i THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME AND AN ESSAY ON STYLE » •» Mm The Function of Criticism AT THE Present Time / By MATTHEW ARNOLD {Reprinted /rom " Essays in Criticism ") AND An Essay on Style By WALTER PATER {Reprinted /rom " Appreciations ") mhj lark MACMILLAN AND COMPANY AND LONDON 3EP 11 189f All rights reserved ^ ^^"i ■fn ^ Copyright, 1895, By MACMILLAN AND CO. Norfajooti ^rrss J. S. Cushing & Co. -- Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A. I. THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME. B I I. THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME. JV /I ANY objections have been made •^ '^ * to a proposition which, in some remarks of mine on translating Homer, I ventured to put forth; a proposition about criticism, and its importance at the present day. I said : " Of the lit- erature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is." I added, that owing to the operation in 3 4 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM English literature of certain causes, "almost the last thing for which one would come to English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desires, — criticism;" and that the power and value of English litera- ture was thereby impaired. More than one rejoinder declared that the impor- tance I here assigned to criticism was excessive, and asserted the inherent superiority of the creative effort of the human spirit over its critical effort. And the other day, having been led by a Mr. Shairp's excellent notice of Wordsworth^ to turn again to his biography, I found, in the words 1 I cannot help thinking that a practice, com- mon in England during the last century, and stilj followed in France, of printing a notice of this kind, — a notice by a competent critic, — to serve as an introduction to an eminent author's works, might be revived among us with advantage. To AT THE PRESENT TIME. 5 of this great man, whom I, for one, must always listen to with the pro- foundest respect, a sentence passed on the critic's business, which seems to justify every possible disparagement of it. Wordsworth says in one of his letters : — "The writers in these publications" (the Reviews), "while they prosecute their inglorious employment, can not be supposed to be in a state of mind very favourable for being affected by the finer influences of a thing so pure as genuine poetry." introduce all succeeding editions of Wordsworth, Mr. Shairp's notice might, it seems to me, ex- cellently serve ; it is written from the point of view of an admirer, nay, of a disciple, and that is right ; but then the disciple must be also, as in this case he is, a critic, a man of letters, not, as too often happens, some relation or friend with no qualification for his task except affection for his author. 6 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM And a trustworthy reporter of h s conversation quotes a more elaborate judgment to the same effect: — "Wordsworth holds the critical power very low, infinitely lower than the inventive; and he said to-day that if the quantity of time consumed in writing critiques on the works of others were given to original com- position, of whatever kind it might be, it would be much better em- ployed; it would make a man find out sooner his own level, and it would do infinitely less mischief. A false or malicious criticism may do much injury to the minds of others, a stupid invention, either in prose or verse, is quite harmless." It is almost too much to expect of poor human nature, that a man capable of producing some effect in one line of AT THE PRESENT TIME. 7 literature, should, for the greater good of society, voluntarily doom himself to impotence and obscurity in another. Still less is this to be expected from men addicted to the composition of the "false or malicious criticism" of which Wordsworth speaks. However, everybody would admit that a false or malicious criticism had better never have been written. Everybody, too, would be willing to admit, as a gen- eral proposition, that the critical fac- ulty is lower than the inventive. But is it true that criticism is really, in itself, a baneful and injurious employ- ment; is it true that all time given to writing critiques on the works of others would be much better em- ployed if it were given to original composition, of whatever kind this may be? Is it true that Johnson 8 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM had better have gone on producing more L^eiies instead of writing his Lives of the Poets; nay, is it certain that Wordsworth himself was better employed in making his Ecclesiasti- cal Sonnets than when he made his celebrated Preface, so full of criti- cism, and criticism of the works of others? Wordsworth was himself a great critic, and it is to be sincerely regretted that he has not left us more criticism; LGoethe was one of the greatest of critics, and we may sin- cerely congratulate ourselves that he has left us so much criticism. With- out wasting time over the exaggera- tion which Wordsworth's judgment on criticism clearly contains, or over an attempt to trace the causes, — not difficult, I think, to be traced, — which may have led Wordsworth to AT THE PRESENT TLME. 9 this exaggeration, a critic may with advantage seize an occasion for trying his own conscience, and for asking himself of what real service at any given moment the practice of criti- cism either is or may be made to his own mind and spirit, and to the minds and spirits of others. The critical power is of lower rank \/ ' than the creative. True; but in as- senting to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind. It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the highest function of man; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true happiness. But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or lO THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM art; if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all men. They may have it in well-doing, they may have it in learning, they may have it even in criticising. This is one thing to be kept in mind. Another is, that the exercise of the creative power in the production of great works of literature or art, however high this exercise of it may rank, is not at all epochs and under all conditions possible; and that therefore labour may be vainly spent in attempting it, which might with more fruit be used in preparing for it, in rendering it possible. This creative power works with elements, with materials; what if it has not those materials, those elements, ready for its use? In that case it must surely wait till they are AT THE PRESENT TIME. II ready. Now, in literature, — I will limit myself to literature, for it is about literature that the question arises, — the elements with which the creative power works are ideas; the best ideas on every matter which lit- erature touches, current at the time. At any rate we may lay it down as certain that in modern literature no m.anifestation of the creative power not working with these can be very important or fruitful. And I say current at the time, not merely ac- cessible at the time; for creative liter- ary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas, that is rather the business of the philosopher. The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired 12 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and at- tractive combinations, — making beau- tiful works with them, in short. But it must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so easy to command. This is why great creative epochs in litera- ture are so rare, this is why there is so much that is unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of real genius; because, for the creation of a master-work of literature two pow- ers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment; the creative power has. AT THE PRESENT TIME. 1 3 for its happy exercise, appointed ele- ments, and those elements are not in its own control. Nay, they are more within the con- trol of the critical power. It is the business of the critical power, as I said in the words already quoted, "in all branches of knowledge, the- ology, philosophy, history, art, sci- ence, to see the object as in itself it really is." Thus it tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere; out of this 14 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature. Or, to narrow our range, and quit these considerations of the general march of genius and of society, — considerations which are apt to be- come too abstract and impalpable, — every one can see that a poet, for in- stance, ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it; else it must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short- lived affair. This is why Byron's po- etry had so little endurance in it, and Goethe's so much; both Byron and Goethe had a great productive power, but Goethe's was nourished by a great 1 AT THE PRESENT TIME. 1 5 critical effort providing the true ma- terials for it, and Byron's was not; Goethe knew life and the world, the poet's necessary subjects, much more comprehensively and thoroughly than Byron. He knew a great deal more of them, and he knew them much more as they really are. It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our liter- ature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it in fact something premature; and that from this cause its productions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied and do still ac- company them, to prove hardly more lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this prema- tureness comes from its having pro- ceeded without having its proper 1 6 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM data, without sufficient materials to work with. In other words, the Eng- lish poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and variety. Wordsworth cared little for books, and disparaged Goethe. I admire Wordsworth, as he is, so much that I cannot wish him differ- ent; and it is vain, no doubt, to im- agine such a man different from what he is, to suppose that he could have been different. But surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is, — his thought richer, and his influence of wider application, — was that he AT THE PRESENT TIME. 1 7 should have read more books, among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him. But to speak of books and reading may easily lead to a misunderstand- ing here. It was not really books and reading that lacked to our poetry at this epoch; Shelley had plenty of reading, Coleridge had immense reading. Pindar and Sophocles — as we all say so glibly, and often with so little discernment of the real import of what we are saying — had not many books; Shakspeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the Eng- land of Shakspeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest de- gree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the c 1 8 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive. And this state of things is the true basis for the creative power's exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only val- uable as they are helps to this. Even when this does not actually exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowl- edge and intelligence in which he may live and work. This is by no means an equivalent to the artist for the nationally diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or Shak- speare; but, besides that it may be a means of preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many share in it, a quickening and sustaining at- AT THE PRESENT TIME. 1 9 mosphere of great value. Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the long and widely-combined critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe, when he lived and worked. There was no national glow of life and thought there as in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Eliza- beth. That was the poet's weakness. But there was a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfet- tered thinking of a large body of Ger- mans. That was his strength. In the England of the first quarter of this century there was neither a national glow of life and thought, such as we had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet a culture and a force of learning and criticism such as were to be found in Germany. Therefore the creative power of poetry wanted, for success 20 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM in the highest sense, materials and a basis; a thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it. At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the French Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of Greece, or out of that of the Renascence, with its powerful episode the Reformation. But the truth is that the stir of the French Revolution took a character which essentially distinguished it from such movements as these. These were, in the main, disinterestedly intellec- tual and spiritual movements; move- ments in which the human spirit looked for its satisfaction in itself and in the increased play of its own activity. The French Revolution took AT THE PRESENT TIME. 21 a political, practical character. The movement which went on in France under the old regime, from 1700 to 1789, was far more really akin than that of the Revolution itself to the movement of the Renascence; the France of Voltaire and Rousseau told far more powerfully upon the mind of Europe than the France of the Revolution. Goethe reproached this last expressly with having " thrown quiet culture back." Nay, and the true key to how much in our Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is this ! — that they had their source in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind. The French Revolution, however, — that object of so much blind love and so much blind hatred, — found undoubtedly its motive-power in the intelligence 2 2 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM of men, and not in their practical sense; this is what distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the First's time. This is what makes it a more spiritual event than our Revolution, an event of much more powerful and world-wide interest, though practically less successful; it appeals to an order of ideas which are universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational? 