It may sound paradoxical to say that the more
widely education spreads, the more generally
intelligent a nation becomes, the greater is
the danger to which Art and Letters are exposed.
And yet how obviously is this the case,
and how easily is this explained. The quality
of skilled work depends mainly on the standard
required of the workman. If his judges and
patrons belong to the discerning few who,
knowing what is excellent, are intolerant of
everything which falls short of excellence, the
standard required will necessarily be a high one,
and the standard required will be the standard
attained. In past times, for example, the only
men of letters who were respected formed a
portion of that highly cultivated class who will
always be in the minority; and to that class,
and to that class only, they appealed. A community
within a community, they regarded the
general public with as much indifference as the
general public regarded them, and wrote only
for themselves, and for those who stood on the
same intellectual level as themselves. It was
so in the Athens of Pericles; it was so in the
Rome of Augustus; it was so in the Florence
of the Medici; and a striking example of the
same thing is to be found in our own Elizabethan
Dramatists. Though their bread depended
on the brutal and illiterate savages for
whose amusement they catered, they still talked
the language of scholars and poets, and forced
their rude hearers to sit out works which could
have been intelligible only to scholars and poets.
Each felt with pride that he belonged to a great
guild, which neither had, nor affected to have,
anything in common with the multitude. Each
strove only for the applause of those whose
praise is not lightly given. Each spurred the
other on. When Marlowe worked, he worked
with the fear of Greene before his eyes, as
Shakespeare was put on his mettle by Jonson,
and Jonson by Shakespeare. We owe Hamlet
and Sejanus, Much Ado about Nothing and the
Alchemist, not to men who bid only for the
suffrage of the mob, but to men who stood in
awe of the verdict which would be passed on
them by the company assembled at the Mermaid
and the Devil.
As long as men of letters continue to form
an intellectual aristocracy, and, stimulated by
mutual rivalry, strain every nerve to excel, and
as long also as they have no temptation to
pander to the crowd, so long will Literature
maintain its dignity, and so long will the standard
attained in Literature be a high one. In
the days of Dryden and Pope, in the days even
of Johnson and Gibbon, the greater part of
the general public either read nothing, or read
nothing but politics and sermons. The few
who were interested in Poetry, in Criticism,
in History, were, as a rule, those who had
received a learned education, men of highly
cultivated tastes and of considerable attainments.
A writer, therefore, who aspired to
contribute to polite literature, had to choose
between finding no readers at all, and finding
such readers as he was bound to respect—between
instant oblivion, and satisfying a class
which, composed of scholars, would have turned
with contempt from writings unworthy of
scholars. A classical style, a refined tone, and
an adequate acquaintance with the chief authors
of Ancient Rome and of Modern France,
were requisites, without which even a periodical
essayist would have had small hope of obtaining
a hearing. Whoever will turn, we do not say
to the papers of Addison and his circle in the
early part of the last century, or to those of
Chesterfield and his circle later on, but to the
average critical work of Cave's and Dodsley's
hack writers, cannot fail to be struck with its
remarkable merit in point of literary execution.
But as education spreads, a very different
class of readers call into being a very different
class of writers. Men and women begin to seek
in books the amusement or excitement which
they sought formerly in social dissipation. To
the old public of scholars succeeds a public, in
which every section of society has its representatives,
and to provide this vast body with
the sort of reading which is acceptable to it,
becomes a thriving and lucrative calling. An
immense literature springs up, which has no
other object than to catch the popular ear, and
no higher aim than to please for the moment.
That perpetual craving for novelty, which has
in all ages been characteristic of the multitude,
necessitates in authors of this class a corresponding
rapidity of production. The writer of
a single good book is soon forgotten by his
contemporaries; but the writer of a series of
bad books is sure of reputation and emolument.
