THE TWO KINDS OF CRITICISM.
AN American writer in the columns of the Chicago Dial has lately put in a plea for the revival of the good old slashing literary criticism, for the use of the cudgel and the bludgeon which Macaulay wielded against Croker and Robert Montgomery. We are living, he says, in an age of soothing, syrup, when fourth-rate works are " boomed" into temporary notoriety, and when nobody dare say what he really thinks about the book of a writer whom perhaps he will meet at the club. We need a healthy revival, this writer contends, of the old and harder school of criticism which shall put the public on its guard against inferior works, and especially against pretentious works which now secure an extensive sale before their real character is known. And now some enter- prising person has enforced this advice by reprinting Dr. Johnson's " Short Strictures on the Plays of Shake- speare," originally published in r65, in which the Great Cham of literature, in his sturdy English way, did not hesitate to say in a few brief, sinewy phrases what he thought of Shakespeare, not hesitating to blend con- . demnation with eulogy whenever he thought the occasion required it. Some of these judgments are amusing. Dr. Johnson thought, e.g., in common with newer Shakespearian
lights, that Love's Labour Lost is characteristic of Shakespeare, and yet that there are vulgar passages in it which ought never to have been told to a maiden lady like Queen Elizabeth. He finds that the Winter's Tale is full of " absurdities " (we sup- pose the allusion is to the Bohemian coast), but yet "very entertaining " ; that Two Gentlemen of Verona exhibits "a strange mixture of knowledge and ignorance, of care and negligence" ; that All's Well that Ends Well is not "produced by any deep knowledge of human nature " ; that Richard III.
contains "some parts that are trifling, others shocking, and some improbable " ; that Cordelia's death is contrary to the natural ideas of justice ; and that Julius Cnsar is " somewhat cold and ilusfFecting." In a word, Shakespeare is handled by Johnson with as little ceremony as he treated Goldsmith to in a conversation with Boswell.
Johnson acted consistently all his life through on his own immortal maxim, " Clear your mind of cant." Prejudiced and narrow he was, nor was he, in our sense of the term, highly cultivated. His judgment was constantly at fault, he attributed to third-rate authors of his time merits that no mortal being can perceive in them, while he was blind to the glories of Lycidas. But no man ever lived who worshipped so sincerely at the shrine of truth ; and if there were elements in Shakespeare or Milton that he thought bad, he would say so even were all the world in arms against him. The transcen- dent valw.e of sincere individual judgment was to him the most important fact in the world. True, he looked askance in religion and politics on the right of private judgment, and the securus judicat orbis terrarium which rang in the ears of Newman affected Johnson to an unusual degree. But when he could fling off the weight of established institutions and make free incursions into the Republic of Literature, Johnson was no man's slave, his judgments were in- dependent, his love of truth dominated his whole being. He trembled before George III., he thought it a transcendent honour "to dine with the Canons of Christ- church " ; but when it came to pronouncing a literary judgment, this hide-bound old. Tory stood upon his feet and became a man. No writer in England since his time, save Macaulay, has so effectively played the part of an honest and determined censor of everything which he conceived to be weak or worthless. He was the great " hanging Judge" of our literary Tribunal.
The criticism of our own time has adopted a quite opposite note, derived, we think, largely from Sainte-Beuve, who pro- foundly influenced the first of our contemporary critics, Matthew Arnold. It was the principle of Sainte-Beuve, as it is generally of modern French criticism, to discover positive merit and &finite formative ideas rather than to denounce or condemn. This is, of course, the criticism of fine in- telligence, like that of Goethe, which has no moral par- tisanship, no partial view, but which approaches its theme, partly as a problem to be solved, partly as the expression of an idea to be sympathetically understood. Johnson and his school have their point of view, to which the writer under
consideration must be assimilated, to whose leading maxima he must subscribe, whose leading conventions he must accept. Sainte-Beuve has no point of view save that of a lover of good art and a mind hospitable to ideas. It would be too much to say that truth was the goddess of the one school, beauty of the other; but it is not untrue to say that any high aesthetic could scarcely be looked for from one who styled the Greeks of Homer's day " mere barbarians," nor is it unfair to say that the many-coloured aspect of modern life has turned the eyes of many of our contemporary critics from simple principles to a highly complex state of moral bewilderment. We are now soft and pliable. There seems so much to be said for any point of view. Even science is monthly revising some of its most cherished dogmas, the mathematicians are beginning to doubt some of their accepted maxims, Herr Nietzsche tells us we must have a complete moral revalua- tion. When in such bewilderment how can we afford to treat any new writer with scorn ? Perchance he may have the secret, and so we put aside our lingering doubts and find out what can be genuinely said for him. Life is so puzzling, the mind has so many facets.
We are all living, not under the sway of positive convic- tions, but under the reign of analysis, in an atmosphere saturated by the critical spirit. Johnson firmly believed in the spiritual efficacy of those hot cross buns, unmilked and unsweetened tea, and the pew in St. Clement-Danes on Good Friday. As Carlyle said, he "worshipped in the era of Voltaire." We neither find now the intense narrow conviction of Johnson nor the confident and sneering persiflage of Voltaire. We have no mind for either. We are too conscious of intel- lectual and moral cross-currents for the one, too burdened with the weight and mystery of the world for the other. We are in a mood to taste everything, and like the Athenians of old, we are ever calling for something new. Our impressionism in art has extended itself to the whole of life, and as we have no leisure for very deep and prolonged study, we are glad to fall back on any new, or apparently new, experience of life. " What have you to say " we ask each new writer, and we please ourselves for the hour with his reply. This, to be sure, is not the true attitude of the great school to which we have referred, but it is the attitude of what Arnold would have called its "lighter self " ; and it is substantially the literary criticism of the moment. Probably each school has its uses, as it has its defects. Johnsonian criticism hardened into the " This will never do" of the Edinburgh Review greet- ing to the " Lyrical Ballads." French criticism has degene- rated into the sloppiest phrase-mongering which the world has ever known. But the excess of either has never, we think, prevented a good book from being known, or made of a bad writer much more than a nine days' wonder. The intellectual world rights itself after the see-saw of literary fashions. We are inclined to agree with the writer in the Dial that, after all this syrup, some wholesome physic would not now be amiss. But happily the progress of the critical spirit, spite of vagaries, is such that no undue lowering of the patient's constitution need be seriously apprehended.
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