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couth experiments,' these critics do not understand that even foolish fashions, if you will, of contemporary literature do "show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." The critic may indeed say to contemporary writers: "By all the tests of good literature I find your standards execrable," but should we not require from contemporary criticism a justice more explanatory and more penetrating? "The law does not deal with a man's motives, but only with the result of his actions" is a principle in jurisprudence consistently set aside by all the great critics of human life. And certainly that finer justice by which the critic seeks to place each man's performance, will lead him first to inquire—what necessity in you, what inheritance, what outcome of what conditions give you your character, and make you the mouthpiece of the life which you represent to us? This is the finer justice, that which considers literature not as fruit detached from the tree, the soil, the climate, the influences which have brought it forth, but that which shows its human meaning, its curious value in relation to the contemporary attitude of mind it bodies forth. If the critic does not pursue this method, but seeks to fix the value of his age's literature by reference to the æsthetic standards of the literature of the past, we shall find him denying "excellence" to whole schools of literature,2 or disdaining to inquire into the significance of the really significant tendencies of his age. We shall find him, in short, failing to show that passion for justice, that delicate sense of

3

"New sentiments and new images others may produce; but to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be effort of tedious toil, and needless curiosity."—"Life of Pope." Johnson's Works, xi. pp. 194, 195.

"The same rule applies to continental literature. 'Decadence' and reaction from Decadence (as in M. Rostand); 'Realism' and reaction from Realism; social philosophies, striving to take literary form (as in Tolstoy); theories and contending critical slogans meet us everywhere, but we find little spontaneous genius, little permanent excellence."-Andrew Lang, “Literature in the Nineteenth Century."

"So when there appears one of these ostentatious, enormous, wearisome works, enveloped in vagueness and mystery, full of symbolical and mystical aspirations, like many of the Romantic Schools of the past, and nearly all of the modern naturalists, symbolists, and decadents, the public is delighted," &c.-Señor Valdés, "The Decadence of Modern Literature."

his relation to his subject, which should lead him to interpret his age's productions. We shall find him, finally, ranging himself amidst that host of critics, who, avowedly fighting the cause of good literature, often ignore, misread, and misinterpret in their day that very literature which is good.1

The con

temporary critic's

duty

III

What, then, is the contemporary critic's duty? He cannot hope to do more than fix a provisional value on the literature of his day. But his aim must surely be (a) to discover in the great mass of literary "matter" the fresh creative spirits bringing new illuminations, new valuations into literature and life; (b) to set down the characteristics of those contemporary documents which do betray to the age "his form and pressure" and (c) to detect the forces underlying the literary movements, and explain the nature of the life which determines their qualities. He aims at justice thereby; and though he rarely attains it, perhaps his verdict on the newcomers, whom he greets, is about as useful as that pronounced by the academic critic upon the ages which have fled far from him. Let us apply this humble scheme of the critic's duty to some of the literary "signs and portents" on our horizon.

literature

IV

What are the manifestations of contemporary literature? Contemporary What does authority say? "The literature of the moment is only in one way encouraging. It cannot well be worse: it is the dark hour before the dawn," says the distinguished critic whom we have already quoted. But why, why are the critics always longing for the dawn instead of rejoicing in the deluge? For is it not the hour of deluge and of no dawn that arrives, and of a still more wonderful deluge tomorrow? Looking at the seas of modern "Mr. Wordsworth's diction has nowhere any pretence to elegance or dignity. Alice Fell is 'trash.' The poem on the Cuckoo is 'absurd.' 'The Ode on Immortality' is 'the most illegible and unintelligible part of the whole publication. We venture to hope that there is now

an end of this folly'."-Edinburgh Review, xxxiv. 203.

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literature before us, around us, advancing upon us, and recalling the text "The fountains of the great deep were broken up. and the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth," it may be asked: Is not this literary inundation indeed the uncontrollable expression of modern life, of its rushing volume, and is not the critic's vocation to face with a spirit curious, undaunted, free, this literature's far-circling expanse, rejoicing in ascertaining its depths and racing currents and all the portents of its babbling shallows? Can any agency assuage, or academic precept stem, this incalculable flood?