Indeed, a good book and a bad book stand,
so far as the general public is concerned, on
precisely the same level, as they meet with
precisely the same fate. Each presents the
attraction of a new title-page. Each is glanced
through, and tossed aside. Each is estimated
not by its intrinsic worth, but according to the
skill with which it has been puffed. Till within
comparatively recent times this literature was,
for the most part, represented by novels and
poems, and by those light and desultory essays,
sketches and ana, which are the staple commodity
of our magazines. And so long as it
confined itself within these bounds it did no
mischief, and even some good. Flimsy and
superficial though it was, it had at least the
merit of interesting thousands in Art and Letters,
who would otherwise have been indifferent
to them. It afforded nutriment to minds which
would have rejected more solid fare. To men
of business and pleasure who, though no longer
students, still retained the tincture of early
culture, it offered the most agreeable of all
methods of killing time, while scholars found
in it welcome relaxation from severer studies.
It thus supplied a want. Presenting attractions
not to one class only, but to all classes, it grew
on the world. Its patrons, who half a century
ago numbered thousands, now number millions.
And as it has grown in favour, it has grown
in ambition. It is no longer satisfied with the
humble province which it once held, but is extending
its dominion in all directions. It has
its representatives in every department of Art
and Letters. It has its poets, its critics, its
philosophers, its historians. It crowds not our
club-tables and news-stalls only, but our libraries.
Thus what was originally a mere excrescence
on literature, in the proper sense of the
term, has now assumed proportions so gigantic,
that it has not merely overshadowed that literature,
but threatens to supersede it.
No thoughtful man can contemplate the present
condition of current literature without
disgust and alarm. We have still, indeed,
lingering among us a few masters whose works
would have been an honour to any age; and
here and there among writers may be discerned
men who are honourably distinguished by a
conscientious desire to excel, men who respect
themselves, and respect their calling. But to
say that these are in the minority, would be to
give a very imperfect idea of the proportion
which their numbers bear to those who figure
most prominently before the public. They are,
in truth, as tens are to myriads. Their comparative
insignificance is such, that they are
powerless even to leaven the mass. The position
which they would have occupied half a
century ago, and which they may possibly
occupy half a century hence, is now usurped by
a herd of scribblers who have succeeded, partly
by sheer force of numbers, and partly by judicious
co-operation, in all but dominating literature.
Scarcely a day passes in which some book
is not hurried into the world, which owes its
existence not to any desire on the part of its
author to add to the stores of useful literature,
or even to a hope of obtaining money, but
simply to that paltry vanity which thrives on
the sort of homage of which society of a certain
kind is not grudging, and which knows no distinction
between notoriety and fame. A few
years ago a man who contributed articles to a
current periodical, or who delivered a course of
lectures, had, as a rule, the good sense to know
that when they had fulfilled the purpose for
which they were originally intended, the world
had no more concern with them, and he would
as soon have thought of inflicting them in the
shape of a volume on the public, as he would
have thought of issuing an edition of his private
letters to his friends. Now all is changed. The
first article in the creed of a person who has
figured in either of these capacities, appears to
be, that he is bound to force himself into notice
in the character of an author. And this, happily
for himself, but unhappily for the interests
of literature, he is able to do with perfect
facility and with perfect impunity. Books are
speedily manufactured and as speedily reduced
to pulp. A worthless book may be as easily
invested with those superficial attractions which
catch the eye of the crowd as a meritorious one.
As the general public are the willing dupes of
puffers, it is no more difficult to palm off on
them the spurious wares of literary charlatans,
than it is to beguile them into purchasing the
wares of any other kind of charlatan. No one
is interested in telling them the truth. Many,
on the contrary, are interested in deceiving
them. As a rule, the men who write bad books
are the men who criticise bad books; and as
they know that what they mete out in their
capacity of judges to-day is what will in turn
be meted out to them in their capacity of
authors to-morrow, it is not surprising that
the relations between them should be similar
to those which Tacitus tells us existed between
Vinius and Tigellinus—"nulla innocentiæ cura,
sed vices impunitatis."
