The

impressionistic

critic

Finally, the first critic may have been chiefly absorbed in himself, in his own sensations, impressions, reactions. He was perhaps used to finding "every moment some form or color growing perfect in hand or face, some tone on the hills choicer than the rest," and he may have found something on the walls of the cave which stirred his senses to the same excitement. He may have seen in Ab's crude drawing something that touched him more nearly than the object in life had done, something more real than actuality, and have felt in consequence a certain enhancement of his personality, a sense of more abundant life. He would try to express his emotion in language, to translate Ab's effort into another medium, and he would therefore become an artist himself, using Ab's work as a source of material as freely as he would have used nature. To the people who objected that he talked of an Ab unrecognized by them or even by Ab himself, he would defend his procedure. "What do I know of Ab? A few facts of his life, probably contradicted by others that I don't know, and which are at best misleading. What do I care about principles of beauty and laws of aesthetics? Who am I to say what is good for my fellow men? All I know are my own sensations. Ab's horse like other phenomena exists for me only in them, and only from them can I honestly bear witness to his art."

I do not mean to suggest that the four types of criticism which I have noted, historical, aesthetic, ethical and impressionistic, afford a complete classification; still less that they exist in classes separate and distinct each from the other. The same critic may partake of more than one type; as he may show more than one critical attitude. He may be by turns interpreter, judge, moralist, and artist. Nearly every critic, however, is predominantly of one type, and shows a tendency to persist in one attitude. Moreover, these different types of criticism predominate in different periods according to the intellectual character of the time. Thus in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century criticism was largely aesthetic, divided into schools, classical and romantic, of which Dr. Johnson, Jeffrey, and Coleridge are the expositors. The

romantic critic tended toward impressionism, in William Hazlitt. In the middle nineteenth century the interest in humanity finds reflection in ethical criticism, in the shadow of which America remains. Matthew Arnold lamented in an early preface to his poems the lack of a critic as aesthetic schoolmaster for young poets; but when he propounded his famous query as to the function of criticism he answered it, in terms befitting a missionary, "to make known the best that is thought and known in the world," and the bulk of his critical performance rests on the foundation of his dictum that conduct is three-fourths of life. The scientific movement in thought, and the accompanying realistic movement in literature and art, naturally led to a criticism of interpretation, biographical, historical, scientific, scholarly. The famous environment theory of Taine is an illustration. At the close of the century, the period known as the decadence is characterized by impressionistic criticism and the emergence of the critic as an artist in his own right. This is the critical attitude of Lemaître, Pater and Wilde, and it is the one to which Mr. T. S. Eliot inclines in his account of The Perfect Critic.

That answer

Intellectual character of our period

In trying to answer the question What is Criticism? I am aware that with a pedantry which justifies Mr. Mencken's worst doubts of my profession I have drawn entirely upon the past. But it is only in the light of the past that I see any approach to an answer to the question which remains as to the function of criticism at the present time. must depend in the present as in the past upon the intellectual character of the period with reference to the arts. Now it is a commonplace that a leading characteristic of the world today is the vast popularization of the arts of expression. To this democracy literature has succumbed; and painting and music, though defended by more exacting technique, are tending in the same direction. No longer do writers form a caste apart, an institution devoted to the production of masterpieces, seeking like Milton "to leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die." On the contrary in these days of popular education everyone writes or threatens to do so,

