and resulted in silencing for some years 
 the poet's song, did exercise a most invigorating effect upon 
 Tennyson's muse, and gave strength to a sweetness that too 
 often candied into a morbid effeminacy. 
 
 " Exquisite as are the beauties, intoxicating as is the 
 atmosphere of Endymion^ no one nowadays could pronounce 
 it free from faults of taste of more kinds than one, or deny 
 that as, after all, it holds itself out to be a story, the demand 
 for some sort of intelligible narrative procession is not so 
 irrelevant as when it is put to a lyric. ... And the critics 
 were justified of their victims. Coleridge and Tennyson 
 altered into perfection the poems which had been so imperfect. 
 Southey added rhyme and better rhythm in Kehama ; Keats 
 grew from the incoherence of Endymion, and its uncertain 
 taste, to the perfection of Lamia and the great Odes and the 
 Eves of St. Agnes and St. Mark " (Saintsbury loc. cit. p. 423). 
 
 Holding as we do to-day the principle of relativity in 
 aesthetic criticism, we can see where the thrusts of Dr. 
 Moulton at the judicial critics fall wide of the mark. A 
 piece of particular criticism may be " true " in and for the 
 eighteenth century, " not true " in and for the nineteenth, 
 and possibly " true " again in and for the twentieth. We 
 may believe that some criticisms based on axiomatic a priori 
 laws are true for all centuries sub specie aeternitatis : for 
 example, that human nature being essentially the same at all 
 times (though Schiller and the Humanists have denied this) 
 a poet like Chaucer or Shakespeare, when he deals with 
 essential humanity, are " universal poets," poets of the centre, 
 " not of an age but for all time." But criticism rarely plumbs 
 so deep. It speaks subjectively from the standpoint of its 
 age, country, environment ; and evaluates the ratio of the 
 , artist's "moment" and "milieu" to the same factors in the 
 public he addresses. It may then pronounce the judicial 
 
68 THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 
 
 criticism, " This will never do ! " of the Excursion of a 
 Wordsworth, and it may thus shock those sympathetic souls, 
 who say that you must not use such a formula as " This will 
 never do ! " and that such criticism will never do. It may 
 then be found out after all by the pragmatist critic that as 
 a matter of fact The Excursion " never did," though, of 
 course, it may yet do. 
 
 It can not be sufficiently borne in mind that even the 
 greatest of artists who writes for all time must, as the whole 
 includes the part, write also for his age. It is, we should say, 
 only when a slighted artist has not been able to reach the 
 special circle of his own age who have ears for his message, 
 that we may affirm the possibility of his being, in spite of the 
 neglect or obloquy of his contemporaries, one of these supreme 
 artists. For example, the case of Blake might be, although 
 we think not, a case in point. We doubt if in literature 
 there is an instance of a writer being known to his age and 
 unhesitatingly and universally condemned by it, and yet 
 afterwards being held to belong to the highest class, unless 
 perhaps as with Keats, he died too young to reach his 
 audience and Keats was not unhesitatingly condemned. 
 The reverse, of course, has happened time and again, that 
 the idols of one age, the Pomfrets or the Cowleys, are later 
 dethroned with ignominy. 
 
 And this illustrates the truth of a previous remark to the 
 effect that history, which is the wider collection of subjective 
 criticisms, corrects the personal and local equation of the 
 particular subjective criticisms of any one country or epoch. 
 If a poet writes for his own age, it may be at the same time 
 true that he is the supreme poet for that age, and yet not the 
 supreme poet or even a respectable poet for other times or all 
 time. Consequently, the criticism which apparently placed 
 Beaumont and Fletcher above Shakespeare is not necessarily 
 false criticism. And in fact " true " and " false " cannot be 
 applied to a criticism until we know the critic's universe of 
 discourse. If, for example, an age sets a high value upon, 
 
THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 69 
 
 let us say, " poetic diction," then a poet is limited by that 
 restriction, and a critic must make " poetic diction " part at 
 least of his universe of criticism. If another age demands 
 the " horrible " in drama then Shakespeare must write a Hamlet 
 and Webster a Duchess of Malfi, and will be supremely great 
 with the former if they can mould to their own the desire of 
 their age, not as with Kyd mould themselves wholly into their 
 age, nor on the other hand with Jonson endeavour to break 
 the mould of their age. / 
 
 -^ 
 
 Dr. Moulton, in advocating the inductive method in 
 cism does, of course, see that truths so discovered will be 
 purely relative, but he does not himself always remember this 
 fact when he is criticising inductively the judicial critic of the 
 past. Yet he himself by no means wishes to exile the judicial 
 critic from the Republic of Letters, but welcomes him, as long 
 as the latter remembers that his method has nothing whatever 
 to do with modern scientific criticism but is an expression of 
 his own views, a creation as much as is the work of the man 
 about whom he is writing. Reviews, he adds, based on taste 
 " may be regarded almost as the lyrics of prose." " Scientific 
 criticism and the criticism of taste have distinct spheres ; and 
 the whole of literary history shows that the failure to keep 
 the two separate results only in mutual confusion." 
 
 We think it would be more scientific to add that past criti- 
 cism, which we think false, may often be only relatively false, 
 or false as regards ourselves, and that past criticism which has 
 proved to be false has arisen quite as often from an error in 
 the inductive process as in the faultiness of the taste. The 
 spirit of the age in modern criticism would seem to feel first 
 that the methods of science may lead men astray (e.g. Taine, 
 Hennequin, as Brunetiere demonstrated, and later Brunetiere 
 himself, when he took over Hennequin's methods) if they do 
 not bring to their task that taste, connoisseurship, or judicial 
 frame of mind which science itself demands. Secondly, that 
 the education of your men of taste, of your future Hazlitts, 
 Lambs, and Anatole Frances may be helped considerably by 
 
70 THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 
 
 the principles of inductive criticism for which Dr. Moulton so 
 eloquently pleads. 
 
 No exception, we think, can be taken to the constructive, 
 that is the major portion of Prof. Moulton's Essay. He 
 shows, as does Mr. J. M. Robertson, in his " Theory and 
 Practice of Criticism," that the relativity of criticism does 
 not debar scientific treatment. He lays down as a rule for 
 criticising particular works that for the critic " there is no 
 court of appeal except to the literary works themselves," and 
 that we can have no a priori appeals to taste. True, taste 
 proves nothing, it only guides. And he recognises the vali- 
 dity of the contention that we have cited from Anatole France, 
 when he writes : " It is not the objective details but the sub- 
 jective impressions they produce that make literary effect. 
 The objective details are the limit on the variability of the 
 subjective impressions." Taking criticism of the character of 
 Macbeth as an example, he says that the best criticism is that 
 which is consistent with the facts of the play. " Interpreta- 
 tion in literature is of the nature of a scientific hypothesis, the 
 truth of which is tested by the degree of completeness with which 
 it explains the details of the literary work as they actually stand" 
 
 This is pure pragmatism and Anatole France and all prag- 
 matists would accept it ; the former probably contenting him- 
 self to point out that after all " facts " and " details " are 
 unknown in themselves but are themselves subjective. The 
 killing of Duncan by Macbeth is a " fact " but till we inter- 
 pret its relationships it is of no value. Facts are what we 
 make of them, and a fact in isolation, if such can be imagined, 
 is to all intents nothing. " The details of the literary work 
 as they actually stand " will mean the relationships of facts as 
 generally admitted, and that is, as we have pointed out before, 
 the appeal to history, the supreme court in pragmatic philo- 
 sophy. Completeness and consistency is then Moulton's test 
 for the value of interpretation of literature. 
 
 This, too, is the final sum of the critical doctrine of John 
 M. Robertson. For him criticism is a way of teaching and 
 
THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. fl 
 
 the science is to be found in the consistency of our literary 
 estimates. Consistency, he argues, is the criterion of the 
 truth of logical propositions, and harmony the criterion of 
 beauty : a twofold consistency, logical and aesthetic, is, there- 
 fore, the test of rightness in criticism. The first requisite for 
 a science is a comparison of judgments and an endeavour to 
 find some greatest common measure. It is the business of a 
 critic to examine judgments in this way, and, if he does not 
 agree with them, to be able at least to account for them, 
 endeavouring always to discount the personal equation of him- 
 self and his predecessors in criticism, that comes from the 
 personal bias, from which no man may escape, which arises 
 from age, tastes, religion or non-religion, in a word human 
 environment. 
 
 Here both Moulton and Robertson give us the completest 
 expression we have yet had in English literature of the modern 
 spirit of criticism. The practical expression of it will be 
 found passim in the critical work of such moderns as Sir 
 Walter Raleigh, John Bailey Lascelles Abercrombie, Robert 
 Lynd, J. Middleton Murry, and most of our younger writers 
 of literary criticism. The same spirit of free inquiry will be 
 found to underlie the newest style of biography and autobio- 
 graphy inaugurated in England by Ethel Smythe and Lytton 
 Strachey, which though only a few years old already promises 
 to be the most fruitful plant of twentieth century critical 
 literature. 
 
 Dr. Saintsbury's masterpiece, the " History of Criticism," 
 traces the genesis of the modern spirit and is its greatest pasan. 
 He shows how Aristotle and Longinus, to mention the two 
 greatest names in ancient criticism, were in so many ways 
 filled with the modern free spirit ; how Dryden's. essential 
 greatness had the same basis ; how Pop^and Dr. Johnson are 
 often surprisingly prophetic ; how Coleridge, Arnold, and 
 Pater complete the wo?k of their long line of predecessors. 
 
 " Feel ; discover the source of feeling ; express the discovery 
 so as to communicate the feeling ; this can be done in every 
 
72 THREE MODERN APOSTLES OF FREEDOM. 
 
 case. And if it cannot be done by every person, why, that is 
 only equivalent to saying that it is not precisely possible for 
 everyone to be a critic." Such is Saintsbury's summing up of 
 Pater's way of criticism and he adds that he does not know a 
 better. 
 