Meanwhile all those vile arts which were
formerly confined to the circulators of bad
novels and bad poems are practised without
shame. It is shocking, it is disgusting to contemplate
the devices to which many men of
letters will stoop for the sake of exalting themselves
into a factitious reputation. They will
form cliques for the purpose of mutual puffery.
They will descend to the basest methods of self-advertisement.
And the evil is fast-spreading.
Indeed, things have come to such a pass, that
persons of real merit, if they have the misfortune
to depend on their pens for a livelihood,
must either submit to be elbowed and jostled
out of the field, or take part in the same ignoble
scramble for notoriety, and the same detestable
system of mutual puffery. Thus everything
which formerly tended to raise the standard of
literary ambition and literary attainment has
given place to everything which tends to degrade
it. The multitude now stand where the scholar
once stood. From the multitude emanate, to
the multitude are addressed two-thirds of the
publications which pour forth, every year, from
our presses.
Viviamo scorti
Da mediocrità: sceso il sapiente,
E salita è la turba a un sol confine
Che il mondo agguaglia.
Matthew Arnold very truly observed, that one of
the most unfortunate tendencies of our time was
the tendency to over-estimate the performances
of "the average man." The over-estimation of
these performances is no longer a tendency, but
an established custom. Literature, in all its
branches, is rapidly becoming his monopoly.
As judged and judge, as author and critic,
there is every indication that he will proceed
from triumph to triumph, and establish his
cult wherever books are read. Now the only
sphere in which "the average man" is entitled
to homage is a moral one, and he is most venerable
when he is passive and unambitious. But
if ambition and the love of fame are awakened
in him, he is capable of becoming exceedingly
corrupt and of forfeiting every title to veneration.
He is capable of resorting to all the
devices to which men are forced to resort in
manufacturing factitious reputations, to imposture,
to fraud, to circulating false currencies of
his own, and to assisting others in the circulation
of theirs. Even when he is free from these
vices, so far as their deliberate practice is concerned,
he is scarcely less mischievous, if he be
uncontrolled. To say that his standard is never
likely to be a high one, either with reference to
his own achievements or with reference to what
he exacts from others, and to say that the
systematic substitution of inferior standards for
high ones must affect literature and all that
is involved in its influence, most disastrously,
is to say what will be generally acknowledged.
And he has everything, unhappily, in his favour—numbers,
influence, the spirit of the age.
For one who sees through him and takes
his measure, there are thousands who do not:
for one who could discern the justice of an
exposure of his shortcomings, there are thousands
who would attribute that exposure to
personal enmity and to dishonest motives. His
power, indeed, is becoming almost irresistible.
The one thing which he and his fellows
thoroughly understand is the formidable advantage
of co-operation. The consequence is that
there are probably not half a dozen reviews
and newspapers now left which they are not
able practically to coerce. An editor is obliged
to assume honesty in those who contribute to
his columns, and also to avail himself of the
services of men who can write good articles, if
they write bad books. In the first case, it is
not open to him to question the justice of the
verdict pronounced; in the second case, the
courtesy of the gentleman very naturally and
properly predominates, under such circumstances,
over public considerations—and how
can truth be told? Nor is this all. Assuming
that an editor is free from such ties, he has
to consult the interests of his paper, to study
popularity, and not to estrange those who are,
from a commercial point of view, the mainstays
of all our literary journals, those who
advertise in them,—the publishers. "If," said
an editor to me once, "I were to tell the
truth, as forcibly as I could wish to do, about
the books sent to me for review, in six months
my proprietors would be in the bankruptcy
court." It is in the power of the publishers to
ruin any literary journal. There is probably
not a single Review in London which would
survive the withdrawal of the publishers' advertisements.
A more honourable class of men than those who
form the majority of the London publishers does
not exist, nor have the interests of Literature,
as distinguished from commercial interests, ever
found heartier and more ungrudging support,
than they have long found in three or four of
the leading firms, and as they are now finding in
two or three of the firms which have been more
recently established. But, unhappily, this is not
everywhere the case. While the firms, to which I
have referred, have never, in any way, attempted
to interfere with the independence of reviewers,
others have made no secret of their intention to
make their patronage in advertisement dependent
on favourable notices of their publications.
