LITERARY SELF-ESTIMATES.
The question, Can an author rightly criticise his own work? has been variously answered. Gibbon emphatically says in his Autobiography that a writer himself is the best judge of his own performance, since no one has so deeply meditated on the subject, and no one is so sincerely interested in the event. Samuel Johnson did not go quite so far as this. In his Life of Dryden, he writes that, in the preface to one of his plays, Dryden ‘discusses a curious question, whether an author can judge well of his own productions; and determines, very justly, that of the plan and disposition, and all that can be reduced to principles of science, the author may depend upon his own opinion; but that in those parts where fancy predominates, self-love may easily deceive. He might have observed, that what is good only because it pleases, cannot be pronounced good till it has been found to please.’
Certainly, from some points of view, nobody can be a better judge of an author’s productions than the author himself. He alone knows fully the difficulties he had to contend with; he alone knows the places where he wrote with full knowledge and deep insight, and the places where he wrote carelessly and with no clear understanding; he alone can tell exactly how much he owes to other writers, and how far his work is the result of his own toil and thought. But that merciful dispensation of providence which prevents us from seeing ourselves as others see us, frequently so far affects an author’s judgment of his own writings, that it has become almost a commonplace of criticism that the greatest of writers occasionally prefer their own least worthy works. They are apt to measure the value of what they have done not by its intrinsic merit, but by the difficulty of doing it; and knowing the pains it has cost them, and being, as Hazlitt says, apprehensive that it is not proportionately admired by others, who know nothing of what it cost them, they praise it extravagantly. Moreover, severe criticism often tempts an author to praise some neglected work of his above what he is conscious to be its real deserts; just as, when her chickens are attacked by the kite, the fond hen rushes straightway to defend the one which seems most in danger.
Milton’s preference of Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost has often been instanced as an example of the false judgments writers form of their works. As a matter of fact, however, this opinion attributed to Milton is overstated. As has recently been pointed out by Mr Mark Pattison, all we know about the matter is, that Milton ‘could not bear to hear with patience’ that it was inferior to Paradise Lost. Of a writer who formed the most exaggerated and erroneous notions about the merits of his works, no better example could be given than Southey. He was indeed, as Macaulay remarked in his Diary, arrogant beyond any man in literary history; for his self-conceit was proof against the severest admonitions, and the utter failure of one of his books only confirmed him in his belief of its excellence. When William Taylor asked him who was to read his massive quartos on Brazil, he replied: ‘That one day he should by other means have made such a reputation that it would be thought a matter of course to read them.’ About Kehama, he wrote: ‘I was perfectly aware that I was planting acorns while my contemporaries were planting Turkey beans. The oak will grow; and though I may never sit under its shade, my children will.’ To one of his contemporaries, he writes in 1805: ‘No further news of the sale of Madoc. The reviews will probably hurt it for a while; that is all they can do. Unquestionably the poem will stand and flourish. I am perfectly satisfied with the execution—now, eight months after its publication, in my cool judgment. William Taylor has said it is the best English poem that has left the press since Paradise Lost. Indeed, this is not exaggerated praise, for there is no competition.’ On another occasion Southey writes: ‘Thalaba is finished. You will, I trust, find the Paradise a rich poetical picture, a proof that I can employ magnificence and luxury of language when I think them in place. One overwhelming propensity has formed my destiny, and marred all prospects of rank or wealth; but it has made me happy, and it will make me immortal.’ In a letter written in 1815, he modestly remarks that nothing could be more absurd than thinking of comparing any of his pieces with Paradise Lost; but that with Tasso, with Virgil, with Homer, there might be fair grounds of comparison! Nor did he think more meanly of himself as an historian, for he predicted that he would stand above Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon; nay, he went even further, and challenged comparison with the Father of History. ‘I have flattered myself,’ he says, ‘that my History of Brazil might in more points than one be compared to Herodotus, and will hereafter stand in the same relation to the history of that large portion of the new world as his History does to that of the old.’
Southey’s friend and admirer, Walter Savage Landor, resembled him in the exalted notions he entertained of the value of his own productions. ‘I have published,’ he says in the conversation with Hare, ‘five volumes of Imaginary Conversations; cut the most of them through the middle, and there will remain in the decimal fraction enough to satisfy my appetite for fame. I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select.’ ‘Be patient!’ he says in another place. ‘From the higher heavens of poetry it is long before the radiance of the brightest star can reach the world below. We hear that one man finds out one beauty, another man finds out another, placing his observatory and instruments on the poet’s grave. The worms must have eaten us before we rightly know what we are. It is only when we are skeletons that we are boxed, and ticketed, and shown. Be it so! I shall not be tired of waiting.’ Knowing, he again writes, that in two thousand years there have not been five volumes of prose (the work of one man) equal to his Conversations, he could indeed afford to wait. If conscious of earthly things, we fear he may be waiting still.
