Epigraph
THE ROVING
CRITIC
I. Toward a Creed
A Fourth Dimension in Criticism
Criticism ordinarily asks about literature one of three questions: “Is it good?” “Is it true?” “Is it beautiful?” Each of these questions, of course, permits the widest range in the critic. He may be so simple as to think a given work is not good when it fails to emphasize some truism or when it violates the sort of poetic justice which children in the nursery are mistaught to expect; he may be so complex as to demand from literature the subtlest casuistries concerning moral problems; he may be so perverse as to wince at the first symptom of any plain contrast between good and evil. If it be the true which exercises him, he may sink so low as to be worried over this or that surface error in his author—such as an anachronism or a blunder in botany or mechanics; he may rise so high as to discuss on an equal plane with a great authority the difficult questions what the nature of truth may be or whether there is after all any such thing as truth. Or, holding beauty uppermost in his mind, he may at the one extreme peck at a masterpiece because it departs from some traditional form or at the other extreme may view it under the light of an eternity of beauty and feel satisfied if he can perceive and identify the masterpiece’s peculiar reflection. Yet wide as these ranges are, they can all be reduced to the three questions and they mark what may be called the three dimensions of criticism.
There is, however, a fourth dimension—to continue the analogy—which comes into the account when a critic asks about literature: “Is it alive?” In a sense this query includes all the others and in a sense it transcends them. Odysseus is not good: he is adulterous and crafty; Faust is not good: he sells his soul for the sake of forbidden power; Gargantua is not good: he buffets and tumbles the decencies in all directions; Henry V is not good: he wastes his youth and wages unjust war; Huckleberry Finn is not good: he is a thief and a liar. The heroes, the demigods, the gods themselves occasionally step aside from the paths into which men counsel one another; there are at least as many great stories about gorgeous courtesans as about faithful wives. It is not the “goodness” of all such literature but the vividness that gives it its perennial impact. Better a lively rogue than a deadly saint.
To a different extent the same thing appears when truthfulness is concerned. There is a vitality which lies back both of naturalism and of romance and which communicates itself through books as dissimilar, say, as Madame Bovary and The Faerie Queene—one of them the most fastidious document and one of them the most spacious dream. The gods of Homer are not real; the history of Virgil will not bear scrutiny; Dante wanders in a maze of superstitions; Shakespeare lets his plots take him almost where they like; the machinery of a folk-tale is good enough for Goethe, as it was for the author of the Book of Job. How many cosmogonies, Bernard Shaw points out, have gone to the dust heap in spite of an accuracy superior to that which keeps Genesis alive through cynical centuries! The looser Molière is in the long run no less convincing than the tighter Ibsen. Swift and Voltaire and Lucian, twitting their worlds for their follies, dare every extravagance of invention without serious penalty. Ariosto with his whimsical paladins and Scott with his stately aristocrats and Dickens with his hearty democratic caricatures and Dostoevsky with his tortured souls—to find a common denominator of truth among them is so hard that the critics who attempt it are likely to end in partisanship for this or that one and to assign the others to a station outside the approved class. Yet an author may be killed a dozen times with the charge of untruthfulness and still live.
And concerning beauty the disagreement of the doctors is unending and unendable. Whitman is now called beautiful and now called ugly; so are Browning, and Hugo, and Tolstoi, and Nietzsche, and Lope de Vega, and Leopardi, and Catullus, and Aristophanes. Moreover, by any aesthetic standard which the judgment can arrive at, any one of these authors is sometimes beautiful and sometimes not. Nor does it finally matter, as it did not finally matter that Socrates had a thick body and a pug-face. The case of Socrates illustrates the whole argument. Was he good? There was so great a difference on this point among the critics of his time that the majority of them, translating their conclusion into action, put him to death as dangerous to the state. Was what he taught the truth? It is of course not easy to disentangle the actual Socrates from the more or less polemic versions of him which Xenophon and Plato furnish, but it seems clear that he had his share of unscientific notions and individual prejudices and mistaken doctrines. Was he beautiful? He confused Greek orthodoxy by being so uncomely and yet so great. But whatever his shortcomings in these regards, no one ever doubted that he was alive—alive in body and mind and character, alive in war and peace and friendship and controversy, alive in bed or at table. Life was concentrated in him; life spoke out of him.
So with literature, which collects, transmutes, and utters life. It may represent the good, may speak the truth, may use the modes of beauty—any one or all of these things. Call the good the bow which lends the power; call the truth the string which fixes the direction; call the beautiful the arrow which wings and stings. But there is still the arm in which the true life of the process lies. Or, to change the figure, one of those gods who in the mythologies model men out of clay may have good clay and a true purpose and may shape his figure beautifully; but there is still the indispensable task of breathing the breath of life into it before it will wake and go its own course and continue its breed to other generations. Life is obviously what makes the difference between human sculpture and divine creation; it is the same element which makes the difference between good literature and dead literature.
The critic who is aware of this fourth dimension of the art he studies saves himself the effort which critics less aware contrive to squander in trying to explain their art in terms merely of the three dimensions. He knows that life began before there were such things as good and evil; that it surges through both of them; that it will probably outlast any particular conception of either one or the other: he knows that it is not the moral of so naïve a tale as Uncle Tom’s Cabin which makes it moving but the life which was breathed into it by fiery passion. He knows that the amount of truth in poetry need not always be great and often indeed is much exaggerated; that a ruthless hand can find heaps of theological slag in Milton and corners full of metaphysical cobwebs in Plato and glittering excrescences of platitude in Shakespeare: he knows that these poets now live most in those parts of their work in the creating of which they were most alive. He knows that a powerful imagination may beget life even upon ugliness: he knows it because he has felt the vibrations of reality in Browning’s cranky grotesques and in Whitman’s long-drawn categories and in Rabelais’s great dung-cart piled high with every variety of insolence and wisdom. Not goodness alone nor truth alone nor beauty alone nor all of them in one of their rare fusions can be said to make great literature, though these are the tools of that hard trade. Great literature may be known by the sign that it communicates the sense of the vividness of life. And it communicates it because its creators were alive with it at the moment of creation.
There are many kinds of literature because there are many kinds of life. Pope felt one kind and Wordsworth another and Poe another—and so on and on. There are no universal poets, not even Homer and Shakespeare. Nor, of course, are there any universal critics, not even Lessing and Sainte-Beuve. Neither creator nor critic can make himself universal by barely taking thought about it; he is what he lives. The measure of the creator is the amount of life he puts into his work. The measure of the critic is the amount of life he finds there.