The strain of temptation and peril to which
editors are thus exposed may be estimated by
the fact that, a flattering review may, if supplemented
by similar ones, put some three hundred
a year into the pockets of their proprietors,
while severity and justice would involve a corresponding
loss. It need hardly be said that no
editor of a respectable review would allow any
definite understanding of this kind to exist, or
that any publisher would ever dare to suggest
it, but there can be no doubt that such considerations
have to be taken into account almost
universally, and place serious restraint on freedom
of judgment.
There is, it is true, another aspect of this
question. Publishers must protect themselves.
Though reviews offend much more frequently
on the side of dishonest and interested puffery,
they are very often made the vehicles of equally
unscrupulous rancour and spite. If they do
their readers injustice, by attempting to foist
bad books on them, they do every one concerned
injustice, by damning good ones. No one could
blame a publisher for declining to support a
paper which was continually making his books
the subjects of unmerited attacks. But a publisher
who attempts to prevent the truth from
being told, and so secures, or seeks to secure,
currency for his spurious wares, is guilty of an
act which borders closely on fraud.
Another circumstance very favourable to the
encouragement of inferiority, and not of inferiority
only, but of charlatanism and imposture,
is the increasing tendency to regard
nothing of importance compared with the spirit
of tolerance and charity. An all-embracing
philanthropy exempts nothing from its protection.
Every one must be good-natured. Severity,
we are told, is quite out of fashion. Such censors
as the old reviewers are now mere anachronisms.
It is vain to plead that tolerance and charity
must discriminate; that, like other virtues, they
may be abused, and that in their abuse they
may become immoral; that there are higher
considerations than the feelings of individuals;
and that, if to give pain or annoyance admits
of no justification but necessity, necessity may
exact their infliction as an exigent duty.
But this spirit of tolerance and charity has
also become attenuated into the spirit of mere
laissez-faire. We have no lack of real scholars
and of real critics, who see through the whole
thing, and probably deplore it; but they make
no sign, look on with a sort of amused perplexity,
and do their own work, thankful, no
doubt, sometimes, when it is oppressive, that
they need not be over-scrupulous about its
quality. If, occasionally, they get a little impatient
and indulge their genius, protest goes
no further than sarcasm and irony, so fine that
it is intelligible only among themselves; while
the objects of their satire, as well as the general
public, missing the one and misinterpreting the
other, take it all for applause. Resistance, it is
said, is useless. Literature is a trade. What
has come was inevitable: vive la bagatelle, and
drift with the stream.
And now let us consider what are the results
of all this. The first and most important is the
degradation of criticism. Criticism is to Literature
what legislation and government are to
States. If they are in able and honest hands
all goes well; if they are in weak and dishonest
hands all is anarchy and mischief. And as
government in a Republic, the true analogy to
the sphere of which we are speaking, is represented
not by those who form the minority
in its councils, but by those who form the majority,
so in criticism, it is not on the few but
on the many among those who represent it, that
its authority and influence depend. And what
are its characteristics in the hands of its prevailing
majority—in the hands of those who are
its legislators in a realm co-extensive with the
reading world? It is not criticism at all. To
criticism, in the true sense of the term, it has no
claim even to approximation. It seems to have
resolved itself into something which wants a
name,—something which is partly dithyramb
and partly rhetoric. Without standards, without
touchstones, without principles, without knowledge,
it appears to be regarded as the one calling
for which no equipment and no training are
needed. What a master of the art has called the
final fruit of careful discipline and of much experience
is assumed to come spontaneously. A
man of literary tastes is born cultured. A critic,
like a poet, is the pure product of nature. Such
canons as these "critics" have are the mysterious
and somewhat perplexing evolutions of their
own inner consciousness, or derived, not from
the study of classical writers in English or in
any other language, of all of whom they are
probably profoundly ignorant, but from a
current acquaintance with the writings of contemporaries,
who are, in intelligence and performance,
a little in advance of themselves.