 Having dealt with the three chief modern English writers 
 upon criticism regarded as a system, we might now proceed to 
 discuss some objections to critical pragmatism. We will then 
 conclude by summing up the matter as a modern sees it. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 
 
 Objections have been taken, and to my mind rightly taken, 
 to the Pragmatic Method of Literary Criticism on account of 
 the unguarded expressions of some modern writers. Thus 
 Dr. Richard Moulton in the document of Pragmatism, which 
 we have had under review in the previous chapter, tells us 
 that each author is a separate species (p. 32) " Wordsworth 
 has laid down that each fresh poet is to be tried by fresh 
 canons of taste : this is only another way of saying that the 
 differences between poets are differences of kind, that each 
 author is a ' school ' by himself, and can be appreciated only 
 by a receptive attitude formed by adjustment to himself alone." 
 Schiller in his Formal Logic, in attacking the Formal Logi- 
 cian's treatment of " species," also asserts that for the prag- 
 matist each individual is a species in itself. 
 
 Pragmatists, who write like this, are in their excess of zeal, 
 it appears to me, exaggerating a truth ; or erecting, what 
 should be after all a mere caveat, into a general proposition. 
 It is, of course, well to bear in mind that any particular author 
 may turn out to be a species by himself, but it seems ridiculous 
 to go so far as to say that every author is sui generis. This 
 would destroy all Literary Criticism truly so-called. The 
 claim of Wordsworth and of Schiller would destroy all science, 
 for the main work of science is, after all, classification, and, 
 if every individual is to be raised into a class by himself, the 
 object of classification is defeated. The suggestion seems to 
 me as useful as would be a similar suggestion for the biologist, 
 to consider each individual domestic cat on account of its 
 undoubted individual differences as a separate species of cat 
 
 73 
 
74 THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 
 
 or of animal. A warning useful to the owner of a cat, but 
 useless to a scientist. 
 
 The dangers in literary criticism, which this sweeping claim 
 is meant to obviate, are sufficiently met, it is clear, by the 
 pragmatic critic's doctrine, that every work of art must be 
 judged by the standard which the author has chosen and not 
 by any which the critic may choose. Thus, if a poet writes 
 us a Miltonic sonnet, it is ridiculous to ask a critic, " Why 
 drag Milton in ? " when it is the author who has already im- 
 plicitly done so. It would be absurd here to argue that such 
 a poet is a class by himself. 
 
 If a poet invents a new form, then until he has followers, 
 this new form would, of course, be considered as a sub-species 
 or class apart, but even then it may not be, as one might think, a 
 purely isolated phenomenon, as it might be subsumed under 
 some wider species or genus, e.g. a thirteen-line sonnet being 
 treated as a sub-species of sonnet the species, of lyric the genus. 
 
 The corollary, which Dr. Moulton draws from his too wide 
 statement, is that for the scientific inductive critic there can 
 be no such thing as order of merit, and this deduction likewise 
 is far too wide. It is, of course, a commonplace of criticism 
 that only a very callow undergraduate arranges poets in order 
 of merit, first, second, and third. As Professor Moulton puts 
 it, " Preferences and comparisons of merit must be kept rigidly 
 outside the sphere of science." And yet in spite of every- 
 thing I am inclined to think that this is nonsense. Even the 
 geologist (whom Professor Moulton cites) does know order of 
 merit. If I consult this geological critic about the amount of 
 gold present in two pieces of gold-bearing quartz and one 
 piece of old red sandstone, and ask him to arrange them for 
 me in order of merit, he would not be likely, I think, to answer 
 me in the haughty tones of Dr. Moulton, " Science knows 
 nothing of competitive examination." 
 
 It is the same in poetry. It is true, to paraphrase Dr. 
 Moulton, that a scientific critic is not heard extolling the son- 
 net as a model formation or making sarcastic comments upon 
 
THE PKAGMATLC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 75 
 
 the Pindaric ode, but he will try to compare the amount of 
 poetic gold present respectively in two particular sonnets. 
 That is his business, and he has his own way of performing 
 his task and of convincing us that the results of his expertise 
 are morally certain. If this is not true, then we have been 
 wrong in condemning poor Martin Tupper. Dr. Moulton 
 would answer, I know, that an inductive critic would not con- 
 demn Martin Tupper any more than a geologist condemns old 
 red sandstone : he would regard Tupper as an interesting 
 phenomenon, and give us all the facts about his work, and 
 then pass on. I reply that in doing so he has condemned 
 him, for, if he has done his work competently, he has assigned 
 him to the old red sandstone formation and out of the class of 
 gold-bearing rock. So that neither the inductive critic, nor 
 the geologist, nor any scientist can escape from the judicial 
 method, which is, as we have tried to establish, a necessary 
 concomitant of all science. 
 
 Once a standard of reference is set up judicial criticism 
 enters. Classification for the pragmatist is for human ends 
 and involves a standard of reference. Nature has established 
 the natural class " dog," and here, of course, there can be no 
 order of merit, a poodle not being more or less doggy than a 
 mastiff. For human ends man may want the class " watch- 
 dog," and here enters at once a standard of reference, and an 
 order of merit, and that not only between classes but between 
 individuals. We do expect the canine critic to be able to 
 pronounce some such judgment as this, " The Airedale terrier 
 is a better watchdog than the Dachshund, yet this particular 
 Dachshund Fritz is a better watchdog than Jock the Airedale." 
 
 If the term " poetry " has any meaning at all, we are entitled 
 to say that Homer has more of the essential qualities which 
 make up the connotation of poetry than has Walt Whitman, 
 let us say, though as men in Nature's primary division they 
 are, of course, equal. If the term "ode" has a definite conno- 
 tation, we may also fruitfully compare Cowley with Gray and 
 institute an order of merit. We cannot, of course, compare 
 
76 THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 
 
 things of different species except on the ground of some com- 
 mon agreement. We cannot, for example, compare a dog 
 with a cat except on the ground, say, of rat-catching ; nor an 
 Elizabethan tragedy with a Greek tragedy except on the ground 
 of psychology and the like. But we always will as human 
 beings, and must as critics, compare things of the same class ; 
 and institute, as far as our power permits, some order of merit. 
 If Dr. Moulton's inductive criticism will not allow him to say 
 that Milton's sonnet on his Blindness is not of higher merit 
 than that on Tetrachordon for the reasons which Professor 
 Moulton could give more convincingly than I, then his induc- 
 tion would be singularly fruitless criticism. 
 
 Another corollary attached by the writer mentioned to this 
 question about order of merit is the ever-living ground of 
 debate, Art for Art's sake. Dr. Moulton writes that the critic 
 as such has nothing to do with morality, which lies outside 
 inductive treatment, though intrinsically more important. We 
 have already given reasons for disputing this standpoint. We 
 have argued that Criticism, like the Art which it criticises, is a 
 social product, and so concerns always society as a whole and not 
 the individual. We would even go further and say that all 
 sciences have a social implication, and that a scientist may have 
 even as scientist to pronounce a social or moral judgment. Thus 
 for a chemist we know that nitroglycerine is no less moral than 
 soothing-syrup, and that as an analyst he will give us a 
 passionless analysis of either ; but he may be asked still as 
 chemist or expert witness in a court of law about the probable 
 danger to society attendant on the indiscriminate use of either ; 
 and he would certainly merit a stern rebuke if he priggishly 
 answered, Chemistry knows nothing of social values or moral 
 implications. 
 
 Dr. Moulton instances the geographer, whose interest in the 
 tropical zone is no whit the less because its enervating climate 
 may enfeeble the moral character ; and the political economist 
 who, he says, rightly ignores the human drama of starvation 
 and misery. Agreed, but is this the whole truth ? Does the 
 
THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 77 
 
 geographer cease to be geographer when he becomes aware of 
 the fact that even geography may contain a moral problem, 
 and that he may be asked purely as geographical expert to 
 afford us some guidance on the problem. Is not Dr. Moulton's 
 idea of Political Economy that of the old Early-Victorian 
 Laissez-Faire school now dead and so rightly damned, just 
 because it did hold that Economics could be treated in vacua, 
 and that the human equation should not count. We would 
 submit, on the contrary, that there is hardly a science in the 
 world not even pure Mathematics which has not at some 
 point or other to consider the social implication. And how 
 much more Criticism of the Fine Arts in which man expresses 
 himself, in which he tries to find full expression of himself as 
 a social animal ! If man were an insect, we could conceive 
 an Unmoral Criticism ; morality has nothing, for example, to 
 do with a bee's activities. But once the human element enters 
 in, morality must enter at once along with it : once a bee-hive 
 is considered as human property, then the moral question may 
 arise about the proximity of the bee-hive to a public road or a 
 neighbour's garden. 
 
 It is well to emphasise this point, because those who take 
 the opposite view are a strong body and use strong language 
 "bourgeois" "Philistine," "Pharisee," and "prude" being 
 their weakest epithets for their opponents. 
 
 Let it be said clearly that those who hold that Art cannot be 
 separated in practice from Morality need not necessarily hold 
 Early- Victorian or prudish views about Art ; nor do they 
 necessarily advocate the infallibility of some Zeal-of-the-Land 
 Busy or Tartufe or of some British Stage Censor. They merely 
 hold this point of view, that, if it is clear that a work of art 
 conveys a message hostile to social health, a critic is justified in 
 holding it to be artistically bad simply and solely because art is 
 primarily a social product. If the social function of art is no 
 axiom, then, of course, the conclusion is false. In the same way 
 a jury of anatomists might hold that considered in itself the 
 murderer's stroke argued wonderful skill and unerring know- 
 
78 THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 
 
 ledge of human anatomy, but, as it cannot be considered in 
 itself and without reference to society, this artist must be 
 condemned and hang. The Art-for-Art's sake fanatic could 
 pour pages of eloquent invective upon such a jury and could 
 quote De Quincey to some effect : " Murders have their little 
 differences and shades of merit, as well as statues, pictures, 
 oratorios, cameos, intaglios, or what not. ... A golden mean 
 is certainly what every man should aim at. ... I find it 
 difficult to maintain that steady equatorial line between the two 
 poles of too much murder on the one hand and too little on the 
 other. I am too soft. . . . This vulgar gout de comparaison, 
 as La Bruyere calls it, will be our ruin ; each work has its own 
 separate characteristics each in and for itself is incompar- 
 able." And this, I humbly submit, is the reductio ad absurdum 
 of the plea, "Art for Art's sake ! " I have dealt at some length 
 here and before with Dr. Moulton's work in no hostile spirit 
 (regarding, in fact, this work as the best exposition in our own 
 generation of the pragmatic system), but because his views 
 have, in my experience and humble opinion, misled students of 
 literary criticism either through over-statement, or, as in this 
 last instance, through error. No student, however, can afford 
 to neglect the admirable introduction to Shakespeare as a 
 Dramatic Artist , nor is its value lessened, if this present essay 
 be read as a possible corrective written from another viewpoint 
 of Pragmatic Criticism. 
 
