IV
But the critic, though liberated, has many hard questions to decide, many subtle temptations to resist. There is the question of his motives, which I said are of no consequence to the author or to the public so long as what he speaks is truth; but which, I must now add, are of great consequence to him. If he feels envy and malice, he must not cherish them as passions to be gratified, but use them, if at all, as dangerous tools. He must be sure that his ruling passion is love of good work—a love strong enough to make him proclaim it, though done by his worst enemy. There is the question again of his own limitations; he must be on his guard lest they lead him into injustice, and yet never so timid that he fails to say what he thinks, for fear it may be wrong.
I speak of these things from the point of view of the critic’s duty to himself; but they are a part also of his duty towards his neighbor, the author. What that duty may precisely be, is his most difficult problem. A few things only are plain. He ought to say as much against a friend as against an enemy, as much against a publisher whom he knows as against a publisher of England or France. He must dare to give pain. He must make his own the ideals of Sarcey. “I love the theatre,” he wrote to Zola, “with so absolute a devotion that I sacrifice everything, even my particular friends, even, what is much more difficult, my particular enemies, to the pleasure of pushing the public towards the play which I consider good, and of keeping it away from the play which I consider bad.”
That perhaps was comparatively easy for Sarcey with his clear ideal of the well-made piece; it is perhaps easy in the simple, straightforward appraisal of the ordinary book; but the critic may be excused if he feels compunctions and timidities when the task grows more complex, when, arming himself more and more with the weapons of psychology, he seeks his explanations of a given work where undoubtedly they lie, in the circumstances, the passions, the brains, the very disorders of the author. How far in this path may he go? Unquestionably, he may go far, very far with the not too recent dead; but with the living how far may he go, how daring may he make his guess? For guess it will be, since his knowledge, if not his competence, will be incomplete until memoirs, letters, diaries, reminiscences bring him their enlightenment. One thinks first what the author may suffer when violent hands are laid upon his soul, and one recoils; but what of the public? Must the public, then, not know its contemporaries just as far as it can—these contemporaries whose strong influence for good or evil it is bound to undergo? These have full license to play upon the public; shall not the public, in its turn, be free to scrutinize to any, the most intimate extent, the human stuff from which emanates the strong influence which it feels? If the public good justifies dissection, does it not also justify vivisection? Is literature an amusement only, or is it a living force which on public grounds the critic has every right in all ways to measure? Doubtless his right in the particular case may be tested by the importance of the answer to the people, yet the grave delicacy of this test—which the critic must apply himself—is equaled only by the ticklishness of the task. Yet there lies the path of truth, serviceable, ever honorable truth.
The critic is, in fact, confronted by two standards. Now and again he must make the choice between admirable conduct and admirable criticism. They are not the same. It is obvious that what is outrageous conduct may be admirable criticism, that what is admirable conduct may be inferior, shuffling criticism. Which should he choose? If we make duty to the public the test, logic seems to require that he should abate no jot of his critical message. It certainly seems hard that he should be held to a double (and contradictory) standard when others set in face of a like dilemma are held excused. The priest is upheld in not revealing the secrets of the confessional, the lawyer in not betraying the secret guilt of his client, although as a citizen each should prefer the public to the individual; whereas the critic who, reversing the case, sacrifices the individual to the public, is condemned. The public should recognize, I think, his right to a special code like that accorded the priest, the lawyer, the soldier, the physician. He should be relieved of certain social penalties, fear of which may cramp his freedom and so lessen his value. Who cannot easily see that a critic may write from the highest sense of duty words which would make him the “no gentleman” that Cousin said Sainte-Beuve was?
But the whole question is thorny; that writer will do an excellent service to letters who shall speak an authoritative word upon the ethics of criticism. At present, there is nothing—except the law of libel. The question is raised here merely to the end of asking these further questions: Would not the greatest freedom help rather than hurt the cause of literature? Is not the double standard too dangerous a weapon to be allowed to remain in the hands of the upholders of the Silent Bargain?
Meanwhile —until the problem is solved —the critic must be an explorer of untraveled ethical paths. Let him be bold whether he is a critic of the deeds of the man of action, or of those subtler but no less real deeds, the words of an author! For, the necessary qualifications made, all that has been said of literary criticism applies to all criticism—everywhere there is a Silent Bargain to be fought, everywhere honest opinion has powerful foes.
The thing to do for each author of words or of deeds, each critic of one or the other, is to bring his own pebble of conviction however rough and sharp-cornered and throw it into that stream of discussion which will roll and grind it against others, and finally make of it and of them that powder of soil in which, let us hope, future men will raise the crop called truth.