But what they lack in attainments they make
up in impudence. The effrontery of some of
these "critics," whose verdicts, ludicrous to
relate, are daily recorded as "opinions of the
Press," literally exceeds belief. They will sit in
judgment on books written in languages of
whose very alphabets they are ignorant. They
will pose as authorities and pronounce ex
cathedrâ on subjects literary, historical, and
scientific of which they know nothing more
than what they have contrived to pick up from
the works which they are "reviewing." Their
estimates of the books, on the merits and
demerits of which they undertake to enlighten
the public, correspond with their qualifications
for forming them. Books displaying in their
writers the grossest ignorance of the very
rudiments of the subjects treated, and literally
swarming with blunders and absurdities, all of
which pass undetected and unnoticed, are made
the subjects of elaborate panegyrics, which
would need some qualification if applied to the
very classics in the subjects under discussion.
Books, on the other hand, of unusual and
distinguished merit are despatched summarily
in a few lines of equally undeserved depreciation;
books written in the worst taste and in the vilest
style are pronounced to be models of both.
Sobriety, measure, and discrimination have no
place either in the creed or in the practice of
these writers. They think in superlatives; they
express themselves in superlatives. It never
seems to occur to them that if criticism has to
reckon with Mr. Le Gallienne it has also to reckon
with Shakespeare; that if it has to take the
measure of Mr. Hall Caine, it has likewise to
take the measure of Cervantes and Fielding, and
that of some dozen prose writers and poets, it
cannot be pronounced, at the same time of each,
that he is "the greatest living master of English
prose," or "without parallel for his superlative
command of all the resources of rhythmical
expression." There is one accomplishment in
which these critics are particularly adroit, and
that is in keeping out of controversy, and so
avoiding all chance of being called to account.
For this reason they deal more in eulogy than
in censure, for the public is less likely to
complain of a bad book being foisted on them
for a good one, than its irate author to sit silent
under reproof.
If we go a little higher, things are almost as
bad, if not quite so ridiculous. In everything but
in criticism it is necessary to specialize. A man
who posed as an authority on all the literatures
of the world, and on the history of every nation
in the world, would be very justly set down as
an impostor. And yet pretentions which men
would be the first to ridicule, as private individuals,
they do not scruple to claim, as critics.
An historical student enriches History with a
volume throwing new and important light on
some obscure episode or period; a classical
student deserves the gratitude of scholars for an
invaluable monograph; English Literature or one
of the Continental Literatures is illustrated by a
series of dissertations as instructive as they are
original; or a truly memorable contribution has
been made to political philosophy, to æsthetics,
or to ethics. What is their fate? It is by no
means improbable that they will be 'reviewed,' in
the course of a few days, by the same man for
three or four, or it may be for five or six, daily and
weekly journals, and their fortune in the market
made or marred by a censor who has probably
done no more than glance at their half-cut pages,
and who, if he had studied them from end to
end, would have been no more competent to take
their measure than he would have been to write
them. This leads, it is needless to say, to every
kind of abuse: to works which deserve to be
authorities on the subjects of which they treat
dropping at once into oblivion, to works which
every scholar knows to be below contempt
usurping their places; to the deprivation of all
stimulus to honourable exertion on the part
of authors of ability and industry; to the encouragement
of charlatans and fribbles; to
gross impositions on the public. A very amusing
and edifying record might be compiled
partly out of a selection of the various verdicts
passed contemporaneously by reviews on particular
works, and partly out of comparisons of
the subsequent fortunes of works with their
fortunes while submitted to this censorship.