With better reason than Southey and Landor, Wordsworth nourished in his breast a sublime self-complacency, and, in spite of adverse criticisms, wrote calmly on, ‘in the full assurance that his poems would be unpopular, and in the full assurance that they would be immortal.’ To a friend who wrote condoling with him about the severity with which his poems were criticised in the Edinburgh Review, he replied: ‘Trouble not yourself about their present reception; of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny? To console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the young and gracious of every age to see, to think, and to feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous—this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we—that is, all that is mortal of us—are mouldering in our graves.’ Again: ‘I doubt not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my writings, and among them these little poems, will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society, wherever found, and that they will, in their degree, be efficacious in making men happier and wiser.’
Byron, to whom Macaulay denied the possession of any high critical faculty, was no better judge of his own poetry than he was of other people’s. His Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage he thought inferior to his Hints from Horace, a feeble imitation of Pope and Johnson, which he repeatedly designed to publish, and was withheld from doing only by the solicitations of his friends, whom, to his astonishment, he could never bring to think of the matter as he did. Scott, who had few of the weaknesses common to literary men, was free from any tendency to unduly estimate his own writings. He always said that his poetry would never live, and was not to be compared with that of many of his contemporaries. He felt that though Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley were then comparatively neglected, the time would come when they would be recognised as having possessed more of the sacred fire of inspiration than he. ‘I promise you,’ he says in an epistle to an old friend, ‘my oaks will outlast my laurels; and I pique myself more on my compositions for manure, than on any other compositions to which I was ever accessory.’ This was, of course, in great part badinage. But he repeatedly, both in writing and conversation, placed literature below some other professions, and especially the military, of whose greatest representative then living, the Duke of Wellington, his admiration knew no bounds.
‘There are two things,’ said Dr Johnson to Reynolds, ‘which I am confident I can do very well: one is an introduction to any literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner; the other is a conclusion proving from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the author promised to himself and the public.’ The Doctor was, on the whole, a very honest critic of his own productions. ‘I showed him,’ writes Boswell, ‘as a curiosity that I had discovered, his translation of Lobo’s Account of Abyssinia, which Sir John Pringle had lent me, it being then little known as one of his works. He said: “Take no notice of it,” or, “Don’t talk of it.” He seemed to think it beneath him, though done at six-and-twenty. I said to him: “Your style, sir, is much improved since you translated this.” He answered with a sort of triumphant smile: “Sir, I hope it is.”’ On one occasion, when some person read his Irene aloud, he left the room, saying he did not think it had been so bad. Reviewing the Rambler late in life, he shook his head, and said it was ‘too wordy.’
A good specimen of honest, manly self-criticism is afforded by a letter of Sydney Smith’s to Jeffrey, who had written to him complaining that he treated grave subjects in too jocular a vein. ‘You must consider,’ he writes, ‘that Edinburgh is a very grave place, and that you live with philosophers who are very intolerant of nonsense. I write for the London, not for the Scotch market, and perhaps more people read my nonsense than your sense. The complaint was loud and universal about the extreme dullness and lengthiness of the Edinburgh Review. Too much, I admit, would not do of my style; but the proportion in which it exists enlivens the Review, if you appeal to the whole public, and not to the eight or ten grave Scotchmen with whom you live.... Almost any one of the sensible men who write for the Review could have done a much wiser and more profound article than I have done upon the Game Laws. I am quite certain nobody would obtain more readers for his essay on such a subject, and I am equally certain that the principles are right, and that there is no lack of sense in it.’
Macaulay also may be ranked among the writers who have formed correct judgments of their own works. ‘I have written,’ he wrote with great candour, to Macvey Napier, ‘several things on historical, political, and moral questions, of which, on the fullest reconsideration, I am not ashamed, and by which I should be willing to be estimated. But I have never written a page of criticism on poetry or the fine arts which I would not burn if I had the power. I leave it to yourself to make the comparison. I am sure that on reflection you will agree with me. Hazlitt used to say of himself, “I am nothing if not critical.” The case with me is directly the reverse. I have a strong and acute enjoyment of great works of the imagination; but I have never habituated myself to dissect them.’ Not less sound was his estimate of his great History. A fortnight before its publication, he wrote in his Diary: ‘The state of my own mind is this: when I compare my own work with what I imagine history ought to be, I feel dejected and ashamed; but when I compare it with some Histories which have a high repute, I feel re-assured.’ At a subsequent stage of the publication, he writes: ‘I dawdled over my book most of the day, sometimes in good, sometimes in bad spirits about it. On the whole, I think that it must do. The only competition, so far as I perceive, it has to dread is that of the two former volumes. Certainly no other History of William’s reign is either so trustworthy or so agreeable.’ The following entry is interesting: ‘I looked through ——’s two volumes. He is, I see, an imitator of me. But I am a very unsafe model. My manner is, I think, and the world thinks, on the whole a good one; but it is very near to a bad manner indeed, and those characteristics of my style which are most easily copied are the most questionable.’