Harper's Weekly/The Critic

by John Galsworthy

 

The Critic

By JOHN GALSWORTHY

Illustrated by by Guy Pene Du Bois

WE have all wondered from time to time what the godlike creatures who sit in remote sanctums and pass judgments on the works of artists and writers, great and small, are like. No doubt many of them are very ordinary mortals. And we have often wondered whether they themselves could write as well as the authors they have been criticizing. This is what Mr. Galsworthy thinks.

HE often thought: "This is a dog's life! I must give it up, and strike out for myself. If I can't write better than most of these fellows, it'll be very queer." But he had not yet done so. He had in his extreme youth published fiction, but it had never been the best work of which he was capable—it was not likely that it could be, seeing that even then he was constantly diverted from the ham-bone of his inspiration by the duty of perusing and passing judgment on the work of other men.

If pressed to say exactly why he did not strike out for himself, he found it difficult to answer, and what he answered was hardly as true as he could have wished, for, though truthful, he was not devoid of the instinct of self-preservation. He could hardly, for example, admit that to know what much better books he could have written if only he had not been handicapped, fostered his hesitation in striking out and writing them. To believe that, was an inward comfort not readily to be put to the rude test of actual experience. Nor would it have been human of him to acknowledge a satisfaction in feeling that he could put in their proper places those who had to an extent, as one might say, retarded his creative genius by compelling him to read their books. But these, after all, were but minor factors in his long hesitation, for he was not a conceited or malicious person. Fundamentally, no doubt, he lived what he called "a dog's life" with pleasure, partly because he was used to it—and what a man is used to he is loth to part with; partly because he really had a liking for books; and partly because to be a judge is better than to be judged. And no one could deny that he had a distinctly high conception of his functions. He had long laid down for himself certain leading principles of professional conduct, from which he never departed. Such as that a critic must not have any personal feelings, or be influenced by any private considerations whatsoever. This was why he often went a little out of his way to be more severe than usual with writers whom he suspected of a secret hope that personal acquaintanceship might incline him to favor them. He would indeed carry that principle further, and where he had, out of an impersonal enthusiasm at some time or another, written in terms of striking praise, he would make an opportunity later on of deliberately taking that writer down a peg or two lower than he deserved, lest his praise might be suspected of having been the outcome of personal motives or of gush—for which he had a great abhorrence. In this way he preserved a remarkably pure sense of independence; a feeling that he was master in his own house, to be dictated to only by a proper conviction of his own importance. It is true that there were certain writers whom for one reason or another he could not very well stand; some having written to him to point out inaccuracies, or counter one of his critical conclusions, or still worse, thanked him for having seen exactly what they had meant—a very unwise and even undignified thing to do, as he could not help thinking; others, again, having excited in him a natural dislike by their appearance, conduct, or manner of thought, or by having perhaps acquired too rapid, or too swollen a reputation to be, in his opinion, good for them. In such cases, of course, he was not so inhuman as to disguise his convictions. For he was before all things an Englishman with a very strong belief in the freest play for individual taste. But of almost any first book by an unknown author he wrote with an impersonality which it would have been difficult to surpass.

[Illustration: He often thought: "This is a dog's life! I must give it up, and strike out for myself.]

{[di|T]}HEN there was his principle that one must never he influenced in judging a book by anything one has said of a previous look by the same writer—each work standing entirely on its own basis. He found this important, and made a point of never re-reading his own criticisms; so that the rhythm of his judgment, which, if it had risen to a work in 1920 would fall over the author's next in 1921, was entirely unbiassed by recollection, and followed merely those immutable laws of change and the moon, so potent in regard to tides and human affairs.

For sameness and consistency he had a natural contempt. It was the unexpected both in art and criticism that he particularly looked for; anything being, as he said, preferable to dullness. A sentiment in which he was supported by the Public—not that, to do him justice, that weighed with him, for he had a genuine distrust of the Public, as was proper for one sitting in a seat of judgment. He knew that there were so-called critics who had a kind of formula for each writer, as divines have sermons suitable to certain occasions. For example: "We have in 'The Mazy Swim' another of Mr. Hyphen Dash's virile stories.... We can thoroughly recommend this pulsating tale, with its true and beautiful character study of Little Katie, to every healthy reader as one of the best that Mr. Hyphen Dash has yet given us." Or: "We cannot say that 'The Mazy Swim' is likely to increase Mr. Hyphen Dash's reputation. It is sheer melodrama such as we are beginning to expect from this writer.... The whole is artificial to a degree.... No sane reader will for a moment believe in Little Katie." Towards this sort of thing he showed small patience, having noticed with some acumen a relationship between the name of the writer, the politics of the paper, and the temper of the criticism. No! For him, if criticism did not embody the individual mood and temper of the critic, it was not worthy of the name.

