CHAPTER VI ON MODERN ENGLISH CRITICISM, AND THE NOTHING is more important for the student who loves literature than to become intimately acquainted with its great critics; for they alone can guide him in his judgments, can teach him to distinguish and classify merit, and can ultimately enable him to estimate literary values for himself. There are critics and critics; hundreds of them are useless, even mischievous; the great ones alone are worth knowing, those few men to whose judgments we can submit our own without hesitation. No course of literature could be complete without some mention of these; and I must speak to you today of the best living English critics of English literature. There are good French critics of English literature also; but we need not for the present consider them. A remarkable fact is the small number of really great English critics of English literature as compared with the number of great French critics of French literature. You can count the latter by dozens, the French having obtained supreme excellence and supreme ease in this branch. of literature. But if I were asked to name the great English literary critics of today, I could name only three. It is of these three that I wish to speak. These three are George Saintsbury, Professor of English literature in the University of Edinborough; Edmund Gosse, Professor of English literature in Cambridge University; and Edward Dowden, Professor of English literature in Dublin University. These are pre-eminent. With some hesitation might be added to these names, but only in a second or third class capacity, the name of Stopford Brooke, whom you may know as the author of a primer of English literature, and of a history of Anglo-Saxon literature. But we have to concern ourselves now only with the work of the other three. The first fact to observe about the work of these three is the degree to which it has been influenced, directed and coloured, by the study of French. Each one of the professors named is an equally good authority upon French as upon English literature; and two of them have written histories of French literature. The best work upon French literature in the English language is Saintsbury's "Short History of French Literature." It is not so very short as the name might imply. It is accompanied by a companion volume entitled "Specimens of French Literature"; and the two should be studied together. Professor Dowden, on the other hand, has given us one excellent volume on modern French literature. As for Mr. Gosse, a great number of his best critical essays deal with French subjects, and show the results of French study upon every page. I believe that all of these men are furthermore students of other foreign literatures. Mr. Gosse is a Scandinavian scholar. Mr. Saintsbury knows Anglo-Saxon and Provençal. Mr. Gosse, an excellent classical as well as modern scholar, has also busied himself with original poetry, and the study of verse in many languages. Again I suppose you know that Professor Dowden is famous as the biographer of Shelley-he provoked Matthew Arnold, by his life of the poet, into a very celebrated essay. The only one of the three who has attempted no creative work outside of criticism is Saintsbury. Perhaps for that very reason, he is the strongest, concentrating all his power in one direction. When we come to think of the acquirements of these men, it is impossible not to wonder at their powers of study. To master even one literature is the work of an ordinary life-time. But to master two, or even three literatures, in addition to the literatures of Greece and Rome, five in all, is certainly a prodigious feat. It is something which reminds us of Gibbon's tremendous powers of reading and digesting what he read. But Gibbon was a rich man, with nothing to do except to please himself. England's three greatest modern critics are comparatively poor men, obliged to teach in order to live. Of the three the greatest charm of style is shown by Mr. Gosse. In the course of this lecture I may quote some passages to you, in order to show you how very exquisitely he can write. This exquisiteness has been learned chiefly ́ by the most careful study of French models. There are times also when Mr. Dowden approaches him. Mr. Saintsbury, altogether the shrewdest critic, is not the best stylist. Sometimes he is almost careless, though he can perform miracles. I imagine that he has always thought it more important to utter the thought than to care about the form of the utterance. But then, consider the enormous quantity of his work on two literatures-his history of French literature, his history of Elizabethan literature, his history of nineteenth century literature, and his volumes of essays, and the number of texts edited by him. He has done the work of five or six men; and if he had given more attention to style, we should have been deprived of some of the benefit of his knowledge. Concerning the opinions of any one of these three critics, I should say to you, "Submit to their judgments." If any one of them should happen to be unjust in a single case, he would certainly be right in ninety-nine cases. No man is infallible in literary judgment. The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three, the greatest critic that ever lived-not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve. I have said that he was not an Englishman; but I must not forget to add that his mother was of English descent. He was born in 1804 and died in 1869, so that he is a very modern person. It was 1 he who really created the highest art of criticism, and whose influence entirely changed critical methods during the latter part of the present century. He was the critic of the great French romantic movement which began between 1820 and 1830. If we have today in England such good critics as Saintsbury and Dowden and Gosse, it is because SainteBeuve taught them how to be critics. I do not mean to tell you that they imitated him; indeed, no one of them would agree that Sainte-Beuve's method should be followed in all things. But it was by studying his method that they made the new English critical method. We must say a few words now about criticism in general -what it means. Put into the simplest language possible, criticism is the art of discovering and of stating what is good and what is not good in a book. The old fashioned criticism, the criticism of the eighteenth century and of the centuries before it, signified very little in the modern meaning of the word. When it was the rule that a subject should be chosen in a certain way, and ordered in a certain way, and written about in a certain way; when there were fixed laws not only for the general construction of a sentence, but for the construction of every part of the sentence, and for the position of each and every word in the sentencethen criticism meant very little more than censorship and measurement. A thing was good if the subject was conventional, if the language was conventional, if the forms. were conventional. On the other hand a book was not praiseworthy if the subject or the language or the thought was not according to the old fixed rules. Early in the nineteenth century higher forms of criticism made their appearance. Macaulay, as I told you long ago, was the founder of a new school of criticism, which consisted in analysing the value of the book in relation to moral and aesthetic ideas, and in relation also to the whole range of the subject treated. Macaulay would take a book upon Italian history, for example, and then compare what it con tained with his own idea of the whole subject of Italian history; then he would consider the author's ideas in relation to accepted moral ideas, and the author's sense of beauty in relation to accepted standards of beauty. This was a much larger and better way of criticism than had been followed before, but it was still far from perfect. Macaulay belonged by taste and feeling to the classical school of the eighteenth century; his standards of morality and ethics and philosophical truth were all old-fashioned, somewhat narrow, and above all English. Now a great criticism ought not to be any more English or French or German, than it should be Greek or Hebrew or Sanskrit. A great criticism should be equally true in all times and countries and conditions. For the highest criticism should not concern itself with any questions except those of beauty and of truth-nay, I should add, eternal beauty and eternal truth. Here is the great difficulty about criticism. Let us consider for a moment how very few persons are capable of judging beauty and truth apart from everything else. A man who has been brought up to think in a narrow way may not be able to see beauty or truth at all. A pious Roman Catholic may not find beauty in a thing not written according to the mediaeval spirit of the religion to which he belongs. Whatever thought is contrary to the teaching of Christianity of the middle ages, may fill him with horror. Again, in the narrower Protestant creeds the education given is usually anti-aesthetic and anti-scientific; the narrowness of mind produced is very hard, and absolutely hostile to independence of expression or originality in feeling. The religious bias, as Spencer calls it, is almost necessarily opposed to fair criticism. Then there is the national feeling, the strong prejudice of country and of race. The average Englishman cannot consider the inhabitant of another country as good as an Englishman; and it is very difficult for him to acknowledge the superiority of anything foreign. |