Part 17
As for contemporary literature, how much of it is there that we dare confidently add to the ranks even of the minor classics? One is sure of a certain number of lyrics, notably those of Mr. Yeats. But in prose one has to be more cautious. Prose, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch lamented the other day, has fallen upon styleless days, and without style it is difficult to live for ever. Plutarch has survived with a minimum of it, and so has Marcus Aurelius, and so has Balzac. But on the whole, it must be admitted that most of the great writers, whether in prose or poetry, wrote well. M. Gide, it must be admitted, writes admirably, though not wonderfully. Lady Rothermere does not communicate the delicacies of his style in _Prometheus Illbound_, but one could not read even this translation without feeling that the author is a man of skill and wit in words. I doubt, however, whether there is enough style in it to give it a place on a shelf with the world’s important books. Lady Rothermere does not assert, indeed, that _Prometheus Illbound_ is itself a masterpiece. She claims for it only that it is “the expression of the humorous side” of one of the world’s greatest minds. The humour, it seems to me, is too elusive to proceed from a great mind. Great minds, if they are humorous at all, are humorous in such a way that the ordinary man can see at least a part of the joke. M. Gide makes jokes for the favoured few. Many a man who is amused by the jokes of Plato and of Gibbon will be merely bewildered by the jokes of M. Gide. He enjoys the swift change of episode as Sterne does, but, whereas Sterne always saves the situation by giving us comic human beings passing across his haphazard stage, M. Gide does not create human beings at all. Lady Rothermere admits that “his world is a world of abstract ideas, under the action of which most of his characters move as marionettes.” She quotes: “Time and space are the boards which, with the help of our minds, have been set up by the innumerable truths of the universe as a stage for their own performances. And there we play our parts like determined, convinced, devoted, and voluptuous marionettes.” This dilettante and purely intellectual attitude to life is, I believe, impossible to a great mind. It is very tedious to hear sentimental people repeating the platitude that “great thoughts come from the heart”; but the platitude happens to be true. Shakespeare, it may be replied, in some of his moods saw the world as a stage and an “insubstantial pageant.” On the other hand, he never saw men and women as marionettes. He was always interested in character, and M. Gide is not. M. Gide is interested in problems. He is interested in ideas. He is not interested in men and women. He is a philosopher at play. Even when he introduces a tragic element into his work, as in _Le Roi Candaule_, we feel that the whole thing is a game, an experiment. A great deal of modern French literature makes one think of clever men amusing themselves in a laboratory. The French are Epicureans of ideas. They test creeds and philosophies and scepticisms with an exquisite freshness of curiosity. They seek after truth itself as an amusement. In no other nation can men talk so admirably of the universe while smoking cigarettes. In England, if a man talks of God, he either lights a pipe or stops smoking.
In _Prometheus Illbound_ M. Gide has lit a cigarette, a rather fragrant cigarette, at the sun. There is perhaps something a little disproportionate in the action, something, too, a little audacious; but he does it, if the phrase is not too stale, with a fine gesture, and as he puffs at it, the glow of his cigarette seems to throw a tiny light on the immense problems of human existence. He is cosmic in his interests, if Parisian in his manners. He has Zeus and Prometheus and the eagle among his chief characters. Zeus, like M. Gide himself, is an experimentalist. He evidently rules the universe for the sensations with which it provides him. At least, when we find him walking along the most famous of the Parisian boulevards, he has just made up his mind to perform a perfectly gratuitous act--an act which not only will bring no return but will have no motive. In this mood, he drops a handkerchief in the street, and, when a thin gentleman named Cocles gives it back to him, he invites him to write the address of anyone he pleases on an envelope so that he may send a £20 note to him. The thin gentleman writes the name of Damocles which he has seen by accident, and Zeus strikes him on the face and disappears. He sends Damocles the £20 note, however. Damocles becomes worried as to where the anonymous note has come from and why. His good fortune, instead of satisfying him, only raises problems in his mind. He does not know to whom he owes it or what to do with it. The last we see of him, he is babbling incoherent questions about it on his death-bed.
