How It Strikes a Contemporary (1925)
In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the
fact that two critics at the same table at the same moment will
pronounce completely different opinions about the same book. Here, on
the right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose; on the left,
simultaneously, a mere mass of waste-paper which, if the fire could
survive it, should be thrown upon the flames. Yet both critics are in
agreement about Milton and about Keats. They display an exquisite
sensibility and have undoubtedly a genuine enthusiasm. It is only when
they discuss the work of contemporary writers that they inevitably come
to blows. The book in question, which is at once a lasting contribution
to English literature and a mere farrago of pretentious mediocrity, was
published about two months ago. That is the explanation; that is why
they differ.
The explanation is a strange one. It is equally disconcerting to the
reader who wishes to take his bearings in the chaos of contemporary
literature and to the writer who has a natural desire to know whether
his own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost utter darkness,
is likely to burn for ever among the fixed luminaries of English letters
or, on the contrary, to put out the fire. But if we identify ourselves
with the reader and explore his dilemma first, our bewilderment is
short-lived enough. The same thing has happened so often before. We have
heard the doctors disagreeing about the new and agreeing about the old
twice a year on the average, in spring and autumn, ever since Robert
Elsmere, or was it Stephen Phillips, somehow pervaded the atmosphere,
and there was the same disagreement among grown-up people about them. It
would be much more marvellous, and indeed much more upsetting, if, for a
wonder, both gentlemen agreed, pronounced Blank’s book an undoubted
masterpiece, and thus faced us with the necessity of deciding whether we
should back their judgement to the extent of ten and sixpence. Both are
critics of reputation; the opinions tumbled out so spontaneously here
will be starched and stiffened into columns of sober prose which will
uphold the dignity of letters in England and America.
It must be some innate cynicism, then, some ungenerous distrust of
contemporary genius, which determines us automatically as the talk goes
on that, were they to agree—which they show no signs of doing—half a
guinea is altogether too large a sum to squander upon contemporary
enthusiasms, and the case will be met quite adequately by a card to the
library. Still the question remains, and let us put it boldly to the
critics themselves. Is there no guidance nowadays for a reader who
yields to none in reverence for the dead, but is tormented by the
suspicion that reverence for the dead is vitally connected with
understanding of the living? After a rapid survey both critics are
agreed that there is unfortunately no such person. For what is their own
judgement worth where new books are concerned? Certainly not ten and
sixpence. And from the stores of their experience they proceed to bring
forth terrible examples of past blunders; crimes of criticism which, if
they had been committed against the dead and not against the living,
would have lost them their jobs and imperilled their reputations. The
only advice they can offer is to respect one’s own instincts, to follow
them fearlessly and, rather than submit them to the control of any
critic or reviewer alive, to check them by reading and reading again the
masterpieces of the past.
Thanking them humbly, we cannot help reflecting that it was not always
so. Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline,
which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now
unknown. That is not to say that the great critic—the Dryden, the
Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold—was an impeccable judge of
contemporary work, whose verdicts stamped the book indelibly and saved
the reader the trouble of reckoning the value for himself. The mistakes
of these great men about their own contemporaries are too notorious to
be worth recording. But the mere fact of their existence had a
centralising influence. That alone, it is not fantastic to suppose,
would have controlled the disagreements of the dinner-table and given to
random chatter about some book just out an authority now entirely to
seek. The diverse schools would have debated as hotly as ever, but at
the back of every reader’s mind would have been the consciousness that
there was at least one man who kept the main principles of literature
closely in view; who, if you had taken to him some eccentricity of the
moment, would have brought it into touch with permanence and tethered it
by his own authority in the contrary blasts of praise and blame.[15] But
when it comes to the making of a critic, nature must be generous and
society ripe. The scattered dinner-tables of the modern world, the chase
and eddy of the various currents which compose the society of our time,
could only be dominated by a giant of fabulous dimensions. And where is
even the very tall man whom we have the right to expect? Reviewers we
have but no critic; a million competent and incorruptible policemen but
no judge. Men of taste and learning and ability are for ever lecturing
the young and celebrating the dead. But the too frequent result of their
able and industrious pens is a desiccation of the living tissues of
literature into a network of little bones. Nowhere shall we find the
downright vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with his fine and natural
bearing, his profound insight and sanity, or Flaubert and the tremendous
power of his fanaticism, or Coleridge, above all, brewing in his head
the whole of poetry and letting issue now and then one of those profound
general statements which are caught up by the mind when hot with the
friction of reading as if they were of the soul of the book itself.
