Significant Books: The Two Pursuits

THE literature of the past half century appears to have been a product, or resultant, of two principal forces, or rather impulses: the impulse toward a freer exercise of the romantic imagination, and the impulse toward an extreme development, in science of material effectiveness, and in art of sheer technical skill. These impulses are obviously independent, if not hostile; they have sometimes neutralized, often deflected, each other, and it would be hard to name an instance in which their action has been perfectly complementary. Not seldom, to be sure, they have worked side by side, if not altogether to mutual advantage: they have jointly, though not harmoniously, and by divers methods, irritated the productive nerves of creators, inventors, and art-for-art’s-sake men. Their somewhat jarring coexistence should suggest a point of attack in dealing with not a few of the more pressing questions of current criticism. To our mind, at least, several recently published books of criticism are of especial significance for the light they, consciously or unconsciously, cast upon the interplay of these impulses in modern fiction,poetry, and drama: the pursuit of virtuosity and the pursuit of illusion.

Of the pursuit of illusion, Mr. WattsDunton is one of our most eminent critical champions. It is significant that he should have been not only the valued friend of Rossetti and Morris, but also for many years the housemate and companion of Swinburne, greatest of modern poetical virtuosi. “The Renascence of Wonder,” is the phrase which Mr. Watts-Dunton connects with that movement toward a freer exercise of the romantic imagination which he considered the important movement in modern art. “As the stormwind is the cause and not the effect of the mighty billows at sea, so the movement in question was the cause and not the effect of the French Revolution. . . . The phrase, the Renascence of Wonder, merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing man, and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious life: the impulse of acceptance, — the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are, — and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.”

By wonder, it is further explained, the critic means, “that poetical attitude which the human mind assumes when confronting those unseen powers of the universe who, if they did not weave the web in which man finds himself entangled, dominate it.” Romanticism, as a term that is feeble in itself and debased by usage, cannot for him express that attitude. “Not all the romantic feeling to be found in all the French romanticists (with their theory that not earnestness but the grotesque is the life-blood of romance) could equal the romantic feeling expressed in a single picture or drawing of Rossetti’s, such, for instance, as Beata Beatrix or Pandora.” Of Pandora he says in another place: “In it is seen at its highest Rossetti’s unique faculty of treating classical legend in the true romantic spirit. The grand and sombre beauty of Pandora’s face, the mysterious haunting sadness in her deep blue - gray eyes as she tries in vain to reclose the box from which are still escaping the smoke and flames that shape themselves as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit-faces, gray with agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in the highest romantic mood.” This is to give Rossetti a high place indeed; since, according to the further generalization which completes the foundation of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s structure of criticism, “Other things being equal, or anything like equal, a painter or poet, of our time is to be judged very much by his sympathy with that great movement, which we call the Renascence of Wonder.”

Here, then, is what appears at first glance to be, if not a reliable, a pretty comfortable vade mecum for the observer of modern letters. It has been seized upon as such by not a few of the younger English critics, with the result, among others, that certain terms like Renascence of Wonder and Natura Benigna are in the way of declining from respectable catchwords to the mere cant of a coterie. Mr. Watts-Dunton has, however, by the employment of such phrases, and by the expression of the critical attitude for which they stand, done not a little toward bridging the gap between a rigid classical criticism, on the one hand, and a flighty pseudo-romantic criticism on the other. That he has persistently refused to collect, revise, and bring into unity those (in the proper sense of the term) essays in criticism, which maintain an obscure, if not precarious, existence in the files of the Athenœum and the pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica, is a fact which he explains in these terms: “I had for years, let me confess, cherished the idea that some day I might be able to take my various expressions of opinion upon literature, especially upon poetry, and mould them into a coherent, and, perhaps, into a harmonious whole. This alone would have satisfied me. But year by year the body of critical writing from my pen has grown, and I felt and feel more and more unequal to the task of grappling with such a mass.... I am not so entirely without literary aspiration as not to regret that, years ago, when the mass of material was more manageable, I neglected to collect them and edit them myself. But the impulse to do this is now gone. . . . Owing to the quite unexpected popularity of The Coming of Love and of Aylwin, my mind has been diverted from criticism, and plunged into those much more fascinating waters of poetry and fiction in which I used to revel long before.”

