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wright," said an old French critic, "but it may not be so easy to justify the success." The test of "success" is an economic test, and concerns not art or the criticism of art, but political economy. Valuable contributions to economic and social history have been made by students who have investigated the changing conditions of the theatre and the vicissitudes of taste on the part of theatrical audiences; but these have the same relation to Criticism, and to the drama as an art, that a history of the publisher's trade and its influence on the personal fortunes of poets would bear to the history of poetry.

Technique

We have done with technique as separate from art. It has been pointed out that style cannot be disassociated from art; and the false air of science which the term "technique" seems to possess should not blind us to the fact that it too involves the same error. "Technique is really personality; that is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the æsthetic critic can understand it," says Oscar Wilde, in a dialogue on "The Critic as Artist," which, amid much perversity and paradox, is illumined by many flashes of strange insight. The technique of poetry cannot be separated from its inner nature. Versification cannot be studied by itself, except loosely and for convenience; it remains always an inherent quality of the single poem. No two poets ever write in the same metre. Milton's line:

"These my sky-robes spun out of Iris' woof"

is called an iambic pentameter; but it is not true that artistically it has something in common with every other line possessing the same succession of syllables and accents; in this sense it is not an iambic pentameter; it is only one thing; it is the line:

"These my sky-robes spun out of Iris' woof."

Poetic

We have done with the history and criticism of poetic themes. It is possible to speak loosely of the handling of such a theme as Prometheus by themes Æschylus and by Shelley, of the story of Francesca di Rimini, by Dante, Stephen Phillips, and D'Annunzio, or the story of King Arthur by Malory and Tennyson; but strictly

speaking, they are not employing the same theme at all. Each artist is expressing a certain material and labeling it with an historic name. For Shelley Prometheus is only a label; he is expressing his artistic conception of life, not the history of a Greek Titan. It is the vital flame he has breathed into his work that makes it what it is, and with this vital flame (and not with labels) the critic should concern himself in the works of poets. The same answer must be given to those critics who insist on the use of contemporary material in poetry, and praise the poets whose subjects are drawn from the life of our own time. But even if it were possible for critics to determine in advance the subject-matter of poetry or to impose subjects on poets, how can a poet deal with anything but contemporary material? How can a twentiethcentury poet, even when he imagines that he is concerned with Greek or Egyptian life, deal with any subject but the life of his own time, except in the most external and superficial detail? Cynics have said since the first outpourings of men's hearts, "There is nothing new in art; there are no new subjects." But the very reverse is true. There are no old subjects"; every subject is new as soon as it has been transformed by the imagination of the poet.

We have done with the race, the time, the environment Taine's of a poet's work as an element in Criticism. theory To study these phases of a work of art is to treat it as an historic or social document, and the result is a contribution to the history of culture or civilization, with only a subsidiary interest for the history of art. "Granted the times, the environment, the race, the passions of the poet, what has he done with his materials, how has he converted poetry out of reality?" To answer this question of the Italian De Sanctis as it refers to each single work of art is to perform what is truly the critic's vital function; this is to interpret "expression" in its rightful sense, and to liberate æsthetic Criticism from the vassalage to Kulturgeschichte imposed on it by the school of Taine.

We have done with the "evolution" of literature. The concept of progress was first applied to literature Evolution in the seventeenth century, but at the very of literature outset Pascal pointed out that a distinction must here be made between science and art; that science advances by accumulation of knowledge, while the changes of art cannot be reduced to any theory of progress. As a matter of fact, the theory involves the ranking of poets according to some arbitrary conception of their value; and the ranking of writers in order of merit has become obsolete, except in the "hundred best books" of the last decade and the "five-foot shelves" of yesterday. The later nineteenth century gave a new air of verisimilitude to this old theory by borrowing the term "evolution" from science; but this too involves a fundamental misconception of the free and original movement of art. A similar misconception is involved in the study of the "origins" of art; for art has no origin separate from man's life.

