Journalism and Criticism

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

“ A MAXIM which it would be well for ambitious critics to chalk up on the walls of their workshops is this : Never mind whom you praise, but be very careful whom you blame.” So wrote Mr. Edmund Gosse ten years ago. There is no such partial legend to be seen, one may fairly guess, in the workshop of the accomplished author of the recently reprinted volume from which this remark is quoted. Mr. Gosse was about to speak of certain special cases, of Winstanley, of Dennis, of Jeffrey, critics of merit, each damned to posterity by a single error. Probably the permanent standing of a critic seldom depends upon his judgment of contemporary work; but Mr. Gosse’s saying is of interest for its implication that reviewing is criticism. Rope-walking is a precarious business, but, after all, it is one possible way of getting across the gap. With all his tumbling into the net of commonplace or of fancifulness, the reviewer must be admitted to accomplish the real feat surprisingly often.

Mr. Brander Matthews has just been preaching upon the text of M. Jules Lemaître’s saying that “the criticism of our contemporaries is not really criticism, but simply conversation.” “Now the aim and intent of book reviewing,” says Mr. Matthews, “ is to engage in this very discussion of our contemporaries, and this is why book reviewing, which is a department of journalism, must be carefully distinguished from criticism, which is a department of literature.” The distinction which is trying to be made here hardly achieves the standing of a difference ; for Mr. Matthews, after quoting Arnold’s definition of criticism as “ the art of seeing the object as in itself it really is,” proceeds: “ Book reviewing, however useful it may be, has a far humbler function ; it may be defined as the art of informing readers just what the latest volume is, in kind, in character, and in quality.” How the reviewer is to fulfill this requirement, to inform readers what the object is, without first performing in some manner the critical function of seeing it “as in itself it really is,” Mr. Matthews does not suggest.

There is a sense in which all criticism is, to use Mr. Gosse’s modest phrase, “ sign-board work.” The business of a sign-board is undeniably affirmative ; we cannot regret that the negative method of reviewing has gone out of fashion. “ The course of those who direct criticism,” says Mr. Halsey sensibly, “ will be to choose the books that have real value and some actual utility in the life of man to-day. To these, chosen from the great mass, and making perhaps ten per cent of the whole output, they can give attention. Let their motive be to inform readers with clearness and good judgment as to the contents of those books. In the main all this will mean that the reviews will not be unfavorable. Dealing, as the article will, with books having at least some temporary value, there will be in most cases commendation.” That is, the time for slashing criticism has gone by : what cannot be praised may now safely be ignored. But it seems that this principle should determine one’s choice of books rather than one’s treatment of them, for if faint praise damns the author, excessive praise makes quite as unequivocal disposition of the critic. There is no denying that the book review has lost much of its potency as well as most of its terrors since the consulship of Jeffrey. In England, to be sure, some relish for critical manslaughter still lingers. It is matter for congratulation, on the whole, that an American Saturday Review would appeal to a very small constituency. But we are in some danger of falling upon the other extreme of undue gingerliness. By requiring the reviewer always to mind his company manners, we may in the end bring about the sinking of his function in that of the special advertising agent. Whatever may have been true in the past, at present, surely, the author is sufficiently served in the matter of advertising by the publisher, without any enlistment of special officers or plain-clothes men. It would be a sad thing for criticism in the larger sense if the future reviewer should deliberately elect amiability rather than discrimination; and if so the honest expression of opinion should be relegated finally to guerrilla service in irresponsible “journals of protest.”

Granted the utmost freedom, the reviewer may find one aspect of his task ungrateful: that his office denies him as a privilege what high authorities are unanimous in urging upon the general reader as a duty. An interesting compilation ¹ has just come to hand which, wholesome food to the reader, turns to ashes in the mouth of the reviewer. How pleasant it would be at times to fall back upon this advice of Schopenhauer’s : “ Be careful to limit your time for reading, and devote it exclusively to those great minds of all times and all countries, who o’ertop the rest of humanity, those whom the voice of fame points to as such.” Or upon this of Ruskin’s : " It is of the greatest importance to you, not only for art’s sake, but for all kinds of sake, to keep out of the salt swamps of literature, and live on a little rocky island of your own, with a spring and a lake in it, pure and good.” But what has the professional book-taster to do with such luxuries of exclusiveness ? And how far must he feel himself cut off from the gentle privileges of the reader set forth in those three famous rules of Emerson’s : “ 1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like.” Yet the reviewer is not altogether envious of these immunities. He may, or so it seems to him, ride the flood of contemporary literature without being swept away by it. There are small discoveries to be made ; and there is always the luxury of first-hand judgment, arrived at and offered, whatever may be its final value, in all sincerity.

