THE LONG CHAIN OF CRITICISM

T HE place of honour in the volume of critical essays which Mr. Drake has selected from the American periodicals of 1926 called ‘American Criticism, 1926,’ very certainly belongs to Mary Colum. Her portrait of Stuart Sherman is a thing of clear colours and a few significant lines, which would give pleasure even if it were not true, but it is also as accurate as an Admiralty map. One can check up on it by turning to the end of the book, to Stuart Sherman’s evaluation of Masefield, just as in a studio one looks from the canvas on the easel to the sitter. All is there, just as she says—the integrity of his absorption in his subject, his Puritan bias, his not at all discreditable willingness to subdue his sense of artistry when he had snuffed up the intimation, for which he had so marvellously sharp a scent, that a book was alive. It is the business of the critic, as of the portrait painter, to synthesize a million glances at his subject that will tell the onlooker at one glance the truth about him, as ultimate as he can get it.

But all this must be done for some other purpose, it occurs to one when one reads this volume, than for the reader’s mere information. There is something more vital afoot than that. One does not learn that so much from one’s appreciation of fine criticism, for all good work, whether creative or critical, tends to light up the same mood of exhilaration. But one gets a clear intimation of it from one’s emotional reaction to poor criticism. A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm, because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity. That sense comes to one twice in this volume, first in an essay by Miss Agnes Repplier, entitled ‘The Fortunate Poets.’ It is gracefully enough about nothing in particular, but in the course of it Miss Repplier gets around quite a bit among contemporary writers and falls to pondering on why Mr. Yeats and not Mr. Thomas Hardy received the Nobel Prize in 1923. We in England are past pondering on this matter. We were greatly relieved when George Bernard Shaw received it the other day; to judge from the previous awards it might just as easily have gone to the Duke of Marlborough or Ricciotti Garibaldi. But in her discussion of this strange state of affairs Miss Repplier remarks: ‘If the prize had been an English one Mr. Hardy’s attitude toward what he called “the dark madness of the war” might possibly have disqualified him. Like Viscount Morley, he felt, or at least he expressed, nothing but resentment at England’s struggle for safety. It seemed to be part of his resentment at an imperfect but not altogether worthless civilization, which we cannot afford to let go until we are sure we have laid hands on something better.’

Now, it would surely not be possible for three sentences to be more compact of error than these three, more drearily fraught with the suggestion of a lifetime spent in giving the whole of the time and half the attention to literature. It is not true that Thomas Hardy felt nothing but resentment against the war. He deplored it as part of the identity of man’s destiny and woe. He wrote many beautiful and sympathetic poems about the armies. Having the intensely practical mind of a craftsman, who is the son of a long line of craftsmen who have been disciplined into a racial common sense by dealing through the ages with obstinate material substances—by ploughing earth, by carving wood, by baking bread—he is the last person to practise any such flimsy intellectual type of pacifism as Miss Repplier implies. He never condemned those who started the war, for the sublimely simple reason that he could not see what else they could have done. Moreover, I do not know that one could have trusted Thomas Hardy to turn pacifist, even if his logic had taken him to it. It happens that he comes of a part of England which, recently enough for him in his distant childhood to have been thrilled by first-hand tales of it, had good cause to realize that, though it was an island, it was not so outlandish after all. It is significant that all along the southern coast, of which he wrote, by which he lived, there are coves where local tradition says Napoleon once landed from a rowboat and strutted on the cliffs to learn how this soil he meant to conquer felt underfoot. And it is perfectly possible that of one of these coves tradition speaks the truth. The greatness of Thomas Hardy was very largely due to the intensity with which he has learned such lessons as were taught him by the soil where he was born. He would, therefore, be specially unlikely to overlook the practical difficulties of pacifism on the part of a country liable to invasion.

‘Like Viscount Morley,’ is one of those phrases that stick in the fastidious mind as a fish-bone in a throat. How could Thomas Hardy be like Viscount Morley in this or any other respect? That doctrinaire Radical, who had many admirable qualities, but who was about as full of the ripe wisdom of earth as an umbrella frame, was a pacifist for the same reason that he was one of the worst prose writers that ever lived. He could not see why he could not force his intention of peace on the world in spite of the contrary movement of history. Just as he never could see why he could not force his meaning on the reader in a certain mould of words in spite of the contrary disposition of the English language.

