There is, however, a sort of difference between authors and works, the constant recognition of which would more than make up to cultured pleasure for discarding comparisons of merit. Inductive treatment is concerned with differences of kind as distinguished from differences of degree. Elementary as this distinction is, the power of firmly grasping it is no slight evidence of a trained mind: the power, that is, of clearly seeing that two things are different, without being at the same time impelled to rank one above the other. The confusion of the two is a constant obstacle in the way of literary appreciation. It has been said, by way of comparison between two great novelists, that George Eliot constructs characters, but Charlotte Brontë creates them. The description (assuming it to be true) ought to shed a flood of interest upon both authoresses; by perpetually throwing on the two modes of treatment the clear light of contrast it ought to intensify our appreciation of both. As a fact, however, the description is usually quoted to suggest a preference for Charlotte Brontë on the supposed ground that creation is 'higher' than construction; and the usual consequences of preferences are threatened—the gradual closing of our susceptibilities to those qualities in the less liked of the two which do not resemble the qualities of the favourite. Yet why should we not be content to accept such a description (if true) as constituting a difference of kind, and proceed to recognise 'construction' and 'creation' as two parallel modes of treatment, totally distinct from one another in the way in which a fern is distinct from a flower, a distinction allowing no room for preferences because there is no common ground on which to compare? This separateness once granted, the mind, instead of having to choose between the two, would have scope for taking in to the full the detailed effects flowing from both modes of treatment, and the area of mental pleasure would be enlarged. The great blunders of criticism in the past, which are now universally admitted, rest on this inability to recognise differences of kind in literature. The Restoration poets had a mission to bring the heroic couplet to perfection: poetry not in their favourite measure they treated, not as different, but as bad, and rewrote or ignored Spenser and Milton. And generations of literary history have been wasted in discussing whether the Greek dramatists or Shakespeare were the higher: now every one recognises that they constitute two schools different in kind that cannot be compared.
Distinctions of kind a primary element in appreciation.
It is hardly going too far to assert that this sensitiveness to differences of kind as distinguished from differences of degree is the first condition of literary appreciation. Nothing can be more essential to art-perception than receptiveness, and receptiveness implies a change in the receptive attitude of mind with each variety of art. To illustrate by an extreme case. Imagine a spectator perfectly familiar with the Drama, but to whom the existence of the Opera was unknown, and suppose him to have wandered into an opera-house, mistaking it for a theatre. At first the mistake under which he was labouring would distort every effect: the elaborate overture would seem to him a great 'waste' of power in what was a mere accessory; the opening recitative would strike him as 'unnaturally' delivered, and he would complain of the orchestral accompaniment as a 'distraction'; while at the first aria he would think the actor gone mad. As, however, arias, terzettos, recitatives succeeded one another, he must at last catch the idea that the music was an essential element in the exhibition, and that he was seeing, not a drama, but a drama translated into a different kind of art. The catching of this idea would at once make all the objectionable elements fall into their proper places. No longer distracted by the thought of the ordinary Drama, his mind would have leisure to catch the special effects of the Opera: he would feel how powerfully a change of passion could move him when magnified with all the range of expression an orchestra affords, and he would acknowledge a dramatic touch as the diabolic spirit of the conspirator found vent in a double D. The illustration is extreme to the extent of absurdity: but it brings out how expectation plays an important part in appreciation, and how the expectation has to be adapted to that on which it is exercised. The receptive attitude is a sort of mental focus which needs adjusting afresh to each variety of art if its effects are to be clearly caught; and to disturb attention when engaged on one species of literature by the thought of another is as unreasonable as to insist on one microscopic object appearing definite when looked at with a focus adjusted to another object. Each author a separate species.This will be acknowledged in reference to the great divisions of art: but does it not apply to the species as well as the genera, indeed to each individual author? Wordsworth has laid down that each fresh poet is to be tried by fresh canons of taste: this is only another way of saying that the differences between poets are differences of kind, that each author is a 'school' by himself, and can be appreciated only by a receptive attitude formed by adjustment to himself alone. In a scientific treatment of literature, at all events, an elementary axiom must be: Second axiom of inductive criticism: its function in distinguishing literary species.That inductive criticism is mainly occupied in distinguishing literary species. And on this view it will clearly appear how such notions as order of merit become disturbing forces in literary appreciation: unconsciously they apply the qualitative standard of the favourite works to works which must necessarily be explained by a different standard. They are defended on the ground of pleasure, but they defeat their own object: no element in pleasure is greater than variety, and comparisons of merit, with every other form of the judicial spirit, are in reality arrangements for appreciating the smallest number of varieties.
II. The 'laws of art': confusion between law external and scientific.
The second is the most important of the three ideas, both for its effect in the past and for the sharpness with which it brings judicial and inductive criticism into contrast. It is the idea that there exist 'laws' of art, in the same sense in which we speak of laws in morality or the laws of some particular state—great principles which have been laid down, and which are binding on the artist as the laws of God or his country are binding on the man; that by these, and by lesser principles deduced from these, the artist's work is to be tried, and praise or blame awarded accordingly. Great part of formal criticism runs on these lines; while, next in importance to comparisons of merit, the popular mind considers literary taste to consist in a keen sensitiveness to the 'faults' and 'flaws' of literary workmanship.