One cannot doubt the ingenuousness of this; nor can one fail to see in it a confession of limitation. Corollary to his insistance upon imaginative spontaneity is an insistence upon spontaneity of expression. To apply this principle has been, for himself, to practice improvisation; patently that in his critical writing, essentially that in his verse and fiction. “To define any kind of style,” he asserts, “we must turn to real life. When we say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or conscious grace which we call manner. The difference is fundamental. It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or grace, — manner is conscious power or grace.” This theory of style, admirable as it is, fails to prescribe that infinite painstaking which is a sine qua non for all, at least, under the first order of genius. And, Aylwin and The Coming of Love to the contrary, Mr. Watts-Dunton’s own minor genius, or major talent, should have found its constructive or creative expression through criticism. He is a lesser, though considerable, poet and novelist; he might have been a really great critic. To many minds he is that: Mr. Swinburne, in his generous way, has called him “the first critic of our time, perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age.”His achievement, whatever it may have been, is, we understand, due to his success in breaking away from tradition, and in “always dealing with first principles.”

What school of criticism does not pride itself on its unique addiction to first principles ? — a phrase capable of as ready appropriation and varied interpretation as the Return to Nature which provided Sir Leslie Stephen with so suggestive a text. In the dedication of his Studies in Prose and Verse, Mr. Arthur Symons has this paragraph: —

“ If there are any names here that do not interest you, disregard them, or read other names in their places. I am interested only in first principles, and it seems to me that to study first principles one must wait for them till they are made flesh and dwell among us. I have rarely contrasted one writer with another, or compared very carefully the various books of any writer among themselves. Criticism is not an examination with marks and prizes. It is a valuation of forces, and it is indifferent to their direction. It is concerned with them only as force, and it is concerned with force only, in its kind and degree.” The first principles, or forces, with which Mr. Symons occupies himself are not altogether identical with those which have employed Mr. Watts-Dunton. In wonder as the saving element in human nature the younger critic has complete faith; but he is by no means confident that we are just now on the road to salvation. Our rebirth of wonder has been attended, and sadly jeopardized, by a monstrous new birth: the worship of fact. For much he holds responsible “that nameless thing, the newspaper, which can be likened only, and that at its best, to a printed phonograph. . . . Facts are difficult of digestion, and should be taken diluted, at infrequent intervals. They suit few constitutions when taken whole, and none when taken indiscriminately. The worship of fact is a wholly modern attitude of mind, and it comes together with a worship of what we call science. True science is a kind of poetry, it is a divination, an imaginative reading of the universe. What we call science is an engine of material progress, it teaches us how to get most quickly to the other end of the world, and how to kill the people there in the most precise and economic manner. The function of this kind of science is to extinguish wonder, whereas the true science deepens our sense of wonder as it enlightens every new tract of the enveloping darkness.”

Upon the question of style (and there is no article of the literary creed which more definitely places a critic) these two devotees of wonder part company, in practice as well as in theory. His theory Mr. Symons expresses with a good deal of vigor: “Every writer of good prose is a conscious artificer; and to write without deliberately changing the sequence of words as they come into the mind is to write badly. There is no such thing, speaking properly, as a ‘natural style;’ and it is merely ignorance of the mental processes of writing which sometimes leads us to say that the style of Swift, for instance, is more natural than the style of Ruskin.” Certainly this is far enough from the “unconscious power or grace” which to Mr. Watts-Dunton means style. Mr. Symons in his pursuit of illusion declares that we require of the great artist “a world like our own, but a world infinitely more vigorous, interesting, profound; more beautiful with that kind of beauty which nature finds of itself for art. It is the quality of great creative art to give us so much life that we are overpowered by it, as by an air almost too vigorous to breathe: the exuberance of creation which makes the Sybils of Michelangelo something more than human, which makes Lear something more than human, in one kind or another of divinity.” That kind of beauty which nature finds of itself for art. Yet Mr. Symons’s own work, both creative and critical (if we must make such a distinction), would on the whole stand as an art-forart’s-sake utterance, as the best possible word to be said for that illegitimate offspring of the Wonder-renascence which we have had to style ungraciously “decadence.”