1642 asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according to con- science? This is the English fashion, a fashion to be treated, within its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in one place is not law in another; what is law here to-day is not law even here to-morrow; and as for conscience, what AT THE PRESENT TIME. 23 is binding on one man's conscience is not binding on another's. The old woman who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles's Church at Edinburgh obeyed an im- pulse to which millions of the human race may be permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are absolute, unchanging, of universal avidity; to count by tens is the easiest way of counting — that is a proposition of which every one, from here to the Antipodes, feels the force; at least I should say so if we did not live in a country where it is not im- possible, that any morning we may find a letter in the Times declaring that a decimal coinage is an absurd- ity. That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent 24 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM zeal for making its prescriptions tri- umph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how little of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into the motives which alone, in general, impel great masses of men. In spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in i spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Rev- olution derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multi- tude for these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is — it will probably long remain — the greatest, the most animating event in history. And as no sincere passion for the things of the mind, even though it turn out in many respects an unfortu- 1 AT THE PRESENT TIME. 25 nate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite barren of good, France has reaped from hers one fruit — the natural and legitimate fruit, though not precisely the grand fruit she expected : she is the country in Europe where the people is most alive. But the mania for giving an immedi- ate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours. And all we are in the habit of saying on it has undoubt- edly a great deal of truth. Ideas can- not be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with; but to transport them abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently to revolutionise this world "to their bidding, — that is quite another 26 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM thing. There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed. A mem- ber of the House of Commons said to me the other day : " That a thing is an anomaly, I consider to be no objec- i tion to it whatever." I venture to think he was wrong; that a thing is an anomaly is an objection to it, but absolutely and in the sphere of ideas : it is not necessarily, under such and such circumstances, or at such and such a moment, an objection to it in the sphere of politics and practice. Joubert has said beautifully: "C'est la force et le droit qui reglent toutes choses dans le monde; la force en attendant le droit." (Force and right are the governors of this world; force AT THE PRESENT TIME. 27 till right is ready. ) Force till light is ready ; and till right is ready, force, the existing order of things, is justi- fied, is the legitimate ruler. But right is something moral, and implies inward recognition, free assent of the will; we are not ready for right, — rights so far as we are concerned, is not ready, — until we have attained this sense of seeing it and willing it. The way in which for us it may change and trans- form force, the existing order of things, and become, in its turn, the legiti- mate ruler of the world, should de- pend on the way in which, when our time comes, we see it and will it. Therefore, for other people enamoured of their own newly discerned right, to attempt to impose it upon us as ours, and violently to substitute their right for our force, is an act of tyranny, 2 8 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISIM and to be resisted. It sets at nought the second great half of our maxim, force till right is ready. This was the grand error of the French Revolution; and its movement of ideas, by quit- ting the intellectual sphere and rush- ing furiously into the political sphere, ran, indeed, a prodigious and mem- orable course, but produced no such intellectual fruit as the movement of ideas of the Renascence, and created, in opposition to itself, what I may call an epoch of concentration. The great force of that epoch of concentration was England; and the great voice of that epoch of concentration was Burke. It is the fashion to treat Burke's writ- ings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered by the event; as the eloquent but unphilo- sophical tirades of bigotry and preju- AT THE PRESENT TIME. 29 dice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Burke's view was bounded, and his observation there- fore at fault. But on the whole, and for those who can make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth. They contain the true philosophy of an epoch of concentration, dissipate the heavy atmosphere which its own na- ture is apt to engender round it, and make its resistance rational instead of mechanical. But Burke is so great because, al- most alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought. It is his accident that his ideas were at the 30 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM service of an epoch of concentration, not of an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up within him, that he could float even an epoch of concentration and English Tory politics with them. It does not hurt him that Dr. Price and the Liberals were enraged with him; it does not even hurt him that George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness is that he lived in a world which neither English Liberalism nor English Tory- ism is apt to enter; — the world of ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits. So far is it from being really true of him that he '' to party gave up what was meant for mankind," that at the very end of his fierce struggle with the French Revo- I AT THE PRESENT TIME. 3 1 iution, after all his invectives against its false pretensions, hollowness, and madness, with his sincere conviction of its mischievousness, he can close a memorandum on the best means of combating it, some of the last pages he ever wrote, — the Thoughts on French Affairs, in December 1791, — with these striking words : — "The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where power, wisdom, and informa- tion, I hope, are more united with good intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this sub- ject, I believe, for ever. It has given me many anxious moments for the last two years. If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it ; the general opinions and feelings will draw that 32 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM way. Every fear, every hope will for- ward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty curreiit in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.''^ That return of Burke upon himself has ahvays seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature. That is what I call living by ideas: when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feel- ings are engaged, when you hear all round you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam-engine and can imagine no other, — still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so AT THE PRESENT TIME. 33 it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak anything but what the Lord has put in your uiouth. I know nothing more striking, and I must add that I know nothing more un-English. For the Englishman in general is like my friend the Member of Parlia- ment, and believes, point-blank, that for a thing to be an anomaly is ab- solutely no objection to it whatever. He is like the Lord Auckland of Burke's day, who, in a memorandum on the French Revolution, talks of "certain miscreants, assuming the name of philosophers, who have pre- sumed themselves capable of establish- ing a new system of society." The Englishman has been called a politi- cal animal, and he values what is polit- D 34 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM ical and practical so much that ideas easily become objects of dislike in his eyes, and thinkers "miscreants," be- cause ideas and thinkers have rashly meddled with politics and practice. This would be all very well if the dis- like and neglect confined themselves to ideas transported out of their own sphere, and meddling rashly with prac- tice; but they are inevitably extended to ideas as such, and to the whole life of intelligence; practice is everything, a free play of the mind is nothing. The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleas- ure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit, what- ever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Eng- AT THE PRESENT TIME. 35 lishman's thoughts. It is noticeable that the word curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a high and fine quality of man's nature, just this disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake, — it is no- ticeable, I say, that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a rather bad and disparag- ing one. PBut criticism, real criti- cism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality. It obeys an in- stinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considera- tions whatever. This is an instinct 36 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM for which there is, I think, little orig- inal sympathy in the practical English nature, and what there was of it has undergone a long benumbing period of blight and suppression in the epoch of concentration which followed the French Revolution. But epochs of concentration cannot well endure for ever; epochs of ex- pansion, in the due course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of expan- sion seems to be opening in this coun- try. In the first place all danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long dis- appeared; like the traveller in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with a long peace, the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though in infinitesimally small AT THE PRESENT TIME. 37 quantities at a time, with our own notions. Tlien, too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutalising influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to me in- disputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man, after he has made him- self perfectly comfortable and has now to determine what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure. I grant it is mainly the privilege of faith, at present, to discern this end to our railways, our business, and our fortune-making; but we shall see if, here as elsewhere, faith is not in the end the true prophet. Our ease, our travelling, and our unbounded liberty -/ 38 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM to hold just as hard and securely as we please to the practice to which our notions have given birth, all tend to beget an inclination to deal a little more freely with these notions them- selves, to canvass them a little, to penetrate a little into their real na- ture. Flutterings of curiosity, in the foreign sense of the word, appear amongst us, and it is in these that criticism must look to find its ac- count. Criticism first; a time of true creative activity, perhaps, — which, as I have said, must inevitably be preceded amongst us by a time of criticism, — hereafter, when criticism has done its work. It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly dis- cern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now open- AT THE PRESENT TIME. 39 ing to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word, — disinterestedness. And how is criti- cism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from what is called " the practical view of things; "■ by reso- lutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches. By steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas, which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country at any rate are certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its busi- ness is, as I have said, simply to know I 40 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and appli- cations, questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them. Else criticism, besides being really false to its own nature, merely continues in the old rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, and will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For what is at present the bane of criticism in this country? It is that practical considerations cling to it and stifle it. It subserves inter- ests not its own. Or organs of criti- cism are organs of men and parties AT THE PRESENT TIME. 4 1 having practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of mind the second; so much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecution of those practical ends is all that is wanted. An organ like the Revue des Deux Mofides, having for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world, existing, it may be said, as just an organ for a free play of the mind, we have not. But we have the Edinburgh Review, existing as an organ of the old Whigs, and for as much play of the mind as may suit its being that; we have the Quarterly Review, existing as an or- gan of the Tories, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the British Quarterly 42 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM Review, existing as an organ of the political Dissenters, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the Times, existing as an organ of the common, satisfied, well-to-do Englishman, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that. And so on through all the various fractions, political and relig- ious, of our society; every fraction has, as such, its organ of criticism, but the notion of combining all fractions in the common pleasure of a free dis- interested play of mind meets with no favour. Directly this play of mind wants to have more scope, and to forget the pressure of practical con- siderations a little, it is checked, it is made to feel the chain. We saw this the other day in the extinction, f so much to be regretted, of the Home i AT THE PRESENT TIME. 43 and Foreign Review. Perhaps in no organ of criticism in this country was there so much knowledge, so much play of mind; but these could not save it. The Dublin Revieiu subor- dinates play of mind to the practical business of English and Irish Cathol- icism, and lives. It must needs be that men should act in sects and par- ties, that each of these sects and par- ties should have its organ, and should make this organ subserve the interests of its action; but it would be well, too, that there should be a criticism, not the minister of these interests, not their enemy, but absolutely and en- tirely independent of them. No other criticism will ever attain any real au- thority or make any real way towards its end, — the creating a current of true and fresh ideas. 