And to all this, too, the critics generously agree. A great critic, they
say, is the rarest of beings. But should one miraculously appear, how
should we maintain him, on what should we feed him? Great critics, if
they are not themselves great poets, are bred from the profusion of the
age. There is some great man to be vindicated, some school to be founded
or destroyed. But our age is meagre to the verge of destitution. There
is no name which dominates the rest. There is no master in whose
workshop the young are proud to serve apprenticeship. Mr. Hardy has long
since withdrawn from the arena, and there is something exotic about the
genius of Mr. Conrad which makes him not so much an influence as an
idol, honoured and admired, but aloof and apart. As for the rest, though
they are many and vigorous and in the full flood of creative activity,
there is none whose influence can seriously affect his contemporaries,
or penetrate beyond our day to that not very distant future which it
pleases us to call immortality. If we make a century our test, and ask
how much of the work produced in these days in England will be in
existence then, we shall have to answer not merely that we cannot agree
upon the same book, but that we are more than doubtful whether such a
book there is. It is an age of fragments. A few stanzas, a few pages, a
chapter here and there, the beginning of this novel, the end of that,
are equal to the best of any age or author. But can we go to posterity
with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the
whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for
our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully
put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.
At first the weight of pessimism seems sufficient to bear down all
opposition. Yes, it is a lean age, we repeat, with much to justify its
poverty; but, frankly, if we pit one century against another the
comparison seems overwhelmingly against us. _Waverley, The Excursion,
Kubla Khan, Don Juan, Hazlitt’s Essays, Pride and Prejudice, Hyperion_,
and _Prometheus Unbound_ were all published between 1800 and 1821. Our
century has not lacked industry; but if we ask for masterpieces it
appears on the face of it that the pessimists are right. It seems as if
an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and
extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. All honour, of course, to
those who have sacrificed their immortality to set the house in order.
But if we ask for masterpieces, where are we to look? A little poetry,
we may feel sure, will survive; a few poems by Mr. Yeats, by Mr. Davies,
by Mr. De la Mare. Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness,
but hours of something very different. Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is
perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages in _Far Away and Long Ago_
will undoubtedly go to posterity entire. _Ulysses_ was a memorable
catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster. And so, picking
and choosing, we select now this, now that, hold it up for display, hear
it defended or derided, and finally have to meet the objection that even
so we are only agreeing with the critics that it is an age incapable of
sustained effort, littered with fragments, and not seriously to be
compared with the age that went before.
But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip
service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly
conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. It is a
barren and exhausted age, we repeat; we must look back with envy to the
past. Meanwhile it is one of the first fine days of spring. Life is not
altogether lacking in colour. The telephone, which interrupts the most
serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has
a romance of its own. And the random talk of people who have no chance
of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often,
of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which
will weave itself into the moment for ever. But this is life; the talk
is about literature. We must try to disentangle the two, and justify the
rash revolt of optimism against the superior plausibility, the finer
distinction, of pessimism.
Our optimism, then, is largely instinctive. It springs from the fine day
and the wine and the talk; it springs from the fact that when life
throws up such treasures daily, daily suggests more than the most
voluble can express, much though we admire the dead, we prefer life as
it is. There is something about the present which we would not exchange,
though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in. And modern
literature, with all its imperfections, has the same hold on us and the
same fascination. It is like a relation whom we snub and scarify daily,
but, after all, cannot do without. It has the same endearing quality of
being that which we are, that which we have made, that in which we live,
instead of being something, however august, alien to ourselves and
beheld from the outside. Nor has any generation more need than ours to
cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our
predecessors. A shift in the scale—the war, the sudden slip of masses
held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom,
alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of
the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking
things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the
differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the
resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed. New books lure us
to read them partly in the hope that they will reflect this
rearrangement of our attitude—these scenes, thoughts, and apparently
fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so
keen a sense of novelty—and, as literature does, give it back into our
keeping, whole and comprehended. Here indeed there is every reason for
optimism. No age can have been more rich than ours in writers determined
to give expression to the differences which separate them from the past
and not to the resemblances which connect them with it. It would be
invidious to mention names, but the most casual reader dipping into
poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by
the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of
our time. But our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book
leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual
poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not
transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work
has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak
shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and
expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash
is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction. The
irritation is as acute as the pleasure was intense.
After all, then, we are back at the beginning, vacillating from extreme
to extreme, at one moment enthusiastic, at the next pessimistic, unable
to come to any conclusion about our contemporaries. We have asked the
critics to help us, but they have deprecated the task. Now, then, is the
time to accept their advice and correct these extremes by consulting the
masterpieces of the past. We feel ourselves indeed driven to them,
impelled not by calm judgement but by some imperious need to anchor our
instability upon their security. But, honestly, the shock of the
comparison between past and present is at first disconcerting.
Undoubtedly there is a dullness in great books. There is an unabashed
tranquillity in page after page of Wordsworth and Scott and Miss Austen
which is sedative to the verge of somnolence. Opportunities occur and
they neglect them. Shades and subtleties accumulate and they ignore
them. They seem deliberately to refuse to gratify those senses which are
stimulated so briskly by the moderns; the senses of sight, of sound, of
touch—above all, the sense of the human being, his depth and the
variety of his perceptions, his complexity, his confusion, his self, in
short. There is little of all this in the works of Wordsworth and Scott
and Jane Austen. From what, then, arises that sense of security which
gradually, delightfully, and completely overcomes us? It is the power of
their belief—their conviction, that imposes itself upon us. In
Wordsworth, the philosophic poet, this is obvious enough. But it is
equally true of the careless Scott, who scribbled masterpieces to build
castles before breakfast, and of the modest maiden lady who wrote
furtively and quietly simply to give pleasure. In both there is the same
natural conviction that life is of a certain quality. They have their
judgement of conduct. They know the relations of human beings towards
each other and towards the universe. Neither of them probably has a word
to say about the matter outright, but everything depends on it. Only
believe, we find ourselves saying, and all the rest will come of itself.