Some time before this, however, Prometheus has arrived, and dined with Cocles and Damocles in a Paris restaurant. He finds Cocles discoursing in perplexity on the meaningless blow he had received from the unknown stranger, and he himself unwittingly becomes the cause of a second and still more distressing accident to Cocles. The conversation having turned on his eagle, Cocles and Damocles express their desire to see it, and Prometheus calls it from afar, whereupon “bursting through the window, it put out Cocles’ eye with one stroke with its wing, and then, chirruping as it did so, tenderly indeed but imperiously, fell with a swoop upon Prometheus’ right side. And Prometheus forthwith undid his waistcoat and offered his liver to the bird.” For the moment, however, we may leave Prometheus. The important event just now is the damage to Cocles’ eye. Neither the undeserved blow nor the accident to his eye ultimately causes misery as the undeserved £20 causes Damocles misery. When he sees Damocles’ misery on his death-bed, Cocles comments: “There you see the fate of a man who has grown rich by another’s suffering.” “But is it true that you suffer?” Prometheus asks him. “From my eye occasionally,” said Cocles, “but from the blow no more; I prefer to have received it. It does not burn any more; it has revealed to me my goodness. I am flattered by it; I am pleased about it. I never cease to think that my pain was useful to my neighbour and that it brought him £20.” “But the neighbour is dying of it,” said Prometheus.... It is clear that M. Gide has not taken it as his province to justify the ways of God to man. I fancy he suspects Zeus of having acted without a motive on many previous occasions before the strange adventure of the boulevard. He is also clearly amused by the workings of the human conscience. If Damocles had not had a conscience, he would not have died.
Cocles and Damocles, however, are only minor characters in this thin fantastic story. Prometheus is the real hero, though the accidents do not happen to him. He has only his eagle and his habit of lecturing about it. But it is his lectures about his eagle that give the book its meaning. His eagle is really a figure in an allegory--an allegory on a new plan. In the old-fashioned allegory one was more conscious of what the allegorical figures meant, than of the figures themselves. It was as if the author had tied labels round their necks. M. Gide realizes that we have got beyond such ancient simplicities. He consequently gives his figures no labels, but bids us “Guess!” and we go on guessing till the end of the story. He has constructed a puzzle, and, though we do not know whether it is worth solving or not, he contrives to make us immensely curious about it and immensely determined to solve it. Most people, when they have read his story, will ask, “What does he mean? What is this eagle of Prometheus?” Why does he first say that everyone has an eagle and that one must nourish one’s eagle? And why does he in the end kill his eagle and make a meal of it? And does M. Gide approve of the last proceeding? I see that the majority of critics identify the eagle with the human conscience. I think it is more than that. It is everything that prevents man from resting satisfied with a pagan philosophy of acceptance before the world’s beauty. It is that fury in the human breast that makes men desire progress. It is the moral consciousness of the race that leads men into profound self-denials and profounder questionings. When Prometheus kills and eats his eagle, he grows fat and cheerful. Does M. Gide then look back regretfully on the moral history of mankind? On the contrary. The eagle was found to be delicious, and at dessert they all drank his health. “‘Has he, then, been useless?’ asked one. ‘Do not say that, Cocles!--his flesh has nourished us. When I questioned him he answered nothing; but I eat him without bearing him a grudge: if he had made me suffer less, he would have been less fat; less fat he would have been less delectable.’ ‘Of his past beauty, what is there left?’ ‘I have kept all his feathers.’” “It is with one of them,” adds M. Gide, “that I write this little book.” Yes, M. Gide is a moralist, though a gay one, and _Prometheus Illbound_ is a tract. He, too, desires progress--even if it be progress somewhere beyond and away from progress. His book is an amusing, though not a very amusing, parable. It will appeal to those who prefer subtle little thoughts to vehement great ones.
FINALE
THE CRITIC
People often forget that criticism, like poetry, is of many kinds. The critics themselves are, perhaps, the worst transgressors in the matter. They are divided into almost as many sects as the theologians, and every sect but one regards its own standards as the very rules of salvation. This would not matter so much if it did not lead to the excommunication of all the critics who cannot subscribe to the same creed. There is nothing more absurd in the history of literature than the severities of the excommunicating sort of critic. A critic has the right to condemn any work, critical or other, which is bad of its kind. He has not the right to say that only his own kind of criticism is good. There are as many ways of writing about books as of writing about flowers. The poet reveals to us a different flower from the flower of the botanist. Wordsworth’s “small celandine” is not seen through the same eyes as the plant of which the botanist tells us: “The lesser celandine is a species of _Ranunculus_ (_R. Ficarus_), a small low-growing herb with smooth heart-shaped leaves and bright yellow flowers about an inch across, borne each on a stout stalk springing from a leaf-axil.” There is yet another sort of writer on flowers whose work is a charming compound of poetry, science and any sort of relevant gossip, whether philological or herbalist--who will inform us, for instance, that _Ranunculus_ is a diminutive of _rana_, “a frog,” which has the same damp, marshy haunts as the flower, and that Nicholas Culpepper held that even to carry the plant about one’s body next the skin helped to cure piles. These are but three out of scores of ways of writing about flowers, and it is mere sectarianism to deny the excellence of any of them.