It must often be difficult, even for Mr. Matthews, to draw the line between the review and the critical essay. When we reflect that a large proportion of the best critical essays in English — those of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Bagehot, to cite three obvious instances—were nominally reviews of current books, the intimacy of the two forms becomes evident. But the critical essay is in itself an extremely flexible medium. Here, for example, is Mr. Halsey’s book,² the first part dealing with literary conditions of the moment, the second with certain notabilities of the past; Mr. Matthews’s volume ³ of longer essays on more general topics ; and Mr. Paul’s collection ⁴ of miscellaneous papers ranging from an essay on Sterne to a discourse on The Philosophical Radicals. Varied as their subject-matter is, these three books may properly be spoken of together as exemplifying the journalistic treatment of literary themes.

Most of Mr. Halsey’s papers have already served time in the newspaper or the newspaperish magazine. Their preservation in book form reminds one a little of Carlyle’s forty-volume dissertation upon the virtue of keeping one’s mouth shut: for the book is hardly more than a bit of flotsam upon the tide which the author expresses some willingness to stem. The essays contain valuable information ; but in structure they are discursive and ill articulated, and in style not only lacking in distinction, but at times declining to an utter commonness which a single quotation will sufficiently suggest : “ The collected volume of Twice-Told Tales will long contain about the choicest productions in the shortstory line that our language has been enriched by.”

Mr. Herbert Paul’s standing as an English man of letters is indicated by the fact that most of the essays in his present volume were originally printed in The Nineteenth Century. The chosen themes are of great interest: what could be more alluring to the lover of sound criticism than such titles as The Classical Poems of Tennyson, The Decay of Classical Quotation, and The Art of LetterWriting? Unfortunately in their treatment one finds a deficiency very much like that of which we have just spoken: an impression, if not of perfunctoriness, at least of incomplete grasp and of uncertain touch. In two or three papers, notably in The Victorian Novel, the sense of desultoriness is particularly discomfiting. In such an essay pretty full mention of the chief novelists and their work would be a matter of course ; but a mere collection of such special notices cannot be taken to constitute an essay on the theme in its large aspects. This paper, like many of the others, abounds in clever phrases. Two passages about Dickens may be cited; the first as an example of Mr. Paul’s aphoristic skill, the second, of his sober criticism at its best. “ A generation has arisen,” he says, in speaking of the changes in taste since the time of Dickens, “ which can be charitable without waiting for Christmas, and cheerful without drinking to excess.” The other passage needs no gloss: “The school of Dickens, for which he cannot be held responsible, is happily at last dying out. Their dreary mechanical jokes, their hideous unmeaning caricatures, their descriptions that describe nothing, their spasms of false sentiment, their tears of gin and water, have ceased to excite even amusement, and provoke only unmitigated disgust. With their disappearance from the stage, and consignment to oblivion, the reputation of the great man they injured is relieved from a temporary strain.” The latter passage possesses unusual roundness of form ; Mr. Paul’s sentences as a rule are detached and choppy, and fail to conceal, as a smooth style might, the invertebrate character of his argument. The most satisfying of the essays are those on Sterne and on Macaulay and His Critics. Mr. Paul plays the part of special pleader extremely well.

