The Critical Spirit

WE are apt to think of criticism as something very unimportant, and to offer it the merest tolerance as the pastime of leisurely scholars and visionaries, with no bearing on daily life. But the power of the press is very largely a critical power, wielding a direct influence on all our undertakings in art, in politics, in religion, in affairs. And this consideration alone should convince us that criticism comes within the range of what we call practical concerns.

Criticism resembles original creation in that it has both a scientific and an artistic side. It is scientific so far as it has to do with the analysis of phenomena, the collecting and arrangement of data, the discovery and eluci

dation of principles, and the exposition of the natural laws of art. It is artistic, in that its purpose is to offer its conclusion to the student with as much convincing grace and polish as may be. It is not merely the part of criticism to investigate the achievements of art, and to record the result of those investigations in a bare tabulation of fact; it is equally its business, surely, to win men to an allegiance to the beautiful, to direct them courteously. It is not enough that we should be brought face to face with all the best interpretations of nature and humanity. humanity. It is needful that they be made clear, convincing, luminous, intelligible.

This is very nearly the service art renders us with respect to life and nature. That famous saying of Arnold's, "Poetry is a criticism of life," is a concise statement of the same idea. It was never intended, I take it, for a definition of poetry, yet it expresses very aptly one aspect and function of all art. And this, without in the least implying anything

like didacticism, or the dreary obligations of a so-called moral purpose. Even the most faithful reproductions of realism are hardly impersonal utterances. They cannot but betray the critical standpoint of their author, however dispassionate he may be. If they are revolting and painful in their bleak veracity, they speak, perhaps, for his pious indignation at some hideous wrong, some social injustice, some piteous tragedy of existence; and we may go our ways, the better for his wholesome though disagreeable lesson. If they are engrossed, even to the point of tediousness, with the familiar, the common, or the dull, unrelieved by any spice of romance, unheightened by any touch of extraneous beauty, they are still, it may be, so many expressions of a serene and humane personality, perceiving good everywhere and implicitly declaring the worth of life. Let him be as literal, as uncompromising, as he will, his temperament and philosophy are still inevitably revealed on every page.

Not a word is traced on

paper, not a colour laid to canvas, but carries some hint of the delineator's hand. The artist's identity is patent in his work, his accent lurks in every line, his features look from every phrase. And at the last, whether he intend it or not, his collected work will form a commentary, or at least a foot-note, to the great book of nature.

There it lies, this green volume of the earth, the dark sea on one page, the dark forested hills on the other, and the creamy margin of shore between, with a ribbon of surf to mark the place. And there you may read to your heart's content; the story will never be finished, nor the interest flag, till you drop the task some night for very weariness, and your candle goes out with a puff of wind. But while the brief light lasts, and your strength holds out, how enthralling a book it is. What legendry and science, what song and story. The obscure records of the mountains and the tides, the shifting pictures of clouds and ruffling forests and changing fields from year

to year; the multitudes of the living trees and grasses, and last, most wonderful of all, the perishable talking tribes of men. And then to think, before this volume how many students have sat and mused, pondering the meaning of its fair text-so fair, yet so obscure as well. Here Shakespeare read and smiled; here Homer and Horace looked and doubted; here Job and Plato, David and Dante, Angelo and Darwin, Virgil and Voltaire, Spinoza and Rubens and Cervantes, found lifelong solace mingled with disquiet. Scholars and saints, painters and ploughmen, lovers and skeptics, emperors and peasants, and poets and kings; and what had they all to say about their reading? No comment? Did they find the work amusing, or was it squalid, or only dull? Think of the poetry of Emerson and Wordsworth; what is it but a critical interpretation of nature? Think of the work of Fielding or Thackeray or Hawthorne; what was it but a running commentary on humanity?