Only believe, to take a very simple instance which the recent
publication of _The Watsons_ brings to mind, that a nice girl will
instinctively try to soothe the feelings of a boy who has been snubbed
at a dance, and then, if you believe it implicitly and unquestioningly,
you will not only make people a hundred years later feel the same thing,
but you will make them feel it as literature. For certainty of that kind
is the condition which makes it possible to write. To believe that your
impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and
confinement of personality. It is to be free, as Scott was free, to
explore with a vigour which still holds us spell-bound the whole world
of adventure and romance. It is also the first step in that mysterious
process in which Jane Austen was so great an adept. The little grain of
experience once selected, believed in, and set outside herself, could be
put precisely in its place, and she was then free to make of it, by a
process which never yields its secrets to the analyst, into that
complete statement which is literature.
So then our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to
believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that
happens to himself. They cannot make a world, because they are not free
of other human beings. They cannot tell stories because they do not
believe the stories are true. They cannot generalise. They depend on
their senses and emotions, whose testimony is trustworthy, rather than
on their intellects whose message is obscure. And they have perforce to
deny themselves the use of some of the most powerful and some of the
most exquisite of the weapons of their craft. With the whole wealth of
the English language at the back of them, they timidly pass about from
hand to hand and book to book only the meanest copper coins. Set down at
a fresh angle of the eternal prospect they can only whip out their
notebooks and record with agonised intensity the flying gleams, which
light on what? and the transitory splendours, which may, perhaps,
compose nothing whatever. But here the critics interpose, and with some
show of justice.
If this description holds good, they say, and is not, as it may well be,
entirely dependent upon our position at the table and certain purely
personal relationships to mustard pots and flower vases, then the risks
of judging contemporary work are greater than ever before. There is
every excuse for them if they are wide of the mark; and no doubt it
would be better to retreat, as Matthew Arnold advised, from the burning
ground of the present to the safe tranquillity of the past. “We enter on
burning ground,” wrote Matthew Arnold, “as we approach the poetry of
times so near to us, poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth,
of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with
passion,” and this, they remind us, was written in the year 1880.
Beware, they say, of putting under the microscope one inch of a ribbon
which runs many miles; things sort themselves out if you wait;
moderation and a study of the classics are to be recommended. Moreover,
life is short; the Byron centenary is at hand; and the burning question
of the moment is, did he, or did he not, marry his sister? To sum up,
then—if indeed any conclusion is possible when everybody is talking at
once and it is time to be going—it seems that it would be wise for the
writers of the present to renounce for themselves the hope of creating
masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but
notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his
hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he
will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them
because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks
of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made. Literature,
as the critics were saying just now, has lasted long, has undergone many
changes, and it is only a short sight and a parochial mind that will
exaggerate the importance of these squalls, however they may agitate the
little boats now tossing out at sea. The storm and the drenching are on
the surface; and continuity and calm are in the depths.
As for the critics whose task it is to pass judgement upon the books of
the moment, whose work, let us admit, is difficult, dangerous, and often
distasteful, let us ask them to be generous of encouragement, but
sparing of those wreaths and coronets which are so apt to get awry, and
fade, and make the wearers, in six months time, look a little
ridiculous. Let them take a wider, a less personal view of modern
literature, and look indeed upon the writers as if they were engaged
upon some vast building, which being built by common effort, the
separate workmen may well remain anonymous. Let them slam the door upon
the cosy company where sugar is cheap and butter plentiful, give over,
for a time at least, the discussion of that fascinating topic—whether
Byron married his sister—and, withdrawing, perhaps, a handsbreadth from
the table where we sit chattering, say something interesting about
literature. Let us buttonhole them as they leave, and recall to their
memory that gaunt aristocrat, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept a
milk-white horse in her stable in readiness for the Messiah and was for
ever scanning the mountain tops, impatiently but with confidence, for
signs of his approach, and ask them to follow her example; scan the
horizon; see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way
for masterpieces to come.
[Footnote 15: How violent these are two quotations will show. “It [Told
by _an Idiot_] should be read as the _Tempest_ should be read, and as
_Gulliver’s Travels_ should be read, for if Miss Macaulay’s poetic gift
happens to be less sublime than those of the author of the _Tempest_,
and if her irony happens to be less tremendous than that of the author
of _Gulliver’s Travels_, her justice and wisdom are no less noble than
theirs.”—_The Daily News._
The next day we read: “For the rest one can only say that if Mr. Eliot
had been pleased to write in demotic English _The Waste Land_ might not
have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists, and literati, so
much waste-paper.”—_The Manchester Guardian._]