It is, of course, open to the man of science to declare that Wordsworth was not a botanist. It is possible, indeed, that Wordsworth did not know that his “host of golden daffodils” belonged to the natural order _Amaryllidaceæ_. This, however, would be to quarrel about words. Wordsworth and the man of science alike give an honest report of the flowers they have seen, and for my part I find Wordsworth’s report the more interesting. It is much the same with books as with flowers. The scientific critic shakes his head over the imaginative treatment of books. His ideal critic would write about books in the spirit of a Linnæus rather than of a Wordsworth. This, I think, is to take a narrow view of criticism. Criticism is an art which has developed in a score of different directions, and it is best to use the word in a sense that includes them all. Criticism--good criticism, at least--is almost any sort of good writing about books by a man or woman of taste. Criticism, says the dictionary, is the art of judging. As a matter of fact, criticism is something more than that. The good critic does a great deal more than deliver judgments on books and authors. He may at times play the part of the defending counsel rather than that of the judge. There are occasions on which he makes no attempt to hide the warmth of his feelings. He cannot announce a masterpiece as though a summary of pros and cons expressed what it meant to him. That is why I like to think of a critic as a portrait-painter rather than a judge. The portrait-painter reveals the character of his subject. He does not label or analyse it so much as set before us a synthesis of all the most interesting things he has seen, felt and thought in observing it. The judgment is always there, but it may be implicit rather than explicit. The author sits to the critic for his portrait. Even the book may be said--if we may put a slight constraint on language--to sit to the critic for its portrait. In criticism the character-sketch of the book or author is as important as any technical analysis. Criticism is a magic mirror, in which a work of art is reflected with a new emphasis and in new relations. The critic must bathe his subject in the light of his own mind--his taste, his enthusiasm, his moral ideas, his knowledge. Hence criticism is an extremely personal thing. It relates, if one may adapt Anatole France’s famous phrase, the adventures of masterpieces in the soul of the critic, or--to put it a little more precisely--in the intellectual and imaginative world of the critic.
It is said that, if we adopt this view, we are denying the existence of any standards in criticism. This is not so. One may believe in the conscience while admitting that moral standards fluctuate. Similarly, one may believe in the literary conscience while admitting that literary standards fluctuate. There is an eternal difference between good and evil, but what seems good to one generation may seem evil to another, and it is possible to recognise the goodness of a man, such as an Old Testament polygamist or a Scottish Sabbatarian, whose moral standards are in conflict with ours. We can hold to our own moral standards while realising that they are not the only conceivable moral standards. There is, no doubt, a perfect moral standard somewhere, but only a perfect spirit could perceive it. The rest of us can but do our best, and we cannot even do that. Milton was right when he made “all-judging Jove” the one supreme critic of literature. Meanwhile, the standards of sublunar critics are but guesses. The critic who claims that they are more is simply a dogmatist who climbs into a pulpit when he should be going on a pilgrimage.
Brunetière accused Anatole France of having no standards, and it is possible that Anatole France does not subscribe to any Thirty-nine Articles of criticism. But if to have a conscience is to have standards, and if taste is conscience in the æsthetic world, who can deny that Anatole France has very fine literary standards indeed? It is obvious that he all the time measures an author by the excellence of all the authors he has loved, just as most of us get our standards of character from the love and veneration we have felt for good men. This love of excellence is indisputably the first of all the requisites of a critic--love of excellence and acquaintance with excellence. The critic’s first standard is his enthusiasm for the great writers. “By ‘poetry,’ in these pages,” says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in one of his books of criticism, “I mean what has been written by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and some others.” It is an admirable definition. It puts us in touch with the writer’s standards at once. It suggests, too, the reflection that all the good critics have been men who agreed in the main with posterity in regard to literature. They have accepted the tradition. Even the revolutionary critics, such as Coleridge, have accepted the tradition for the most part, while advancing on it. It is scarcely possible for a man so whimsical or irreverent of the tradition as Samuel Butler to be a good critic. Nor is the man who cannot enter into the tradition that puts Homer and Dante and Shakespeare among the greatest of the poets capable of criticising the free verse of our own day. There is clearly, however, a danger in traditionalism. To criticise not in the spirit but in the letter of the tradition is to become a formalist, a pedant, and it is probable that the French injured their literature in the seventeenth century by their too literal respect for the Greeks. The critic must have respect for the life of his own times as well as for the writings of the dead. He cannot safely yield to the belief that great literature is a temple that has already been built. If he does not know that creation is still going on, he is little more than a guide to the ruins of classical architecture.