Thus we arrive, shaken as if we had been travelling on a springless cart, at the final sentence, which is as reelingly off the perpendicular of accuracy as all the rest. ‘It seemed to be part of his resentment against an imperfect but not altogether worthless civilization, which we cannot afford to let go until we are sure we have laid hands on something better.’ This sentence is initially obnoxious simply as writing. There is no switch in the middle to inform us that the description of civilization does not belong to Mr. Hardy’s cerebrations, but is a piece of school ma’amish crispness on the part of Miss Repplier. But its major offence is its ignorance of the sufficiently patent facts that there never was a great writer who more completely swallowed civilization, hook, line and sinker, than Thomas Hardy. Life he resents, sure enough, the limitations placed on the will of man by his own nature and the physical frame of existence. The boundless opportunities afforded to pain enrage him. But of civilization, of the methods which man takes to establish himself in life and, so far as possible, to circumvent it, he is curiously uncritical. Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure scandalized their age not because they threatened social revolution, but because they were tragic. So far as they had propagandist intention they advocated trifling extensions of sexual and religious tolerance and educational facilities which had been demanded often and long before and have been carried into effect fairly painlessly since. What shocked his readers was his statement which he made with such intensity that it cut through the solid mass of Victorian optimism as if it were cheese, that there are people who, when they die, are God’s creditors, who have not been paid what was due, and who probably never will be. But neither there nor in any other of his works is there a single line which suggests that the present economic structure of society could possibly be improved; and the remoteness of revolution from his social conceptions may be judged from the fact that when, just after the war, he sat down and pondered what England really needed, he decided it was a revival of the Anglican Church.

Now, it is undoubtedly the case that these sentences of Miss Repplier’s infuriate the reason far more than three sentences of fiction would do, even if those matched them in fatuity. This acerbity is not peculiar to the occasion. One can reawaken it from the same volume by turning to Miss Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s paper which she calls, with that trick, much practised by Henry James’s disciples, of picking up a common phrase and using it with a wise, kind, playful air, surely very offensive, ‘The Heart of the Matter.’ Miss Sedgwick herself is a writer of great merit who persistently stultifies her talent by naively admiring the cheapest effects of other authors and imitating them with a deadly intensity and power. This led her at one time to commit a large number of stories which climbed up slowly and with an air of extreme sensitiveness to renunciatory tags of the sort that were to Henry James far worse than drink. Indeed Henry James and Mrs. Wharton and Miss Sedgwick were responsible for an entire school of fiction writers who invariably ended their stories with an elliptical remark on the part of their principal figure: ‘“Oh, but you see,” he said humbly, “I never really did,”’ and rounded them off with a brief passage ecstatically ascribing to him reduced circumstances and spiritual radiance. These are the glycerine tears of fiction. Miss Sedgwick rationalizes this inclination in her paper by selecting with gusto similar passages from various modern writers.

Now, these false identifications of Miss Sedgwick’s contemporaries immediately engender the same sense of calamity which came on one in reading Miss Repplier’s ideas concerning Thomas Hardy. And it becomes more and more acute as she pays various brief visits of misapprehension on the great, which are rendered much more irritating by her air of confidence and graciousness. One would think she was putting flowers in their studies. Of Henry James she says, ‘Reality alarmed as much as it fascinated him, and he only approached it when he saw it safely clothed in the complexities and preoccupations of super-civilization. Enchanting, absorbing as he is, lovable and often deeply moving, we do not feel that sense of tears for a single one of his situations or figures—unless it is the wistful little figure of “The Pupil”.’ The jaw drops. If it had not, one would have inquired, ‘Four Meetings?’‘Washington Square?’

Miss Sedgwick then passes on to Marcel Proust, whom she discusses in that same manner which one has found so deplorable in Mrs. Wharton when she dealt with the same subject, as if she were a cultured and fastidious society woman in doubt as to whether to engage a chef because, though his cooking is excellent, his references concerning character are not quite satisfactory. The situation is, in fact, different. The man was a god. Miss Sedgwick coughs in church in this essay by a curious allegation that he was heartless, though obviously ‘Le Temps Retrouvé’ is an epic of the heart. The power which the ‘I’ of the tale had, which made his friends forget his sickliness and fretfulness, was his power to love. The books are an account of his quest first of a society, then of a relationship, where he would know nothing but harmony and the gracious practice of the affections, such as he had known with his adorable grandmother. But what can one expect of a writer who astonishingly describes Jane Austen as ‘tearless’? Is it really possible that anybody could read Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion without seeing behind them a face graven with weeping? ‘It is dangerous to feel much unless one is great enough to feel much; and wise and charming as she is, her glance would be the pinprick to many an inflated emotion, though to many real ones she would be blind.’