We ought not, perhaps, to have said “illegitimate,” since opposed to the “impulse of acceptance” is not only “the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder,” but the impulse to produce whatever is superficially unconventional, whatever may be likely to make people’s eyes stick out in a kind of physical wonder. At all events, it must be reluctantly admitted that, excellent critic as Mr. Symons is, given his premises, those premises in themselves seem to offer a somewhat insecure foothold. Strange gods indeed are some of those to whom, in the present volume, he has erected shrines. Of an Oscar Wilde one should have heard enough, and of a Hubert Crackanthorpe one can hardly hear too little: why, at worst, inflict upon us the paltry reminiscences of an Ernest Dowson? “I have never known him when he could resist either the desire or the consequences of drink. . . . He drank the poisonous liquors of those pothouses which swarm about the docks; he drifted about in whatever company came in his way; he let heedlessness develop into a curious [why curious ?] disregard of personal tidiness. In Paris, Les Halles took the place of the docks. At Dieppe, where I saw so much of him one summer, he discovered strange, squalid haunts about the harbour, where he made friends with amazing innkeepers, and got into rows with the fishermen who came in to drink after midnight. At Brussels, where I was with him at the time of the Kermesse, he flung himself into all that riotous Flemish life, with a zest for what was most sordidly riotous in it.” Yet “A soul unspotted from the world, in a body which one sees visibly soiling before one’s eyes; that improbability is what all who knew him saw in Dowson, as his youthful physical grace gave way year by year, and the personal charm underlying it remained unchanged.” Here is “indifference to direction,” and no mistake: the true pathetic fallacy of decadence. All honor to the cad and the ne’er-do-weel: they are not to be stalled in any slough of respectability. Villon and Verlaine . . . never to bathe and always (if possible) to get drunk; and to record the omission and the commission in impeccable verse: so, among other ways, wonder may be worshiped; so one may register one’s resistance against the impulse of acceptance.

This is, of course, a bald and shallow putting of the case, but one cannot help regretting keenly that so rich, and in some respects so exquisite, a critical faculty as that of Mr. Symons should seem to exhaust itself in the judgment of work often exquisite, but seldom rich, seldom of the first order according to any recognizable criterion. Mr. Symons’s mind, indeed, with all its delicacy of behavior, is irresistibly moved by the appeal of novelty in the studied expression of emotion. Conformity is so abhorrent to him as to make even deformity not altogether intolerable to him: deformity of mood veiled, that is, by some kind of new elegance of manner. What he says of the (it would seem) unspeakable hyper-æsthete of the past generation may be applied without undue strain to that whole movement to which the unkindly label of “ decadence ” has affixed itself: “The unbiased, scornful intellect, to which humanity has never been a burden, comes now to be unable to sit aside and laugh, and it has worn and looked behind so many masks that there is nothing desirable left in illusion. Having seen, as the artist sees, further than morality, but with so partial an eyesight as to have overlooked it on the way, it has come at length to discover morality in the only way left possible, for itself. And, like most of those who, having thought themselves weary, have made the adventure of putting thought into action, it has had to discover it sorrowfully, at its own incalculable expense.” In defining decadence, Mr. Symons does not spare his hand; it is, he says, “that learned corruption of language by which style ceases to be organic, and becomes, in the pursuit of some new expressiveness or beauty, deliberately abnormal.” Yet it is among the practitioners of such a “corrupt” literary art that his personal enthusiasms range, and that his own place must be recognized.

“Escape from self,” “escape from life,” these are the always recurring phrases which give the keynote to Mr. Symons’s criticism. His critical inquiry, whatever its immediate object, invariably resolves itself into the question, How did this human being think to escape from life, and how far did he succeed in escaping ? Let us keep ourselves indifferent to the direction which that impulse may take: through dissipation, through hard mechanical work, through religion, through love, through art: these are the means among which we are to choose; “and our happiness, our success in life, will depend on our choosing rightly, each for himself, among the forms in which that choice will come to us.” This, then, is our gospel according to Symons; there is no place in it, we notice, for the impulse of acceptance. “The one certainty is, that society is the enemy of man, and that formal art is the enemy of the artist.”