This attitude to art illustrates the enormous misleading power of the metaphors that lie concealed in words. The word 'law,' justly applicable in one of its senses to art, has in practice carried with it the associations of its other sense; and the mistake of metaphor has been sufficient to distort criticism until, as Goldsmith remarks, rules have become the greatest of all the misfortunes which have befallen the commonwealth of letters. Every expositor has had to point out the widespread confusion between the two senses of this term. Laws in the moral and political world are external obligations, restraints of the will; they exist where the will of a ruler or of the community is applied to the individual will. In science, on the other hand, law has to do not with what ought to be, but with what is; scientific laws are facts reduced to formulæ, statements of the habits of things, so to speak. The laws of the stars in the first sense could only mean some creative fiat, such as 'Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven'; in the scientific sense laws of the stars are summaries of their customary movements. In the act of getting drunk I am violating God's moral law, I am obeying his law of alcoholic action. So scientific laws, in the case of art and literature, will mean descriptions of the practice of artists or the characteristics of their works, when these will go into the form of general propositions as distinguished from disconnected details. The key to the distinction is the notion of external authority. There cannot be laws in the moral and political sense without a ruler or legislative authority; in scientific laws the law-giver and the law-obeyer are one and the same, and for the laws of vegetation science looks no further than the facts of the vegetable world. The 'laws of art' are scientific laws.In literature and art the term 'law' applies only in the scientific sense; the laws of the Shakespearean Drama are not laws imposed by some external authority upon Shakespeare, but laws of dramatic practice derived from the analysis of his actual works. Laws of literature, in the sense of external obligations limiting an author, there are none: if he were voluntarily to bind himself by such external laws, he would be so far curtailing art; it is hardly a paradox to say the art is legitimate only when it does not obey laws. The word 'fault' meaningless in inductive criticism.What applies to the term 'law' applies similarly to the term 'fault.' The term is likely always to be used from its extreme convenience in art-training; but it must be understood strictly as a term of education and discipline. In inductive criticism, as in the other inductive sciences, the word 'fault' has no meaning. If an artist acts contrary to the practice of all other artists, the result is either that he produces no art-effect at all, in which case there is nothing for criticism to register and analyse, or else he produces a new effect, and is thus extending, not breaking, the laws of art. The great clash of horns in Beethoven's Heroic Symphony was at first denounced as a gross fault, a violation of the plainest laws of harmony; now, instead of a 'fault,' it is spoken of as a 'unique effect,' and in the difference between the two descriptions lies the whole difference between the conceptions of judicial and inductive criticism. Again and again in the past this notion of faults has led criticism on to wrong tracks, from which it has had to retrace its steps on finding the supposed faults to be in reality new laws. Immense energy was wasted in denouncing Shakespeare's 'fault' of uniting serious with light matter in the same play as a violation of fundamental dramatic laws; experience showed this mixture of passions to be the source of powerful art-effects hitherto shut out of the Drama, and the 'fault' became one of the distinguishing 'laws' in the most famous branch of modern literature. It is necessary then to insist upon the strict scientific sense of the term 'law' as used of literature and art; and the purging of criticism from the confusion attaching to this word is an essential step in its elevation to the inductive standard. It is a step, moreover, in which it has been preceded by other branches of thought. At one time the practice of commerce and the science of economy suffered under the same confusion: the battle of 'free trade' has been fought, the battle of 'free art' is still going on. In time it will be recognised that the practice of artists, like the operations of business, must be left to its natural working, and the attempt to impose external canons of taste on artists will appear as futile as the attempt to effect by legislation the regulation of prices.
Objection as to the moral purpose of literature:
Objections may possibly be taken to this train of argument on very high grounds, as if the protest against the notion of law-obeying in art were a sort of antinomianism. Literature, it may be said, has a moral purpose, to elevate and refine, and no duty can be higher than that of pointing out what in it is elevating and refining, and jealously watching against any lowering of its standard. this outside inductive treatment, though intrinsically more important.Such contention may readily be granted, and yet may amount to no more than this: that there are ways of dealing with literature which are more important than inductive criticism, but which are none the less outside it. Jeremy Collier did infinite service to our Restoration Drama, but his was not the service of a scientific critic. The same things take different ranks as they are tried by the standards of science or morals. An enervating climate may have the effect of enfeebling the moral character, but this does not make the geographer's interest in the tropical zone one whit the less. Economy concerns itself simply with the fact that a certain subsidence of profits in a particular trade will drive away capital to other trades. But the details of human experience that are latent in such a proposition: the chilling effects of unsuccess and the dim colour it gives to the outlook into the universe, the sifting of character and separation between the enterprising and the simple, the hard thoughts as to the mysterious dispensations of human prosperity, the sheer misery of a wage-class looking on plenty and feeling starvation—this human drama of failing profits may be vastly more important than the whole science of economy, but economy none the less entirely and rightly ignores it.
Objection: Art as an arbitrary product not subject to law.
To some, I know, it appears that literature is a sphere in which the strict sense of the word 'law' has no application: that such laws belong to nature, not to art. The essence, it is contended, of the natural sciences is the certainty of the facts with which they deal. Art, on the contrary, is creative; it does not come into the category of objective phenomena at all, but is the product of some artist's will, and therefore purely arbitrary. If in a compilation of observations in natural history for scientific use it became known that the compiler had at times drawn upon his imagination for his details, the whole compilation would become useless; and any scientific theories based upon it would be discredited. But the artist bases his work wholly on imagination, and caprice is a leading art-beauty: how, it is asked, can so arbitrary a subject-matter be reduced to the form of positive laws?