44 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM It is because criticism has so little kept in the pure intellectual sphere, has so little detached itself from prac- tice, has been so directly polemical and controversial, that it has so ill accomplished, in this country, its best spiritual work; which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is re- tarding and vulgarising, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things. A polemical practical criticism makes men blind even to the ideal imperfection of their practice, makes them willingly assert its ideal perfection, in order the bet- ter to secure it against attack; and clearly this is narrowing and baneful for them. If they were reassured on the practical side, speculative consid- AT THE PRESENT TIME. 45 erations of ideal perfection they might be brought to entertain, and their spiritual horizon would thus gradually widen. Sir Charles Adderley says to the Warwickshire farmers : — "Talk of the improvement of breed! Why, the rac? we ourselves represent, the men and women, the old Anglo- Saxon race, are the best breed in the whole world. . . . The absence of a too enervating climate, too unclouded skies, and a too luxurious nature, has produced so vigorous a race of people, and has rendered us so superior to all the world." Mr. Roebuck says to the Sheffield .cutlers : — " I look around me and ask what is the state of England? Is not prop- erty safe? Is not every man able to say what he likes? Can you not walk 46 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM from one end of England to the other in perfect security ? I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last. " Now obviously there is a peril for poor human nature in words and thoughts of such exuberant self-satis- faction, until we find ourselves safe in the streets of the Celestial City. " Das wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blicke Der vorvvarts sieht, wie viel noch iibrig bleibt— " says Goethe; "the little that is done seems nothing when we look forward and see how much we have yet to do." Clearly this is a better line of reflec- tion for weak humanity, so long as it remains on this earthly field of labour and trial. AT THE PRESENT TIME. 47 But neither Sir Charles Adderley nor Mr. Roebuck is by nature inaccessible to considerations of this sort. They only lose sight of them owing to the controversial life we all lead, and the practical form which all specula- tion takes with us. They have in view opponents whose aim is not ideal, but practical; and in their zeal to uphold their own practice against these inno- vators, they go so far as even to attrib- ute to this practice an ideal perfection. Somebody has been wanting to in- troduce a six-pound franchise, or to abolish church-rates, or to collect agricultural statistics by force, or to diminish local self-government. How natural, in reply to such proposals, very likely improper or ill-timed, to go a little beyond the mark, and to say stoutly, "Such a race of people 41 48 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM as we stand, so superior to all the world ! The old Anglo-Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world ! I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last ! I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is any- thing like it? " And so long as criti- cism answers this dithyramb by insisting that the old Anglo-Saxon race would be still more superior to all others if it had no church-rates, or that our unri- valled happiness would last yet longer with a six-pound franchise, so long will the strain, "The best breed in the whole world ! " swell louder and louder, everything ideal and refining will be lost out of sight, and both the assailed and their critics will remain in a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly unvital, a sphere in which spiritual progression is impossible. But let 'I II AT THE PRESENT TIME. 49 criticism leave church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit, v/ithout a single lurking thought of practical innovation, con- front with our dithyramb this par- agraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper immediately after reading Mr. Roebuck: — "A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody." Nothing but that; but, in juxtapo- sition with the absolute eulogies of Sir Charles Adderley and Mr. Roe- buck, how eloquent, how suggestive are those few lines! "Our old Anglo- E 50 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM Saxon breed, the best in the whole world! " — how much that is harsh and ill-favoured there is in this best! Wragg / If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of " the best in the whole world," has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names, — Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than "the best race in the world; " by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And "our unrivalled happi- ness;" — what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the , dismal Mapperly Hills, — how dis- mal those who have seen them will I AT THE PRESENT TIME. 5 1 remember; — the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child ! " I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is any- thing like it?" Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer; but at any rate, in that case, the world is very much to be pitied. And the final touch, — short, bleak, and inhuman : IVragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happi- ness; or (shall I say?) the superflu- ous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo- Saxon breed ! There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this; criti- cism serves the cause of perfection by establishing them. By eluding sterile conflict, by refusing to remain in the sphere where alone narrow and rela- tive conceptions have any worth and 52 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM validity, criticism may diminish its momentary importance, but only in this way has it a chance of gaining admittance for those wider and more perfect conceptions to which all its duty is really owed. Mr. Roebuck will have a poor opinion of an adver- sary who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wi'agg is i?i custody; but in no other way will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to mod- erate themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive and offensive, and to fall into a softer and truer key. It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am thus prescribing for criticism, and that, by embracing in this manner the Ind- ian virtue of detachment and aban- doning the sphere of practical life, it AT THE PRESENT TIME. 53 condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper work of crit- icism. The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. The rush and roar of practical life will always have a dizzying and attracting effect upon the most collected spectator, and tend to draw him into its vortex; most of all will this be the case where 54 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM that life is so powerful as it is in Eng- land. But it is only by remaining collected, and refusing to lend him- self to the point of view of the prac- tical man, that the critic can do the practical man any service; and it is only by the greatest sincerity in pur- suing his own course, and by at last convincing even the practical man of his sincerity, that he can escape misunderstandings which perpetually threaten him. For the practical man is not apt for fine distinctions, and yet in these dis- tinctions truth and the highest culture greatly find their account. But it is not easy to lead a practical man, — unless you reassure him as to your practical intentions, you have no chance of leading him, — to see that a thing which he has always been used AT THE PRESENT TIME. 55 to look at from one side only, which he greatly values, and which, looked at from that side, quite deserves, per- haps, all the prizing and admiring which he bestows upon it, — that this thing, looked at from another side, may appear much less beneficent and beautiful, and yet retain all its claims to our practical allegiance. Where shall we find language innocent enough, how shall we make the spotless purity of our intentions evi- dent enough, to enable us to say to the political Englishman that the Brit- ish Constitution itself, which, seen from the practical side, looks such a magnificent organ of progress and virtue, seen from the speculative side, — with its compromises, its love of facts, its horror of theory, its studied avoidance of clear thoughts, — that, 56 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM seen from this side, our august Con- stitution sometimes looks, — forgive me, shade of Lord Somers ! — a colos- sal machine for the manufacture of Philistines? How is Cobbett to say this and not be misunderstood, blackened as he is with the smoke of a lifelong conflict in the field of political practice? how is Mr. Carlyle to say it and not be misunderstood, after his furious raid into this field with his Latter-day Pamphlets ? how is Mr. Ruskin, after his pugnacious political economy? I say, the critic must keep out of the region of imme- diate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere, if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treatment of things, which may perhaps one day make its bene- fits felt even in this sphere, but AT THE PRESENT TIME. 57 in a natural and thence irresistible manner. Do what he will, however, the critic will still remain exposed to frequent misunderstandings, and nowhere so much as in this country. For here people are particularly indisposed even to comprehend that without this free disinterested treatment of things, truth and the highest culture are out of the question. So immersed are they in practical life, so accustomed to take all their notions from this life and its processes, that they are apt to think that truth and culture themselves can be reached by the processes of this life, and that it is an imperti- nent singularity to think of reaching them in any other. "We are all terrce. filii,'" cries their eloquent ad- vocate; "all Philistines together. 58 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM Away with the notion of proceeding by any other course than the course dear to the Philistines; let us have a social movement, let us organise and I combine a party to pursue truth and new thought, let us call it the liberal party, and let us all stick to each other, and back each other up. Let us have no nonsense about indepen- dent criticism, and intellectual deli- cacy, and the few and the many. Don't let us trouble ourselves about foreign thought; we shall invent the ^ whole thing for ourselves as we go along. \i one of us speaks well, ap- plaud him; if one of us speaks ill, applaud him too; we are all in the same movement, we are all liberals, we are all in pursuit of truth." In this way the pursuit of truth becomes really a social, practical, pleasurable AT THE PRESENT TIME. 59 affair, almost requiring a chairman, a secretary, and advertisements; with the excitement of an occasional scan- dal, with a little resistance to give the happy sense of difificulty overcome; but, in general, plenty of bustle and very little thought. To act is so easy, as Goethe says; to think is so hard! It is true that the critic has many temptations to go with the stream, to make one of the party movement, one of these terra filii ; it seems ungracious to refuse to be a terrce filius, when so many excellent people are; but the critic's duty is to refuse, or, if resist- ance is vain, at least to cry with Ober- mann : Perissons en resistant. How serious a matter it is to try and resist, I had ample opportunity of ex- periencing when I ventured some time ago to criticise the celebrated first 6o THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM volume of Bishop Colenso.