Really, it is time this comic patronage of Jane

Austen ceased. To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond. There are those who are deluded by the decorousness of her manner, by the fact that her virgins are so virginal that they are unaware of their virginity, into thinking that she is ignorant of passion. But look through the lattice-work of her neat sentences, joined together with the bright nails of craftsmanship, painted with the gay varnish of wit, and you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love, whose delicate reactions to men make the heroines of all our later novelists seem merely to turn signs, ‘Stop’ or ‘Go’ toward the advancing male. And the still sillier reproach, that Jane Austen has no sense of the fundamental things in life, springs from a misapprehension of her place in time. She came at the end of the eighteenth century, when the class to which she belongs was perhaps more intelligent than it has ever been before or since, when it had dipped more deeply than comfortable folk have ever done into philosophical inquiry. Her determination not to be confused by emotion, and to examine each phenomenon of the day briskly and on its merits, was never a sign of limitation. It was a sign that she lived in the same world as Hume and Gibbon. Her cool silence on the wherefore of the why is a million times more evidential of an interest in the fundamental things of life than ‘“Brother, brother, how shall I know God?” sobbed Alyosha, who by this time was exceedingly drunk,’ or any such sentence from those Russians.

Now, why is Miss Anne Douglas Sedgwick annoying us so much more by all this than Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson would do by an equivalent number of pages which would criticize life with such vast malappropriateness as she has criticized the great? It will help, perhaps, if we try to recognize the particular kind of emotion we are feeling, and ask ourselves if we ever feel the same emotion on other occasions. We will find, I think, that we do; and that the occasion is when some one, a clumsy servant or visitor, breaks some treasured family possession. A sweep of the wrist, that Bristol decanter, that Nailsea vase is gone for ever. Something beautiful that has lasted a long time is at an end. The man who made it, the hundreds of people who have tenderly appreciated it and guarded it, are insulted by its fracture.

There, in that identity of feeling, one gets a clue. Criticism is a process that ought to be continuous. Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world. They are great works of art if the forces involved are immensely numerous, and if the artist can truthfully report the conflict as he knows it. It is the business of the critic to give a detached report on the conflict. The artist cannot tell you exactly what happened, any more than the soldiers in a battle can tell you exactly what has happened.

There is need for an outside observer who will stand clear and look down on the proceedings as from a height. He is able to see the new angles of the spiritual situations because, as all human beings are unique, his conflict will not be the same as the artist’s. But because he has, if he has sufficiently vital need to make his criticism of value, a conflict of his own, his view also will have its limitations; which, however, can be corrected by some other critic who will come along and read both the work and the criticism and in the light of both and his own state of mind can provide yet another interpretation of the conflict.

We have an example of criticism at this stage in this volume, where that delightfully scrupulous critic, Alyse Gregory, turns her intelligence on Mr. Van Wyck Brooks’s story of Henry James. But the chain of criticism can be interminably long. We have Professor Gilbert Murray here in this country to-day holding a golden chain whose other end is held by Euripides and Sophocles, and certainly he will not be the last man to hold it. Mr. T. S. Eliot disputes with him, the writers of The Criterion, given a standard by his high standard, will keep the disputation in mind, it will reappear some day in their writings, others bred in another school will bring them to argument, and so on….

Such are the elements that make for continuity in literature; that make the wisdom of the artist live longer than the grasses of the field which are cut down in the fall of the year. But criticism such as Miss Repplier and Miss Sedgwick have indulged in in the present volume defeat this movement towards immortality. They are ungracious to the gracious past. They are ruptures of tradition. They take the end of the chain with which patient critics have linked the common mind to the harmony of Henry James and Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen and they let it fall into the darkness. Worse still, they circulate rumours which would prevent any intelligent person from picking it up again. It is admirable to contemplate such essays in this volume as Mr. Edmund Wilson’s admirable ‘Literary Vaudeville,’ where he soundly estimates the importance of contemporary American writers, computing the importance of their conflicts and rejecting those of them who sublimate them too easily; and to reflect that we have such sober critics, so truly reverent of art, to counter those like Miss Repplier and Miss Sedgwick, who will sacrifice the heritage of our past to a smart phrase, and pull down the reputations of our great men in a glib and facile epigram.