AUTHORS AND CRITICS.
At the gracious Christmas season of the year we are reminded by nearly every post of our duty towards our neighbours, meaning thereby not merely those who live within what Wordsworth, with greater familiarity than precision, has defined as ‘an easy walk,’ but, with few exceptions, mainly of a party character, all mankind. The once wide boundaries of an Englishman’s sphere of hatred are sorely circumscribed. We are now expected not only to love all peoples, which in theory is easy enough, particularly if we are no great travellers, but to read their publications in translations unverified by affidavit, which in practice is very hard. Yet if we do not do it, we are Chauvinists, which has a horrid sound.
Much is now expected of a man. Even in his leisure hours, when his feet are on the hob, he must be zealous in some cause, say Realism; serious, as he reflects upon the interests of literature and the position of authors; and, above all and hardest of all, he must be sympathetic. Irony he should eschew, and levity, but disquisitions on duty are never out of place.
This disposition of mind, however praiseworthy, makes the aspect of things heavy, and yet this is the very moment selected by certain novelists, playwrights, and irresponsible persons of that kind, to whom we have been long accustomed to look for relaxation, to begin prating, not of their duty to please us, but of our duty to appreciate them. It appears that we owe a duty to our contemporaries who write, which is not merely passive, that is, to abstain from slandering them, but active, namely, to read and admire them.
The authors who grumble and explain the merits of their own things are not the denizens of Grub Street, or those poor neglected souls to one of whom Mr. Alfred Austin lately addressed these consolatory words:
‘Friend, be not fretful if the voice of fame,
Along the narrow way of hurrying men,
Where unto echo echo shouts again,
Be all day long not noisy with your name.’
No; it is the shouted authors who are most discontented; the men who have best availed themselves of all the resources of civilization, who belong to syndicates, employ agents, have a price-current, and know what it is to be paid half a dozen times over for the same thing. Even the prospect of American copyright and taxing all the intelligence of a reading Republic—even this does not satisfy them. They want to be classics in their own lifetime, and to be spoken and written of as if they were already embalmed in the memory of a grateful nation. To speak or write lightly of departed genius is offensive, but people who have the luck to be alive must not expect to be taken quite so seriously. But they do. Everything is taken seriously in these grim days, even short stories. There is said to be a demand for short stories, begotten, amongst many other things, by that reckless parent, the Spirit of the Age. There is no such demand. The one and only demand poor wearied humanity has ever made, or will ever make, of the story-teller, be he as long-winded as Richardson or as breathless as Kipling, is to be made self-forgetful for a season. Interest me somehow, anyhow; make me mindless of the room I am sitting in, of the people about me; soothe me, excite me, tickle me, make me better, make me worse; do what you like with me, only make it possible for me to keep reading on, and a joy to do so. This is our demand. There is nothing unreasonable in it. It is matter of experience. Authors have done all this for us, and are doing it to-day. It is their trade, and a glorious one.
But the only thing that concerns the reader is the book he holds in his hand. He cannot derive inspiration from any other quarter. To the author the characters may be living, he may have lived amongst them for months; they may be inexpressibly dear to him, and his fine eyes may fill with tears as he thinks of Jane or Sarah, but this avails naught to the reader. Our authors are too apt to forget this, and to tell us what they think of their own figments, and how they came to write their books. The imitation of Carlyle cannot be generally recommended, but in one respect, at all events, his example should be followed. Though he made fuss enough whilst he was writing a book, as soon as he had done with it he never mentioned it again.
This sudden display of nervousness on the part of authors is perhaps partly due to their unreasonable confusion of the Reviewers with the Readers. The great mass of criticism is, delivered vivâ voce, and never appears in print at all. This spoken criticism is of far greater importance than printed criticism. It is repeated again and again, in all sorts of places, on hundreds of occasions, and cannot fail to make dints in people’s minds, whereas the current printed criticism of the week runs lightly off the surface. ‘Press notices,’ as they are called, have no longer ‘boodle’ in them, if I may use a word the genius of Mr. Stevenson has already consecrated for all delightful use. The pen may, in peaceful times, be mightier than the sword, but in this matter of criticism of our contemporaries the tongue is mightier than the pen. Authors should remember this.
