Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

destructive criticism is, of course, of an iconoclastic kind; a good example of vigorous attacks on reputations of great currency will be found in Mr. Robertson's Modern Humanists. As to constructive criticism, it aims to establish new ideas and principles, to ascertain what may underlie the obvious and the ordinary that is really of more importance, and it aims to infer the unknown from the known. To its inductions and generalizations we owe whatever literary principles we have.

As has been said these types are merely tendencies, and others may be recognized. Viewed with regard to any group of contemporary authors they do not seem, unless the critics are openly hostile to each other, to amount to much. It is when one overlooks the whole field of criticism that they assume larger proportions and stand for different fashions and different vogues.

IV

As a matter of form, criticism may be defined as a body of more or less substantial and complete theses. If actual critical books and essays are looked at, criticism will appear to be no more than a great many separate essays and books each of which presents a pretty complete or a pretty scattering set of ideas, of which the latter type is the more moribund. The truth of this characterization will be borne out by an cursory glance at the contents of this volume. Here are fifteen essays, varying in length from five thousand to twenty-five thousand words. Nearly every one is a wellknown example of literary criticism, but practically all that can be said, truthfully, of them in common is that each presents the sincere views of the author, that each presents a pretty complete thesis, or central idea, and that each has been more or less widely read and accepted. Yet each, as the footnotes witness, is capable of extension and elaboration. Were they articles, treatises, and books instead of being essays, or were they short reviews and notes they would still be amenable to this description, to wit, that a critical article, essay, or book, is a piece of writing that aims to present a body of fact or theory about some author or book, - about literature, in short, to a reader or an audience. Criticism, then, may be judged on purely rhetorical grounds. Aside from the value or the currency of its ideas, it is good criticism in so far as it presents a clear thesis or a coherent body of facts. Like any other piece

of writing it is amenable to sound rhetorical principles. Its clearness is of prime importance.

Any occasion may serve for the display of criticism and any motive may serve for its expression. Desire to explain the vogue of an author; a zeal, as in Ruskin's Modern Painters, to see justice done; a personal interest and a wish to share a pleasure ; a desire, as with Arnold, to keep people from dying in their literary sins; the need of money all these are adequate motives for the production of critical work. Hence criticism may also take any form it pleases. Here, again, we recognize conventional types. The most frequent and most perishable is the book notice, a little shorter lived than the formal book-review; there is the introductory essay, preface, or prologue; there is the independent essay, the lecture or address, the critical biography, the literary history. These are matters of more or less formal occasion. They are not essentially different from any forms of discourse or public address, and goodness and badness, from this point of view, has been abundantly treated in books on formal rhetoric or the art of discourse.1

From the rhetorical point of view, criticism is sometimes spoken of as if it were a separate form or method of discourse, distinct, that is, from description, narration, exposition, and argumentation. Specific critical essays, however, are, like almost any actual writing, combinations of these forms. Criticism certainly employs description and narration, chiefly by way of illustration, and it is, as has been shown in the present section, in form, a matter of good exposition; in substance it is often largely argumentative.

V

The relation of criticism to argumentation naturally leads to the important question of the proof of which critical opinion is susceptible. Clearly this is a very vital question, and no one should shirk it; for the reason that people are prone to accept the word of critics as final, as fact, whereas the word of critics is, in the first instance, fact only in the sense that it exists in the mind of the critics. What, so to speak, is the objective proof for such opinions, what is the demonstration, what the sanctions for any critical opinion whatsoever? How can critical opinion about books be verified, be accepted as of wider than merely personal intuition and truth?

1

1 As, for example, R. C. Ringwalt's Modern American Oratory.

These questions are capable of no one answer.

It would be

a far easier matter for Leslie Stephen to prove the truth of his conclusions about Swift's work for Ireland, than for Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ultimate value of his touchstones, or for Shelley to substantiate the conception underlying his famous essay. Church records, histories of Ireland, some well-deduced conclusions from well-known facts would furnish Stephen with the proof that he needed. No such facts exist for the establishment of the presumption that a few selected lines of poetry may serve as a gauge for all literary production whatsoever, and most people, even if they grant the truth of Arnold's thesis, are put to it when they try to make a practical application thereof; one can find the "great note" in many things, if one has an ear for great notes or is willing to put up with a little self-deception. The proof for Shelley's position is as general as that which divides into opposing camps the philosophers of the origin of ideas and the reasons why there is such a thing as conscience. The demonstration of much of an essay like Bagehot's is a series of axiomatic (and brilliantly phrased) divisions; if you have a large number of the hoops and have arranged them well, and can shoot tolerably straight through them, you are sure, if you can draw Bagehot's bow of Odysseus, to make some palpable hit. Johnson arrives at his conclusions about the metaphysical poets largely by process of illustration. In a sense one may prove anything by illustration; it is very easy to find some sort of illustration for any thesis that one may wish; Shakespeare has been written down an ass by analysis and illustration; and the charge brought against the fairness and the finality of Johnson is that he failed to give examples of the really admirable side of the poets whom he happens almost immortally to have characterized.