Mr. Matthews’s volume may be taken to have stood much more than the Emersonian test of time, since it is now reprinted after a lapse of fourteen years. To the present writer, however, it seems to rank fairly with the later work of Mr. Halsey and Mr. Paul. In one or two respects, probably, the opinions expressed would not conform to the author’s final judgment. He would not now take the work of Mr. Rider Haggard so seriously ; and one main point in the essay on The Dramatization of Novels would be abandoned, — the point of the introductory paragraph, summed up in this sentence : “ And if we were to make out a list of novels which have been adapted to the stage in the past thirty years or so, we should discover a rarely broken record of overwhelming disaster.” It is evident, too, from the substance of the concluding paper on The Whole Duty of Critics that Mr. Matthews had not then begun to strive for his distinction between reviewing and criticism, since the critics whom he is exhorting are reviewers. Apart from these matters of detail, the Mr. Matthews of these essays is precisely the Mr. Matthews from whose latest paper we were quoting a few moments ago. His fault as an essayist is a fault, partly, no doubt, of personality, but largely of method. What one feels very strongly in Mr. Halsey, one feels distinctly in Mr. Paul and Mr. Matthews, — a deficiency in that spontaneity and definition of thought, in that compactness and refinement of expression which, far more vitally than any partition of categories, distinguish literature from journalism.

From the real essayist one has more to expect and less to fear than from any other worker in the field of belles-lettres. The bird’s-eye viewer of book announcements may well find his vision and perhaps his patience taxed by the extent and intricacy of the prospect. Here and there, luckily, the eye finds a straight path to some green clearing or shining water which lies without shadow of doubt in the book lover’s paradise. At such moments the essayist has his innings. We are feeling a little doubtful about Mr. So-and-So’s forthcoming novel, or about Miss This-or-That’s new book of verse. How do we know that the divine fire may not have waned or even gone out altogether: this business of inspiration is such a tricky one. But the essayist with his lesser torch, — we shall know just where to find him, ready to lead us with even pace along the wellknown waysides of his choice. We shall not make the very highest peaks of Parnassus, but the journey is sure to bring us through a pleasant and profitable country ; and there will be no serious accidents by the way.

Among the titles which may have cheered the prospector at the beginning of this season is that of Mr. Dobson’s new book of essays.⁵ This second volume of Miscellanies gives more than it promises, for to the group of studies, mainly in the eighteenth century, which we had looked for, is added a considerable collection of verses. The prose papers occasionally, as in The Grub Street of the Arts, present a baffling complexity of allusion to those who do not know their Old London and its faded worthies, but they will not resent it. Mr. Dobson could make interesting reading of a census report if he chose to take the trouble. For such papers as Mrs. Woffington, On Certain Quotations in Walton’s Angler, and Vader Cats, no shade of allowance need be made by anybody ; they must surely be charming to all comers. But Mr. Dobson will not be remembered merely as a fancier of obscure antiques. The most valuable essay in this volume, The Story of the Spectator, turns again a much-tliumbed leaf, and without spectacular novelty of method gives the disputed passage what one feels to be its final interpretation.

The verses are all of the right Dobson flavor, though here and there with a certain diminution of richness which their occasional nature has made inevitable. Sometimes (as in After a Holiday) there rings a deeper strain, to remind us that this debonair minstrel does not see life go by always in motley. But in the main he has contented himself with the natural register of his own delicate lyre ; and in the lines written For a Copy of The Compleat Angler, in The Philosophy of the Porch, in The Holocaust, and in many others, he has shown all of his old grace and melodiousness. No fewer than eight of the bits of verse which conclude the volume are inscribed to Mr. Edmund Gosse. The briefest is among the best: —

Ten years ago Mr. Gosse produced a volume of brief sketches on odd first editions which chanced to be in his own library. It is now reprinted with an added note on the original edition of White’s Selborne. Nothing could better indicate what slight material may turn to literature in the right working. Most of the books treated are curious and rare rather than intrinsically valuable as literature. Mr. Gosse is professedly speaking to bibliophiles; but his aim, or his fate, is to find a literary interest in these first editions of his; to achieve by tempered praise, or, at least, by kindly laughter, a discriminating sympathy with certain almost forgotten literary ambitions. Except White’s Selborne, The Shaving of Shagpat, and Peter Bell, hardly a title is likely to be familiar to the casual reader ; but unless he is insensible as well as casual, there is not a paper which will fail to interest him. Surely, we reflect, if one modern critic can extract such excellent music from these ancient instruments, long mute and untroubled, others, though of a humbler sort, need not despair utterly of their experiments with the many-stopped inventions of this day.

