Peter Whiffle

by Carl Van Vechten

But Hamlet replies:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

Both are true, both good philosophy, and so from the playwright, the great poet, the novelist, you get a rounded view of life which a critic usually denies you.

Occasionally a critic does contradict himself and really becomes human and delightful and we take him to our hearts, but the next day all the doctors and professors and pundits are excoriating him, assuring us that he is not consistent, that he is a loose writer, etc. Good critics, I should like to believe, are always loose writers; they perpetually contradict themselves; their work is invariably palinodal. How, otherwise, can they strive for vision, and how can they inspire vision in the reader without striving for vision themselves? Good critics should grope and, if they must define, they should constantly contradict their own definitions. In this way, in time, a certain understanding might be reached. For instance, how delightful of Anatole France to describe criticism as a soul's adventures among masterpieces, and then to devote his critical pen to minor poets and unimportant eighteenth century figures.

But, asked Edith, does not the reader in his own mind contradict the consistent critic? Does not this answer your purpose?

By no means. What you say is quite true. A dogmatic writer rouses a spirit of contradiction in the reader, but this is often a spirit of ire, of deep resentment. That is in itself, assuredly, something, but it is not the whole purpose of criticism to arouse anger, whatever the prima donna who reads the papers the morning after her début at the Opera may think. Criticism should open channels of thought and not close them; it should stimulate the soul and not revolt it. And criticism can only be wholesome and sane and spiritually stimulating when it is contradictory. I do not mean to say that a critic should never dogmatize—I suppose at this moment I myself appear to be dogmatizing! He may be as dogmatic as he pleases for a page or two pages, but it is unsafe to base an entire book on a single idea and it is still more unsafe to reflect this idea in one's next book. It is better to turn the leaf and begin afresh on a new page. Artists are never consistent. Ibsen apparently wrote A Doll's House to prove that the truth should always be told to one's nearest and dearest and, apparently, he wrote The Wild Duck to prove that it should not. Ibsen, you see, was a poet and he knew that both his theses were true. In his attempt to explain the revolutionary doctrines which he found inherent in Wagner's Ring, Bernard Shaw ran across many snags. He swam through the Rheingold, rode triumphantly through Die Walküre, even clambered gaily through Siegfried, by making the hero a protestant, but when he reached Götterdämmerung, his hobby-horse bucked and threw him. Shaw was forced to admit that Götterdämmerung was pure opera, and he attempted to evade the difficulty by explaining that Wagner wrote the book for this work before he wrote the other three, quite forgetting that, if Wagner's intention had been the creation of a revolutionary cycle, it would have been entirely possible for him to rewrite the last drama to fit the thesis. The fact is that the work is inconsistent from any point of view except the point of view of art. Any critic who is an artist will be equally inconsistent.

Truth! Truth! Peter cried in scorn. Forsooth, what is truth? Voltaire was right: error also has its merits.

And yet ... I began.

And yet! he interrupted, still more scornfully. No, there is no such thing as truth. Truth is impossible. Truth is incredible. The most impossible and incredible physical, spiritual, or mental form or idea or conception in the cosmos is the cult of truth. Truth implies permanence and nothing is permanent. Truth implies omniscience and no one is omniscient. Truth implies community of feeling and no two human beings feel alike about anything, except perhaps for a few shifting seconds. Truth, well if there is such a thing as truth, we may at least say that it is beyond human power to recognize it.

But it is not impossible to approach Truth, to play around her, to almost catch her, to vision her, so to speak. No, that is not impossible. Natheless, the artist, the writer, the critic who most nearly approaches Truth is he who contradicts himself the oftenest and the loudest. One of the very best books James Huneker has written is a work purporting to come from the pen of a certain Old Fogy, in which that one opposes all of James's avowed opinions. It is probable, indeed, that we can get the clearest view of Huneker's ideas from this book.