[to be continued.]
A few months ago one of the youngest of the group of eccentric writers who call themselves "Symbolists" was paying a visit to London. The conversation in a drawing-room happened to run on the province of the Franche-Comté, and the guest remarked, as a curious circumstance, that no poet had ever come from that part of France. Somebody ventured to murmur the name of Victor Hugo. "Ah! sir," replied the young Symbolist, with a charming air of deprecation, "but we don't consider Victor Hugo a poet!" It is obvious that, for the present at least, this particular expression of opinion will remain rare; it was conceived in the very foppery of paradox, of course. But it is quite conceivable that such a judgment might spread, might become common, might become authoritative and universal. To our generation, at all events, Victor Hugo has appeared to be the typical poet; he and Tennyson have been named side by side as the very types of the imaginative creator, as purveyors of inexhaustible poetic pleasure. That is what we have all thought; but suppose that our grandchildren determine to think the opposite, what is to be done? Manifestly we shall be too old to whip them and too weary to argue with them. If they decide that Victor Hugo was not a poet, that Dickens was not amusing, that Hawthorne wrote bad novels, we shall have to go, indignant, to our tombs, but our indignation will not convert the younger generation.
So far as the history of the world has yet proceeded, the standards in literature have not been overturned in this rapid and revolutionary manner. But nowadays, if things once begin to move, they move fast, and we must be prepared for changes. In the parallel art of painting we have seen the most violent and apparently the most final reversals of the standards. It is very difficult to believe that various schools of art which have enjoyed great popularity in the course of the present century, and have fallen, will ever be revived. I had an uncle who purchased the works of Mr. Frost, R.A., and a very bad bargain it has proved to his family. Nothing is so deathly cold as the public interest to-day in Frost; his brown satyrs and his wax-white nymphs, with floating pink scarfs insufficiently concealing them, are not worth sixpence now. We do not, as I have said, see these violent upheavals in literature yet. No author who was praised and valued when Hilton or Frost or George Jones were thought to be great masters of painting has passed so utterly out of repute as they have. Hitherto, if a man of letters has contrived to secure a certain amount of respect, the public interest in him may dwindle, but it never quite disappears. Every now and then somebody "revives" him, his poems are reprinted and praised, his correspondence is published, he is respectfully admitted to have been "somebody."
The first standard in literary matters is, obviously, excellence in execution. In other words, to write singularly well, and to be recognized as doing so, is to achieve fame, though not necessarily popularity. But in using the word "standard" we accept the idea, not merely of individual excellence, but of comparison with others. In coinage, for instance, that is called the standard which unites in what is practically found to be the most useful combination the elements of precise weight and fineness. Again, there is a technical sense in which a "standard" is a type of which all other measures or instruments of the same kind must be exact copies. In yet another signification a standard is an ensign or flag carried on high in front of a marching army for its encouragement and stimulus. We have to consider in what degree, and how, without forcing language, we can form a conception of a literary standard of excellence in style which shall unite these various definitions.
The precision of the eighteenth century offers us a very clear example of the way in which the first of these ideas can be adapted to literary illustration. When it was determined by universal consent to bind all poetical writing down to set laws, and what was supposed to be the precept of Aristotle, there was at first no modern standard of style. The great object was to emulate the Latin poets; but as these writers had used not merely another language, but other prosodical effects, a different order of moral ideas, and totally distinct imagery, it was necessary to find a modern substitute for imitation. Various English poets wrote with force, but they lacked delicacy; others had fineness, but with an insufficiency of weight. At length Pope came, who accepted the theories of style which were current in his day, and acted upon them with a more perfect balance of the qualities they demanded than any one had done before him or has done since. The best parts of Pope's writings, therefore, created a standard, and one which was of paramount influence for nearly a century.
Again, those who invent forms of writing which are accepted by the world of letters as valuable additions to what we may call the tools of the author's trade, create standards in the second sense of the word. There does not appear to be an indefinite degree to which these forms can be created, and when once perfected they often remain for centuries unaltered. For instance, when an early Tuscan poet, of the age of Dante, invented the sonnet as we now possess it, he made a thing which has been proved to be the best possible of its sort. Ingenious people, in various languages, for centuries past, have tried to alter the form of the sonnet, to add to it, to retrench it; all their suggestions have proved vain, and it remains, in the best hands, exactly what its old Italian maker devised it in a moment of inspiration. In a lesser degree, the forms of prose are the result of invention and adaptation, and can be referred back, more or less indefinitely, to a standard or type. Thus the short story has certain limitations of length and character which distinguish it from a novel or a play or a lecture, and in discussing the merits of an example of this species of literature, we unconsciously hold before our minds a norm or ideal of what a short story should be. If we speak of it as highly successful, we think of it as a close copy in form of a typical short story which should be universally acknowledged as the best in every technical respect.
