Most of these papers have been published in reviews and magazines, The Freeman, The Dial, The New Republic, the Boston Herald, the Atlantic Monthly, the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, the New York Tribune.
The essay on Joseph Conrad appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1906. I am proud only of the date. Sixteen years ago Conrad was not universally recognized; some of his best work had not been done; and many finer essays than mine had not yet been written. If I was not the first American critic to pursue that mysterious mariner across enchanted seas, at least I can swear before the critical court of admiralty that the waters were not crowded with little craft like mine. It is a pleasure to read again a few letters which hail me for hailing Conrad and which make me believe that I did introduce the master to a few readers. If so, I have not lived in vain.
But my pride is somewhat reduced by the consideration that any reader intelligent enough to look at a literary essay in the Atlantic Monthly must sooner or later have discovered Conrad for himself without the assistance of a critic. However, I hug with amusement the memory of a Harvard professor who threw up his hands and said: "My God! I had no idea there was a man living who could write like that!" To the professorial mind in those days English literature stopped officially with the death of Browning or, at the latest, with the deaths of Stevenson and Pater. The essay itself is a little professorial, enfeebled by a sort of Boston-Harvard timidity, utterly failing to express the wild joy which I felt. The second paper on Conrad, written fifteen years later, is not so hesitant. It is interesting to look again at the bibliographical footnote to the first essay and see how Conrad's few books were scattered among the publishers. I could not find "An Outcast of the Islands" except in the Tauchnitz edition. Today his work is collected. There is a handsome subscription edition. And Mr. Doubleday tells me that a new book by Conrad has an assured immediate sale of twenty to thirty thousand. Perhaps, after all, we who cheered long ago when it was not the fashion to cheer have justified our miserable existence as critics.
The essay on Tolstoy was written in the two months immediately after his death. Mr. Ellery Sedgwick asked me to write it for the Atlantic Monthly and then rejected it. It was published in the New York Call. I bear no bitter grudge against Mr. Sedgwick for returning an article that he had ordered. But I am convinced, as I read the article over again, that he is an incompetent critic of criticism. Sometimes editors and publishers, whose business it is to provide the arena and assemble the spectators, play their part of the game stupidly. But on the whole I think they are more than generous to second-rate performers. If I owned a magazine I should be very grudging of the space I gave to literary chatter—except my own.
A critical friend—we critics suffer from each other—admonishes me that in the foregoing remarks I have treated an important art in a flippant manner. Certainly I am not so foolish as to take my essays very seriously, and I believe that much modern criticism is too solemn, that if we fooled with literature in a lighter spirit we should enjoy it more and be happier.
Charles Lamb was not afraid to kick up his heels, and yet nobody will accuse him of being a trivial clown. Oscar Wilde was a man of wit, sometimes a buffoon, and he could puncture a stupid piece of work with ridicule. But the prevailing tone of his best essays is one of dignity and sobriety.
Good criticism is as important as anything that man can put on paper. Moreover, certain subjects must be treated by the critic with the utmost gravity. It would be owlishly humourless, uncritical, not to take Tolstoy seriously. Essays about the greater men of genius and the deeper problems of art must be substantial, solid, or they are inappropriate, out of key.
But it is possible to be sane and erudite without being leaden, to approach a noble subject earnestly without striking an attitude of priestly austerity. Some of our sincerest contemporaries, both the academic and the rebellious, seem to me to worry about literature, as if it were an invalid that needed nursing or a dead man about whom the last word must be said before next Thursday afternoon. They do not get enough fun out of it. They forget that Pater, who was not a mad wag and not a dilettante, could sometimes see the gaiety of things and was willing to be inconclusive.
Criticism is important. The best contemporaneous English criticism is not good enough. And even in France, where we have been taught to look for sound critics, Flaubert thought as late as 1869 that criticism was still in its infancy. He wrote to George Sand: "You speak of criticism in your last letter to me, telling me that it will soon disappear. I think, on the contrary, that it is, at most only dawning…. When will they (critics) be artists, only artists, but really artists? Where do you know a criticism? Who is there who is anxious about the work in itself, in an intense way?… The unconscious poetic expression? Where it comes from? its composition, its style? The point of view of the author? Never. That criticism would require great imagination and great sympathy." To which George Sand replied with good sense: "The artist is too much occupied with his own work to forget himself in estimating that of others."
Since then France has had a generation of critics, some of whom were artists. If Hennequin, who thought he was a scientific critic, was not an artist, if De Gourmont, who smiled wisely at the whole game, was not an artist, then the word means nothing. In England and America criticism has not made much progress since Pater died. I know that I am punctuating literature in the manner of the academic fogies. But one of the humours of this sport is that you sometimes do things which are fouls when your opponent is guilty of them.