^ The echoes of the storm which was then raised I still, from time to time, hear grmnbling round me. That storm arose out of a misunderstanding al- most inevitable. It is a result of no little culture to attain to a clear percep- tion that science and religion are two 1 So sincere is my dislike to all personal at- tack and controversy, that I abstain from reprint- ing, at this distance of time from the occasion which called them forth, the essays in which I criticised Dr, Colenso's book ; I feel bound, how- i ever, after all that has passed, to make here a ' final declaration of my sincere impenitence for having published them. Nay, I cannot forbear repeating yet once more, for his benefit and that of his readers, this sentence from my original re- marks upon him : There is truth of science a/7d truth of religion ; truth of science does not become truth of religion till it is made religious. And I I will add : Let us have all the science there is from I the men of science ; from the men of religion let us have religion. AT THE PRESENT TDIE. 6 1 wholly different things. The multi- tude will for ever confuse them; but happily that is of no great real impor- tance, for while the multitude imag- ines itself to live by its false science, it does really live by its true religion. Dr. Colenso, however, in his first vol- ume did all he could to strengthen the confusion,^ and to make it dangerous. He did this with the best intentions, I freely admit, and with the most can- did ignorance that this was the natural effect of what he was doing; but, says Joubert, "Ignorance, which in mat- ters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself, in intellectual matters, a crime of the first order." I criticised Bishop 1 It has been said I make it " a crime against literary criticism and the higher culture to at- tempt to inform the ignorant." Need I point out that the ignorant are not informed by being confirmed in a confusion? 62 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM Colenso's speculative confusion. Im mediately there was a cry raised: "What is this? here is a liberal at- tacking a liberal. Do not you be- long to the movement? are not you a friend of truth? Is not Bishop Co- lenso in pursuit of truth? then speak with proper respect of his book. Dr. Stanley is another friend of truth, and you speak with proper respect of his book; why make these invidious dif- ferences? both books are excellent, admirable, liberal; Bishop Colenso's perhaps the most so, because it is the boldest, and will have the best prac- tical consequences for the liberal cause. Do you want to encourage to the attack of a brother liberal his, and your, and our implacable ene- mies, the Church and State Review or the Record^ — the High Church rhi- I AT THE PRESENT TIME. 63 noceros and the Evangelical hyaena? Be silent, therefore; or rather speak, speak as loud as ever you can! and go into ecstasies over the eighty and odd pigeons." But criticism cannot follow this coarse and indiscriminate method. It is unfortunately possible for a man in pursuit of truth to write a book which reposes upon a false concep- tion. Even the practical conse- quences of a book are to genuine criticism no recommendation of it, if the book is, in the highest sense, blundering. I see that a lady who herself, too, is in pursuit of truth, and who writes with great ability, but a little too much, perhaps, under the influence of the practical spirit of the English liberal movement, classes Bishop Colenso's book and M. Kenan's 64 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM together, in her survey of the religious state of Europe, as facts of the same order, works, both of them, of "great importance;" "great ability, power, and skill;" Bishop Colenso's, per- haps, the most powerful; at least. Miss Cobbe gives special expression to her gratitude that to Bishop Co- lenso "has been given the strength to grasp, and the courage to teach, truths of such deep import." In the same way, more than one popular writer has compared him to Luther. Now it is just this kind of false esti- mate which the critical spirit is, it seems to me, bound to resist. It is / really the strongest possible proof of the low ebb at which, in England, the critical spirit is, that while the critical hit in the religious literature of Germany is Dr. Strauss' s book, in AT THE PRESENT TIME. 65 that of France M. Kenan's book, the book of Bishop Colenso is the critical hit in the religious literature of Eng- land. Bishop Colenso' s book reposes on a total misconception of the essen- tial elements of the religious problem, as that problem is now presented for solution. To criticism, therefore, which seeks to have the best that is known and thought on this problem, it is, however well meant, of no im- portance whatever. M. Kenan's book attempts a new synthesis of the ele- ments furnished to us by the Four Gospels. It attempts, in my opinion, a synthesis, perhaps premature, per- haps impossible, certainly not success- ful. Up to the present time, at any rate, we must acquiesce in Fleury's sentence on such recastings of the Gospel-story: Quiconque s' imagine la F 66 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISIM poiivoir viieux ecrire, ne V entend pas. M. Renan had himself passed by an- ticipation a like sentence on his own work, when he said : " If a new pres- entation of the character of Jesus were offered to me, I would not have it; its very clearness would be, in my opin- ion, the best proof of its insufficiency." His friends may with perfect justice rejoin that at the sight of the Holy Land, and of the actual scene of the Gospel-story, all the current of M. Renan 's thoughts may have naturally changed, and a new casting of that story irresistibly suggested itself to him; and that this is just a case for applying Cicero's maxim: Change of mind is not inconsistency — nemo doc- tus unquam mtctationem coiisilii iiicort- siantia?n dixit esse. Nevertheless, for criticism, M. Renan' s first thought AT THE PRESENT TIME. 67 must Still be the truer one, as long as his new casting so fails more fully to commend itself, more fully (to use Coleridge's happy phrase about the Bible) to find us. Still M. Renan's attempt is, for criticism, of the most real interest and importance, since, with all its difficulty, a fresh synthesis of the New Testament data, — not a mak- ing war on them, in Voltaire's fashion, not a leaving them out of mind, in the world's fashion, but the putting a new construction upon them, the taking them from under the old, traditional, conventional point of view and plac- ing them under a new one, — is the very essence of the religious problem, as now presented; and only by efforts in this direction can it receive a solu- tion. Again, in the same spirit in which 68 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM she judges Bishop Colenso, Miss Cobbe, like so many earnest liberals of our practical race, both here and in America, herself sets vigorously about a positive reconstruction of religion, about making a religion of the future out of hand, or at least setting about making it. We must not rest, she and they are always thinking and saying, in negative criticism, we must be creative and constructive; hence we have such works as her recent Relig- ions Duty, and works still more con- siderable, perhaps, by others, which will be in every one's mind. These works often have much ability; they often spring out of sincere convic- tions, and a sincere wish to do good; and they sometimes, perhaps, do good. Their fault is (if I may be permitted to say so) one which they have in AT THE PRESENT TIME. 69 common with the British College of Health, in the New Road. Every one knows the British College of Health; it is that building with the lion and the statue of the Goddess Hygeia before it; at least I am sure about the lion, though I am not ab- solutely certain about the Goddess Hygeia. This building does credit, perhaps, to the resources of Dr. Morrison and his disciples; but it falls a good deal short of one's idea of what a British College of Health ought to be. In England, where we hate public interference and love in- dividual enterprise, we have a whole crop of places like the British College of Health; the grand name without the grand thing. Unluckily, credit- able to individual enterprise as they are, they tend to impair our taste by 70 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM making us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character properly belongs to a public institution. The same may be said of the religions of \ the future of Miss Cobbe and others. Creditable, like the British College of ' Health, to the resources of their au- thors, they yet tend to make us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beauti- ful character properly belongs to re- ligious constructions. The historic religions, with all their faults, have had this; it certainly belongs to the relig- ious sentiment, when it truly flowers, to have this; and we impoverish our spirit if we allow a religion of the fut- i ure without it. What then is the duty of criticism here? To take the prac- f tical point of view, to applaud the liberal movement and all its works, — its New Road religions of the future AT THE PRESENT TIME. 7 1 into the bargain, — for their general utility's sake? By no means; but to be perpetually dissatisfied with these works, while they perpetually fall short of a high and perfect ideal. For criticism, these are elementary laws; but they never can be popular, and in this country they have been very little followed, and one meets with immense obstacles in following them. That is a reason for asserting them again and again. Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the practical spirit it must express dis- satisfaction, if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting. It must not hurry on to the goal because of its practical impor- tance. It must be patient, and know 72 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM how to wait; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to things and how to withdraw from them. It must be apt to study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be maleficent. It must be apt to discern the spiritual short- comings or illusions of powers that in the practical sphere may be benefi- cent. And this without any notion of favouring or injuring, in the prac- tical sphere, one power or the other; without any notion of playing off, in this sphere, one power against the other. When one looks, for instance, at the English Divorce Court, — an institution which perhaps has its practical conveniences, but which in the ideal sphere is so hideous; an AT THE PRESENT TIME. 73 institution which neither makes di- vorce impossible nor makes it decent, which allows a man to get rid of his wife, or a wife of her husband, but makes them drag one another first, for the public edification, through a mire of unutterable infamy, — when one looks at this charming institution, I say, with its crowded trials, its news- paper reports, and its money compen- sations, this institution in which the gross unregenerate British Philistine has indeed stamped an image of him- self, — one may be permitted to find the marriage theory of Catholicism refreshing and elevating. Or when Protestantism, in virtue of its sup- posed rational and intellectual origin, gives the law to criticism too mag- isterially, criticism may and must remind it that its pretensions, in 74 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM this respect, are illusive and do it harm; that the Reformation was a moral rather than an intellectual event; that Luther's theory of grace no more exactly reflects the mind of the spirit than Bossuet's philosophy of history reflects it; and that there is no more antecedent probability of the Bishop of Durham's stock of ideas being agreeable to perfect reason than of Pope Pius the Ninth's. But criticism will not on that account forget the achievements of Protestantism in the practical and moral sphere; nor that, even in the intellectual sphere, Prot- estantism, though in a blind and stumbling manner, carried forward the Renascence, while Catholicism threw itself violently across its path. I lately heard a man of thought and energy contrasting the want of ardour ii ( AT THE PRESENT TIME. 75 and movement which he now found amongst young men in this country with what he remembered in his own youth, twenty years ago. "What re- formers we were then ! " he exclaimed; " what a zeal we had ! how we can- vassed every institution in Church and State, and were prepared to remodel them all on first principles ! " He was inclined to regret, as a spiritual flag- ging, the lull which he saw. I am disposed rather to regard it as a pause in which the turn to a new mode of spiritual progress is being accom- plished. Everything was long seen, by the young and ardent amongst us, in inseparable connection with poli- tics and practical life. We have pretty well exhausted the benefits of seeing things in this connection, we have got all that can be got by so see- 76 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM ing them. Let us try a more disin- terested mode of seeing them; let us betake ourselves more to the serener life of the mind and spirit. This life, too, may have its excesses and dan- gers; but they are not for us at pres- ent. Let us think of quietly enlarging our stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we get an idea or half an idea, be running out with it into the street, and trying to make it rule there. Our ideas will, in the end, shape the world all the better for ma- turing a little. Perhaps in fifty years' time it will in the English House of Commons be an objection to an insti- tution that it is an anomaly, and my friend the Member of Parliament will shudder in his grave. But let us in the meanwhile rather endeavour that in twenty years' time it may, in Eng- AT THE PRESENT TIME. 77 lish literature, be an objection to a proposition that it is absurd. That will be a change so vast, that the im- agination almost fails to grasp it. Ab integro scEcloruni nascitiir ordo. If I have insisted so much on the course which criticism must take where politics and religion are concerned, it is because, where these burning mat- ters are in question, it is most likely to go astray. I have wished, above all, to insist on the attitude which criticism should adopt towards things in general; on its right tone and tem- per of mind. But then comes another question as to the subject-matter which literary criticism should most seek. Here, in general, its course is deter- mined for it by the idea which is the law of its being; the idea of a disin- terested endeavour to learn and prop- 78 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM » agate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to es- .