We who have yet to be!
Grocer Shops and Souls
A very eminent American professor has recently declared that American literary criticism is deficient, that the commercialism of publishers is largely responsible. The first proposition is obvious, the second defensible. The professor further argues for a criticism based on academic standards, which he says are as immutable as the ten commandments; and he couples this with the declaration that criticism finds its justification in the desire of the public to know what it is buying. The immutable standards are to correspond with the government-approved weights and measures of the grocer-shop.
It would be enlightening to give the professor an opportunity to try his plan. Let some millionaire, instead of starting a new college, endow a critical magazine for the professor. In the first number should be announced the fixed standards by which all literature is to be judged. Then would follow calm, irrefutable issues in which the principles of unity, coherence, emphasis and perhaps one or two other measures, should be applied to new literature. The public, eager for standard articles, would, of course, never again read Hall Caine and Harold Bell Wright. The commercialization of literature would be abolished, for would not the professor declare it to be against the decalogue? And there would arise a new generation of writers, carefully observing all academic rules, and scrupulously giving the public full measure of what it wants. A veritable Utopia, an apotheosis of the grocer-shop!
But, however much we may doubt the possibility of such a thing, we cannot oppose the professor, because he has disarmed opposition by predicting it. Of course, he says in effect, there will arise hordes of young, ill-seasoned, and irresponsible persons who will deny my sound position. But don’t let them trouble you; they are of a piece with all the queer people who nowadays are advancing preposterous new ideas. As if anything that is not sanctioned by tradition could possibly be taken seriously!
Very well, we won’t oppose the professor. We are quite willing to let him go ahead pigeon-holing the kind of literature that appeals to him, and anything he may be able to do in turning the public taste from Hall Caine deserves approbation. But in the meantime we shall assiduously forget about him, and try some experiments of our own in the effort to say vital things about literature.
In the first place, we don’t believe in the majority rule for writers. We don’t believe that a writer ever lived who wrote anything really good because he thought the reading public wanted it. Our conviction is based on the testimony of writers themselves. A writer should write what is in him, not what is in the public. He has no excuse for writing unless he is a stronger, more sensitive, and more intelligent man than either his readers or his critics. That is the first distinction between the manufacturer of sausages and the maker of books.
In the second place, we don’t believe in the subjection of writers to critics, or to fixed standards, or to anything except themselves. Whatever excuse there is for standards arises from the fact that writers have furnished the examples on which the standards are founded. The writer must find his authority in his own soul. The one thing he must do is to say what he has to say in the way which seems to him right. The history of art is one long example of the discarding by genius of rules founded on previous work. When was a new technique ever predicted by the academic critic? When has not the new genius been bitterly fought by the academic critic? The natural history of art is this—first the artist, then the intelligent critic, then the appreciative public.
The function of the critic is to be a warrior for the artist. He must understand profoundly, he must be quick to detect and denounce artistic insincerity, he must declare the man who has attained the magic of real aesthetic rightness. The recognition of artistic excellence does not proceed by the scaffolding of academicism; it is instinctive, just as its creation was instinctive, emotional. The critic may, if he likes, oppose the artist, but his first duty is to make him known. He must say to the public, not “you will like this man” but “you must like this man, or at least you must experience him.” No critic is fit to do these things unless he understands the passionate independence of the real artist, his service of no law except inner necessity.
Our spiritual world is tangled up in mechanism. No sooner does a fresh wind make itself known than we try to imprison it in a system, to impale it with a classification. Let us have done with these futilities. The important joy is to feel the mysterious and dynamic glory of the wind. We need in our criticism, as in our literature, more insight, more emotion, more of the power that is produced by virility and the corresponding female quality for which there is as yet no adequate name. The heightening of consciousness, the intensifying of essential values—these shall be our critical aims.