 What all moderns will without cavil agree with whole- 
 heartedly are these positions : 
 
 (i) That the inductive process, though not criticism, is a 
 useful propaedeutic to the critic, and first-aid to 
 the reviewer. 
 
 (ii) That difference of kind is of greater importance to 
 the critic than difference of degree. 
 
 (iii) "That inductive criticism is mainly occupied in 
 
 distinguishing literary species." 
 (iv) "That literature is a thing of development." 
 
THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 79 
 
 We would add to (ii) the rider, with which Dr. Moulton 
 apparently does not agree, that 
 
 (v) Other things being equal, criticism does take note of 
 quantitative elements. 
 
 Thus, for example, it is not, we think, foolish to say that on 
 account of its greater difficulty an epic or a tragedy must be 
 reckoned as of higher merit and greater importance than a sonnet, 
 or that the best miniature painter must give precedence to a 
 Michael Angelo. This, I fear, Dr. Moulton would reckon as 
 a peculiarly bad example of the foolishness of the old judicial 
 criticism, but, I think, that the modern critic, however free, 
 does not (in fact, cannot) revolt against the "laws" which a 
 pragmatist discovers, if his common sense convinces him that 
 they do exist. 
 
 A final objection to Pragmatic Criticism might, it occurs to 
 me, be formulated in this way, Are you not, after all, freeing 
 the critic at the expense of the artist ? The artist is to be tied 
 while the critic remains free ! 
 
 My answer would, I think, take some such form as the 
 following considerations about Art viewed from the pragmatic 
 standpoint. 
 
 Every artist, whatever his art, has to correlate two things, 
 first, some concrete embodiment of his particular message and, 
 secondly, an audience. The aim of a musician is to express 
 his emotions in the language of music in such a way that an 
 audience will feel similar emotions according to its capacity 
 and the sympathy he can arouse, and will wish to have the 
 experience repeated. 
 
 A stage dramatist wishes to tell a tale and create the illusion 
 of real life by means of living actors, and rouse the interest and 
 curiosity of an audience to such an extent as to keep them for 
 two or three hours unwilling to leave a cramped posture in an 
 uncomfortable seat. 
 
 " Equivocations in dramatic art," writes Jacinto Benavente, 
 the great modern Spanish dramatist and pragmatic critic in , 
 his Table Talk, "invariably end in an empty house and in one 
 
80 THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 
 
 more equivocation, that the play failed because it was art, and 
 the public is unable to appreciate art. But the true art of the 
 theatre is to do good business, and to do good business you 
 must do good art. Shakespeare and Moliere were both good 
 managers, and as managers made a good deal of 
 money." 
 
 A novelist's task is to tell a tale and create the illusion of 
 real life in such a way by his words as to rouse the interest 
 and curiosity of his readers, to keep them from being bored, 
 and induce them to buy and read another book by the same 
 hand. A lyric poet has to rouse the emotions of his readers 
 by the expression of his own emotions in the verbal rhythm and 
 music which accompanied his feelings at the time or his recollec- 
 tion of them, and in such a way as to induce his readers 
 to wish the experiment to be repeated. 
 
 One aim common to all artists is to avoid boring audience or 
 spectators. In the long run and at the right times and places 
 good work never bores. 
 
 An artist will choose his audience, and may be popular or 
 unpopular. A true critic is he who is at home in any 
 audience. The popular artist must be simple and forcible ; 
 the unpopular artist may deliberately address a complex 
 message to a small audience of special tastes and culture, but 
 the circle of his hearers may be widened by the teaching and 
 propaganda of qualified interpreters otherwise called critics. 
 It is ridiculous for critics or other admirers of an artist to 
 complain of his limited appeal, when perhaps, as with George 
 Meredith, at all events after the publication of The Egoist, 
 he appealed, like Walter Savage Landor, deliberately to a 
 select few ; or, as with Blake, both his thought and expres- 
 sion of it are too complex for the simple-minded reader of 
 good-will. Browning said of himself that he did not intend 
 his writings to be a substitute for a cigar, an easy method of 
 soothing tired nerves, and implied that hard mental effort 
 would be needed to achieve the reward for the soul which was 
 to be found at the end of the work. One feels uneasily that 
 
THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 81 
 
 Shakespeare, the deeper psychologist, would have been less 
 haughty. 
 
 Simplicity is not in itself a virtue, as it is a quality shared 
 by Shakespeare and Martin Tupper, but the power of making 
 the complex simple and arousing sympathetic interest is the 
 special mark of every teacher of the first rank. Keats un- 
 mistakably has this power as a constant gift ; Shelley unmis- 
 takably has it less often ; Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer 
 always ; Browning sometimes ; Blake more rarely. The great 
 artist is the patient teacher who has the great gift or takes 
 the immense trouble to put complex feelings or thoughts in a 
 simple way. A lesser artist, but still great, is he who can put 
 simple thoughts and feelings in a complex way of beauty, 
 whether by verbal melodies, musical chords, wonderful colour 
 schemes, or subtle interlacings of sculptured stone. 
 
 A minor artist is one who aims low and hits his mark con- 
 sistently, or one who at times, but not for long, produces great 
 effects. 
 
 The bad artist is he who through lowness of aims, in- 
 sincerity of message, or sheer inability to deliver it, is found 
 wearisome in the long run by those to whom he has made 
 appeal. The critic is, or ought to be, a man of good taste 
 and keen susceptibility, whose endeavour it is to widen the 
 circle of a good but unpopular artist, or to diminish the circle 
 of a bad artist who is injuring the souls of his admirers. His 
 function it is to fulfil the dual role of a mission preacher and 
 also special constable in the realm of art. As he has to be an 
 artist himself in his own secondary art, his work will also be 
 judged in the same way as is that of other artists : if he bores 
 his own audience, he is a bad critic. 
 
 POPULARITY AS CRITERION. 
 
 Pragmatic criticism has everything in its favour, and it has 
 this to its credit that it kills for ever the odious pretensions of 
 the superior person for whom popularity is the cardinal vice. 
 M. c. 6 
 
82 THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 
 
 Dickens is popular, therefore he is bad ; Meredith is un- 
 popular, therefore he is good. " You can deceive some of the 
 people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but 
 you cannot deceive all the people all the time," was the 
 homely pragmatic rendering by the greatest American of the 
 famous Old World thought " Securus judicat orbis terrarum." 
 Popularity is no criterion, it may be either good or bad ; 
 permanence is the criterion, and it rests on certain qualities 
 which also make for popularity. The experiencing mind of 
 the critic hunts for those qualities in the temporary popular 
 or unpopular. He has history to guide him, and he has to 
 search for the true Attic salt which alone keeps the works of 
 man from decay. 
 
 Pope was popular till he produced his really great work for 
 which he is popular to-day ; Keats was unpopular in his own 
 day and is popular to-day ; Shelley, despite what his ad- 
 mirers have attempted to do for him, has never formed a 
 popular cult ; the popularity of Robert Montgomery was 
 killed by a single article ; Dickens was and remains a popular 
 artist. Popularity, therefore, in itself is no criterion. But 
 popularity widening with a widening circle, and unchanging 
 amid changes caused by the widening circle of culture, is the 
 foundation of permanence. Chaucer in our day has a wider 
 audience than he had in his own, and' his popularity widens 
 with the ever-widening circle of those who can read him, 
 therefore the critic will suspect that he has the three dimen- 
 sions of every great artist, simplicity, harmony, generosity : 
 in other words, the true, the -beautiful, the good. Browning 
 widens slowly, but does' widen the circle of his audience, and 
 so the critic will suspect the existence of the same dimensions 
 in his work ; the audience of Thomas Hardy, like that of 
 Emile Zola, grows less each year, and so a critic may suspect 
 pessimism or some other ugliness or some other seeds of decay 
 in the work of an author still living, and may conclude that 
 he is a photographer whose work is of to-day's sun, and not 
 an artist whose work challenges time. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC METHOD, SOME OBJECTIONS. 83 
 
 The artist is, then, as free as the critic, each being tied 
 from his own choice by the conditions of his art. Nature, too, 
 has its laws just as Art has, and just because Nature is part 
 of Art. 
 
 A wild animal is called free, and yet a lion can neither dis- 
 obey the law of gravity, nor yet disobey the law of his own 
 nature and become a cow. In the same way, a poet is not 
 free to write blank verse which rhymes, nor a tragedy with a 
 happy ending, nor vers libres, nor songs without melody. The 
 first two are impossible, the last two are possible but tanta- 
 mount to suicide. And they are laws not imposed by the 
 critic but by Nature. The critic neither praises nor blames 
 the parrot for his vers libres, but as a humble observer of 
 natural phenomena he may legitimately refuse to rank the 
 parrot with the canary in the rank of song-birds. On other 
 grounds he may praise the parrot. 
 
 And such an attitude is derogatory to no artist and marks 
 humility in the critic. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 
 JUDICIAL PRAGMATISM. 
 
 While welcoming all possible aids which modern science can 
 give us, whether of induction or otherwise, one feels to-day 
 that criticism, as we have said, neither belongs nor can claim 
 to belong to the category of the so-called exact sciences, 
 although it will use the same pragmatic method whose worth 
 these have proved. It, too, will first and above all be judicial, 
 and one feels that in adopting this attitude it is departing in 
 no way from the frame of mind of the best scientists. If, as 
 Dr. Moulton argues, to be judicial involves some prejudice, we 
 accept it and merely plead that every scientist is involved of 
 necessity in the same charge. 
 