But the canon which of all he regarded as most sacred, was this: A critic must surrender himself to the mood and temper of the work he is criticizing, take the thing as it is with its own special method and technique, its own point of view, and only when all that is admitted, let his critical faculty off the chain. He was never tired of insisting on that, both to himself and others, and never sat down to a book without having it firmly in his mind. Not infrequently, however, he found that the author was, as it were, wilfully employing a technique or writing in a mood with which he had no sympathy, or had chosen a subject obviously distasteful, or a set of premises that did not lead to the conclusion which he would have preferred. In such cases his scrupulous honesty warned him not to compromise with his conscience, but to say outright that it would have been better if the technique of the story had been objective instead of subjective; that the morbidity of the work prevented serious consideration of a subject which should never have been chosen; or that he would ever maintain that the hero was too weak a character to be a hero, and the book therefore of little interest. If any one pointed out to him that had the hero been a strong character there would have been no book, it being in point of fact the study of a weak character, he would answer: "That may be so, but it does not affect what I say—the book would have been better and more important if it had been the study of a strong character." And he would take the earliest opportunity of enforcing his recorded criticism that the hero was no hero, and the book no book to speak of. For though not obstinate, he was a man who stood to his guns. He took his duty to the Public very seriously, and felt it, as it were, a point of honor never to admit himself in the wrong. It was so easy to do that and so fatal; and the being anonymous, as on the whole he preferred to be, made it all the harder to abstain (on principle and for the dignity of criticism), from noticing printed contradictions to his conclusions.

"In spite of all the heart he put into his work, there were times when, like other men, he suffered from dejection, feeling that the moment had really come when he must either strike out for himself, or compile a volume of synthetic criticism. And he would say: "None of us fellows are doing any constructive critical work; no one nowadays seems to have any perception of the first principles of criticism." Having talked that theory out thoroughly he would feel better, and next day would take an opportunity of writing: "We are not like the academic French, to whom the principles of criticism are so terribly important; our genius lies rather in individual judgments, pliant and changing as the works they judge."

There was that in him which, like the land from which he sprang, could ill brook control. He approved of discipline, but knew exactly where it was deleterious to apply it to himself; and no one perhaps had a finer and larger conception of individual liberty. In this way he maintained the best traditions of a calling whose very essence was superiority. In course of conversation he would frequently admit, being a man of generous calibre, that the artist by reason of long years of devoted craftsmanship had possibly the most intimate knowledge of his art, but he would not fail to point out, and very wisely, that there was no such unreliable testimony as that of experts, who had an axe to grind, each of his own way of doing things; for comprehensive views of literature seen in due perspective there was nothing—he thought—like the trained critic, rising superior, as it were professionally, to myopia and individual prejudice.

OF the new school who maintained that true criticism was but reproduction in terms of sympathy, and just as creative as the creative work it reproduced, he was a little impatient, not so much on the ground that to make a model of a mountain was not quite the same thing as to make the mountain; but because he felt in his bones that the true creativeness of criticism (in which he had a high belief) was its destructive and satiric quality: its power of reducing things to rubbish and clearing them away, ready for the next lot. Instinct fortified by his own experience had guided him to that conclusion. Possibly, too, the conviction always lurking deep within him that the time was coming when he would strike out for himself and show the world how a work of art really should be built, was responsible for the necessity he felt to keep the ground well cleared.

He was nearly fifty when his clock chimed, and he began seriously to work at the creation of that masterpiece which was to free him from "a dog's life" and perhaps fill its little niche in the gallery of immortality. He worked at it happily enough till one day at the end of the fifth month he had the misfortune to read through what he had written. With his critical faculty he was able to perceive that which gave him no little pain—every chapter, most pages, and many sentences destroyed the one immediately preceding. He searched with intense care for that coherent thread which he had suspected of running through the whole. Here and there he seemed to come on its track, then it would vanish. This gave him great anxiety.

ABANDONING thought for the moment, he wrote on. He paused again towards the end of the seventh month, and once more patiently reviewed the whole. This time he found four distinct threads that did not seem to meet; but still more puzzling was the apparent absence of any individual flavor. He staggered. Before all he prized that quality, and throughout his career had fostered it in himself. To be unsapped in whim or fancy, to be independent, had been the very salt of his existence as a critic. And now, and now—when his hour had struck, and he was in the very throes of that long-deferred creation, to find—! He put thought away again, and doggedly wrote on.

At the end of the ninth month in a certain exaltation he finished, and slowly, with intense concentration, looked at what he had produced from beginning to end. And as he looked something clutched at him within, and he felt frozen. The thing did not move, it had no pulse, no life at all—it was dead.

And sitting there before that shapeless masterpiece, still-born, without a spirit or the impress of a personality, a horrid thought crept and rattled in his brain. Had he in his independence, in his love of being a law unto himself, become so individual that he had no individuality left? Was it possible that he had judged, and judged, and not been judged, too long? It was not true—not true! Locking the soft and flavorless thing away, he took up the latest novel sent him, and sat down to read it. But as he read, the pages of his own work would implant themselves above those that he turned and turned. At last he put the book down, and look up pen to review it. "This novel," he wrote, "is that most pathetic thing, the work of a man who has burned the lamp till the lamp has burned him; who has nourished and cultured his savor, and fed his idiosyncrasies, till he has dried and withered, without savor left." And, having written those words about the book that was not his own, the blood began once more flowing in his veins, and he felt warm.