But it is not these causes only which contribute
to the degradation of criticism. A very
important factor is the prevalence, or rather the
predominance, of mere prejudice, the prejudice
of cliques in favour of cliques, the prejudice of
cliques against cliques, the prejudice of the
veteran against or in favour of the novice, the
subsequent compensation, in corresponding prejudice
on the part of the novice, when his
novitiate is over. The two things which never
seem to be considered are the interests of Literature
and the interests of the public. The appearance
of a work by the member of a particular
coterie is the signal, on the one hand, for a series
of preposterously intemperate eulogies, and for
a series, on the other hand, of equally intemperate
depreciations, in such organs as are accessible to
both parties. If a work, with any pretension to
originality, by a previously unknown author
makes its appearance, it is pretty sure to fare
in one of three ways: it will scarcely be noticed
at all; it will be made the theme of a philippic
against innovating eccentricities and newfangled
notions; or it will fall into the hands
of a critic who is on the look-out for a "discovery."
Its fortune, so far as notoriety is concerned,
will, in that case, be made. The critic,
thus on his mettle and with his character for discernment
at stake, will not only become proportionately
vociferous but will rally his equally
vociferous partisans. Hyperbole will be heaped
on hyperbole, rodomontade on rodomontade,
till real merit will be made ridiculous, and
the unhappy author awake at last, to assume
his true proportions, in a Fool's Paradise.
And to this pass has criticism come, and
Literature generally, in almost all its branches,
is necessarily following suit. It would be no exaggeration
to say, that the sole encouragement
now left to authors to produce good books is
the satisfaction of their own conscience, and the
approbation of a few discerning judges; and
this attained, they must starve if their bread
depends upon their pen. It is not that a good
book will not be praised, but that bad books
are praised still more; it is not that it will fail
to find fair and competent reviewers, but that
for one fair and competent reviewer it will find
fifty who are unfair and incompetent. It is on
its acceptance, not with the few who can estimate
its merits, but with the many who take
that estimate on trust from judges, whose competence
or incompetence they are equally unable
to gauge, that the possibility of a book yielding
any return to its author depends. The public
neither can nor will distinguish. A book which
has two or three favourable press notices which
are merited cannot stand against a book having
twenty or thirty which are unmerited. Nor is
this all. Measured and discriminating eulogy,
which means precisely what it expresses, and
which is always the note of sound and just
criticism, is to the uninitiated poor recommendation
compared with that which has no limitation
but extremes. How can the still small
voice of truth expect to get a hearing amid a
bellowing Babel of its undistinguishable mimic?
What inducement has an author to aim at excellence,
to spend three or four years on a monograph
or a history that it may be sold for waste
paper, when some miserable compilation, vamped
up in as many weeks, will, with a little management,
give him notoriety and fill his purse?
There is not a scholar, not a discerning reader in
England who will not bear me witness when I say
that, as a rule, the best books produced in Belles
Lettres are those of which the general public
knows nothing, and that he has been guided
to them sometimes by pure accident, and sometimes,
it may be, by a depreciatory notice or curt
paragraph in "our library table" limbo. And
what does this mean? It means that a writer
has discovered that it is impossible for him to
have a conscience, or aim at an honourable reputation,
unless he can afford to lose money. It
means more; it means that publishers are
obliged to discourage the production of solid and
scholarly works. It is notorious that the Delegates
of the Clarendon Press at Oxford, and one
or two firms in London, having regard to the
honourable traditions of their predecessors, have
wished to maintain those traditions by encouraging
the production of such works, and
have, at a great pecuniary loss, persevered in
this ambition. But no publisher can continue
to multiply books which do not pay their
expenses, and whose sale begins and ends in
the remainder market.
This state of things is the more deplorable
when we consider its effect, not merely in degrading
and corrupting Literature on its productive
side, but in detracting so seriously from
its efficacy on its influential side. During the
last few years the rapid spread of higher
education, the popularization of liberal culture
through such agencies as the University Extension
Lectures, the National Home Reading
Union and similar institutions have called into
being an immense and constantly multiplying
class of serious readers and students. These
already number tens of thousands, they will
before long number hundreds of thousands.