Speaking, in general, there are two chief classes of proof for critical opinion in literary matters. These classes may be shown by an analysis of actual critical essays and books. The first and by far the most common sanction for critical opinion lies in personality, broadly regarded. The ability to express one's opinion tends to create believers in that opinion, and, though opposition may also be aroused, it is in this way that cults are formed and opinion becomes crystallized. Such opinions will be more or less widely held in proportion as they are useful and valuable to the people whom they chance to affect; what seems to be good will hold, what is not useful will perish or be regarded as a curious and

casual expression of by-gone taste. Agreement of opinion on a small scale constitutes a cult or school; on a large scale, held rather subconsciously, agreement goes to make taste, the most potent, though not a fixed, arbiter in matters literary. Personal opinion, then, expanded and diffused till it becomes an affair of wide-spread conviction, of pleasing certitude, finally of common-sense, is really the main sanction and source of support for all critical opinion whatsoever.

[ocr errors]

That this is so may be shown by two examples, which, though open to the charge of being illustrations, are nevertheless reasonably true. That Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and others are "classics can be demonstrated only by this method of universal consent, by this broad argument from personality. We do not necessarily read these classics, but we hold them dear, because there are in them elements of permanent value (as it seems) for mankind. It would, perhaps, be more strictly truthful to say that the word "classic" is a term of endearment that we have agreed to apply to books of a certain type, fulfilling certain requirements that we have agreed to like. However that may be, the point is that the place of such books exists in, receives its sanction through, is demonstrable by, popular favour, through a large number of years, over a wide extent of country. Like the American Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, a literary opinion is a human institution, and will be held so long as it is useful and no longer. The demonstration of its truth lies in its utility, just as tastes change and literary taste is modified, when they cease to be agreeable, pleasing, and satisfying.

Lest this should seem too pragmatic a view of criticism to hold, the other illustration may be cited. Just as a plain matter of fact. most criticism, as actually written, never trespasses on fundamental ground. Nine-tenths of the actual criticism is in perfect accord with the popular and traditional taste, with popular and traditional morality and ethics. Certain critics, to be sure, thrive and batten on dissent and paradox: but for the most part it is the rôle of the critic to receive as correct the current "collective" opinion which he is doing something to help form and crystallize. His task is then to find reasons for its correctness. These reasons naturally differ according to the temperament and taste of the critic, as in the variety of reasons found by the distinguished English critics of the first quarter of the nineteenth century for the assumption that Shakespeare is of unparalleled genius. Indeed,

the critics who make us see things in a different light are comparatively few and far between. Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, to name a few mentioned in this volume, have given new facts and have more or less widely inculcated new ways of looking at things.

The other method of demonstration is of a more scientific sort. What scientific checks, what argumentative methods of the convincing, rather than the persuasive, sort can be applied to critical opinion? Clearly the facts of any established branch of knowledge might be applied to opinions. Thus, modern philology undoubtedly teaches us that Dryden's view of Chaucer's verse is wrong, and a flitting acquaintance with the life of Shakespeare, the history of the stage, or the most common motive for human endeavour, would dispose of the Lamb's paradox that Shakespeare's plays are unfit for stage representation. The facts of philology, of literary history, and even the course of traditional authority are checks to opinion. This matter, of course, requires a very full exposition for satisfactory treatment.

[ocr errors]

Tests such as are to be used in a legal proceeding may be employed with some result. A critic, who is capable of contradicting himself, is, despite Emerson's famous dictum, not to be taken as a guide to ultimate truth. It is, naturally, reasonable to avoid any such guide to the kingdom of right in literary matters. A prevailing love of paradox, a scorn of common opinion, a contempt for authority, are often entertaining in a critic - where they do not do much real harm — but they do not contribute to one's certitude and peace of mind, if one is in quest of verity. Inaccuracy with regard to facts may, under some circumstances, tend to make a reader hesitate about accepting an opinion as really very authoritative, and yet some of our most charming literary critics are not always exact. Vagueness as to the main thesis may possibly cause one to doubt the minor dicta. It is, for example, a substantial charge to be made against much of Arnold's social criticism, and to some degree against his literary criticism, that after cautioning us against our besetting sins, he tells that we must have something "real." Now, "the real thing" is something that the shortcomings are not, but we never get any nearer to it than that; positively, it remains undefined, and causes beginners in Arnold to scratch their heads and chew their pencils, forgetting that Arnold is a very valuable critic by reason of bringing in new material and new points of view to the attention of his fellow-islanders. "Per

« AnteriorContinuar »