A few months ago one of the youngest of the group of eccentric writers who call themselves "Symbolists" was paying a visit to London. The conversation in a drawing-room happened to run on the province of the Franche-Comté, and the guest remarked, as a curious circumstance, that no poet had ever come from that part of France. Somebody ventured to murmur the name of Victor Hugo. "Ah! sir," replied the young Symbolist, with a charming air of deprecation, "but we don't consider Victor Hugo a poet!" It is obvious that, for the present at least, this particular expression of opinion will remain rare; it was conceived in the very foppery of paradox, of course. But it is quite conceivable that such a judgment might spread, might become common, might become authoritative and universal. To our generation, at all events, Victor Hugo has appeared to be the typical poet; he and Tennyson have been named side by side as the very types of the imaginative creator, as purveyors of inexhaustible poetic pleasure. That is what we have all thought; but suppose that our grandchildren determine to think the opposite, what is to be done? Manifestly we shall be too old to whip them and too weary to argue with them. If they decide that Victor Hugo was not a poet, that Dickens was not amusing, that Hawthorne wrote bad novels, we shall have to go, indignant, to our tombs, but our indignation will not convert the younger generation.
So far as the history of the world has yet proceeded, the standards in literature have not been overturned in this rapid and revolutionary manner. But nowadays, if things once begin to move, they move fast, and we must be prepared for changes. In the parallel art of painting we have seen the most violent and apparently the most final reversals of the standards. It is very difficult to believe that various schools of art which have enjoyed great popularity in the course of the present century, and have fallen, will ever be revived. I had an uncle who purchased the works of Mr. Frost, R.A., and a very bad bargain it has proved to his family. Nothing is so deathly cold as the public interest to-day in Frost; his brown satyrs and his wax-white nymphs, with floating pink scarfs insufficiently concealing them, are not worth sixpence now. We do not, as I have said, see these violent upheavals in literature yet. No author who was praised and valued when Hilton or Frost or George Jones were thought to be great masters of painting has passed so utterly out of repute as they have. Hitherto, if a man of letters has contrived to secure a certain amount of respect, the public interest in him may dwindle, but it never quite disappears. Every now and then somebody "revives" him, his poems are reprinted and praised, his correspondence is published, he is respectfully admitted to have been "somebody."
The first standard in literary matters is, obviously, excellence in execution. In other words, to write singularly well, and to be recognized as doing so, is to achieve fame, though not necessarily popularity. But in using the word "standard" we accept the idea, not merely of individual excellence, but of comparison with others. In coinage, for instance, that is called the standard which unites in what is practically found to be the most useful combination the elements of precise weight and fineness. Again, there is a technical sense in which a "standard" is a type of which all other measures or instruments of the same kind must be exact copies. In yet another signification a standard is an ensign or flag carried on high in front of a marching army for its encouragement and stimulus. We have to consider in what degree, and how, without forcing language, we can form a conception of a literary standard of excellence in style which shall unite these various definitions.
The precision of the eighteenth century offers us a very clear example of the way in which the first of these ideas can be adapted to literary illustration. When it was determined by universal consent to bind all poetical writing down to set laws, and what was supposed to be the precept of Aristotle, there was at first no modern standard of style. The great object was to emulate the Latin poets; but as these writers had used not merely another language, but other prosodical effects, a different order of moral ideas, and totally distinct imagery, it was necessary to find a modern substitute for imitation. Various English poets wrote with force, but they lacked delicacy; others had fineness, but with an insufficiency of weight. At length Pope came, who accepted the theories of style which were current in his day, and acted upon them with a more perfect balance of the qualities they demanded than any one had done before him or has done since. The best parts of Pope's writings, therefore, created a standard, and one which was of paramount influence for nearly a century.
Again, those who invent forms of writing which are accepted by the world of letters as valuable additions to what we may call the tools of the author's trade, create standards in the second sense of the word. There does not appear to be an indefinite degree to which these forms can be created, and when once perfected they often remain for centuries unaltered. For instance, when an early Tuscan poet, of the age of Dante, invented the sonnet as we now possess it, he made a thing which has been proved to be the best possible of its sort. Ingenious people, in various languages, for centuries past, have tried to alter the form of the sonnet, to add to it, to retrench it; all their suggestions have proved vain, and it remains, in the best hands, exactly what its old Italian maker devised it in a moment of inspiration. In a lesser degree, the forms of prose are the result of invention and adaptation, and can be referred back, more or less indefinitely, to a standard or type. Thus the short story has certain limitations of length and character which distinguish it from a novel or a play or a lecture, and in discussing the merits of an example of this species of literature, we unconsciously hold before our minds a norm or ideal of what a short story should be. If we speak of it as highly successful, we think of it as a close copy in form of a typical short story which should be universally acknowledged as the best in every technical respect.
The third definition of a standard is one which may without difficulty be applied to literature, but which is really a little more dangerous to deal with than the preceding. If the standard is to be an ensign or flag carried at the head of an army, we are confronted with an idea which is less durable than those which we have considered. For if the army marches with drums and trumpets, and all flags flying, it may not only march to defeat instead of victory, but it may alter its direction, and march back with no less pomp and noise than it marched forward. In these conditions, its ensigns, instead of representing a fixed purpose, may be the standards of irresolution and vacillation. We can find an exact literary parallel for this in European taste in the seventeenth century. The cleverness and fancy of writers, in prose and verse, and almost in every country, led them to adopt methods of writing which strained to the utmost the powers of language. Poetry, instead of being content to walk and run, turned somersaults on the trapeze. As long as this was done by very graceful and nimble intellectual athletes it gave great pleasure, and the world of letters seemed marching to victory under this ensign of imaginative acrobatism. But it speedily proved to have been a mistake; the graceful athletes gave place to grotesque contortionists, and the army of writers retreated in confusion, but slowly, doggedly, and under the same standards of taste. There was no other way back to health but to discard the existing ideals altogether; they were too obstinately fixed in men's minds to make it possible to modify them.