Two other volumes ⁶ must naturally be included in any comment upon the essays of the past year, and as they represent a somewhat graver and more measured type of criticism, they may well be spoken of last. Each contains, within confined limits, a body of carefully considered criticism, the accumulation of years. It would hardly be too much to assert that not since the day of those most famous of all English Essays in Criticism (unless, indeed, we except certain work of Professor Dowden and Mr. Gosse) have two volumes of critical papers appeared of such weight and ripeness. Work of this sort must necessarily lack the intimate ease of Mr. Dobson’s, and the glancing lightness of Mr. Birrell’s. It cannot be denied that Mr. Brownell’s manner is often involved, and occasionally even puzzling ; but so is his theme. Very rarely comes a critic like Bagehot, or (to cite an antipodal instance) Arnold, who is able to gain subtle effects almost without departure from the vernacular. Mr. Brownell does not achieve this; the subtlety of his thought is often mirrored in his expression rather than concealed by it. He has not the knack, or perhaps the bent, for putting things concretely ; and his reward is that the reader will not be misled by mere fluency into a fancied understanding of what he could not be likely to understand without effort. A simple illustration of the two methods suggests itself. “ Thackeray,” wrote Bagehot, “ looked at everything — at nature, at life, at art — from a sensitive aspect. . . . He had distinct and rather painful sensations when most men have but confused and blurred ones. Most men have felt the instructive headache, during which they are more acutely conscious than usual of all that goes on around them, — during which everything seems to pain them, and in which they understand it because it pains them and they cannot get their imagination away from it. Thackeray had a nerve-ache of this sort always ; he acutely felt every possible passing fact, every trivial interlude in society.” With what effect of almost physical force does this figure of the “ instructive headache ” come into impact with the inert mind. Mr. Brownell contents himself with a plain record of the fact. “ Thackeray was extremely sensitive, and his susceptibility was as highly organized as it was sensitive.” Whatever else he has to say to the point is by way of increment rather than of illustration. One more contrasting parallel may perhaps be cited. Of that curious Thackeray an harping upon snobbishness which reached its fullest expression in The Book of Snobs, Bagehot wrote warmly: “ Mr. Thackeray, as we think, committed two errors in this matter. He lacerates ’snobs ’ in his books as if they had committed an unpardonable outrage and inexpiable crime. ’That man,’ he says, ‘ is anxious to know lords ; and he pretends to know more of lords than he really does know. What a villain ! What a disgrace to our common nature ! What an irreparable reproach to human reason ! ’ Not at all; it is a fault which satirists should laugh at, and which moralists condemn and disapprove, but which yet does not destroy the whole vital excellence of him who possesses it; which may leave him a good citizen, a pleasant husband, a warm friend, — ‘ a fellow,’ as the undergraduate said, 'up in his morals.’ In transient society it is possible, we think, that Mr. Thackeray thought too much of social inequalities. They belonged to that common, plain, perceptible world which filled his mind, and which left him at times and at casual moments no room for a purely intellectual and just estimate of men as they really are in themselves, and apart from social imperfection and defect.” Mr, Brownell, in the character of apologist, replies to this verdict, so often echoed during the past forty years : “ The Book of Snobs is an amazing series of variations on this single theme — hardly robust enough in itself to have avoided flatness and failure, in the course of such elaboration, by a writer less ‘ possessed ’ by it. This at least is what saves its perennial interest for other readers than those familiar with the particular society it satirizes, for other than English readers, that is to say. ‘ You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of snobs; to do so shows that you are yourself a snob. I myself have been taken for one.’ These statements are for all nationalities. It need hardly be pointed out that hypocrisy constitutes one of the most effective elements which the novelist can use in portraying human life on a large scale and under civilized conditions. Imposture of one kind or another almost monopolizes the seamy side of any society’s existence. In the material of the novelist of manners it has the same place as crime in that of the romance of adventure. It is the natural concomitant of gregariousness, the great social bane, the social incarnation of Ahriman, the shadow if not also the middle tint of the social picture. Almost inevitably the novelist, who both by predisposition and by practice handles it well, presents a picture of sound and vital verisimilitude, and of profounder and more universal significance than a study of most other social forces affords.”