- tablish a current of fresh and true I ideas. By the very nature of things, as England is not ail the world, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of English growth, must be foreign; by the nat- ure of things, again, it is just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought is streaming in upon us from all sides, and takes excellent care that we shall not be ignorant of its existence. The English critic of literature, therefore, must dwell much on foreign thought, and with particu- lar heed on any part of it, which, while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him. Again, judging is often spoken of as the critic's one business, AT THE PRESENT TIME. 79 and so in some sense it is; but the judgment which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge, is the val- uable one; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic's great concern for himself. And it is by communicating fresh knowl- edge, and letting his own judgment pass along with it, — but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver, — that the critic will generally do most good to his readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an author's place in literature, and his relation to a central standard (and if this is not done, how are we to get at our best in the world ?) criticism may have to deal with a subject-matter so familiar that 80 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM fresh knowledge is out of the question, and then it must be all judgment; an enunciation and detailed application of principles. Here the great safe- guard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong. Still, under all circum- stances, this mere judgment and ap- plication of principles is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic; like mathematics, it is tauto- logical, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity. But stop, some one will say; all this talk is of no practical use to us what- ever; this criticism of yours is not what we have in our minds when we AT THE PRESENT TIME. 8 1 speak of criticism; when we speak of critics and criticism, we mean critics and criticism of the current English literature of the day; when you offer to tell criticism its function, it is to this criticism that we expect you to address yourself. I am sorry for it, for I am afraid I must disap- point these expectations. I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavoiLr to learn and pi'opagate the best that is knoivn and thought in the world. How much of current English literature comes into this " best that is known and thought in the world?" Not very much, I fear; certainly less, at this moment, than of the current literature of France or Germany. Well, then, am I to alter my definition of criticism, in order to meet the requirements of a number of G 82 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM practising English critics, who, after all, are free in their choice of a busi- ness? That would be making criti- cism lend itself just to one of those alien practical considerations, which, I have said, are so fatal to it. One may say, indeed, to those who have to deal with the mass — so much better disregarded — of current English lit- erature, that they may at all events endeavour, in dealing with this, to try it, so far as they can, by the standard of the best that is known and thought in the world; one may say, that to get anywhere near this standard, every critic should try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the bet- ter. But, after all, the criticism I am really concerned with, — the criticism which alone can much help us for the AT THE PRESENT TIME. 8;^ future, the criticism which, through- out Europe, is at the present day meant, when so much stress is laid on the importance of criticism and the critical spirit, — is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellect- ual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result; and whose members have, for their proper outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one an- other. Special, local, and temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will in the intellect- ual and spiritual sphere make most prog- ress, which most thoroughly carries out this programme. And what is that but \ saying that we too, all of us, as individ- uals, the more thoroughly we carry it out, shall make the more progress? 84 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM There is so much inviting us! — what are we to take ? what will nourish us in growth towards perfection? That is the question which, with^the immense field of life and of literature lying before him, the critic has to answer; for himself first, and after- wards for others. In this idea of th^ critic's business the essays brought together in the following pages have had their origin; in this idea, widely different as are their subjects, they have, perhaps, their unity. ■ I conclude with.what I said at the beginning: to have*'fhe sense of crea- tive activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, AT THE PRESENT TIME. 85 in no contemptible measure, a joy- ful sense of creative activity; a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, frag- mentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible. Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to gen- uine creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true man of letters ever can forget it ? It is no such common matter for a gifted nat- ure to come into possession of a cur- rent of true and living ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely to underrate it. The epochs of ^schylus and Shak- speare make us feel their pre-emi- nence. In an epoch like those is, no 86 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM. doubt, the true life of literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon. That prom- ised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness : but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, per- haps, the best distinction among con- temporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity. II. STYLE. I t I I II. STYLE. QINCE all progress of mind consists ^ for the most part in differentia- tion, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object into its compo- nent aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of achieved distinctions, the dis- tinction between poetry and prose, for instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and characteristic excellences of verse and prose com- position. On the other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction between prose and 89 90 STYLE. verse, prose and poetry, may some- times have been tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too nar- rowly; and this again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the re- nunciation of a certain means or fac- ulty, in a world where after all we must needs make the most of things. Crit- ical efforts to limit art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with which this or that artist works, as the sculp- tor with solid form, or the prose- writer with the ordinary language of men, are always liable to be discred- ited by the facts of artistic produc- tion; and while prose is actually found to be a coloured thing with Bacon, picturesque with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mystical and intimate with Plato and STYLE. 91 Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted or florid, it may be, with Mil- ton and Taylor, it will be useless to protest that it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely and narrowly confined to mainly practi- cal ends — a kind of "good round- hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry might not touch prosaic sub- jects as with Wordsworth, or an ab- struse matter as with Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson. In subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to esti- mate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excel- 92 STYLE. lences which that too has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions, the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the logical structure : — how whole- some ! how delightful ! as to identify- in prose what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not treating it as out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of an estimate of its rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there. Dryden, with the characteristic in- stinct of his age, loved to emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest against their con- fusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished effect from one whose poetry was so prosaic. In truth, his sense of prosaic excellence affected his verse rather than his prose, STYLE. 93 which is not only fervid, richly fig- ured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, all unconsciously, by many a scanning line. Setting up correctness, that humble merit of prose, as the cen- tral literary excellence, he is really a less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun. It might have been foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its assertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellect- ual needs, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literary form, the range of the poetic force in liter- ature was effectively enlarged by Wordsworth. The true distinction between prose and poetry he regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or presence of 94 STYLE. metrical beauty, or, say ! metrical re- straint; and for him the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as the essential dichot- omy in this matter, between imagi- native and unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between "the literature of power and the literature of knowledge," in the former of which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact, whether past or present. Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of the last century, and with it the prej- udice that there can be but one only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they STYLE. 95 apply to the literature of fact, apply still more to the literature of the im- aginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and prose, so far as either is really imaginative — certain conditions of true art in both alike, which conditions may also con- tain in them the secret of the proper discrimination and guardianship of the peculiar excellences of either. The line between fact and some- thing quite different from external fact is, indeed, hard to draw. In , Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive writers generally, how difficult to de- fine the point where, from time to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading — a theorem no longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to g6 STYLE. \ catch the writer's spirit, to think with him, if one can or will — an expres- sion no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present, in either case changed somewhat from the actual world. In science, on the other hand, in history so far as it con- forms to scientific rule, we have a lit- erary domain where the imagination may be thought to be always an in- truder. And as, in all science, the functions of literature reduce them- selves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so all the excellences of lit- erary form in regard to science are reducible to various kinds of painstak- ing; this good quality being involved in all "skilled work" whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in STYLE. 97 sewing. Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history especially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on the borders of science, will still take the place of fact, in various degrees. Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful intention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs select, and in selecting as- sert something of his own humour, something that comes not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbon moulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Taci- tus, Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the past, each, after his own sense, mod- ifies — who can tell where and to what degree ? — and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as he thus modifies, passing into the domain of H 98 STYLE. art proper. For just in proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or uncon- sciously, comes to be the transcrib- ing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art ; and good \art (as I hope ultimately to show) in I proportion to the truth of his present- ment of that sense ; as in those hum- bler or plainer functions of literature also, truth — truth to bare fact, there — is the essence of such artistic qual- ity as they may have. Truth ! there can be no merit, no craft at all, with- ^._ out that. And further, all beauty is • in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within. — The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being prefer- ST\'LE. 99 able, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding of a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts itself, wherever the producer so mod- ifies his work as, over and above its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of course, in the first instance) there, "fine " as opposed to merely serviceable art, exists. Lit- erary art, that is, like all art which is in any way imitative or reproductive of fact — form, or colour, or incident — is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific per- sonality, in its preferences, its volition and power. Sach is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature — this transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infi- lOO STYLE. nite variety, as modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied forms. It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its representation of that sense, that soul- fact, is true, verse being only one department of such lit- erature, and imaginative prose, it may be thought, being the special art of the m,odern world. That imaginative prose should be the special and opportune art of the modern world results from two important facts about the latter: first, the chaotic variety and complex- ity of its interests, making the intel- lectual issue, the really master currents of the present time incalculable — a condition of mind little susceptible of the restraint proper to verse form, so that the most characteristic verse of STYLE. lOI the nineteenth century has been law- less verse; and secondly, an all-per- / vading naturalism, a curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, in- volving a certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the less ambitious form of literature. And prose thus asserting itself as the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflect- ing on the facts of its latest experi- ence — an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. Its beauties will be not exclusively "pedestrian": it will exert, in due measure, all the varied charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, or Michelet, or Newman, I 1 02 ST\'LE. at their best, gives its musical value to every syllable.