The third definition of a standard is one which may without difficulty be applied to literature, but which is really a little more dangerous to deal with than the preceding. If the standard is to be an ensign or flag carried at the head of an army, we are confronted with an idea which is less durable than those which we have considered. For if the army marches with drums and trumpets, and all flags flying, it may not only march to defeat instead of victory, but it may alter its direction, and march back with no less pomp and noise than it marched forward. In these conditions, its ensigns, instead of representing a fixed purpose, may be the standards of irresolution and vacillation. We can find an exact literary parallel for this in European taste in the seventeenth century. The cleverness and fancy of writers, in prose and verse, and almost in every country, led them to adopt methods of writing which strained to the utmost the powers of language. Poetry, instead of being content to walk and run, turned somersaults on the trapeze. As long as this was done by very graceful and nimble intellectual athletes it gave great pleasure, and the world of letters seemed marching to victory under this ensign of imaginative acrobatism. But it speedily proved to have been a mistake; the graceful athletes gave place to grotesque contortionists, and the army of writers retreated in confusion, but slowly, doggedly, and under the same standards of taste. There was no other way back to health but to discard the existing ideals altogether; they were too obstinately fixed in men's minds to make it possible to modify them.
If we are to form any opinion with regard to that question of the literary standard, which democratic habits of thought tend to make every day a more dangerous one, it is manifest that we must regard it from these three points of view, or from a combination of them. The taste of the public is a floating, a vague impression of an amateur body with regard to a matter which is more precisely and sharply defined by a consensus of experts. But the experts themselves are not united, and the precision of their views only tends to darken counsel and reduce opinion to chaos. Unhappily a piece of literature cannot be assayed mechanically like a piece of coinage. Under the strictest rules that ever were enacted and a régime the most academic conceivable, there will never be anything like unanimity regarding the excellence of a literary product. All we can hope to reach is a general agreement of the best-trained minds, recurrent for so many generations as to become practically durable.
Even in the most ancient cases, where it would be supposed that opinion would finally have crystallized, we observe curious oscillations. Homer, it is true, is accepted by all critics, in all nations, as the final standard of what is admirable in heroic narrative poetry, and has for centuries been so accepted. But what is the standard of Greek tragedy? The study of classic criticism will show us that the standard has been incessantly shifting from Æschylus to Sophocles and on to Euripides and back again to Æschylus. If we wish to point to an authoritative type, we must consider this triad as one, since no two generations agree as to their comparative, though all to their positive merit. In like manner, the relative value of Virgil and Theocritus, of Horace and Catullus, is always shifting, according as the quality of the one or of the other happens to appeal to one or to another habit of modern thought. Yet antiquity obviously provides us with a standard of bucolic poetry, and another of subjective and semi-social lyric, each of them settled now beyond any probability of decay. People will go on preferring Theocritus to Virgil, or Virgil to Theocritus, but no rational person is likely to question again the excellence of the species of art of which these two are the leading exponents. So there are those who prefer Dryden to Pope, or Coleridge to Wordsworth, and to whom neither seem to present the complete practitioner of a system. Yet no one denies, and it grows increasingly probable that no one will ever deny, the authority of the Pope-Dryden or of the Wordsworth-Coleridge standard of excellence, final and unquestionable, in a particular department. Opinion, that is to say, wavers as to the individual long after it has irrevocably accepted the type.
In all consideration of the past we find ourselves securely guided by the test of technical excellence. Nothing else has preserved the principal writers of antiquity in esteem. Mr. Lowell called style "the great antiseptic"; good writing, in other words, is the only chemical product which can prevent literature from corrupting and fading away. In the days of Shakespeare there were a dozen writers who had a just right to consider themselves more "serious seekers after truth" than the playwright of Stratford, for they discussed graver subjects and brought forward a weightier array of facts. Their very names are now forgotten, while his pages grow more brilliantly vital as the years pass on. The fancy and tenderness of Shakespeare, the wit of Molière, the sublimity of Milton, the wisdom of Goethe, are revealed to us and preserved for us by their style, and without it would have sunk long ago in the ocean of oblivion. Such phrases as "the matter is the important thing, not the manner," "never mind how he says it, but find out what he has to say"—which are common enough on the tongues and pens of those who have secured no grace of delivery—are pure fallacies. Style is the atmosphere without which what is written cannot continue to breathe; it is the indispensable medium for rendering what a man has got to say continuously audible to the world. These are truths which we might suppose too obvious to need repetition, since the whole history of literature proclaims them, yet so great is the natural love of slovenly writing and vague thinking that this heresy about the matter being far more important than the manner is incessantly recurring. It is needful, once more, therefore, to say as plainly as possible that without a distinguished and appropriate manner, that is to say, without style, no "matter" will ever have the chance to reach posterity.