The critic must be governed by his sense of life, both in men and in books. The sense of the past alone is not enough. Even as he reads Æschylus or Shakespeare, it is his sense of life, not his sense of the past, that is the more important. Hence the best critics have been men in whom the sense of life, which is the imaginative artist’s sense, has been strong. They have been, for the most part, men who have also attempted with some success other forms of literature--poets, novelists, essayists, such as Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve, Lamb, Matthew Arnold and Anatole France. The old sneer that the critics are men who have failed in literature might almost be reversed, so far as the good critics are concerned. The good critics are men who have succeeded in literature.
A good critic tells us as interesting things about his subject as Gilbert White tells us about a bird. It is essentially the same kind of illuminated observation that enables Gilbert White to write well about a blackcap and Anatole France to write well about Pierre Loti. “With an exquisitely delicate skin,” we are told of Loti, “he feels nothing deeply. While all the pleasures and sorrows of the world leap around him like dancing girls before a Rajah, his soul remains empty and depressed, indolent and unoccupied. Nothing has entered it. This is an excellent disposition for the writing of pages which perturb the reader.” To deny the possession of critical standards to a writer whose work is full of imaginative criticism such as this is to speak of standards as though they were a sort of plumbline existing entirely outside the imagination of the critic. It is to fail to see that, as Anatole France says, “every book has as many different aspects as it has readers and a poem like a landscape, is transformed in all the eyes that see it, in all the souls that conceive it.” It is the object of the critic to enable us to share this magical transformation with him, not to issue immutable decrees. Anatole France, it may be, exaggerates the personal element in criticism at the expense of the traditional. He compares himself to a man who goes about “placing rustic benches in the sacred woods and near the fountains of the Muses.” “It demands neither system nor learning,” he declares, “and only requires a pleasant astonishment before the beauty of things. Let the village dominie, the land surveyor, measure the road and set up the milestones!” This is extravagant and fanciful, but it shows us at least the bright side of the moon of criticism. The other side of the moon is useful, but it is not the side that gives us light.
THE END
_A Selection from the Catalogue of_
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
❦
Complete Catalogues sent on application
The Art of Reading
By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
_8°_
Editor, novelist, poet, and critic, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is one of the most versatile as well as distinguished living men of letters. His are fresh viewpoints, opening up ever new possibilities of appreciation for the reader at the same time that they educate his judgment.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
On the Art of Writing
By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
In a fresh and untrammeled manner the author deals with the craftsmanship as well as the content of letters. The scope of the volume is indicated by the appended chapter titles: “The Practice of Writing,” “On the Difference between Verse and Prose,” “Interlude,” “On Jargon,” “On the Special Difficulty of Prose,” “On the Lineage of English Literature,” “English Literature in our Universities.”
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
Studies in Literature
Second Series
By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
A new collection of essays which demonstrates the author’s peculiar ability to say something original about even the most threadbare subject. J. C. Squire in The Observer (London) says: “The man is rare who, with Sir Arthur’s combination of sense and sensibility, learning and levity, love of the exquisite and sympathy with the normal, can range over the whole field of ancient and modern literature and vitalize whatever he touches.” This volume includes essays on Byron, Shelley, Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and “The Victorian Age.”
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
Books and Folks
By Edward N. Teall
“Writing after having had unusual experience with books and people, and in a vein that is as creditable to the books as it must be pleasing to the people, his treatise is of great value.”
_Evening Post_, July 9, 1921.
“In a time when so many literary counsellors are drawing attention to the freakish, the rebellious writers, and to the ones who would pioneer new styles and methods it is refreshing to have at hand a book that speaks lovingly for the art of letters, the whole art, and for the individual and unbiased appreciation.
“... The book is a most acceptable library companion. There’s no pretense and no posing in all of its pages.”--_Oakland Tribune_, July 10, 1921.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
Page 139: “way-born” should be “way-worn”.