That sentence might be the motto of Mr. Huneker’s “book of dramatists;” Iconoclasts is a series of studies of living or recent dramatists who have resolutely abandoned formal art. They have produced we cannot as yet absolutely know what: nightmares are not of necessity more illuminating than facts, and much of this strange non-conforming literature may seem to later generations to have been simply hag-ridden. Mr. Huneker is a critic of the most brilliant journalistic type. By that one does not mean simply to record the fact that the substance of the present volume has appeared from time to time in the columns of the New York Sun, or to find anything undignified in the account of a sought and obtained interview with M. Maeterlinck, with which the book closes. This writer has evidently a wide knowledge of art, and a wide acquaintance with men. What one misses in his work is the repose, the finish, the, it may be, studied avoidance of mere epigram, mere cleverness, which gives so stable a charm to such criticism as that of Mr. Symons. Mr. Huneker would very likely be quite frank in preferring effect to achievement; or would allege that for his purpose they are really the same thing. At all events, he follows a method which in the hands of Mr. Chesterton and others is now giving a kind of popularity to criticism, at least to criticism of contemporary work; a service well worth performing, both as contributing to rational enjoyment and as an exercise of the missionary function. But criticism has yet another office: that of an art whose purity gives permanence to the utterances of critics so diverse as Sainte-Beuve and Walter Pater, Professor Dowden and Mr. Symons. It comes in the end, as always, to a question of style, of the true expression of a personality. If Mr. Huneker is not indifferent to questions of style, he is certainly not preoccupied by them. The play’s the thing: the raw forces, the novel or quasi-novel activities, of the modern European drama are what mainly absorb his attention. Hence a perhaps excessive admiration for playwrights like Villiers de l’Isle Adam, or Bernard Shaw. Mr. Shaw, we are relieved to hear him say, is guilty of one “grievous error, a total disbelief in the illusions of art.” “ Earth folk do everything to dodge the facts of life, to them cold, harsh, and at the same time fantastic. Every form of anodyne, ethical, intellectual, æsthetical, is resorted to to deaden the pain of reality. We work to forget to live; our religions, art, philosophy, patriotism, are so many buffers between the soul of man and bitter truth.” Mr. Huneker’s own method of escape from life is an escape from facts through “the veils, consoling and beautiful, of art.” But illusion may be pursued by many paths: Mr. Huneker discerns in the latest developments of European drama not so much a new-born as a surviving idealism. Of Ibsen, even, he finds it possible to assert that “the surface pessimism of his plays conceals a mighty belief in the ultimate goodness of mankind. Realist as he is, his dramas are shot through with a highly imaginative symbolism. A Pegasus was killed early under him, as Georg Brandes says; but there remains a rich remnant of poesy. And may there not be deduced from his complete compositions a constructive philosophy that makes for the ennoblement of his fellow beings ? ... Ibsen is a reflective poet, one to whom the idea presents itself before the picture; with Shakespeare and Goethe the idea and form were simultaneously born. His art is great and varied, yet it is never exercised as a sheer play of form or color or wit. A romantic originally, he pays the tax to beauty by his vivid symbolism and his rare formal perfections.”

An imaginative symbolism seems to him to inform, from Ibsen to Maeterlinck, the product of this modern dramatic impulse: “Maurice Maeterlinck employs the symbol instead of the sword; the psyche is his panache. . . . And therein the old ghost of the romantics comes to life, asserting its ‘ claims of the ideal,’ as Ibsen has the phrase. Crushed to dust by the hammers of the realists, sneered at in the bitter-sweet epigrams of Heine, Romance returns to us wearing a new mask. We name this mask Symbolism; but joyous, incarnate, behind its shifting shapes, marches a Romance, the Romance of 1830, the Romance of — before the Deluge. The earth-men, the troglodytes, who went delving into moral sewers and backyards of humanity, ruled for a decade and a day; then the vanquished reconquered. In this cycle of art it is Romance that comes to us more often, remains longer when it does come.” It is Romance newly incarnate at the hands of the modern playwright, newly garbed by the modern stage manager. Mr. Huneker accepts without grumbling the conditions of our present stragecraft. He is undisguisedly interested in the manipulations of scenery, costume, and lights. Success in these particulars can even console him for failures of interpretation. For Miss Terry to attempt, the part of Hjördis (in The Vikings of Helgeland) was “murdering Ibsen outright;” but “the play had its compensations;” the costuming and lighting, which were in charge of Miss Terry’s son, were so effective and original as to make the production well worth seeing, if not quite worth hearing. So charitable, nowadays, may be a critic whose profession has concerned him with audible forms of art.

