Criticism in its scientific aspects or as a purely intellectual effort—a search for the exact truth, a sifting of evidence, weighing and comparing data, disentangling testimony, separating the false from the true, as with the lawyer, the doctor, the man of science, the critic of old texts and documents—is one thing. Criticism of literature and art, involving questions of taste, style, poetic and artistic values, is quite another, and demands quite other powers. In the former case it is mainly judicial, dispassionate, impersonal; in the latter case the sympathies and special predilections are more involved. We seek more or less to interpret the imaginative writer, to draw out and emphasize his special quality and stimulus, to fuse him and restate him in other terms; and in doing this we give ourselves more freely. We cannot fully interpret what we do not love, and love has eyes the judgment knows not of. What a man was born to say, what he speaks out of his most radical selfhood,—that the same fate and power in you can alone fully estimate and interpret.
VI
One’s search after the truth in subjective matters is more or less a search after one’s self, after what is agreeable to one’s constitutional bias or innate partialities. We do not see the thing as it is in itself so much as we see it as it stands related to our individual fragment of existence. The lesson we are slowest to learn and to act upon is the relativity of truth in all these matters, or that it is what we make it. It is a product of the mind, as the apple is of the tree. We get one kind of truth from Renan, another from Taine, still another from Ruskin or Carlyle or Arnold. The quality differs according as the minds or spirits differ whence the truth proceeds. Do we expect all the apples in the orchard to be alike? In general qualities, but not in particular flavors; and in literature it is the particular flavor that is most precious. It is the quality imparted to the truth by the conceiving mind that we prize.
It is a long while before we rise to the perception that opposites are true, that contrary types equally serve. “One supreme does not contradict another supreme,” says Whitman, “any more than one eyesight contravenes another eyesight, or one hearing contravenes another hearing.” Great men have been radical and great men have been conservative; great men have been orthodox and they have been heterodox; they have been forces of expansion and they have been forces of contraction. In literature, it is good to be a realist, and it is good to be a romanticist; it is good to be a Dumas, and it is good to be a Zola; it is good to be a Carlyle, and it is good to be a Mazzini,—always provided that one is so from the inside and not from without, from original conviction and not from hearsay or conformity.
A man makes his way in the world amid opposing forces; he becomes something only by overcoming something; there is always a struggle for survival, and always merit in that which survives. Let each be perfect after its kind. We do not object to the Gothic type of mind because it is not the classic, nor to the Englishman because he is not the Frenchman. We look for the measure of nature or natural force and authority in these types. Nature is of all types; she is of to-day as well as of yesterday; she is of this century as well as of the first; she was with Burns as well as with Pindar. Because the Greek was natural, shall we say therefore nature is Greek? She is Asiatic, Icelandic, Saxon, Celtic, American, as well. She is all things to all men; and without her nothing is that is.
VII
Truth is both subjective and objective. The former is what is agreeable to one’s constitution and point of view, or mental and spiritual make-up. Objective truth is verifiable truth, or what agrees with outward facts and conditions.
Criticism deals with both aspects. It is objective when it is directed upon objective or verifiable facts; it is subjective when it is directed upon subjective facts. It is an objective fact, for instance, that such a man as Shakespeare lived in such a country in such a time, that he wrote various plays of such and such a character, and that these plays were founded upon other plays or legends or histories. But the poetic truth, the poetic beauty of these plays, their covert meanings, the philosophy that lies back of them, are not in the same sense objective facts. In these respects no two persons read them just alike. Hamlet has been interpreted in many ways. Which Hamlet is the true one, Goethe’s, or Coleridge’s, or Hazlitt’s, or Kean’s, or Booth’s? Each is true, so far as it expresses a real and vital conception begotten by the poet upon the critic’s or the actor’s mind. The beauty of a poem or any work of art is not an objective something patent to all; it is an experience of the mind which we each have in different degrees. In fact, the field of our æsthetic perceptions and enjoyments is no more fixed and definite than is the field of our religious perceptions and enjoyments, and we diverge from one another in the one case as much as in the other. This divergence is of course, in both cases, mainly superficial; it is in form and not in essence. Religions perish, but religion remains. Styles of art pass, but art abides. Go deep enough and we all agree, because human nature is fundamentally the same everywhere. All that I mean to say is that the outward expressions of art differ in different ages and among different races as much as do the outward expressions of religion. In all these matters the subjective element plays an important part. Is Browning a greater poet than Tennyson? Is Thackeray a greater novelist than Dickens? Has Newman a better style than Arnold? Is Poe our greatest poet, as many British critics think? These and all similar questions involve the personal equation of the critic, and his answer to them will be given more by his unconscious than by his conscious self. The appeal is not so much to his rational faculties as to his secret affinities or his æsthetic perceptions. You can move a man’s reason, but you cannot by any similar process change his taste or his faith. If we are not by nature committed to certain views, we are committed to a certain habit of mind, to a certain moral and spiritual attitude, which makes these views almost inevitable to us. “It is not given to all minds,” says Sainte-Beuve, “to feel and to relish equally the peculiar beauties and excellences of Massillon,” or, it may be added, of any other author, especially if he be of marked individuality.
We do not and cannot all have the same measure of appreciation of Emerson, or Wordsworth, or Ruskin, or Whitman, or Browning. To enjoy these men “sincerely and without weariness is a quality and almost a peculiarity of certain minds, which may serve to define them.” Sainte-Beuve himself was chiefly interested in an author’s character,—“in what was most individual in his personality.” He had no arbitrary rules, touchstones, or systems, but pressed each new work gently, almost caressingly, till it gave up its characteristic quality and flavor.
But the objective consideration of the merits of a man’s work does not and cannot preclude or measure the subjective attraction or repulsion or indifference which we do or do not feel toward that work. Something deeper and more potent than reason is at work here. Back of the most impartial literary judgment lies the fact that the critic is a person; that he is of a certain race, family, temperament, environment; that he is naturally cold or sympathetic, liberal or reactionary, tolerant or intolerant, and therefore has his individual likes and dislikes; that certain types attract him more than others; that, of two poets of equal power, the voice of one moves him more than that of the other. Something as subtle and vital and hard to analyze as the flavor of a fruit, and analogous to it, makes him prefer this poet to that. One may see clearly the superiority of Milton over Wordsworth, and yet cleave to the latter. How beautiful is “Lycidas,” yet it left Dr. Johnson cold and critical. There is much more of a cry—a real cry of the heart—in Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” One feels that the passion is real in one, and assumed in the other. Is “Lycidas” therefore less a creative work? The affirmative side of the question is not without support. Johnson undervalued some of Gray’s best work; the touch of sympathy was lacking. This touch of sympathy does not wait upon the critical judgment, but often underruns and outruns it. It is said that Miss Martineau found “Tom Jones” dull reading, that Charlotte Brontë cared not for Jane Austen, and that Thackeray placed Cooper above Scott,—all, no doubt, from a lack of the quickening touch of sympathy.