"In climes beyond the solar road,

Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam,
The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom;"

but though she wore savage raiment, she was no less the Muse. Art is simple at times, complex at others, but it is always art. The simple art of early times may be studied with profit; but the researches of anthropology have no vital significance for Criticism, unless the anthropologist studies the simplest forms of art in the same spirit as its highest; that is, unless the anthropologist is an æsthetic critic.

Finally, we have done with the old rupture between genius and taste. When Criticism first propounded Genius

and

taste

as its real concern the oft-repeated question: "What has the poet tried to express and how has he expressed it?" Criticism prescribed for itself the only possible method. How can the critic answer this question without becoming (if only for a moment of supreme power) at one with the creator? That is to say, taste must reproduce the work of art within itself in order to understand and judge it; and at that moment æsthetic judgment becomes nothing more nor less than creative art itself. The identity of genius

and taste is the final achievement of modern thought on the subject of art, and it means that fundamentally, in their most significant moments, the creative and the critical instincts are one and the same. From Goethe to Carlyle, from Carlyle to Arnold, from Arnold to Symons, there has been much talk of the "creative function" of Criticism. For each of these men the phrase held a different content; for Arnold it meant merely that Criticism creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age,a social function of high importance, perhaps, yet wholly independent of æsthetic significance. But the ultimate truth toward which these men were tending was more radical than that, and plays havoc with all the old platitudes about the sterility of taste. Criticism at last can free itself of its agelong self-contempt, now that it may realize that æsthetic judgment and artistic creation are instinct with the same vital life. This identity does not sum up the whole life of the complex and difficult art of Criticism, but without it Criticism would really be impossible. "Genius is to æsthetics what the ego is to philosophy, the only supreme and absolute reality," said Schelling; and without subduing the mind to this transcendental system, it remains true that what must always be inexplicable to mere reflection is just what gives power to poetry; that intellectual curiosity may amuse itself by asking its little questions of the silent sons of light, but they vouchsafe no answer to art's pale shadow, thought; the gods are kind if they give up their secret in another work of art, the art of Criticism, that serves as some sort of mirror to the art of literature, only because in their flashes of insight taste and genius are

one.

THE CONTEMPORARY CRITIC

By EDWARD GARNETT

In considering the province of contemporary criticism it may be well to begin by examining how fundamental differences of mental attitude lead men into different schools. The watchword of one school is Authority,' the aim of the other is Interpretation.

The critic

First let us accept the critic's delicate position. It is no objection to him, as is confusedly felt, that he is a self-appointed judge. The value of as judge his pronouncements lies in their justice, and not, as the vulgar hold, in their issuing from a high and impressive seat of judgment. But how if the word critic, down the long centuries, has attached to itself shades of meaning at odds with the idea of justice? Styling themselves the judges, the discerners (κpivw, separate), have not the contemporary critics shown themselves, to the mind of disillusioned generations, kith and kin with the fault-finders? Is it not that the word critic, in general, suggests to men an inimical shadow hastening to run before slow-footed justice? and where are men more sure of disinterring old criticism than from the learned grave of error? A curious fact this, that when men hear the word Judge, their thoughts turn towards the justice administered, but when they hear the word Critic, they are simply apprehensive; they wait as men expecting anything. And they are rarely disappointed!

They are rarely disappointed because the critic's utility, and liberty of delivering judgment being conceded, and since his is the right to construe everything as he pleases, there remains only his own relation to his subject to be settled. Nothing can there be, or ought there to be, to prevent the critic from seizing those special vantage grounds, whence his subFrom Friday Nights, by Edward Garnett, 1922. By permission of Alfred A. Knopf, authorized publisher.

Mr. Garnett, a son of Dr. Richard Garnett, is a well known English critic. He published in 1917 a study of Turgenev.

"The first and most indispensable (condition) is the acknowledgment of the principle of Authority."-Professor Courthope's "Law in Taste," p. 431.

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