Practical objection: Did the authors intend those interpretations?
In actual operation I have often found that such positive analysis raises in the popular mind a very practical objection: that the scientific interpretation seems to discover in literary works much more in the way of purpose and design than the authors themselves can be supposed to have dreamed of. Would not Chaucer and Shakespeare, it is asked, if they could come to life now, be greatly astonished to hear themselves lectured upon? to find critics knowing their purposes better than they had known them themselves, and discovering in their works laws never suspected till after they were dead, and which they themselves perhaps would need some effort to understand? Deep designs are traced in Shakespeare's plots, and elaborate combinations in his characters and passions: is the student asked to believe that Shakespeare really intended these complicated effects?
Answer: changed meaning of 'design' in science.
The difficulty rests largely upon a confusion in words. Such words as 'purpose,' 'intention,' have a different sense when used in ordinary parlance from that which they bear when applied in criticism and science. In ordinary parlance a man's 'purpose' means his conscious purpose, of which he is the best judge; in science the 'purpose' of a thing is the purpose it actually serves, and is discoverable only by analysis. Thus science discovers that the 'purpose' of earthworms is to break up the soil, the 'design' of colouring in flowers is to attract insects, though the flower is not credited with fore-sight nor the worm with disinterestedness. In this usage alone can the words 'purpose,' 'intention,' be properly applied to literature and art: science knows no kind of evidence in the matter of creative purpose so weighty as the thing it has actually produced. This has been well put by Ulrici:
The language of the artist is poetry, music, drawing, colouring: there is no other form in which he can express himself with equal depth and clearness. Who would ask a philosopher to paint his ideas in colours? It would be equally absurd to think that because a poet cannot say with perfect philosophic certainty in the form of reflection and pure thought what it was that he wished and intended to produce, that he never thought at all, but let his imagination improvise at random.
Nothing is more common than for analysis to discover design in what, so far as consciousness is concerned, has been purely instinctive. Thus physiology ascertains that bread contains all the necessary elements of food except one, which omission happens to be supplied by butter: this may be accepted as an explanation of our 'purpose' in eating butter with bread, without the explanation being taken to imply that all who have ever fed on bread and butter have consciously intended to combine the nitrogenous and oleaginous elements of food. It is the natural order of things that the practical must precede the analytic. Bees by instinct construct hexagonal cells, and long afterwards mensuration shows that the hexagon is the most economic shape for such stowage; individual states must rise and fall first before the sciences of history and politics can come to explain the how and why of their mutations. Similarly it is in accordance with the order of things that Shakespeare should produce dramas by the practical processes of art-creation, and that it should be left for others, his critics succeeding him at long intervals, to discover by analysis his 'purposes' and the laws which underlie his effects. The poet, if he could come to life now, would not feel more surprise at this analysis of his 'motives' and unfolding of his unconscious 'design' than he would feel on hearing that the beating of his heart—to him a thing natural enough, and needing no explanation—had been discovered to have a distinct purpose he could never have dreamed of in propelling the circulation of his blood, a thing of which he had never heard.
Three points of contrast between judicial and inductive criticism.
There are three leading ideas in relation to which inductive and judicial criticism are in absolute antagonism: to bring out these contrasts will be the most effective way of describing the inductive treatment.
The first of these ideas is order of merit, together with the kindred notions of partisanship and hostility applied to individual authors and works. 1. Comparisons of merit: these outside science.The minds of ordinary readers are saturated with this class of ideas; they are the weeds of taste, choking the soil, and leaving no room for the purer forms of literary appreciation. Favoured by the fatal blunder of modern education, which considers every other mental power to stand in need of training, but leaves taste and imagination to shift for themselves, literary taste has largely become confused with a spurious form of it: the mere taste for competition, comparison of likes and dislikes, gossip applied to art and called criticism. Of course such likes and dislikes must always exist, and journalism is consecrated to the office of giving them shape and literary expression; though it should be led by experience, if by nothing else, to exercise its functions with a double reserve, recognising that the judicial attitude of mind is a limit on appreciation, and that the process of testing will itself be tried by the test of vitality. But such preferences and comparisons of merit must be kept rigidly outside the sphere of science. Science knows nothing of competitive examination: a geologist is not heard extolling old red sandstone as a model rock-formation, or making sarcastic comments on the glacial epoch. Induction need not disturb the freedom with which we attach ourselves to whatever attracts our individual dispositions: individual partisanship for the wooded snugness of the Rhine or the bold and bracing Alps is unaffected by the adoption of exact methods in physical geography. What is to be avoided is the confusion of two different kinds of interest attaching to the same object. In the study of the stars and the rocks, which can inspire little or no personal interest, it is easy to keep science pure; to keep it to 'dry light,' as Heraclitus calls it, intelligence unclouded by the humours of individual sentiment, as Bacon interprets. But when science comes to be applied to objects which can excite emotion and inspire affection, then confusion arises, and the scientific student of political economy finds his treatment of pauperism disturbed by the philanthropy which belongs to him as a man. Still more in so emotional an atmosphere as the study of beauty, the student must use effort to separate the beauty of an object, which is a thing of art and perfectly analysable, from his personal interest in it, which is as distinctly external to the analysis of beauty as his love for his dog is external to the science of zoology. The possibility of thus separating interest and perception of beauty without diminishing either may be sufficiently seen in the case of music—an art which has been already reduced to scientific form. Music is as much as any art a thing of tastes and preferences; besides partialities for particular masters one student will be peculiarly affected by melody, another is all for dramatic effect, others have a special taste for the fugue or the sonata. No one can object to such preferences, but the science of music knows nothing about them; its exposition deals with modes of treatment or habits of orchestration distinguishing composers, irrespective of the private partialities they excite. Mozart and Wagner are analysed as two items in the sum of facts which make up music; and if a particular expositor shows by a turn in the sentence that he has a leaning to one or the other, the slip may do no harm, but for the moment science has been dropped.
Inductive treatment concerned with differences of kind, not of degree.