-^ The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he proposes to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the scholarly conscience — the male conscience in this matter, as we must think it, under a system of education which still to so large an extent limits real scholarship to men.. In his self-criticism, he supposes al-U 1 Mr. Saintsbury, in his Specimens of English Prose, from Malory to Macaulay, has succeeded in tracing, through successive English prose- writers, the tradition of that severer beauty in them, of which this admirable scholar of our literature is known to be a lover. English Prose, from Mandeville to Thackeray, more recently " chosen and edited " by a younger scholar, Mr. Arthur Galton, of New College, Oxford, a lover of our literature at once enthusiastic and discreet, aims at a more various illustration of the eloquent powers of English prose, and is a delightful com- panion. STYLE. 103 ways that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily, considerately, though without consideration for him, over the ground which the female con- science traverses so lightly, so ami- ably. For the material in which he worksjs_no more a creation of his own than th£scul£tor' s marble. Product of a myriad various minds and con- tending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recon- dite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship con- sists. A writer, full of a matter he is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws, the limita- tions of vocabulary, structure, and the like, as a restriction, but if a real ar- tist will find in them an opportunity. His punctilious observance of the pro- ") 104 STYLE. prieties of his medium will diffuse ' through all he writes a general air of sensibility, of refined usage. Ex- ' clusiones debitce natu7'ce — the exclu- ■ sions, or rejections, which nature demands — we know how large a part these play, according to Bacon, in the science of nature. In a somewhat changed sense, we might say that the art of the scholar is summed up in the observance of those rejections demanded by the nature of his me- dium, the material he must use. Alive to the value of an atmosphere in which : every term finds its utmost degree of expression, and with all the jealousy of a lover of words, he will resist a ' constant tendency on the part of the majority of those who use them to ' efface the distinctions of language, the facility of writers often reinforcing in STYLE. 105 this respect the work of the vulgar. He will feel the obligation not of the laws only, but of those affinities, avoid- ances, those mere preferences, of his language, which through' the associa- tions of literary history have become a part of its nature, prescribing the re- jection of many a neology, many a license, many a gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expres- sive. His appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in literature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyed illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the unlearned. Hence a conten- tion, a sense of self-restraint and re- nunciation, having for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge for minute consideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest detail, I06 STYLE. being a pledge that it is worth the reader's while to be attentive too, that the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, and therefore, indi- rectly, with the reader himself also, that he has the science of the instru- ment he plays on, perhaps, after all, with a freedom which in such case will be the freedom of a master. For meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is really vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art. Pedantry being only the scholarship of le aiistre (we have no English equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the rules of language in his freedoms U STYLE. 107 with it, addition or expansion, which like the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred person will still further illustrate good taste. — The right vo- Icabulary! Translators have not inva- riably seen how all-important that is in the work of translation, driving for the most part an idiom or construc- tion; whereas, if the original be first- rate, one's first care should be with its elementary particles, Plato, for in- stance, being often reproducible by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after word, as the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only each word or syllable be not of false colour, to change my illustration a little. Well ! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowed and searched through his vocabulary, I08 STYLE. is conscious of the words he would se- lect in systematic reading of a diction- ary, and still more of the words he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; and doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search of an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets a vocabulary faithful to the ^J colouring of his own spirit, and in the strictest sense original. That living authority which language needs lies, in truth, in its scholars, who recog- nising always that every language pos- sesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, of its own, expand at once and purify its very elements, which must needs change along with the changing thoughts of living people. Ninety years ago, for instance, great mental force, certainly, was needed by Words- ST\^LE. 109 worth, to break through the conse- crated poetic associations of a century, and speak the language that was his, that was to become in a measure the language of the next generation. But he did it with the tact of a scholar also. English, for a quarter of a cent- ury past, has been assimilating the phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, the phraseology of the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years ago; in part also the language of mystical theology : and none but pedants will regret a great consequent increase of its resources. For many years to come its enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation of the vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eve of a sensitive scholarship — in a liberal naturalisa- tion of the ideas of science too, for no STYLE. after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full, rich, complex matter to grapple with. The literary- artist, therefore, will be well aware of physical science; science also at- taining, in its turn, its true literary ideal. And then, as the scholar is nothing without the historic sense, he will be apt to restore not really obso- lete or really worn-out words, but the finer edge of words still in use : ascer- tain, co7nmunicate, discover — words like these it has been part of our "business" to misuse. And still, as language was made for man, he will be no authority for correctnesses which, limiting freedom of utterance, were yet but accidents in their origin; as if one vowed not to say "//)'," which ought to have been in Shakspeare; "///i'" and ^^hers,'' for inanimate ob- STYLE. Ill jects, being but a barbarous and really inexpressive survival. Yet we have known many things like this. Racy Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix readily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in "second inten- tion." In this late day certainly, no critical process can be conducted reasonably without eclecticism. Of such eclecticism we have a justifying example in one of the first poets of our time. How illustrative of monosyl- labic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the phraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the writings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarship throughout ! A scholar writing for the scholarly, he will of course leave something to the willing intelligence of his reader. 112 - STYLE. "To go preach to the first passer-by," says Montaigne, "to become tutor to the ignorance of the first I meet, is a thing I abhor;" a thing, in fact, nat- urally distressing to the scholar, who will therefore ever be shy of offering uncomplimentary assistance to the reader's wit. To really strenuous \ minds there is a pleasurable stimulus / in the challenge for a continuous effort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate grasp of the author's sense. Self-restraint, a skilful econ- omy of means, ascesis, that too has a . beauty of its own; and for the reader ' supposed there will be an aesthetic sat- isfaction in that frugal closeness of style which makes the most of a word, in the exaction from every sentence of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word to thought, in the logically STYLE. 113 filled space connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty overcome. Different classes of persons, at dif- ferent times, make, of course, very various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not only schol- ars, but all disinterested lovers of books, will always look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vul- garity in the actual world. A perfect poem like Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of a theory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something of the uses of a religious " retreat. " Here, then, with a view to the central need of a select few, those " men of a finer thread " who have formed and maintain the literary ideal, everything, every component element, will have under- I 114 STYLE. gone exact trial, and, above all, there will be no uncharacteristic or tarnished or vulgar decoration, permissible orna- ment being for the most part structural, or necessary. As the painter in his picture, so the artist in his book, aims at the production by honourable arti- fice of a peculiar atmosphere. "The artist," says Schiller, "may be known rather by what he omits " / and in literature, too, the true artist may be best recognised by his tact of omis- sion. For to the grave reader words too are grave; and the ornamental word, the figure, the accessory form or colour or reference, is rarely con- tent to die to thought precisely at the right moment, but will inevitably lin- ger awhile, stirring a long "brain- wave " behind it of perhaps quite alien associations. STYLE. 115 Just there, it may be, is the detri- mental tendency of the sort of schol- arly attentiveness of mind I am rec- ommending. But the true artist allows for it. He will remember that, as the very word ornament indi- cates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one beauty" of all literary style is of its very essence, and inde- pendent, in prose and verse alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in its fullest lustre, as in Plau- bert's Madame B ovary, for instance, or in Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noii-, in a composition utterly unadorned, v/ith hardly a single suggestion of vis- ibly beautiful things. Parallel, allu- sion, the allusive w-ay generally, the flowers in the garden : — he knows the narcotic force of these upon the negli- gent intelligence to which any diver- Il6 STYLE. sion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can go wander- ing away with it from the immediate subject. Jealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that does not hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never depart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a ponderable some- thing thereby. Even assured of its congruity, he will still question its serviceableness. Is it worth while, can we afford, to attend to just that, to just that iigure or literary reference, just then? — Surplus"age ! he will dread that, as the runner on his muscles. For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blow- ing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of STYLE. 