The volume of unprinted criticism is immense, and its force amazing. Lunching last year at a chophouse, I was startled to hear a really important oath emerge from the lips of a clerkly-looking man who sat opposite me, and before whom the hurried waiter had placed a chump-chop. ‘Take the thing away,’ cried the man with the oath aforesaid, ‘and bring me a loin chop.’ Then, observing the surprise I could not conceal that an occurrence so trifling should have evoked an expression so forcible, the man muttered half to himself and half to me: ‘There is nothing I hate so much in the wide world as a chump-chop, unless indeed it be’ (speaking slowly and thoughtfully) ‘the poetry of Mr. ——,’ and here the fellow, unabashed, named right out the name of a living poet who, in the horrid phrase of the second-hand booksellers, is ‘much esteemed’ by himself, and some others. After this explosion of feeling the conversation between us became frankly literary, but I contrived to learn in the course of it that this chump-chop-hater was a clerk in an insurance office, and had never printed a line in his life. He was, as sufficiently appears, a whimsical fellow, full of strange oaths and stranger prejudice, but for criticism of contemporary authors—keen, searching, detached, genuine—it would be impossible to find his equal in the Press. The man is living yet—he was lately seen in Cheapside, elbowing his way through the crowd with a masterful air, and so long as he lives he criticises, and what is more, permeates his circle—for he must live somewhere—with his opinions. These are your gods, O Authors! It is these voices which swell the real chorus of praise or blame. These judges are untainted by hatreds, strangers to jealousy; your vanity, your egotism, your necktie, your anecdotes, do not prevent them from enjoying your books or revelling in your humour, be it new or old, for they do not know you by sight; but neither will the praise of the Athenæum, or of any newspaper, or the conventional respect of other authors save your productions, your poem, your novel, your drama, your collected trifles, from the shafts of their ridicule or the dust of their indifference.
But do we owe any duty to contemporary authors? Clearly we are at liberty to talk about them and their ‘work’ as much as ever we choose—at dinner-tables, in libraries and smoking-rooms, in railway carriages (if we like shouting and do not mind being inaudible), in boats, at balls, in Courts of Justice, and other places, ejusdem generis, at Congresses (before, during, and after the speeches), and, indeed, everywhere and at all times, if we are so disposed and can find anybody to listen, or even to seem to listen, to us. Of this liberty we can never be deprived even by a veto of authors ad hoc, and, as already stated, the free exercise of it is a far more important constituent in the manufacture of literary opinion than printed notices of books.
But though we are just as much entitled to express in conversation our delight in, or abhorrence of, a contemporary author as we are to bless or curse the weather, it cannot be said to be our duty to do so. No adult stands in a fiduciary relationship to another adult in the matter of his reading. If we like a book very much, it is only natural to say so; but if we do not like it, we may say so or hold our tongues as we choose.
Suppose one dreamt (gentle reader, remember this is nothing but a dream) that there was one woebegone creature alive at this moment in this Britain of ours who cordially disliked, and shrank from, the poetry of Sir Edwin Arnold, Mr. Lewis Morris, and Mr. Alfred Austin, who could not away with ‘Robert Elsmere,’ ‘The Wages of Sin,’ or ‘Donovan,’ who abhorred the writings of Mrs. Lynn Linton, Archdeacon Farrar, and Mr. Shorthouse, who hated ‘Amiel’s Journal,’ ‘Marie Bashkirtseff,’ and ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy,’ who found it easy, and even helpful, to live for six months at a time without reading a new novel by Mr. Hall Caine or Mr. Black, who failed to respond to the careful and often-repeated raptures of those wise critics who assured him that the author of ‘Amos Barton’ and ‘Middlemarch’ cowers and crouches by the side of Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith; who, when he wants to laugh very heartily indeed, does not take down the works of—— But my list is long enough for a dream—could you honestly advise that man to run amuck in print against all these powerful and delightful writers? What good could come of it? The good people who like a writer will not like him or her any the less because you don’t. Reading is a democratic pursuit, else why are children taught it—very badly, no doubt—out of the rates? Sensible men and foolish men alike resent being dictated to about their contemporaries. They are willing to learn about the dead, but they crave leave to lay their own hands upon the living.