 It is true that no astronomer is prejudiced in favour of a 
 fixed star as opposed to a planet, that a geologist does not 
 look with contempt upon non-gold-bearing rock, nor a chemist 
 despise a bromide because it is not a sulphide ; but neither 
 does a modern critic of literature, thanks to his knowledge of 
 mistakes in the past, have similar prejudices. He will not 
 condemn a poet because of his " eye in fine frenzy rolling," 
 nor because his work belongs to the Silver Age, nor will he 
 condemn the writer upon a dull subject on account of the 
 absence of sparkle in his treatment. But he will have his 
 own prejudices, and so has every scientist. 
 
 An astronomer is prejudiced by certain laws of astronomy, 
 and similarly the chemist and physicist. He has, for example, 
 a strong prejudice in favour of the law of gravity, and will 
 only modify that prejudice when an Einstein may manage to 
 compel him. A scientist, too, will have prejudices about 
 instruments, apparatus, and methods of using them. A critic 
 
 84 
 
THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 85 
 
 will have similar human prejudices. He will have Words- 
 worth's " experiencing mind," itself a prejudice. Drama, for 
 example, he may take for granted, must involve " movement " 
 of some kind ; he may have a prejudice that this is a " law " 
 of the drama ; but remembering history in the past and 
 Einstein in the present, he will not dismiss with contempt the 
 dictum of the great Belgian dramatist Maeterlinck that : " An 
 old mart) seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his 
 lamp beside him submitting with bent head to the presence of 
 his soul and destiny motionless as he is, lives yet in reality, a 
 deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who 
 strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the 
 husband who avenges his honour." He will not refuse to the 
 new static drama (such as Conan Doyle's Story of Waterloo} 
 its right to be taken seriously ; and he will either find room 
 for it in the old formula on the ground that there is movement 
 and conflict even in it, though the force is all on one side, that of 
 Fate ; or else he will come to the conclusion that movement 
 and conflict is not so much the law of , the whole drama as of 
 its larger species. In fine, the modern critic, like his brother 
 the modern scientist, has the modern philosophy, whose temper 
 it is to feel no surprise at the possibility of fluidity or evolu- 
 tion in a " law," which, he knows, ceases to be final when and 
 where it ceases to work. 
 
 Criticism for the modern is a science like logic or ethics or 
 political economy, dealing with values in a department of 
 human life : it classifies art products, providing elastic categories 
 into which the art products will go, and endeavouring to find 
 the scientific " laws " which best summarise the causes for 
 difference both in their kind and their degree. Its task is 
 therefore, unending, as the human mind is always moving in an 
 apparently unending process and carrying with it in its flight 
 its range of production. Criticism consequently cannot be 
 static and its laws must be always in evolution. While its 
 cyclic register records deaths, it has its infinite scroll ever 
 unrolling to inscribe the new births of the Time Spirit. 
 
is 
 
 86 THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 
 
 The individual critic may regard his science as normative in 
 so far as he can give reasons for suspecting that his little norm 
 is part of the greater norm registering itself upon this unend- 
 ing scroll of history, and not the mere prejudice of his age or 
 tastes or personal bias. He must have some prejudices, as we 
 have seen, but this prejudice, if he would approach perfection, 
 he must eliminate as far as humanly possible. That he will 
 not be able to do it altogether will be a gain, for it will make 
 him interesting and keep him human, perfection or faultless- 
 ness being, as our master Longinus noted, intolerable in human 
 composition. 
 
 The modern critic, like the modern scientist, having assimi- 
 lated the lessons which history has given him will have a 
 prejudice for humility. Just as a chemist does not impose 
 laws of being upon the objects of his world of chemistry, so 
 too the literary critic is nowadays content to register rather 
 than to prescribe laws. And thus his universe will not be 
 shattered when radium insists on becoming helium. 
 
 ART FOR ART'S SAKE. 
 
 As the critic has to deal with a product of the mind of man 
 his humility will make him refuse the formula " Art for Art's 
 sake." I There is no such thing as Art apart from the mind of 
 man, or if there be it is unknowable, and the unknowable is 
 for a knower the non-existent. We would submit then, also 
 with humility, that Ethics and Art touch but cannot clash, 
 that any art product which is bad in ethics is bad in art too. 
 If our modern philosophy has established anything, it has 
 established this, that there is no such thing for science as man- 
 in-himself ; psychology and ethics know man as part of society, 
 a social unit. The immoral in the sphere of art is then the 
 unsocial, or rather the enemy of society, and may be called 
 non-art or bad art. There can be no water-tight compart- 
 ments in aesthetics, man and his activities being one and that 
 one being a unit of the social whole. 
 
THE SUM OP THE MATTER. 87 
 
 THE LAWS OF GENERAL CRITICISM. 
 (A) CRITICISM A SOCIAL FUNCTION. 
 
 The first general law, then, or prejudice of the modern critic 
 is that criticism is a social activity because art concerns society 
 as a whole. His universe of discourse will implicitly be con- 
 structed on the assumption that a work of art in isolation is 
 meaningless, unknowable, and so non-existent ; criticism in 
 vacuo is, therefore, preposterous because art in vacua does not 
 exist. 
 
 (B) THE FUNCTION OF A CRITIC. s- 
 
 His second law concerns critical practice and may be 
 summarised, Each work of art has to be judged by its artist's 
 aims. The critic's function is that of an interpreter, ex- 
 pounder, judge in the realm of taste not in the world of law. 
 The modern critic puts and answers this question, What has 
 the artist proposed to accomplish ? How far has he succeeded 
 in his aim ? It is here that Carlyle's theory, though not 
 always his work, anticipated modern critical practice : 
 
 " Criticism stands like an interpreter between the inspired and 
 the uninspired ; between the prophet and those who hear the 
 melody of his words., and catch some glimpse of their material 
 meaning ', but understand not their deep import" (State of 
 German Literature.) 
 
 And in his later essay on Goethe he showed both by 
 example and in his words how the critic should perform his 
 task of interpretation : 
 
 " First we must have made plain to ourselves what the poet's 
 aim really and truly was., how the task he had to do stood before 
 his own eye, and how far, with such means as it afforded him, 
 he has fulfilled it. Secondly, we must have decided whether and 
 how far his aim, this task of his, accorded not with us, and 
 our individual crotchets, and the crotchets of our little senate 
 where we give or take the law but with human nature, and the 
 nature of things at large ; with the universal principles of poetic 
 
88 THE SUM OF THE MATTEK. 
 
 beauty, not as they stand written in our text-books, but in the 
 hearts and imaginations of all men" 
 
 Pope, who was so unexpectedly modern in some of his dicta, 
 anticipated the first of Carlyle's Critical Imperatives, when he 
 said that to try Shakespeare by the rules of Aristotle " is like 
 trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those 
 of another." Carlyle's second commandment is in the nature 
 of an ideal to keep always before our eyes, but one which, 
 being mortal men, we may never hope to reach. Critics, too, 
 are judged in the same pragmatic way by their success or 
 failure as interpreters. Why is Prof. Sir Henry Jones' 
 " Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher " a 
 work of sterling value as criticism ? Simply because it has 
 been the means of widening not only the mere numbers but 
 also the mental range of readers of Browning ; has lifted up, 
 so to speak, so many children to the upper shelves, and not 
 stood between them and the sweetness they would find there. 
 With some other critics, on the contrary, the gateway has 
 absorbed the building, which is only good when the critic like 
 Johnson is great and the building like Savage is paltry. 
 
 SPECIAL LAWS OF CRITICISM. 
 (A) UNITY OF DESIGN. 
 
 There are certain art formulae which have stood the test of 
 time and which are still considered to be laws. The first is 
 that of unity of design. Critics have condemned, and it would 
 seem rightly, that delightful novel, Our Mutual Friend, be- 
 cause Dickens changed his mind, as he so often did, in the 
 middle of his work (e.g. in the character of Mr. Boffin) but 
 let the inconsistencies stand. Boffin was to have become by 
 the force of temptation a villain, but Dickens grew, as we do, 
 to love him, and so restored him his halo undimmed. One who 
 loves this novel best of all the Master's works has yet to 
 admit that the critics are right and that it fails to achieve 
 artistic greatness on account of the notorious lack of unity in 
 
THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 89 
 
 its design. And this is not judging the author by extraneous 
 laws but, as pragmatism demands, by the laws he proposed to 
 himself when he wrote a novel round a plot, that is a novel to 
 be judged by a definite design. Novels that are not written 
 with a definite design, e.g. the modern plotless novels of the 
 school of Jean- Christophe, would, of course, be criticised on 
 other lines and those lines their own. The ordinary reader, it 
 may be said in parenthesis, is always an Aristotelian, and for 
 him in a novel as for Aristotle in tragedy the plot is the thing. 
 It will be for those critics, who do not profoundly sympathise 
 with his views, the task to raise his mind to the appreciation 
 of the plotless novel. If they fail in the long run to do this, 
 then it will have been discovered (what many think) that plot 
 is an essential of the novel, for the Man-in-the-Street is in the 
 long run infallible ( Securus iudicat orbis terrarum). 
 
 (B) THE LAW OF ILLUSION. 
 
 The second Art formula is Ars est celare artem. Art must 
 be natural. This is the great law of illusion. The supreme 
 model of it in dramatic literature is the famous second scene 
 of Shakespeare's Tempest^ where the author has much to tell 
 us, and does it so naturally and easily, that we never suspect 
 that Prospero is talking to us and not to Miranda. The con- 
 juror must never let us see how he does his trick. And here 
 the critics not unfairly condemn the great Thackeray, when in 
 Vanity Fair and elsewhere he forgets that one cannot move in 
 two universes at once. Children, who are unbiassed critics, 
 rightly condemn the Punch and Judy showman who makes his 
 fingers visible on the stage. 
 
 THE SPONTANEOUS. 
 
 This law involves the two different ideas of spontaneousness 
 and inevitability. An artist's great work is rarely spontaneous, 
 but it must always appear so. We take less interest in the 
 prize chrysanthemum if we have seen the gardener at work on 
 it with his clippers. A temple adds no beauty to a landscape 
 
90 THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 
 
 unless it seems to have grown out of the ground, and not to 
 have been laboriously built upon it. In literature the " purple 
 patch" is held not to mar the unity of design, when and when 
 only the splendour of the purple blinds the reader to the 
 existence of the patch. 
 
 THE INEVITABLE. 
 