117 the finished work to be, lying some- where, according to Michelangelo's fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone. And what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all other acci- dental or removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not of specific ornament only, but of all that latent colour and imagery which language as such carries in it. A lover of words for their own sake, to whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constant observer of their physi- ognomy, he will be on the alert not only for obviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is mixed in all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no cognition of it. Currently recognising the incident, the colour, the physical elements or Il8 STYLE. particles in words like absoi'b, con- sidei', extract, to take the first that occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to the resources of expression. The elementary particles of language will be realised as colour and light and shade through his schol- arly living in the full sense of them. Still opposing the constant degrada- tion of language by those who use it carelessly, he will not treat coloured glass as if it were clear; and while half the world is using figure uncon- sciously, will be fully aware not only of all that latent figurative texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half- formed personification — a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, because it has no really rhetorical motive — which plays so large a part there, and, as in the case of more STYLE. 119 ostentatious ornament, scrupulously exact of it, from syllable to syllable, its precise value. So far I have been speaking of cer- tain conditions_of the literary_axtaris- ing out of the mediuni-oj:_jii^terial..,m or upon which it works, the essential -qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and, good ta ste re spectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate quality of good style : more intimate, as com- ing nearer to the artist himself. The otiose, the facile, surplusage : why are these abhorrent to the true literary ar- tist, except because, in literary as in ail other art, structure is all-impor- tant, felt, or painfully missed, every- where ? — that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the I20 STYLE. beginning and never loses sight of it, an3^ in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first — a condition of literary art, which, in contradistinc- tion to another quality of the artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity of mind in style. An acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel (a writer whose works illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, and with obvious repression or economy of a fine rhetorical gift) wrote a book, of fascinating precision in a very obscure subject, to show that all the technical \ laws of logic are but means of secur- ' ing, in each and all of its apprehen- sions, the unity, the strict identity with itself, of the apprehending mind. ' STYLE. 121 All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple sensations. To give the phrase, the^ sentence, the structural member, the) entire composition, song, or essay, a ; similar unity with its subject and with itself : — style is in the right way when it tends towards that. All depends]? upon the original unity, the vital , wholeness and identity, of the initia- / tory apprehension or view. So much s is true of all art, which therefore < requires always its logic, its compre- ' hensive reason — insight, foresight, retrospect, in simultaneous action — • true, most of all, of the literary art, as \J 12 2 STYLE. being of all the arts most closely cog- nate to the abstract intelligence. Such logical coherency may be evidenced not merely in the lines of composition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it by no means in- terferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in the building of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive, discursive, of this or that part or member of the entire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's expression of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending, victoriously intricate sentence; the sentence, born with the integrity of a single word, relieving the sort of sen- tence in which, if you look closely, you can see much contrivance, much adjustment, to bring a highly quali- ^ STYLE. 123 fied matter into compass at one view. For the literary architecture, if it is <^ to be rich and expressive, involves not only foresight of the end in the beginning, but also development or growth of design, in the process of ^ execution, with many irregularities, \ surprises, and afterthoughts; the con- ^ tingent as well as the necessary being subsumed under the unity of the whole. As truly, to the lack of such archi- tectural design, of a single, almost vis- ual, image, vigorously informing an entire, perhaps very intricate, com- position, which shall be austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful, yet true from first to last to that vision within, may be attributed those weaknesses of con- scious or unconscious repetition of word, phrase, motive, or member of the whole matter, indicating, as Flau- 124 STYLE. bert was aware, an original structure in thought not organically complete. With such foresight, the actual con- clusion will most often get itself writ- ten out of hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished. With some strong and leading sense of the world, the tight hold of which secures true composition and not mere loose accretion, the literary artist, I suppose, goes on considerately, set- ting joint to joint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardour, re- tracing the negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that he may give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress, readjusting mere assonances even, that they may soothe the reader, or at least not interrupt him i on his way; and then, somewhere be- fore the end comes, is burdened, in- STYLE. 125 Spired, with his conclusion, and be- s times delivered of it, leaving off, not in weariness and because he finds hini- \self at an end, but in all the freshness 'of volition. His work now structurally complete, with all the accumulating ' effect of secondary shades of mean- ing, he finishes the whole up to the just proportion of that ante-penulti- \ mate conclusion, and all becomes ex- 1 Ipressive. The house he has built is rather a body he has informed. And so it happens, to its greater credit, that the better interest even of a narrative to be recounted, a story to be told, will often be in its second reading. And though there are instances of great writers who have been no artists, an unconscious tact sometimes directing work in which we may detect, very pleasurably, many of the effects of con- 126 STYLE, scious art, yet one of the greatest pleas- ures of really good prose literature is in the critical tracing out of that con- scious artistic structure, and the per- vading sense of it as we read. Yet of poetic literature too; for, in truth, the kind of constructive intelligence here supposed is one of the forms of the imagination. That is the special function of mind, in style. Mind and soul: — hard to ascertain philosophically, the distinc- tion is real enough practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict, with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance of pre- ponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an area of preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a fact, in certain writers .« — the way they have of absorbing STYLK. 127 language, of attracting it into the 1 peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration. ]ly mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objective indications of design in his work, legible to all. Jiy soul, he reaches us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of imme- diate contact. Mind we cannot choose but approve where we recognise it; soul may repel us, not because we misunderstand it. The way in which theological interests sometimes avail themselves of language is perhaps the best illustration of the force I mean to indicate generally in liter- ature, by the word sou/. Ardent relig- ious persuasion may exist, may make 128 STYLE. its way, without finding any equiva- lent heat in language : or, again, it may enkindle words to various de- grees, and when it really takes hold of them doubles its force. Religious history presents many remarkable in- stances in which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconscious liter- ary tact has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway from one to another. "The altar-fire," people say, "has touched those lips!" The Vulgate, the English Bible, the Eng- lish Prayer-Book, the writings of Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times : — there, we have instances of widely different and largely diffused phases of religious feeling in operation as soul in style. But something of the same kind acts with similar power in certain writers of quite other than STYLE. 129 theological literature, on behalf of I'some wholly personal and peculiar sense of theirs. Most easily illus- trated by theological literature, this quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence. At their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, "prophets"; such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter, but of their mat- ter as allied to, in "electric afifinity" with, peculiar form, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic contact, on which account it is that it may be called soul, as opposed to [ mind, in style. And this too is a fac- ] ulty of choosing and rejecting what is congruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity — unity of atmosphere here, as there of design — soul secur- ing colour (or perfume, might we K 1 30 STYLE. say?) as mind secures form, the latter ])eing essentially finite, the former vagiie or infinite, as the inHuence of a living person is practically infinite. I There are some to whom nothing has any real interest, fjr real meaning, except as operative in a given person; and it is they who Ijest appreciate the quality of soul in literary art. ""J'hey seem to know a person, in a book, and make way l^y intuition: yet, al- though they thus enjoy the complete- ness of a personal information, it is still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that it does but suggest what can never be uttered, not as ])cing different from, or more ob- scure than, what actually gets sai(], but as containing that plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet in what is there expressed. I STYLE. 1 3 I If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps rank as the martyr of literary style. In his printed correspondence, a curious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year, records what seems to have been his one other passion — a series of letters which, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed an- guish, its tone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in which the whole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes supposed, one of his own fictions. Writing to Madame X. certainly he does display, by "taking thought" mainly, by con- stant and delicate pondering, as in his love for literature, a heart really moved, but still more, and as the pledge of that motion, a loyalty to his work. Ma- dame X., too, is a literary artist, and the 132 STYLE. best gifts he can send her are precepts of perfection in art, counsels for the effectual pursuit of that better love. In his love-letters it is the pains and pleasures of art he insists on, its sol- aces : he communicates secrets, re- proves, encourages, with a view to that. Whether the lady was dissatis- fied with such divided or indirect service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees that, on Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival of what was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat soli- tary and exclusive one. "I must scold you," he writes, "for one thing, which shocks, scandalises me, the small concern, namely, you show for art just now. As regards glory be it so : there, I approve. But for art ! — the one thing in life that is good and real — can you compare with it an earthly love? — prefer the adoration of a relative STYLE. 133 beauty to the cultus of the true beauty? Well ! I tell you the truth. That is the one thing good in me : the one thing I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with the beautiful a heap of alien things, the use- ful, the agreeable, what not? — " The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all beside when it is established on a large basis. Work! God wills it. That, it seems to me, is clear. — " I am reading over again the JEneid, cer- tain verses of which I repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in one's head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are for ever returning, and cause you pain, you love them so much. I observe that I no longer laugh much, and am no longer depressed. I am ripe. You talk of my serenity, and envy me. It may well surprise you. Sick, irritated, the prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I continue my labour like a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling 134 STYLE. himself whether it rains or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not like that formerly. The change has taken place naturally, though my will has counted for something in the matter. — "Those who write in good style are some- times accused of a neglect of ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician were something else than healing, of the painter than painting — as if the end of art were not, before all else, the beautiful." What, then, did Flaubert under- stand by beauty, in the art he pur- sued with so much fervour, with so much self-command? Let us hear a sympathetic commentator : — " Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman labour for the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. In this way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of expression, and when a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went i STYLE. 