Duties
of the
contemporary

critic

and measures success not in length of time, but in width of space, not by a fit audience though few extending in a thin line down the centuries, but by the unfit and vast assembly of readers scattered over the whole world who for a week or a month may be held by the charm of a "best seller." No longer does the literary audience consist of a group of connoisseurs, instructed by criticism to make formal comparisons and praise the best. On the contrary, everybody reads; and supplying reading-matter to an immense and voracious public has become a business like supplying it with clothes and food. In these circumstances the function of criticism becomes one of immense importance. In the first place literature is exposed to two dangers, the practice of its art by the unlearned and the determination of its quality by the masses. It would seem that the first duty of chivalrous criticism is to defend the art of letters from malpractice, as in the past it defended poetry from bad poets. Should not criticism seek to play the schoolmaster, limiting the vast area of subject matter, preserving the principles of form, and raising anew the institution of literature on aesthetic principles which should decisively separate it from mere reading matter? Or rather is not the proper preoccupation of criticism with the author? Should the critic not give himself with all his zeal to the single task of interpretation? Is there not danger that genius will be lost in the mass of mediocrity, and its masterpieces be choked to death among the weeds of the jungle? Or finally is not the critic's chief concern with the public, lest it innoculate itself with the germs of its own obscure maladies? Is he not more than ever before called upon to act as judge, censor, executioner in the interest of public welfare? Undoubtedly a plausible case can be made out for any one of these three functions of criticism, or of all together, for as I have said they are not necessarily exclusive. But the assumption of any or all of them depends upon the critic's being Don Quixote. It happens indeed that he sometimes justifies a new relation of subject matter and form; or that, by a tour de force, he rescues a sinking artist, or even that before his condemning eloquence

the wayward public stands rebuked. These triumphs, however, are byproducts of his activity, not the main objects of his endeavor.

In the general sauve qui peut, I believe that the critic's chief occupation should be with himself. His first duty is to save his own soul. And this he will accomplish most surely by divesting himself of preconceptions and prejudices whether derived from the authority of history or of science, by preserving in the whirl of phenomena the self-consciousness and detachment of the artist. The mass of production about him is part of the material of the world, the stuff of life. Among the paradoxes of Oscar Wilde a sentence emerges which is profoundly true. "The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticizes as the artist does to the visible world of form and color, or the unseen world of passion and thought." It is his primary function to bear a faithful record of his impressions. He is valuable for the sensitiveness of his nerves, for the fineness of his perceptions, for the validity of his thought, whether in the field of aesthetics, ethics or human sympathy. His service to the artist, to art, or to the people is comprehended in his conscience toward himself. He will stimulate the artist to more passionate creation by his appreciation and by his competition; he will serve art by enlarging its boundaries, not by circumscribing them; and he will aid the public not by imposing impressions of his own or theories of other men upon it, but by arousing it to reaction on its own account. For "The aim of criticism is to make every man his own critic."

THE AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM

By WILLIAM P. TRENT

I

The comparatively recent visit of M. Ferdinand Brunetière to this country has stimulated among us fresh interest in a question as old as the hills, and as varied in the forms it assumes; to wit, What is the weight of authority carried by criticism? Is there such a thing, men are asking themselves, as a science of criticism, or is all criticism at bottom merely the expression of an individual opinion, unsupported, or supported in varying degrees, by other individual opinions? If it is well-nigh impossible to eliminate the personal equation in strictly scientific experiments, is it worth while, they ask, to try to eliminate it from our studies in the semi-sciences, such as ethics and history, or in the arts? In other words, is not criticism a present, individual act; ought not the critic to say “I” instead of "we"; and is not every one of us that reads a book or looks at a picture as much master of his own likes and dislikes as the typical Englishman is lord of his own castle?

Influence of teachers and reporters

But, over and above the labors of individual critics, there are two forces at work in all parts of the Western world that continue to carry on this conflict, often unconsciously. These two forces are the teachers and the reporters. Nearly all persons who engage in any form of teaching are interested in preserving the sway of authority, and may be counted on the side of conservative criticism. On the other hand, men whose business it is primarily to amuse and interest, and only secondarily to instruct, society, are not led to uphold the sway of authority (save in matters of religion and politics about which their

From The Authority of Criticism and Other Essays, by William P. Trent, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899. Reprinted by special arrangement with the publishers. The author, a professor of English Literature in Columbia University, is known as one of the editors of The Cambridge History of American Literature and as a biographer of Defoe. In 1905 he published Greatness in Literature.