 Inevitableness is a different conception. It is what Coleridge 
 termed " untranslatableness," and Flaubert " le mot juste" 
 A thought may wait for years for its soul-mate and may form 
 many temporary alliances, until at last genius fixes it for ever 
 in its lasting habitation and its name. Several Scots poets, 
 for example, wrote " Auld Lang Syne " before Burns, and 
 wrote it well, but Burns made it his own for ever just because 
 he made the sentiment seem spontaneous and the expression 
 inevitable. Here, for example, is the seventeenth century 
 
 Semphill : 
 
 Should auld acquaintance be forgot 
 
 And never thought upon, 
 The flames of love extinguished 
 
 And freely past and gone ? 
 Is thy kind heart now grown so cold, 
 
 In that loving breast of thine, 
 That thou canst never once reflect 
 
 On auld lang syne? 
 
 This becomes with the eighteenth century Allan Ramsay : 
 
 Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
 
 Tho' they return with scars ? 
 These are the noblest hero's lot 
 
 Obtain'd in glorious wars. 
 Welcome, my Varo, to my breast, 
 
 Thy arms about me twine, 
 And make me once again as blest 
 
 As I was lang syne. 
 
 Semphill's would have contented us for ever, had not Burns 
 seen with a flash of genius that "auld acquaintance" is of the 
 masculine gender, and that therefore the song must be dedi- 
 cated to Bacchus and not to Venus, The criticism was as 
 
THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 91 
 
 inevitable as Burns' version. What lover could sing of his 
 love even in the sober North as " auld acquaintance " ? 
 Romeo and Juliet's " auld acquaintance " I 
 
 The sentiment, although Semphill probably borrowed it 
 himself, seemed to come (though we know it did not) straight 
 from Burns' own heart and so is what we call spontaneous ; the 
 words seem made to fit exactly the sentiment, and so we call 
 them inevitable ; and hence, we call Burns' song both original 
 and great. 
 
 (c) THE LAW OF ECONOMY. 
 
 The third canon is the law of economy of effort, or simpli- 
 city, which was expressed by our greatest artist in the formula, 
 " Brevity is the soul of wit," and by " wit " the Elizabethan 
 signified " artistry." Just as in the game of golf the best 
 player is held to be he who holes out in the smallest number 
 of strokes, so in the craft of letters he, who produces the 
 effect intended with the least apparent expenditure of effort, is 
 reckoned in the ranks of genius. 
 
 " Schiller" said Coleridge, " has the material sublime ; to 
 produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws 
 infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father 
 in an old tower. But Shakespeare drops a handkerchief, and 
 the same or greater effects follow." 
 
 When Chaucer wishes to describe the avarice of his doctor 
 he writes, " For gold in physic is a cordial, Therefore he loved 
 gold in special ; the well-stocked larder of an English country 
 gentleman, It snowed in his house of meat and drink " ; the 
 spirit of a true student, " And gladly would he learn, and gladly 
 teach" It is this marvellous economy of effort of his that 
 sends us to find his match to those geniuses of the highest 
 flight, to Dante with his countless lines of such magic as " Amor 
 che a nulV amato, amare perdona " ; to Shakespeare with his 
 " Grief Jills the room up of my absent child," with his "multi- 
 tudinous seas incarnadine " ; to Milton and to Keats and to all 
 the great masters of literature. Genius in art is the ability to 
 
92 THE SUM OF THE MATTEK. 
 
 do in a stroke what fumblers fail to do in many. Annotated 
 editions of great poets furnish rich store of examples. Milton 
 wrote : 
 
 No light, but rather darkness visible. 
 
 His best annotator writes : " What M. means is not absolute 
 darkness ('pitch darkness,' as we say), for then the 'sights 
 of woe ' would have been invisible but the gloom which half 
 conceals and half reveals objects, and itself (to borrow Pope's 
 words) strikes the sense no less than light.' Mr. Beeching 
 reminds us of Job x., 22." 
 
 In such ways do our annotators throw a light upon great 
 poets' visible darknesses. 
 
 (D) BE THOU CLEAR. 
 
 The fourth great commandment which underlies the modern 
 practice of criticism is what we have already mentioned as the 
 supreme command of grammar, and that is the prohibition of 
 obscurity. Be thou as clear as the matter allows. It is, of 
 course, the supreme touchstone for prose, the language 
 primarily of reason and of logic, but it has its uses even in the 
 criticism of poetry, the language of feeling which has a logic 
 of its own. 
 
 Speaker and singer, prose-writer, orator, and poet, agree in 
 this that they have in their minds a message and an audience. 
 We can admit to the full the poet's proud claim to be, as Plato 
 put it, eK<pu)i> KL e'vflcos, out of his mind and filled with God's 
 mind ; we can admit that poetry is a sort of divine enthusiasm, 
 or to use Shelley's phrases, " eternal truth ... as existing in 
 the mind of the Creator," " Elysian light," " the interpenetra- 
 tion of a diviner nature " ; and yet we must, in all humility 
 and in full consciousness of our own grosser clay, tell the poet 
 that his poetry is some kind of a message and has some kind 
 of a meaning. The meaning may transcend mere verbal ex- 
 pression, it may contain 
 
THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 93 
 
 Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 
 Into a narrow act, 
 
 Fancies that broke through language and escaped, 
 
 but still it must produce upon the hearts rightly attuned for 
 the message the feelings that are aroused by the wordless 
 telepathy of thought ; the chords of the sensitive heart must 
 quiver in unison with the chords of the poet's lyre. Not more 
 than this must the poet claim, nor does the true poet claim 
 more than this, though the quack, the sham poet will. If we 
 can haltingly, and each according to his degree, follow with 
 our minds the sublimity of the message of Christ, our sub- 
 limest poet ; of Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Shelley, and 
 Francis Thompson ; we must regard it as an impertinence to 
 be told by a critic that Browning and Blake are so often 
 obscure on account of the transcendency of their thought 
 which soars above all human ken. For such a critic the prag- 
 matic answer is ready, " Do you understand in any way the 
 message ? If so, tell us, and let us judge." 
 
 The most useful fable for critics is that of the great mystic 
 Hans Christian Andersen's, the Story of the King and the 
 Suit Invisible to all but the Righteous, and every true prag- 
 matic critic keeps this allegory pasted in his blotting-book 
 along with Pope's shrewd pieces of common sense : 
 
 True expression, like the unchanging sun, 
 Clears and improves whate'er it shines upon ; 
 It gilds all objects, but it alters none 
 A vile conceit in pompous words expressed 
 Is like a clown in regal purple dressed 
 Things seem large which we thro' mists descry, 
 Dullness is ever apt to magnify 
 
 And finally. 
 
 The worst avarice is that of sense. 
 
 Even to so great a writer and a teacher as Browning un- 
 doubtedly is, the critic has the right of saying, Be obscure at 
 your own peril. No bird ever sings for himself alone. A 
 poet is no chimaera " bombinating in vacuo" but a living inter- 
 preter to living men. Sublimity of thought will explain the 
 
94 THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 
 
 difficulty of the Pauline Epistles, but they are not wholly 
 obscure to the man of good will, and so still live : Bordello, 
 Fifine at the Fair, much of Meredith's poetry, are obscure to 
 men of excellent good will, and so remain with many volumes 
 of metaphysical verse shrouded in dust, especially as the 
 meaning which literary detectives have managed with trouble 
 to squeeze out of them does not seem to be worth all the pain- 
 ful trouble of extraction. Sweetness of melody will atone 
 for absence of intelligible meaning, and so, much of Swinburne, 
 for example, will be judged as we judge piano music, and its 
 meaning will be just that, but if a poet cannot sing, then 
 critics must not pretend with all the solemnity of the augurs 
 of old to extract poetry from what after all are but the 
 grotesque hiccups of genius in its cups. 
 
 When Byron ended Stanza 180 Canto IV. of his Childe 
 Haroltfs Pilgrimage with the so-called mistake in grammar 
 known to every school-boy, " there let him lay," Browning, 
 who detested the philosophy of his brother poet, took it upon 
 him to correct this solecism in his Fifine at the Fair in the 
 following words : 
 
 Him who egged on hounds to bay, 
 
 Go curse, in the poultry yard, his kind : " there let him lay " 
 The swan's one addled egg : which yet shall put to use, 
 Rub breast-bone warm against, so many a sterile goose ! 
 
 Here Browning palpably can see the mote in the eye of 
 Byron's muse but is blind to the beam in his own muse's 
 vision. Grammar being so often, when not based on logic, a 
 mere convention or fashion, being after all the science of 
 expressing our thoughts with logical clearness, forgives any 
 infringement of its temporary rules more easily than an offence 
 against its eternal law, "Be thou clear, as clear as the matter 
 will allow." Browning therefore fails here and in so many 
 other places as an artist, because he cannot plead that it is 
 the depth of the thought rather than his own careless clum- 
 siness of execution, which makes his work too often as obscure 
 as the worst stanzas of the worst Icelandic court-poet. On 
 
THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 95 
 
 the other hand, Byron could have pleaded precedent in English 
 literature for his usage of " lay," could have pleaded that he 
 was using the language of a Wordsworthian rustic in a state 
 of excitement, could have pleaded that poetic licence would 
 cover the case of the intransitive use of an active verb, that 
 it was no worse, in fact, than writing " there let him wash " 
 would have been. But Browning's sin is the worse because 
 he missed his effect, and this is judging the poet, as we must, 
 by his own laws. Browning meant to say something very 
 cutting against Byron, something that would be always re- 
 membered, but for the ordinary English reader he might as 
 well have written his satire in cuneiform on a brick and have 
 buried it. 
 