If once we resign this position as to the pre-eminent importance of style we lose all means of measuring the standards of literature. As long as excellence in writing is recognized as the main factor in the formation of judgment, we are not likely to go very far wrong. We have seen that those who permit themselves no other lamp than this may differ as to the relative value of figures in a single group, but they unite in their appreciation of that group itself. This is the case in the criticism of ancient writers, and what other means have we of forming a judgment about the moderns? As long as we are content to measure them as we do their noble predecessors, we may make mistakes, but they will be mistakes, not of principle, but only of detail. The moment that we allow ourselves to believe that modern writing, the authorship of to-day, is distinct in kind from that of the old masters, and can be measured by different standards, we have resigned ourselves to a heresy, and are in imminent peril of encouraging literary anarchy.
It is a mistake to be too yielding and shy in expressing a conviction which has been gravely formed on serious grounds. Those who love the more austere and splendid parts of literature will always find themselves in a minority in every collection of persons. It is probable that if the prestige of Paradise Lost had to depend upon popular suffrage, no majority of citizens in any part of the English-speaking world would be willing honestly to admit that they admired it or could read it with pleasure. That does not prevent it from being one of the most glorious, most enviable and unique possessions of the race. On questions of the literary standard it is the majority which is always wrong. The majority likes a warm easy book, without pretension, unambitiously written, on a level with the experience of the vast semi-educated classes of our society. "One man, one vote," extended to the domain of literary taste, would mean the absolute and final extinction of all distinguished masterpieces.
But in every generation there is a remnant which occupies itself with beauty and distinction. The individuals of this little group fight among themselves about the details of excellence, but they guard, as in a pyx or shrine, the primal idea of that excellence and a general sense of its formal character. Outside this small class of experts there is a large body of the public which recognizes its authority and is docile to its directions. Again, outside is the vast concourse of persons competent to read and write, but no more capable of forming an opinion than is the dog that barks at their shadow or the discreeter cat that curls at their fireside and says nothing. It has often occurred to me as a grave speculation how long this vast dumb force of untrained readers will be content to be silent. How long will they have the good nature to pretend to respect the things which they cannot enjoy? Flattered as the average man or woman is in these days, accustomed to hear the voice of democracy praying for votes on every subject, how soon will the average reader pluck up courage to say to himself, "I do not like the novels of Thackeray nearly so much as I do those of E. P. Roe, and I do not intend to allow anybody to persuade me that they are better?" Questioning the standards of taste, refusing to bow to traditional canons of criticism—this is the Red Spectre which I dread to see arise in the midst of our millions of half-trained readers.
But the cure will probably come from the very nature of the disease. If we put a dangerous power in the hands of the crowd by the infinite facilities given nowadays to reading and the discussion of books, we support the traditions of literature by giving unprecedented opportunities to persons of native capacity to fortify themselves in the truth. No boy, nowadays, in the whole English-speaking world, can wholly refrain from indulgence in literary pleasures, if an appetite for such enjoyments have been born in him. In some newspaper, in some cheap reprint, that which is exquisite and final, that which is assimilated to the inviolable standards of excellence, must meet his eye and be accepted by him. The enemies of literature may become extremely numerous; they will remain languid and blundering; its friends will be always few, perhaps, but they will be ardent and active. That the good tradition may be swamped for a time in some Commune of the intellect seems to me very possible, but that it should be lost, that it should go down altogether into the deeps of anarchical vulgarity, that, happily, is not to be believed.
Meanwhile, every one who, however humbly, is devoted to what is nobly and purely said in prose and verse, may do his or her part to prevent even a temporary descent into barbarism. The only way to become sensitive to what literary excellence is, is to study and re-study those books which have stood the assaults of time, and are as fresh to-day as when they were written. It is not to be expected that to any one taste all these books, in their various classes, will appear equally delightful. But it is from a wide acquaintance with these, and a reverent and affectionate wish to discover their charm, that literary appreciation grows. If once we are convinced that there is a standard, that a well-written book is distinguishable from a dull and slovenly one, that style is not a vain ornament, but as essential to literary life as oxygen is to a human being, then, without affectation or priggishness, every man may become a sober lover of the best, and may feel that though certain specimens of literary work may go up and down in public esteem, the central standards are firm and the laws of intellectual beauty immutable.