The difference in manner is obvious. The preference for vigor and simplicity lies with Bagehot; but Mr. Brownell’s argument is as plainly superior in breadth and discrimination as it is inferior in concreteness and audible enthusiasm. Walter Bagehot was a notable critic by the grace of Heaven, while Mr. Brownell’s power is the result of broad study and conscious attainment. His essay on George Eliot is interesting for its contention that the novelist lacked the æsthetic sense and had no style ; that her power is the power of the moralist rather than of the artist. “ Thus there are no ‘ passages,’ either ’fine ’ or in any way sustained, in her works ; at least I think of none, and if any exist I suspect they are put into the mouth of some personage with whom they are ‘ in character,’ — in which case they would be sure to be very well done indeed. Every sentence stands by itself ; by its sententious self, therefore. The ‘ wit and wisdom ’ of the author are crystallized in phrases, not distilled in fluid diction. Their truth strikes us sharply, penetrates us swiftly; the mind tingles agreeably under the slight shock, instead of glowing in expansive accord and dilating with actual conviction.” The passage reminds us of an oddly different judgment in Professor Dowden’s essay, written many years ago: “At the same time the novels of George Eliot are not didactic treatises. They are primarily works of art, and George Eliot herself is artist as much as she is teacher. Many good things in particular passages of her writings are detachable ; admirable sayings can be cleared from their surroundings, and presented by themselves, knocked out clean as we knock out fossils from a piece of limestone. But if we separate the moral soul of any complete work of hers from its artistic medium, if we murder to dissect, we lose far more than we gain. When a work of art can be understood only by enjoying it, the art is of a high kind.” Well, one takes one’s choice in such a flat disagreement among the doctors. It need only be said (to adapt the sentence last quoted) that when a piece of criticism can be made profitable only by agreeing with it, the criticism is of a shallow kind. In this case one hardly feels that Mr. Brownell is without some secret relenting toward the quality of George Eliot’s art — else why is she included in his august assembly of Victorian Prose Masters ?

The papers in Dr. Richard Garnett’s collection are of considerable variety. Dr. Garnett is that somewhat rare manifestation, a scholar who is also a man of letters. Even the more particular of his present essays are therefore of interest to the not erudite reader. The more general of them, however, are of greatest moment, — the papers on Coleridge, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, and especially the essay On Translating Homer. From two of these papers we may quote briefly : “ We entirely agree with Mr. Frederic Harrison that Arnold’s fame will mainly rest upon his poetry, and that it will be durable, pure, and high.... If we were called upon to indicate Arnold’s place upon the roll of English poets, by comparison with one of accepted fame, we should seek his nearest parallel in Gray. Both are academic poets, the dominant note of each is a tender and appealing pathos, each possessed a refinement of taste which in some measure degenerated into fastidiousness, and tended to limit a productiveness not originally exuberant.” This from one of Arnold’s contemporaries is the sane and conservative sort of judgment which may well make one pause before accepting the generalization of M. Lemaître.

Upon the main theory of Arnold’s lectures on translating Homer is based the very suggestive essay to which Dr. Garnett, with the proper assurance of one who is master of his subject, does not hesitate to give Arnold’s title. The present essayist, however, fails to agree with Arnold that Homer should be rendered in English hexameters. He contends that the principal reason for the continued supremacy of Pope’s version is simply that all subsequent translators of note have eschewed Pope’s medium. Dr. Garnett offers excellent reasons for his belief that the letter and spirit of Homer may best be rendered in English by means of the heroic rhyme which Pope’s muscle-bound manipulation deprived of its due credit. Of Dr. Garnett’s own experiments, subjoined to the essay, one is tempted to quote what he himself remarks of Arnold: “His own attempts at Homeric translation, indeed, were by no means fortunate, but this in no wise detracts from the value of his criticism.” They are apparently lacking in the rapidity and directness if not in the nobility which he follows Arnold in prescribing to the ideal translator. They are not unsuccessful, however, in showing of what flexible treatment a metre is capable which the world has come to associate with formality and rigidity. Dr. Garnett’s prose style is less involved and conscious than Mr. Brownell’s, but this is because his intellectual method is simpler. Certainly, taken together, these two volumes, with their serious appeal to the intellect, suggest the necessary qualification of so taking and significant a remark as Professor Dowden’s : “ The most valuable critic is the critic who communicates sympathy by an exquisite record of his own delights, not the critic who attempts to communicate thought.”

H. W. Boynton.