 Who has not heard of the intolerable boorishness of some 
 North-countryman being excused on the ground that after all 
 "he has a heart of gold." A good excuse when enough gold 
 can be found to make it worth the mining, but what if the 
 mining is worth more than the few grains to be extracted ? 
 That there are grains of gold in the first half of Sordello or in 
 the most uncouth of Meredith's verse no one but a fool would 
 deny, but the question which the critic must answer is, Are 
 they worth the mining ? We who have so much rich payable 
 ground in Spenser, Goethe, Dante, Shelley, and the thousand 
 other goldfields of Parnassus, which it is pleasurable ease to 
 work in beautiful air amid the songs of birds, must not be 
 blamed if we neglect the possible grains of gold to be found in 
 the unworkable quartz of a Cleveland or a Meredith. It is 
 the business of the critic to draw, like Moses, water out of the 
 rock, but the faithful Israelites would probably not have drunk 
 the water of Horeb if they had been not in the desert but in a 
 land flowing with milk and honey. At any rate, it is the 
 peculiar function of the critic to make clear to us that the 
 rock-water has a wonderful flavour all its own. And this our 
 modern critic, Augustine Birrell, has done for some of the 
 "alleged obscurities" in Robert Browning, and has thus 
 achieved one of a critic's functions. No one has summed up 
 
96 THE SUM OF THE MATTEK. 
 
 more neatly than he has in the same essay the implications of 
 the critic's fourth commandment : "A sane man ought not to 
 be unintelligible. Lucidity is good everywhere, for all time 
 and in all things, in a letter, in a speech, in a book, in a poem. 
 Lucidity is not simplicity. A lucid poem is not necessarily an 
 easy one. A great poet may tax our brains, but he ought not 
 to puzzle our wits. We may often have to ask in humility 
 What does he mean ? but not in despair, What can he mean ? " 
 
 "... Misty, therefore, the poet has our kind permission 
 sometimes to be ; but muddy never ! " 
 
 And if that is the sum and substance of the matter for 
 poetry, how much more applicable is this to all prose ? 
 
 We have read many defences for the opacity of so much of 
 George Meredith's prose. The most cogent one can conceive 
 is the essential difficulty inherent in popular exposition of all 
 philosophy, and especially of psychology. We admit the 
 difficulty, but deny that the opacity inheres so much in 
 Meredith's subject-matter as in his manner. Meredith, we 
 would submit, was not born to teach philosophy ; William 
 James, Shakespeare, and Browning, each in his different way, 
 was. William James could have made Einstein's difficult 
 theory clear, if he had set himself the task. Browning, in his 
 Ring and Book, did set himself a difficult psychological task, 
 and his expression is as clear as his thought. Shakespeare 
 puts a lamp inside the human soul. George Meredith in his 
 worst moments makes the easy difficult, or the difficult more 
 difficult, by the arduous gymnastics of a verbal contortionist. 
 If the object of writing in prose is to convey clearly one's 
 thought as one thinks it, then we must condemn Meredith and 
 all his imitators, either on the ground of their having used 
 prose, or on the ground of failure in their conceptions, for, as 
 Benedetto Croce teaches in his ^Estetica, expression and 
 intuition are not two, but one ; what is obscurely expressed is 
 obscurely intuited ; or, as John Morley wrote of Emerson, a 
 great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpreta- 
 tion. Still the obscurest work of men like Meredith, who are 
 
THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 97 
 
 great thinkers, has its value in this, that it remains a vast un- 
 sorted heap, whence some future genius will, like a Moliere, 
 find his gold and mint it as his own. As has been well said 
 of Walt Whitman's work, it is not poetry but materials for 
 poetry. He has dumped down valuable material for some 
 future builder. Obscurity in prose is, then, the greatest 
 fault unless it is wilful. This is the paradox involved in the 
 commandment, Be Thou Clear ! 
 
 The writer must primarily be judged by his own intentions, 
 so that if his intentions involve mist and obscurity, we may 
 have to praise him for the success which attended his efforts. 
 Thus a great orator on the hustings, in Parliament, or at the 
 bar, may deliberately intend to hide his real meaning, to throw 
 dust in people's eyes, or to leave himself, as was said of Glad- 
 stone's great oratory, several loopholes out of which he may 
 wriggle, if the need arises. An oracular obscurity would then 
 be praised, but we can think of no other occasion, except in 
 an enigma, on which it can be forgiven. Even here it will 
 receive only the modified praise which is given to prudence or 
 cunning or self -protection, compared with the highest praise 
 which self-sacrifice, frankness, and courage obtain even in 
 their literary expression. 
 
 (E) RETICENCE. 
 
 (i) Artistic. 
 
 Reticence is, of course, not to be confused with obscurity, 
 the former being often a virtue, the latter a vice, or, if wilful, 
 at the least a cowardice. Reticence takes two forms, the first 
 that of the never to be sufficiently praised literary tact, which 
 is part of the economy of effort we have already discussed. A 
 great writer or speaker will have so worked upon the minds of 
 his readers or audience, and have led them so far with him, 
 that the smallest significant hint will cause them to complete 
 the picture far more fully and richly than he could do it in 
 hundreds of strokes. This is part of the hypnotism of genius 
 and one of its happiest effects. Readers, especially in these 
 
 M. c. 7 
 
98 THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 
 
 days when reticence seems to be a lost art, when verse-writers 
 vie with novelists in the indecent exposure of the more squalid 
 portions of their minds, are truly grateful to an artist who 
 leaves something to the imagination, who sometimes pays his 
 audience the welcome compliment of crediting it with some 
 brains. Webster, who so often sins against artistic reticence, 
 will in his greatest play put into the mouth of Ferdinand at 
 the sight of his murdered sister's body : " Cover her face ; 
 mine eyes dazzle ; she died young" and the pathos surges 
 tumultuously in our souls far higher than a speech which left 
 nothing to the imagination could have effected. Shakespeare 
 does this, of course, times without number : " Put out the 
 light and then put out the light!" "Poor Toms a-cold" 
 " The little dogs and all. Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, 
 see, they bark at me ! " Browning will write in that marvellous 
 dramatic monologue, My Last Duchess, the pregnant words : 
 " I gave commands ; Then all smiles stopped together." One 
 could fill a volume with examples of such artistic reticence 
 from Virgil, Tacitus, Dante, Milton, and all the supreme 
 artists. 
 
 (ii) Moral. 
 
 The second kind of reticence is moral reticence, the golden 
 mean between the indecencies of prudishness and of coarse- 
 ness. If one may judge from much of our most modern 
 literature, it is out of fashion at present, at least in fiction. 
 Ever since Matthew Arnold attacked the Philistine (who had 
 and has many good points), ever since Guy de Maupassant 
 and Anatole France, and the French short story with ob- 
 scenity treated artistically as its motif, became the model for 
 our fiction, our writers shrink from the one extreme, that of 
 prudishness. They are afraid of being sneered at as not up- 
 to-date, and so are desirous of spicing their work in order to 
 appeal to the most universal of all feelings, suppressed or un- 
 suppressed lust. Provincial writers wish to be considered 
 Parisian, artistic, men above petty prejudices, and, in their 
 desire to shock the prude, disgust the normal man of normal 
 
THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 99 
 
 human decency of feeling. We have, too, shoals of women 
 writers of fiction, who feel that they are hampered by their 
 sex in their struggle for the high rungs on the ladder of 
 success. They cannot climb in petticoats, and so they fling 
 away modesty. Their one aim is to be virile. They catch 
 at the man's coarseness, but carry off merely the surface dirt. 
 And they write like strong men in hysteria. Yet they have 
 not shrewdly gauged market values, for the great mass of 
 simple readers they long to reach and to shock, buy up 
 hundreds of thousands of copies of the work of the school 
 which is the extreme opposite, the work of our Florence 
 Barclay or of the American Gene Stratton Porter, which is 
 an over-sweet mixture with too little variety in flavour. The 
 works of this latter school are clean, certainly, as clean as 
 soap, but one's mind cannot live on soap alone. On the other 
 hand, the virile school, the male and female writers of strong 
 fiction, who come two by two into the ark of realism, do not 
 really shock us or surprise us, as much as they fondly imagine. 
 They write the dirty little page or the dirty little chapter, which 
 is to sell their book, and decent folk shrug their shoulders, for 
 it is after all vieux jeu ; we have read our Freud. It is the 
 oldest buffoonery in the world ; it is prehistoric ; it is found 
 in the jungle and in the monkey-house of any zoo. The 
 eighteenth century was not mealy-mouthed, but Pope assuredly 
 did hit the blot when he said, " Want of decency is want of 
 sense." When a rustic zany has exhausted his poor coarse 
 humour, he has from time immemorial resorted to indecency to 
 eke out the poverty of his wit. 
 
 Modern writers defend unreticence on many grounds, realism 
 in art, honi soit^ adult food for the adult mind on every 
 ground except the real one, the open secret, the pathological 
 secret which everybody knows. To begin with, it is not 
 realism. It is not the whole truth, but only a small part of 
 the truth, that man is mere animal. There is quite a large 
 world outside the wards reserved for nervous, functional, and 
 mental disorders ; a world of health and nature which looks 
 
100 THE SUM OF THE MATTEE. 
 
 at natural things in a natural way. The unreticent writer 
 makes healthy things unhealthy, and sees the world with 
 his own unhealthy squint. A realist who is also an artist 
 knows that the primary duty of the artist is selection. One 
 selects according to one's purpose, one's bent, one's own desires. 
 As has been noted more than once, our dabblers in coprology 
 fail in artistry where the French succeed, and many reasons 
 have been assigned for it, one being a difference in the genius 
 of the two languages. It has to be remembered that form, 
 though the greatest factor, is not the sole factor in art : the 
 matter, the choice of material has also its importance, wax- 
 work can never hope to rank as high as marble sculpture, nor 
 the dung-beetle to receive the admiration given to the bee. 
 
 REALISM AND RETICENCE. 
 
 The unreticent writer offends, too, in another way against 
 realism. Reticence is part of realism. We are not seeking 
 to dispraise writers like G. B. Shaw, who know how to attack 
 our conventional morality, which is so often mere etiquette, 
 our hypocrisies, and the conventional shams of a civilisation 
 grown luxurious, boldly and vigorously and in plain Saxon 
 without ever transgressing the line which separates moral 
 reticence from bad taste. And yet, as he himself has more 
 than once complained, a feeble-minded censorship has confused 
 in his regard plain Biblical speech with the pruriency from 
 which it is so far removed. Shaw at times may offend against 
 artistic reticence ; he will let his characters prattle ; he will 
 occasionally forget the artist's great adage that the half is 
 often greater than the whole ; but he never offends against 
 moral reticence, simply because he has the instincts of a 
 gentleman, which instincts are as real as realism. No, the 
 mistake which the unreticent make is want of taste, of artistic 
 tact. They emphasise wrongly. Nature is not indecent, but 
 an inartistic farmer may emphasise his manure-heap to such 
 an extent that the atmosphere of his living-room may become 
 
THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 101 
 
 unbreathably indecent. Here the lady-writer who pants to 
 be virile and only succeeds in being naughty, and her 
 hysterical male confrere, are realists not as Nature is, but as 
 a sloppy farmer is. In short, some decencies are fundamental 
 and found among savages just as much as among civilised 
 men, so that reticence and restraint are the true strongrealism, 
 and lack of reticence and indecency mark the abnormal and 
 the degenerate. 
 