‘Who set you up as a judge over us?’ they cry testily, when they are told by a perfect stranger that they ought not to like what they do like, and ought to like what they go to sleep over.
Schopenhauer, a man who hated much, in his ‘Parerga,’ fervently desires a literary journal which ‘should be a dam against the unconscionable scribbling of the age, the everlasting deluge of bad and useless books.’
He proceeds (I am quoting from Mr. Saunders’ translation):
‘If there were such a paper as I mean, every bad writer, every brainless compiler, every plagiarist from others’ books, every hollow and incapable place-hunter, every sham philosopher, every vain and languishing poetaster, would shudder at the prospect of the pillory in which his bad work would inevitably have to stand soon after publication.’
It is an animated passage, and reeks of the shambles. How awkward for poor so-and-so! one murmurs whilst reading. But even were the thing possible, I demur to the ferocity. There is no need to be so angry. A dishonest and lazy plumber does more harm in a week than all the poetasters of the Christian era. But the thing is not possible, as the robust sense of Schopenhauer made plain to him. He goes on:
‘The ideal journal could, to be sure, be written only by people who joined incorruptible honesty with rare knowledge and still rarer power of judgment, so that, perhaps, there could, at the very most, be one, and even hardly one, in the whole country; but there it would stand, like a just Areopagus, every member of which would have to be elected by all the others.’
Who, I wonder, would elect the first member of this just Ruin? He would, I suppose, be nominated by the subscribers of the necessary capital, and would then proceed to gather round him, were his terms better than his quarters, the gang we all know so well, incorruptible as Robespierre, not quite so learned as Selden, and with powers of judgment which can only be described as varying.
It is of course obvious that no journal, be its contributors who they may, can exercise criminal jurisdiction over bad or stupid authors. The hue and cry has before now been raised at the heels of a popular author, but always to the great enrichment of the rascal. The reading community owes no allegiance, and pays no obedience, to the critical journals, who, if they really want to injure an author, and deprive him of his little meed of contemporary praise and profit, should leave him severely alone. To refer to him is to advertise him.
The principles of taste, the art of criticism, are not acquired amidst the hurly-burly of living authors and the hasty judgments thereupon of hasty critics, but by the study, careful and reverential, of the immortal dead. In this study the critics are of immense use to us. Dryden, Addison, Gray, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Bagehot, Swinburne, reveal to us their highest critical powers not whilst vivisecting a contemporary, but when expounding the anatomy of departed greatness.
Teach me rightly to admire Milton and Keats, and I will find my own criticism of living poets. Help me to enjoy, however feebly, Homer and Dante, and I will promise not to lose my head over Pollok’s ‘Course of Time,’ or Mr. Bailey’s ‘Festus.’ Fire my enthusiasm for Henry Vaughan and George Herbert, and I shall be able to distinguish between the muses of Miss Frances Ridley Havergal and of Miss Christina Rossetti. Train me to become a citizen of the true Republic of Letters, and I shall not be found on my knees before false gods, or trooping with the vulgar to crown with laurel brazen brows.
In conclusion, one may say that though authors cannot be expected to love their critics, they might do well to remember that it is not the critics who print, but the reading community whose judgments determine an author’s place amongst contemporary writers. It may be annoying to be sneered at by an anonymous critic in the Saturday Review, but it is quite as bad to be sneered at by a stranger in a railway carriage. The printed sneer may be read by more people than overheard the spoken sneer; but printed sneers are not easily transferred from writer to reader in their original malice. One may enjoy a sneer without sneering.
