Ephemera Critica; Or, Plain Truths About Current Literature

by John Churton Collins

[21] Retrospective Reviews. A Literary Log. By Richard Le Gallienne. 2 vols.

Nearly two thousand years ago Horace observed that, though every calling presupposed some qualification in those who followed it, and a man who knew nothing of marine affairs would not undertake to manage a ship, or a man who knew nothing of drugs to compound prescriptions, yet everybody fancied himself competent to commence poet. Qualified or unqualified, at it we all go, he complains, and scribble verses. But times have changed, and those who in Horace's day were the pests of poetry, with which they could amuse themselves without mischief, have now become the pests of another kind of literature in which their diversions are not quite so harmless. Where the poetaster once stood the criticaster now stands. The transformation of the one pest into the other, where they do not, as they often do, become both, is easily accounted for, and as Dr. Johnson has so excellently explained it, we cannot do better than transcribe his words. "Criticism," says the Doctor, "is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may by mere labour be attained is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others, and he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant may yet support his vanity by the name of critic." But criticasters and their patrons have improved on this—for "he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant" may, in our time, not merely support his vanity, but support himself.

Till we inspected the volumes before us, we had really no conception of the pass to which things have now come in so-called criticism. The writer sits in judgment on most of the authors who have, during recent years, been before the public. He passes sentence not merely on current novelists, poets, and essayists, but on some of our classics, and on books like the late Mr. Pater's Lectures on Plato and Platonism and Dr. Wharton's edition of Sappho. To any acquaintance with the principles of criticism, to any conception of criticism in relation to principles, to any learning, to any scholarship, to any knowledge of the history of literature and of the masterpieces of literature, either in our own language or in other languages, he has not the smallest pretension. Nor does he allow this to be gathered simply from the work itself, where it is, needless to say, abundantly apparent, but with a naïveté and impudence which are at once ludicrous and exasperating he glories in his ignorance. Literature and its interpretation are to him what the Bible and its interpretation were to the ranting sectaries of Dryden's satire. In its explanation knowledge and learning were folly, nothing was needed but "grace."

"No measure ta'en from knowledge, all from grace,

Study and pains were now no more their care,

Texts were explained by fasting and by prayer."

So to our critic knowledge and learning are of equal unimportance—nay, equally contemptible—and all that is needed to take the measure of Plato and Wordsworth is, in his own words, "the capacity for appreciation." With this very slender outfit he sits down to the work of criticism, to enlighten the world de omni scibili in literature, from the lyrics of Sappho, "the singer, a single petal of whose rose is more than the whole rose-garden of later women singers," to "the statesmanlike reach and grasp" of Mr. E. Gosse's essays.

To discuss seriously the opinions or impressions of a writer of this kind would be as absurd as to attempt to fight gnats with a sword, and we shall merely content ourselves with transcribing, without comment, a few of the aphorisms with which these volumes are studded. "Criticism is the art of praise." "Shakespeare is the greatest English poet, not because he created Hamlet and Lear, but because he could write that speech about Perdita's flowers and Claudio's speech on death in Measure for Measure." "The perfection of prose is the essay, of poetry the lyric, and the most beautiful book is that which contains the most beautiful words." These specimens will probably suffice. Mr. Le Gallienne is also of opinion that "culture is mainly a matter of temperament"—that "a man is born cultured," that mere education and study are to such a one not simply superfluities, but impertinences. "What matters it," he eloquently asks, "that one does not remember or even has never read great writers? Our one concern is to possess an organization open to great and refined impressions." A paltry scholar, for example, may be able to construe Sappho, but it is only "an organization open to great and refined impressions" which can discern (in a crib) "the pathos of eternity in some twenty words" of "this passionate singer of Lesbos." Plato may be studied by poor pedants, but to an organization of this kind the binding of a volume is sufficient enlightenment; "to merely hold in the hand and turn over its pages is a counsel in style," for do not "the temperate beauty, the dry beauty beloved of Plato, find expression in the sweet and stately volume itself" [he is "reviewing" the late Mr. Pater's lectures on Plato], "with its smooth night-blue binding, its rose-leaf yellow pages, its soft and yet grave type"? The value of Mr. Le Gallienne's judgments, of his praise, and of his censure, which, ludicrous to relate, are quoted by some publishers as recommendations, or "opinions of the press," may be estimated by these dicta, and by this theory of a critical education.

Macaulay somewhere speaks of a certain nondescript broth which, in some Continental inns, was kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured, without distinction, on every dish as it came up to table. The writer of these essays appears, metaphorically speaking, to be provided with a similar abomination. Whatever be his theme, poem, essay, novel, picture, he contrives to serve it up with the same condiment, a sickly and nauseous compound of preciosity and sentimentalism.

The melancholy thing about all this is the profound unconsciousness on the part of the author of these volumes that he is exciting ridicule; that he is, in Shakespeare's phrase, making himself a motley to the view. But there are considerations more melancholy still. We should not have noticed these volumes had they not been representative and typical of a school of so-called critics which is becoming more and more prominent. Incredible as it may seem, there are certain sections of literary society and of the general public which take Mr. Le Gallienne and his dicta quite seriously, and to which the prodigious nonsense in these volumes does not present itself as absurdity, but as the articles of a creed. These essays have, moreover, appeared in publications the names of some of which carry authority. It is, therefore, high time that some stand should be made, some protest entered against writings which cannot fail to corrupt popular taste and to degrade the standard of popular literature. Of one thing we are very certain, that no self-respecting literary journal which undertook to review these volumes could allow them to pass without denunciation.