"But a voice changed it. Glimpses of such sights
Have scared me, like the revels through a door
Of some strange house of idols at its rites!
This world seemed not the world it was, before:
Mixed with my loving, trusting ones, there trooped
... Who summoned those cold faces that begun
To press on me and judge me? Though I stooped
Shrinking, as from the soldiery a nun,
They drew me forth, and spite of me ... enough!"
Unhappily, there are few souls so humble, so conventual as that. George Eliot, as Mr. Walkley recalled, was terrified lest ill-judged blame or ill-judged praise should discourage her production; but then she made it a strict rule never to read any criticism, so that, of course, it had no restraining effect upon her. Wordsworth seems to have read his critics, but though they did their utmost to restrain or silence him, he paid no heed. "Too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet," he called them:
"Too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too
feeble to grapple with him;—men of palsied imagination and
indurated hearts; in whose minds all healthy action is languid,
who therefore feed as the many direct them, or, with the many,
are greedy after vicious provocatives;—judges, whose censure
is auspicious, and whose praise ominous!"
In them there was no restraining power for such a man, any more than in Christopher North for Tennyson:
"When I heard from whom it came,
I forgave you all the blame;
I could not forgive the praise,
Rusty Christopher!"
On this line, then, there is not much to be hoped from the critics. Over-sensitive writers are too rare, and the productive impulse of the others is too self-confident for prudence to smother. Obviously, they care no more for the critics than Tom and Sal a century ago cared for Malthus. They disregard them. The most savage criticism only confirms their belief in the beauty and necessity of their progeny, just as a mother always fondles the child that its aunts consider plain. Against such obstinacy, what headway can the critics make? May we not advise them to drop the old method of frontal attack altogether? Let them adopt the methods of these new teachers of Eugenics, whom we have described as insisting on quality. For the teachers of Eugenics, as I understand, do not go about saying, "O parents, what inferior and degenerate children you have! How goose-faced, rabbit-mouthed, lantern-jawed, pot-bellied, spindle-shanked, and splay-footed they are! It was a most anti-social action to produce these puny monstrosities, and when you found yourselves falling in love, you ought to have run to opposite antipodes." That, I believe, is no longer the method of the Eugenic teacher. He now shows beforehand wherein the beauty and excellence of human development may lie. He insists upon quality, he raises a standard, he diffuses an unconscious fastidiousness of selection. He does not prevent Tom and Sal from falling in love, but he makes Tom, and especially Sal, less satisfied with the first that comes, less easily bemused with the tenth-rate rubbish of a man or girl.
By similar methods, it seems to us, the critics might even now relieve humanity from the oncoming host of spirits that threatens to overwhelm us. They find it useless to tell creative writers how hideous and mis-begotten their productions are—how deeply tainted with erotics, neurotics, hysteria, consumption, or fatty degeneration. Either the writers do not listen, or they reply, "Thank you, but neurotics and degeneracy are in the fashion, and we like them." Let the critics change their method by widely extending their action. Let them insist upon quality, and show beforehand what quality means. Let them rise from the position of reviewers, and apply to the general thought of the world that critical power of which Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote:
"The best spiritual work of criticism is to keep man from
self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising, to lead him
towards perfection by making his mind dwell upon what is
excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things."
Such criticism, if persisted in by all critics for a generation, would act as so wholesome and tonic a course of Eugenic instruction, would so strongly insist upon quality, and so widely diffuse an unconscious fastidiousness of selection, that the locust cloud of phantoms which now darken the zenith might be dissipated, and again we should behold the sky which is the home of stars. For we may safely suppose that excellence will never be super-abundant, nor quality be found in hordes. No one can tell how fine, how fit, and few the children of our creative artists might then become. But, as in prophetic vision, we can picture the rarity of their beauty, and when they come knocking at our door, we will share with them the spiritual food that they demand from our brains, and give them a drink of our brief and irrevocable time.