Authors may also advantageously remember that we live in hurried times, and enjoy scanty leisure for reading, and that of necessity the greater fraction of that leisure belongs to the dead. Merely a nodding acquaintance with Shakespeare is not maintained without a considerable expenditure of time. The volumes with which every man of ordinary literary taste would wish to be familiar can only be numbered by thousands. We must therefore be allowed time, and there is always plenty. Every good poem, novel, play, at once joins and becomes part and parcel of the permanent stock of English literature, and some time or another will be read and criticised. It is quite safe. Every author of spirit repudiates with lofty scorn the notion that he writes in obedience to any mandate from the public. It is the wretched, degraded politician whose talk is of mandates; authors know nothing of mandates, they have missions. But if so, they must be content to bide their time. If a town does turn out to meet a missionary, it is usually not with loud applause, but with large stones.
As for the critics, the majority of them no doubt only do what they are told. It is a thousand pities the habit of reviewing so many new books in the literary papers has become general. It is a trade thing. Were a literary paper to have no advertising columns, do you suppose it would review half the new books it does? Certainly not. It gets the books, and it gets the advertisements, and then it does the best it can for itself and its readers by distributing the former amongst its contributors with the request that they will make as lively ‘copy’ as they can out of the materials thus provided them. The reviews are written and printed; then begins the wail of the author: My reviewer, says he, has not done me justice; his object appears to have been, not to show me off, but himself. There is no sober exposition of my plan, my purpose, my book, but only a parade of the reviewer’s own reading and a crackling of his thorns under my pot. The author’s complaint is usually just, but he should remember that in nine cases out of ten his book calls for no review, and certainly would receive none on its merits. The review is not written for those who have read or intend to read the book, but for a crowd of people who do not mean to read it, but who want to be amused or interested by a so-called review of it, which must therefore be an independent, substantive literary production.
What a mercy it would be if the critical journals felt themselves free to choose their own subjects, new and old, and recognised that it was their duty to help to form the taste of their readers, and not merely to pick their provender for them or to promote the prosperity of publishers, which, as a matter of fact, they can no longer do.
The critics who criticise in print, were they left to themselves, would be found praising enthusiastically all they found praiseworthy in contemporary effort. Even now, when their tempers must be sorely tried by the dreary wilderness in which they are compelled to sojourn, it is marvellous how quick they are to snuff the fresh, blowing airs of genuine talent. It is slander to say that present-day critics are grudging of praise. They are far too free with it. Had they less hack-work, they might by chance become a little more fastidious; but even if this were so, it would only increase their joy, delight, and satisfaction in making the discovery that somebody or another—some Stevenson, some Barrie, some Kipling—had actually written something which was not only in form but in fact a new book.
Fiery souls there would no doubt always be who would insist, on occasions, in rushing out to strike the shield of some many-editioned living author, and defy him to mortal combat. An occasional fray of the kind is always an agreeable incident, but a wise editor would do his best to control the noble rage of his contributors, bidding them remember the words of John Keats: ‘The sure way, Bailey, is first to know a man’s faults, and then be passive.’
The time and space liberated by giving up the so-called criticism of bad and insignificant books could be devoted to the real criticism of the few living and the many dead classics; and, for one does occasionally get a little weary of the grand style, with arguments and discussions about smaller folk. If basting there must be, let it be the basting of the brainless compilers, the plagiarists, the sham philosophers, and the languishing poetasters of the past. Dead donkeys are far more amusing than living ones, and make much better texts for fierce critics than men with wives and families dependent upon them. The vagaries of great authors have often done harm in their generation; the follies of small ones, including the supreme and most visible of all their follies, that of thinking themselves great, have never harmed a human creature.
Elliot Stock, Paternoster Row, London.