 Reticence is, then, a literary commandment, and we con- 
 clude with the poet Schiller that an artist is known by what 
 he omits, and with the Greek poetess Corinna that it is better 
 to sow from the hand than from the basket, 
 (iii) Reticence in Ornamentation. 
 
 This leads us to discuss ornamentation, as over-ornamenta- 
 tion sins against artistic reticence. Here a distinction has to 
 be made between poetry, rhetoric or prose-poetry, and prose. 
 
 Ornamentation of every sort has always been the chief 
 prerogative of poetry, and secondarily of rhetoric. We recall 
 Keats' advice to Shelley, " Load every rift with ore." Excel- 
 lent advice when the poet or orator has the artistic tact and 
 can distinguish gold from tinsel ; dangerous, one would think, 
 if it confirmed the popular delusion that a poet sits down 
 deliberately to decorate his thoughts. This is artifice rather 
 than true art and destroys spontaneity in the work. A true 
 poet is not like the wanton who paints her face in a glass : a 
 true poem has Nature's own colouring and is intuited as 
 expressed. This in no way forbids " the labour of the file," 
 any more than the prohibition of rouge vetoes a natural atten- 
 tion to toilet and dress. Over-ornamentation is, of course, a 
 vice in a poem as well as in a prose-composition, but the im- 
 propriety is a question of relativity and can only be judged by 
 the effect proposed to himself by the artist and by the material 
 he is handling. 
 
 Walter Bagehot (d. 1877j, a modern pragmatic critic, 
 whose essays are models in criticism, divides in his essay on 
 Browning and Tennyson poetry into three types, pure (wrongly 
 
102 THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 
 
 called classical), ornate (wrongly called romantic), and 
 grotesque ; Wordsworth and Milton being types of the first, 
 Tennyson of the second, and Browning of the last. He says 
 that the essence of ornate art is to accumulate round the typi- 
 cal object everything which could be said about it, and that 
 Enoch Arden, e.g. in classical style would not have taken 
 three pages. The defect of the ornate, or our over- 
 ornamentation, he finds to be want of simplicity and definition : 
 nothing is described as it is, everything has about it an 
 atmosphere of something else. He thinks the modern prefer- 
 ence for the ornate and the grotesque to be the mark of a 
 semi-educated age. He was happy in the moment of his death 
 or he might have lived to have read our latest monstrosities, the 
 vermifications of some of our verslibristes. Bagehot ascribes 
 choice of the ornate style to artistic imperfection in character- 
 isation : 
 
 " The sudden millionaires of the present day hope to disguise 
 their social defects by buying old places and hiding among 
 aristocratic furniture ; just so a great artist, who has to deal 
 with characters artistically imperfect, will use an ornate style> 
 will Jit them into a scene where there is much else to look 
 at." 
 
 While Bagehot's thought is always stimulating, I am inclined 
 to think that in this essay he is less acute than usual. Surely 
 the real distinction to be drawn is between the ornate and the 
 flamboyant : ornate with restraint being classical, ornate with- 
 out restraint bad Gothic. Through not seeing this distinction 
 he is less fair to Virgil and Tennyson. It is, one would say, 
 impossible to draw the line between pure and ornate ; many 
 purple patches will be pure enough if the stuff can only carry 
 the rich embroidery. Some subjects, too, seem to lend them- 
 selves naturally to pure, others to ornate treatment. Contrast, 
 for example, Keats' Ode to a Nightingale or his Grecian Urn 
 with his St. Agnes' Eve. One element in the greatness of 
 Keats is the inspiration of choosing infallibly the style which 
 will suit the subject. 
 
THE SUM OP THE MATTER. 103 
 
 No subject, however, can carry off the over-ornate style, the 
 rococo, or the flamboyant. Neither the slimmest Duchess in 
 Mayfair, nor the Jewess the most opulent in charms in Johan- 
 nesburg could carry off the barbaric bedizenments of Petticoat 
 Lane. In literature as in life over-ornamentation proclaims 
 unsoundness in the essentials : 
 
 Still to be powder'd, still perfum'd ; 
 Lady, it is to be presumed, 
 Though art's hid causes are not found, 
 All is not sweet, all is not sound. 
 
 One would think that this is a question which can be 
 decided only by judicial criticism, those instincts or prejudices 
 of Aristotle's "man of sound sense," by the man of refine- 
 ment. 
 
 Women of taste know that ornament is best when it seems 
 not ornament but part of the wearer, that a well-dressed woman 
 is never conspicuous ; and such critics have no difficulty in 
 discriminating between the suitable and the flashy. One 
 would think that it is the same for a poem or a speech. If 
 one feels that the ornamentation is an integral part of either, 
 that the ornaments do not by their dazzle distract attention 
 from the reality, then a critic cannot bring accusations of 
 floridity and over-decoration. Youth and inexperience will 
 tend to attach over-importance to the glitter rather than to the 
 substance, as may be seen from occasional failures of that 
 supreme but youthful master Keats, and from the perennial 
 popularity of Macaulay's weaker qualities with youthful 
 readers. On the other side one must always remember that 
 there must be artists for every age, and a pragmatic critic is 
 not likely to fall into the mistake of thinking that the tastes 
 of a man of forty or a woman of thirty are a touchstone for all 
 literature. We would not sneer to-day, for example, at the 
 laureate of the nursery as " Namby-Pamby," but we would 
 put upon an infinitely higher pedestal another nursery-laureate, 
 Hans Christian Andersen, because he in his wider sweep took 
 in Ambrose Philips, and higher circles as well. 
 
104 THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 
 
 In prose from the very beginning of literary criticism what 
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus called the "Asiatic" style, or 
 what we term the Florid, or " Babu " English, or the bombas- 
 tic, has always been denounced. 
 
 Prose is for use, poetry for beauty. Hence any ornamenta- 
 tion which hampers use has unreservedly to be condemned. 
 
 PROSE AND THE NOVEL. 
 
 Take the novelist as an example. His primary intention is, 
 or should be, to tell a story, not to keep a secret. Psycho- 
 logical dispositions and minute character analyses, if they 
 interfere with his plain tale, or sentences over-elaborated 
 through a diseased passion for verbal jugglery, are plainly out 
 of place. A modern novel must have psychology, we freely 
 grant, but it must not be psychology. There has been in the 
 world no greater psychologist than Shakespeare, but he never 
 reminds us of it. With him we seem to study our psychology 
 in the open air, with the lesser artist Browning in a laboratory, 
 with George Meredith in a diving-bell. Our physiological 
 machine functions best when we are least aware of it. A 
 lecture on the physiology of the digestive apparatus is (or was 
 in happier times) out of place at a dinner party. But not less 
 is a psychological lecture out of place (or will be in happier 
 times) in that feast of reason known as a novel. The psycho- 
 logy works best when it is least obtruded : it is the salt in the 
 dish which flavours but does not dominate. And knowing 
 this Lawrence Merrick has written four novels of remarkable 
 power, and Laurels and the Lady, the greatest short story in 
 the language. 
 
 Unfortunately, this criticism is old-fashioned (but also, we 
 hope, prophetic) because to-day many novels are so formless 
 that it is impossible to define the novel as an art term or form in 
 art. The novel has become, it has well been said, the Gladstone 
 bag of literature : anything may be squeezed into it and it 
 bulges out to an alarming extent. The old idea that a novel 
 was a prose epic with plot and characterisation has been 
 
THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 105 
 
 abandoned. We have had the novel with a purpose which could 
 still be a novel, and we have come to the novel without purpose, 
 coherence, or finality. The revolution has been as great as if, 
 in the building trade, futurist builders should insist on being 
 paid for houses that had neither rooms nor doors nor roofs. 
 We have novelists who scamp their work and others who never 
 finish it. An artistic ending, they will tell you, leaves 
 much to the imagination and so does a house without a 
 staircase or roof. But, if we have read the signs of the times 
 aright, the future lies, as the past has lain, with the novel 
 with a plot. And such novels as the "Jean Christophe " genre 
 will be classed, not as novels, but as studies in sociology. 
 
 " It is not the business of the artist to supply brains," has, 
 of course, been said. This is true : that is the business of 
 the critic. But it is the business of the artist who, after all, 
 aims at affording pleasure, not to confuse one form of art with 
 another, a sonnet or a love story with a guessing competition 
 or a Chinese puzzle. A coterie may admire the cryptic artist 
 for many reasons, for fashion's sake, from affection for the 
 artist, or for the vanity of belonging to some exclusive or 
 secret society, but they know, as we know, that the marks of 
 a great artist are simplicity, largeness, universality of appeal. 
 With this specific difference as his test, a critic is safe in 
 classifying artists of every possible type. 
 
 As prose is for use, the final pragmatic test of the goodness 
 or badness of ornament in prose will be, Does the ornament 
 interfere with the use ? If so, good as the ornament may be 
 in itself, the prose is bad as prose. A great writer has com- 
 pared prose to a cup. A good cup is one from which we can 
 drink with ease. Ornaments may make the cup more valuable, 
 more beautiful, and yet not interfere with the goodness of the 
 cup. But it is clearly excess of ornamentation when the user 
 of the cup tears his lips and fails to get a drink. 
 