What is the special note of this literature that "cannot well be worse"? Vulgarity and banality, some will answer. "The note of emancipation from certain human decencies," Mr. Lang replies; but does not a broader note in our literature's voluminous voice, one of a deeper import, force itself upon us? Shall we not rather recognize that modern life's fecundity, diversity, and complexity, along with its vulgarity, are being marvellously mirrored by the literature of our time," that our literature breathes that spirit of expansion whereby the modern man's horizons are constantly enlarged, and whereby he is today, no less than yesterday, exploring, seizing, and developing the illimitable fields of life and thought stretching for his annexation and investigation. And is not our literature, in the main, one of sympathetic curiosity and keen inquiry as to the thousands of roads life is going.3 "The note of the early century was that of emancipation from rules which had always been conventional, the rules of French criticism under Louis XIV. The note of the closing century is emancipation from certain human decencies."-Andrew Lang, "Literature in the Nineteenth Century." "To take only the fifty writers best known to us in England as creative artists who have produced their main work since 1860 (the year that marks for Mr. Lang "the degeneracy of literature") we may cite: Meredith, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchekov, Björnson, Ibsen, Maupassant, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Anatole France, Howells, Nietzsche, Jules Lemaitre, the Goncourts, Zola, Bourget, Pater, Rossetti, Swinburne. Morris, Maeterlinck, Heredia, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Serao, Fogazzaro, Carducci, D'Anunzio, Negri, Sienkiewicz, Spielhagen, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Couperus, Verhaeren, Valdés, Jonas Lie, Jacobson, Hardy, Henley, Stevenson, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Miss Thackeray, Miss Wilkins, Daudet, Robert Bridges, Jokai, Orzeszko.

"I can at all events attempt without undue temerity to discover the common tendency of writers of today. You meet, I think, almost everywhere an aversion to the conventional, the artificial, and a patient and persistent search for Nature, reality and truth."-Jules Pravieux. "On Contemporary French Literature," Athenæum, July 6, 1901.

Our literature and our life

3

Wherever the civilized man places his foot, in whatsoever spot of the globe he finds his habitation, there is contemporary literature speedily recording him, and so adding to the old world's realization of its new life.1 Centuries to come, looking back on our generation's literature, will see in it the ceaseless movement and expansion that characterize our day. Now, if our literature brings to men's cognizance so fully the variegated life of European societies, its decadence in those "centres" where decadence is and its vigorous expansion where growth is, does it not accomplish its mission? Can the literature of decaying communities and the literature of the new peoples beyond sea alike gain sincerity by their spiritual adjustment to classic models? Yet the academic critic's dissatisfaction with modern literature poises itself delicately on the vast and rounded contention that they can and should.* If we have to endure, in Mr. Lang's words, "constant exhibitions of crude and one-sided experiments," "symbolism, adventures in odd metres, etc.," may we not recognize that these "one-sided" experiments cry aloud with the great voice of Culture which has taught the general public to become articulate, which has opened a way for the yeasty waters of popular literature and carried them over the breakwaters of the Academies and the "literary men," and over the quiet beaches sacred to the "fine spirit"? Must we not recognize as kindred phenomena of one and the same great spectacle—

Our

culture-ridden

age

'Stevenson in the South Seas; Pierre Loti in Indo-China; Stephen Crane in Mexico; Joseph Conrad in Malaya; Henry Lawson in Australia; Maxim Gorky in South Russia; V. Korolenko in Siberia, &c. &c.

'Huysman, Eckhoud, Pierre Louys, Catulle Mendes, &c.

*Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling, Hamlin Garland, &c.

"The most marked characteristic in the contemporary art and literature of every country in Europe is the pursuit of Novelty; by which word I mean not the freshness, character, and individuality, which are essential to every work of genius, but the determination to discover absolutely new matter for artistic treatment. . . . The causes of Poetical Decadence are moral not physical."-Professor Courthope, "Law in Taste."

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the world's progress-the facts that, on the other hand, never was a generation more culture ridden than ours, never were there so many "Classics for the Million" and "World Classics," so many "Edited Texts," "Golden Treasuries," and "Globe Libraries," so many "Temple Shakespeare's" and "Century Scotts," so many "Manuals of Literature," "Literary Histories" and "Histories of Literature," so many "Standard Editions" and "Complete Works"; never were there so many "Royal Roads" and "Extension Lectures," and certified professors of literature and language, so many registered teachers and scholarly expounders of all the standards that the academic critics deem to be "old and excellent"-nay, is not the Daily Mail itself edited by young Oxford and Cambridge scholars?—and yet, yet on the other hand this is the age of "The Sorrows of Satan" and Miss Marie Corelli's other novels, of "The Eternal City," and Mr. Hall Caine's novels running into their millions of copies; and of Mr. Guy Boothby and his hundreds of thousands of copies. Does it not almost look as if it were the successful application of the "sweetness and light" of the classics to the Philistine soul of our world that has aroused the great general public to manifest itself in literature, and to pour from the floodgates of its consciousness that whirling sea which "cannot well be worse"? And while academic teaching and the literary deluge synchronize, is it possible that we shall not get rid of either in this inspiring modern world? Is it possible that we are merely viewing two phantasmagorial aspects of one and the same ingenious spectacle?

V

Contemporary literature as documentary evidence

In any case, whether it be the diffusion of superficial culture which assists the depraved human mind to produce the bulk of popular literature, must not the contemporary critic accept that wider standpoint which involves a recognition of the "bulk" as "the literature of the self-education of the crowd"-the mental food necessary to its present state of development? And will he not better seize its significance,

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