The World's Greatest Books — Volume 20 — Miscellaneous Literature and Index

by Unknown

Many objections have been made to a proposition of mine about criticism: "Of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort—the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, to see the object as in itself it really is." I added that "almost the last thing for which one would come to English literature was just that very thing which now Europe most desired—criticism," and that the power and value of English literature were thereby impaired. More than one rejoinder declared that the importance here again assigned to criticism was excessive, and asserted the inherent superiority of the creative effort of the human spirit over its critical effort. A reporter of Wordsworth's conversation quotes a judgment to the same effect: "Wordsworth holds the critical power very low; indeed, infinitely lower than the inventive."

The critical power is of lower rank than the inventive—true; but, in assenting to this proposition, we must keep in mind that men may have the sense of exercising a free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or art; and that the exercise of the creative power in the production of great works of literature or art is not at all epochs and under all conditions possible. This creative power works with elements, with materials—what if it has not those materials ready for its use? Now, in literature, the elements with which creative power works are ideas—the best ideas on every matter which literature touches, current at the time. The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in most effective and attractive combinations, making beautiful works with them, in short. But it must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of the ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so easy to command. This is really why great creative epochs in literature are so rare—because, for the creation of a master-work of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment; and the man is not enough without the moment.

The creative power has for its happy exercise appointed elements, and those elements are not in its control. Nay, they are more within the control of the critical power. It is the business of the critical power in all branches of knowledge to see the object as in itself it really is. Thus it tends at last to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces—to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society; the touch of truth is the touch of life; and there is a stir and growth everywhere. Out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature.

II.—The Literary "Atmosphere"

It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our literature through the first quarter of the nineteenth century had about it something premature, and for this cause its productions are doomed to prove hardly more lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth, profound as he is, so wanting in completeness and variety.

It was not really books and reading that lacked to our poetry at this epoch. Shelley had plenty of reading, Coleridge had immense reading; Pindar and Sophocles had not many books; Shakespeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles and the England of Shakespeare the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to creative power.

Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the long and widely combined critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe when he lived and worked. In the England of the first quarter of the nineteenth century there was neither a national glow of life and thought, such as we had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet a force of learning and criticism, such as was to be found in Germany. The creative power of poetry wanted, for success in the highest sense, materials and a basis—a thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it.

At first it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the French Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of Greece, or out of that of the Renaissance, with its powerful episode of the Reformation. But the truth is that the stir of the French Revolution took a character which essentially distinguished it from such movements as these. The French Revolution found, undoubtedly, its motive power in the intelligence of men, and not in their practical sense. It appeals to an order of ideas which are universal, certain, permanent. The year 1789 asked of a thing: Is it rational? That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason is a very remarkable thing when we consider how little of mind, or anything so worthy or quickening as mind, comes into the motives which in general impel great masses of men. In spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives, from the force, truth and universality of the ideas which it took for its law, a unique and still living power; and it is, and will probably long remain, the greatest, the most animating event in history.

But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours. Ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with; but to transport them abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently to revolutionise this world to their bidding—that is quite another thing. "Force and right are the governors of the world; force till right is ready" Joubert has said. The grand error of the French Revolution was that it set at naught the second great half of that maxim—force till right is ready—and, rushing furiously into the political sphere, created in opposition to itself what I may call an epoch of concentration.

The great force of that epoch of concentration was England, and the great voice of that epoch of concentration was Burke. I will not deny that his writings are often disfigured by the violence and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Burke's view was bounded and his observations therefore at fault; but for those who can make the needful corrections what distinguishes these writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth—they contain the true philosophy of an epoch of concentration. Now, an epoch of expansion seems to be opening in this country. In spite of the absorbing and brutalising influence of our passionate material progress, this progress is likely to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life. It is of the last importance that English criticism should discern what rule it ought to take, to avail itself of the field now opening to it. That rule may be summed up in one word—disinterestedness.