Ibsen, Strindberg, Becque, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Hervieu, Shaw, D’Annunzio, Maeterlinck, — one might add the names of Mr. Phillips and Mr. Yeats, but would hardly thereby increase the representative value of this list of modern dramatists. The critic’s familiar manner is oddly tempered by his addiction to technical phraseology. He has, moreover, the to-date fashion of criticising one art in terms of another: a fashion to which his character of music critic must naturally make Mr. Huneker more than usually susceptible. “The Ibsen technic is rather tight in the social dramas, but the larger rhythms are nowhere missing.” Parallel with this studied confusion of tongues is a tendency to make strange bedfellows of noun and adjective: “The grandiloquent silhouettes of the Romantic drama, the mouthers of rhetoric, the substitution of a bric-à-brac mirage for reality, have no place in Ibsen’s art.” This kind of brilliant verbal coruscation is thrown off, we should say, quite spontaneously; yet it must be recognized as far more a manner and less a style than the measured prose of that “conscious artificer,” as he calls himself, Mr. Symons.

Mr. Hale’s book of essays is in all respects lighter than the others; but it covers much the same ground as Mr. Huneker’s volume, and, representing a quite distinct order of criticism, should suggest some useful comparisons. This is a series of impressions rather than of careful studies; they have that tone of conscious complaisance to which the pecunious academic person in the act of unbending to literature seems doomed. Certainly these papers are what is called readable: chatty, urbane, a little ostentatiously inconsequent, perhaps, and familiar not always in the best sense. Mr. Hale has, he intimates, no desire to play the Ruskin or the Anatole France: “ I remain on an isthmus of a middle state. Somewhere about half way between the holy mountain and the abyss, do I mount beside the puppet booth and give, as through a barker, some comment on the dramatists of our day.” He is probably wise to restrict himself in the main to his booth, if we are to judge by the two essays in the present collection in which he permits himself to generalize. His “ Note on Standards of Criticism” reads much like an apology for having no standard. “One must,” he admits, “do a good deal in the way of description and analysis of character, construction, situation, for that is often the only way that one can present one’s impressions, and those things are immensely interesting and valuable for themselves or in relation to other criticism. All is, they are not the main thing here: if they were, I should have to apologize for many omissions and, I suppose, not a few commissions. No one, I hope, will carp at my neglecting academic system and completeness. I have so much lecturing on literature from day to day, so much of the academic way of looking at things, that it is really a means to mental health to do something else.” We ought, perhaps, to be more touched by this confidence than we are able to be; but we do not enjoy a book for the sake of the mental health of its author; if Mr. Hale has anything to apologize for (and, taking his work at its face value, we do not think he has), it is hardly to be taken care of in such terms. His object, he states with sufficient explicitness, is to record the effect which certain modern plays have had upon him personally. Further, he suggests, somewhat obscurely (alas, for the discursive method), that this effect is threefold: upon the moral sense, upon the sense of reality, and upon the sense of ideality, or, as our other critics would say, illusion. What follows will have or lack value for the reader according as he is satisfied or dissatisfied with a cultivated but not too distinct expression of personal opinion. To us it appears that, adventurous as criticism must be in its contact with masterpieces, or other pieces, adventitious it must not be, if it aspires to stability as well as effectiveness.

Dreamer, virtuoso, journalistic commentator, academic observer, intelligent amateur, — among or out of such categories the contemporary writer has his being; and into whatever abeyance the creative spirit may have been apparently thrown by the worship paid for the moment to material progress, to merely technical excellence, wonder, the pursuit of illusion, is, it seems, to have no great difficulty in maintaining that priority among the forces making for human happiness which it has always — yes, even in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth — held among the sons of men.