135 on seeking another, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got hold of the unique word. ... A thousand preoccupations would beset him at the same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his spirit : Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but one — one form, one mode — to express what I want to say." The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there ! — the unique word, phrase, sentence, para- graph, essay, or song, absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within. In that perfect justice,\ overand above the many contingent and removable beauties with which beauti- ful style may charm us, but which it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing itself of them, \ 136 STYLE. omnipresent in good work, in function It every point, from single epithets to the rhytlim of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellect- ual, beauty of literature, the possibil- ity of which constitutes it a fine art. One seems to detect the influence of a philosophic idea there, the idea of a natural economy, of some pre- existent adaptation, between a rela- tive, somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative, somer where in the world of language — both alike, rather, somewhere in the mind of the artist, desiderative, ex- pectant, inventive — meeting each other with the readiness of "soul and body reunited," in Blake's rapt- urous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his theory philo- sophical expression. — STYLE. 137 ' ' There are no beautiful thoughts," he would say, " without beautiful forms, and conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a physical body the qualities which really constitute it — colour, extension, and the like — without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, without destroying it ; just so it is impossible to detach the form from the idea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form," All the recognised flowers, the re- movable ornaments of literature (in- cluding harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully considered by him) counted certainly; for these too are part of the actual value of what one says. But still, after all, with Flaubert, the search, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth, or winsome, or forcible word, as such, as with false Ciceronians, but quite simply and honestly, for the world's adjustment to its meaning. The first 138 STYLE. condition of this must be, of course, to know yourself, to have ascertained your own sense exactly. Then, if we suppose an artist, he says to the reader, — I want you to see precisely what I see. Into the mind sensitive to "form," a flood of random sounds, colours, incidents, is ever penetrating from the w^orld without, to become, by sympathetic selection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the vis- ible vesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within, nay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined, enlarged, cor- rected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just at those doubtful points that the function of style, as tact or taste, intervenes. The unique term I will come more quickly to one than another, at one time than another, STYLE. 139 according also to the kind of matter in question. Quickness and slowness, ease and closeness alike, have nothing to do with the artistic character of the true word found at last. As there is a charm of ease, so there is also a spe-f cial charm in the signs of discovery, of ^ effort and contention towards a due end, as so often with Flaubert himself — in the style which has been pliant, as any obstinate, durable metal can be, to the inherent perplexities and recu- sancy of a certain difficult thought. If Flaubert had not told us, perhaps we should never have guessed how tardy and painful his own procedure really was, and after reading his con- fession may think that his almost end- less hesitation had much to do with diseased nerves. Often, perhaps, the felicity supposed will be the product 140 STYLE. of a happier, a more exuberant nature than Flaubert's. Aggravated, certainly, by a morbid physical condition, that anxiety in " seeking the phrase," which gathered all the other small e?imns of a really quiet existence into a kind of battle, was connected with his lifelong contention against facile poetry, facile art — art, facile and flimsy; and what constitutes the true artist is not the slowness or quickness of the process, but the absolute success of the result. As with those labourers in the parable, the prize is independent of the mere length of the actual day's work. " You talk," he writes, odd, trying lover, to Madame X. — " You talk of the exclusiveness of my liter- ary tastes. That might have enabled you to divine what kind of a person I am in the matter of love. I grovi^ so hard to please as a STYLE. 141 literary artist, that I am driven to despair. I shall end by not writing another line." "Happy," he cries, in a moment of discouragement at that patient labour, which for him, certainly, was the con- dition of a great success — " Happy those who have no doubts of themselves ! who lengthen out, as the pen runs on, all that flows forth from their brains. As for me, I hesitate, I disappoint myself, turn round upon myself in despite : my taste is augmented in proportion as my natural vigour decreases, and I afflict my soul over some dubious word out of all proportion to the pleasure I get from a whole page of good writing. One would have to live two centuries to attain a true idea of any matter whatever. What Buff"on said is a big blasphemy : genius is not long-continued patience. Still, there is some truth in the statement, and more than people think, especially as regards our own day. Art ! art ! art ! bitter deception ! phan- tom that glows with light, only to lead one on to destruction." 142 STYLE. Again — " I am growing so peevish about my writ- ing. I am like a man whose ear is true but who plays falsely on the violin : his fingers refuse to reproduce precisely those sounds of which he has the inward sense. Then the tears come rolling down from the poor scrap- er's eyes and the bow falls from his hand." Coming slowly or quickly, when it comes, as it came with so much labour of mind, but also with so much lustre, to Gustave Flaubert, this discovery of the word will be, like all artistic suc- cess and felicity, incapable of "strict analysis: effect of an intuitive condi- tion of mind, it must be recognised by like intuition on the part of the reader, and a sort of immediate sense. In every one of those masterly sen- tences of Flaubert there was, below all mere contrivance, shaping and after- STYLE. 143 thought, by some happy instantaneous concourse of the various faculties of the mind with each other, the exact apprehension of what was needed to carry the meaning. And that it fits with absolute justice will be a judg- ment of immediate sense in the appre- ciative reader. We all feel this in what may be called inspired transla- tion. Well ! all language involves translation from inward to outward. In literature, as in all forms of art, there are the absolute and the merely relative or accessory beauties; and precisely in that exact proportion of the term to its purpose is the absolute beauty of style, prose or verse. All the good qualities, the beauties, of verse also, are such, only as precise expression. In the highest as in the lowliest lit- 144 STYLE. erature, then, the one indispensable beauty is, after all, truth : — truth to bare fact in the latter, as to some per- sonal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from men's ordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy, truth here as expression, that finest and most intimate form of truth, the vraie verite. And what an eclectic principle this really is! eniploying for its one sole purpose — that absolute accordance of expression to idea — ■ all othe r litera ry beauties an3 excellences whatever : fhow many kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same ^time safeguards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply pondered evoca- tion of "the phrase," are equally good art. Say what you have to say, what you have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact STYLE. 145 manner possible, with no surplusage: — there, is the justification of the sen- tence so fortunately born, "entire,'^ smooth, and round," that it needs no punctuation, and also (that is the point!) of the most elaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration. Here is the office of ornament: here also the purpose of restraint in ornament. As the exponent of truth, that austerity (the beauty, the function, of which in literature Flaubert understood so well) becomes not the correctness or purism of the mere scholar, but a security_ against the otiose, a jealous exclusion o>f what does not really tell towards the pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in_ the portraiture, oi oneL-S-Jiense^. Li- 'cehse again, the making free with rule, if it be indeed, as people fancy, a habit of genius, flinging aside or L 146 STYLE. transforming all that opposes the lib- erty of beautiful production, will be but faith to one's own meaning. The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is nothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Miserables is nothing in itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence, only re- doubled beauty — the phrase so large and so precise at the same time, hard as bronze, in service to the more per- fect adaptation of words to their mat- ter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of profit only so far as they too really serve to bring out the original, initiative, generative, sense in them. In this way, according to the well- known saying, "The style is the man," complex or simple, in his individu- ality, his plenary sense of what he really has to say, his sense of the STYLE. 147 world; all cautions regarding style arising out of so many natural scru- ples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction : noth- ing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that. Style in all its varieties, re- served or opulent, terse, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is reallv characteristic or ex- pressive, finds thus its justification, ' the sumptuous good taste of Cicero being as truly the man himself, and not another, justified, yet insured in- ■ alienably to him, thereby, as would have been his portrait by Raffaelle, in full consular splendour, on his/ ivory chair. A relegation, you may say perhaps 148 STYLE. — a relegation of style to the subjec- tivity, the mere caprice, of the indi- vidual, which must soon transform it into mannerism. Not so ! since there is, under the conditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every lineament of the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable word, recog- nisable by the sensitive, by others "who have intelligence " in the matter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in the evanescent and delicate region of human language. The style, the man- ] ner, would be the man, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices, involuntary or affected, but i in absolutely sincere apprehension of I what is most real to him. But let us hear our French guide again. — " Styles," says Flaubert^s commentator, ^'Styles, as so many peculiar moulds, each of STYLE. 149 which bears the mark of a particular writer, who is to pour into it the whole content of his ideas, were no part of his theory. What he believed in was Style : that is to say, a certain absolute and unique manner of ex- pressing a thing, in all its intensity and colour. For him the forj?i was the work itself. As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and exter- nal aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed, neces- sarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm — the for??i in all its characteristics." If the Style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal." I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, that prose lit- erature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, 150 STYLE. have assigned that place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the opposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting to the imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free and various as those which music presents to it through sense. And certainly the tendency of what has beeri^here said is to bring literature too under those conditions, Ijy conformity to which music takes rank as the typically per- fect art. If music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or mat- Ter, t'Ke su bject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its specific \ excellence in the absolute correspond- '^ ence of the term to its import, will be but fulfilling the condition of all i STYLE. 151 artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art. Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all events, not on its form, but on the matter. Thack- eray's Esmond, surely, is greater art than Va7iity Fair, by the greater dig- nity of its interests. It is on the \ quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of i i 1 the note of revolt, or the largeness of ' hope in it, that the greatness of liter- \ ary art depends, as The Divine Com- edy, Paradise Lost, Les Alise rabies. The English Bible, are great art. Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art ; — then, if it be devoted further to the 152 ST\'LE. increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such present- ment of new or old truth about our- selves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, overand above those qualities I summed up as mind and soul — that colour and mystic per- fume, and that reasonable structure, it has something of the soul of human- ity in it, and finds its logical, its ar- chitectural place, in the great structure of human life. 3I;77-^ ( ^- LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 014 387 190 3