 Modern critics have here their great work, to preach in 
 season and out of season against effeminacy and Orientalism 
 in our Western art. It is comforting to feel that we have 
 
106 THE SUM OF THE MATTER. 
 
 critics of the virility of G. K. Chesterton and others like him 
 whose endeavour it is to bludgeon pretentiousness and euphuism 
 out of English literature. G. B. Shaw follows Dr. Johnson 
 in urging us to clear our minds of cant : the younger prag- 
 matic critics of the day are trying to free our literary style 
 from cant. They have much work to do because we have 
 much so-called poetry which is nothing but affectation, a cant 
 of bizarrerie, pretentious and obscure ugliness, the last whiffs 
 of miasma from our last decadence in the '90's of last century. 
 And our poets of promise like Ralph Hodgson, in whom we 
 augured another Keats, sing all too rarely and are leaving the 
 critics to fight their battle unaided. But, thanks to the critics, 
 the future looks bright. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 PROSPECTS OF CRITICISM. 
 
 In no previous age of literature has there been so much 
 excellent reviewing and criticism as there is to-day in England. 
 We expect this department of literature to flourish especially 
 after an epoch of literary creation, and to prepare the paths 
 for a coming creative epoch. We have every right to hope 
 that a time so rich in good criticism will have served to usher 
 in a glorious age of literature, which may surpass in accom- 
 plishment the Romantic Revival, or even, if it be possible, the 
 Age of Shakespeare. 
 
 The spirit of tolerance, of generosity, of looking to the 
 merits first and the faults second, of following a-Kempis's 
 golden advice, Look to what is said rather than to the sayer, 
 reigns to-day in the writers for our critical press as it has 
 never done before. The only adverse criticism of modern 
 reviewing that makes itself heard is that the business manager's 
 interests sometimes control the literary department ; that none 
 but advertisers need apply for recognition ; that the more 
 profitable the advertiser the better review will the advertised 
 book receive. This has been true of some periodicals happily 
 defunct, and may be true still of some second-rate journals, 
 but it is happily not true of our greater organs of criticism, 
 such as the Nation and Athenaeum, the Times Literary Sup- 
 plement, the London Mercury, the Saturday Westminster, 
 Punch, the Observer, or our larger monthlies and quarterlies. 
 
 Matthew Arnold could not to-day write of England with 
 truth : " What is at present the bane of criticism in this 
 country ? It is that practical considerations cling to it and 
 
 107 
 
108 PROSPECTS OF CRITICISM. 
 
 stifle it ; it subserves interests not its own ; our organs of 
 criticism are organs of men and parties having practical ends 
 to serve, and with them these practical ends are the first thing, 
 and the play of mind the second. . . : An organ like the Revue 
 des Deux Mondes . . . we have not ; but we have the Edin- 
 burgh Review, existing as an organ of the old Whigs . . . the 
 Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the Tories. . . . 
 The Dublin Review subordinates play of mind to the practical 
 business of Roman Catholicism." 
 
 To-day Whig and Tory have ceased to exist for the Edin- 
 burgh and Quarterly. One reads in an English review like 
 the Times Literary a highly sympathetic criticism of a book 
 of poems by an Irish Sinn Feiner, or of a book of prose by a 
 Russian Bolshevist. The Dublin Review will gracefully ac- 
 knowledge the literary merit of Exeter Hall. 
 
 And this modern spirit of disinterestedness in literary criti- 
 cism, this absence of provinciality, of sectarianism, are due in 
 the main to that great teacher whom we have just cited, to 
 Matthew Arnold himself, and to his master in this respect, 
 Thomas Carlyle, and to the line of teachers of criticism such 
 as Minto r Bagehot, Dowden, John Morley, Walter Raleigh, 
 George Saintsbury, Quiller-Couch, Richard Moulton, and 
 J. M. Robertson (to mention but a few names out of many), 
 who have carried on and are carrying on the same generous 
 tradition. 
 
 OUR FREEDOM. 
 
 In English poetry freedom has ever been the note of our 
 greatest achievement all down the royal line, from Chaucer to 
 Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton ; from the great Eliza- 
 bethans to Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats ; from the 
 great Romantics to Browning. Our criticism to-day is great 
 because it is also free. 
 
 Freedom, however, is a much-abused term and a fruitful 
 mother of fallacies. Absolute freedom is, of course, a 
 chimaera, and in literature, as in politics, freedom implies 
 
PROSPECTS OF CRITICISM. 109 
 
 some government : that is to say, some restraint, the minimum 
 amount of restraint which is compatible with rational civilised 
 existence. A free criticism which denied the existence of all 
 laws is as much an absurdity as free verse or free love, both 
 love and verse implying bonds and duties. One is free to love 
 or not to love, as one may choose, but not to be a free lover ; 
 one is free to write drama or not r but one may not write free 
 drama, that is drama, let us say, without characters. It is 
 important to insist upon this because the idea of freedom is too 
 intoxicating a draught for many minds, and we find to-day a 
 few critics writing as if the freedom of criticism implied 
 anarchy. Nothing is farther from the truth, and the healthy 
 instincts of the unsophisticated general reader are right when 
 he refuses to call formless verse poetry, or a plotless play 
 drama, just as the simple countryman is right when he refuses 
 to call butter some chemical product of the town. There is 
 no dogmatic tyranny in all this, produce as much vers libre a& 
 you like, but at least be as honest as your commercial con- 
 geners, and for heaven's sake find a new name for your 
 artificial product, and don't call your margarine " free butter." 
 There is no Trade Label Act in literature, and booksellers 
 cannot, unfortunately, be made to refund money obtained for 
 volumes labelled " Poetry " which are deficient in mental food 
 values. 
 
 THE USE OF THE LABEL. 
 
 Do not imagine that this is a plea for a return to critical 
 bondage. It has always seemed to me that the modern 
 denunciation of labels in criticism or philosophy has been 
 considerably overdone. Labels are an extremely useful 
 institution, and save many dangerous mistakes, as every good 
 housewife or chemist knows. " No labels in matters of the 
 mind," shriek many modern philosophers. This is a pretty 
 cry, calculated to catch the unwary thinker. But what if the 
 modern dislike of labels in philosophy is due to there being 
 nothing to label ? Formlessness, chaos, wish-wash, cannot be 
 
110 PROSPECTS OF CRITICISM. 
 
 labelled, but a Descartes, Spinoza, or a Berkeley can. We 
 can label an honest art product such as butter or a sonnet, and 
 write a scientific description upon the label. This we claim 
 to be the special critical function of the analyst, literary or 
 otherwise. Despite the superior person whose dictum is very 
 much quoted in philosophical circles to-day, labels are an 
 imperative necessity. We have, of course, to see to the 
 qualifications of the label-writer. I may well be wrong, but 
 it has always seemed to me that the frequently heard boast, 
 " I refuse to wear a label, to be ticketed ! " comes quite as 
 often from timidity, from fear of having to make a defence, 
 and of being found out, as from the proud gesture of unbend- 
 ing independence and freedom from servility which it is too 
 often meant to convey. With some critics and some phil- 
 osophers it connotes a readiness to throw missiles at the Aunt 
 Sallies of other philosophers, especially dead ones, combined 
 with a desire to conceal prudently one's own target. Criticism 
 in fact, all philosophy is a battlefield in which to shrink 
 from regimentals is due, let us put it charitably, from the not 
 unnatural desire to avoid drawing the fire of an enemy. 
 
 Nature herself wears labels large, flaunting labels for 
 those who have eyes to see them. Nor is this surprising if 
 we remember that, as we have said before, Nature is part of 
 Art, which in its widest sense means the expression of design 
 existing in some mind. Our greatest thinkers have always 
 seen this : witness Wordsworth on every page, witness Shake- 
 speare, who tells us explicitly : 
 
 Yet Nature is made better by no mean, 
 But Nature makes that mean. So over that art, 
 Which you say adds to Nature, is an art, 
 That Nature makes. . . . 
 
 This is an art, 
 
 Which does mend Nature change it rather, but 
 The art itself is Nature. 
 
 Epic, drama, lyric, criticism are, therefore, natural products, 
 like oaks or elms, beehives or loaves of bread. Each has its 
 
PROSPECTS OF CRITICISM. Ill 
 
 essence, each has its law of kind, and you, poet, gardener, or 
 baker, defy them at your peril. Horace and eighteenth- 
 century criticism said the same, and let us always honour them 
 for it and for the service they rendered to literature. Here is 
 where our best modern criticism departs from its parent, 
 Romantic Criticism, in the humble confession : We are not 
 the people, nor will wisdom die with us ! 
 
 Let us not, with all our prized freedom, despise, then, 
 labels and laws which are found everywhere in Nature. These 
 laws a critic, literary or scientific, learns inductively by ex- 
 perience and applies judicially by the condensed experience 
 known as taste and tact : 
 
 The harvest of a quiet eye 
 
 That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 
 
 Such laws are not now held to be those arbitrary commands 
 issued to the Eternal Artist by the man of science or to the 
 poet by the critic, as in the bad old days of materialism, which, 
 if the poet tried to keep, he could get this praise only : 
 
 A Poet ! He hath put his heart to school, 
 Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staff 
 Which Art hath lodged within his hand must laugh 
 By precept only, and shed tears by rule : 
 
 but those very laws of his art and being as an artist, which he 
 cannot disobey and remain artist. 
 
 Just as to-day the man of science is proclaiming the eman- 
 cipation of God from the shackles of evolution, so, too, is the 
 critic preaching the essential freedom of the artist. We no 
 longer say that the age of miracles is past ; we are ever, in 
 fact, announcing new ones. We look on a linnet with reverent 
 eyes, and stand in awe at the miracle of a Francis Thompson 
 or an Edith Cavell. We are beginning, too, to perceive 
 dimly that all freedom consists in obeying a higher law, and 
 that law and freedom are not contradictories but correlative 
 terms. Acting on the knowledge of this truth is the one 
 
112 PROSPECTS OF CRITICISM. 
 
 thing wanting to save the world, whether of politics or of art, 
 from its present state of anarchy. Only under the law is 
 there freedom : only the truth will make us free. We must 
 go humbly back to the old, sane ideal which makes the true 
 poet one who has given up his own life for the divine vitality. 
 
 How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold? 
 
 Because the lovely little flower is free 
 Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold ; 
 
 And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree 
 Comes not by casting in a formal mould, 
 
 But from its own divine vitality. 
 
 And what these laws are, in so far as they affect the critic of 
 to-day, has been set forth, I hope not altogether inadequately, 
 in this unpretentious essay, which here reaches its conclusion. 
 
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