Now it is of the utmost importance that these
readers, who are quite prepared to appreciate
what is excellent, should be guided to what is
excellent, and discouraged in every way from
conversing with what is bad and inferior in
Literature. But how is this to be done when
those who are striving, in every way, to raise
the standard of popular taste and of popular
culture, as teachers, find all their efforts counteracted
by the intense activity of those who are
doing their utmost to degrade both, as writers.
It is only those engaged in education, and more
particularly in popular education, who can understand
the extent of the mischief which bookmakers
and the puffers of bookmakers are
doing, who can understand the tone, the taste,
the temper induced by the habitual and exclusive
perusal of the writings characteristic of
these pests,—the inaccuracies and errors, the
misrepresentations and absurdities, to which
these writings give currency.
In the days of our forefathers, a reader of
literary tastes, if he wished to acquaint himself
with an English classic, went to the fountain
head and read Spenser or Milton, Pope or
Addison for himself. If he desired to know
what criticism had said about them, he had
criticism of authority at hand, and he consulted
it. In our day it is about an even
chance whether the ordinary reader would
trouble himself to turn to the originals or not:
he would probably content himself with the
notices of them in some current manual of
English Literature, or with some essay or monograph.
Now, in the myriads of such publications,
in vogue or out of vogue, knocked under
by their successors or scuffling with their
contemporaries, he might have the luck to
light on a good guide; he might have the luck
to light on Dean Church, or Mark Pattison, or
Mr. Leslie Stephen, or Professor Courthope, or
Mr. Frederic Harrison; but he is much more
likely to make his way to a luminary in the
last well-puffed "series." The first article in
the creed of the modern book-maker seems
to be that the appearance or existence of a
good book is a sufficient justification for the
production of a bad one to take its place. An
excellent monograph is published, and is popular.
This is the signal for the manufacture of
half a dozen inferior ones, which are mutually
destructive, and serve no end except to substitute
bad books for a good one, and to make
the good one forgotten. Again, a work which
has long been classical in criticism is assumed
not to be "up to date," and is either edited on
this hypothesis, or we have another substituted
for it. This in turn yields its vogue—for
fashions change quickly in modern taste—to a
similar experiment, till a third is announced. Of
the relation of criticism to principles, or indeed
to anything else but to their own whims or
impressions, these iconoclasts appear to be profoundly
unaware.
It requires, needless to say, the utmost
wariness and care on the part of those who
regulate, and on the part of those who are engaged
in, education, to keep this inferior literature
in its place. If it were allowed to make its
way authoritatively into our schools and Universities,
or indeed into any of our educational
institutions, the consequences would be most
disastrous. It is not so much that it would
disseminate error as that it would become influential
in more serious ways, æsthetically in
its influence on taste, morally in its influence on
tone and character, intellectually in lowering the
whole standard of aim and attainment in studies.
That the evils which have been described
admit of no remedy at present, or perhaps in
the present generation, may be fully conceded.
But they may be palliated if they cannot be
cured, and they must be palliated by the agents
to whom we may ultimately look for their cure,
education and fearless criticism. As their origin
may be mainly ascribed to the failure of the
Universities to adapt themselves to new conditions,
so on the willingness of the Universities
to repair their error must depend all possibility
of rectifying the results of it. From its organization
at the Universities everything comprehended
in the system of liberal study takes its
ply; its standards are there determined, its
methods formulated, its aims defined. As a
subject of teaching, and as the result of teaching,
in its relation to theory and in its relation
to practice, it there receives an impression which
is permanent. It has been so with classical
scholarship, and with Philology; it has been
so with Philosophy and Theology, with Jurisprudence
and History. What has been imparted
in the lecture-rooms of Oxford and
Cambridge has orally, and by the pen, become
influential wherever these subjects are represented.
There is not an educational institute in
Great Britain or in the colonies, there is not a
serious magazine or review on which it has not
set its seal. We have a striking illustration of
this in the case of Modern History. Some thirty
years ago it was practically unrepresented,
either at Oxford or Cambridge. Since then its
study has been organized. What has been the
result? It has become one of the most flourishing
branches of learning. It has reduced chaos
to order; it has raised its teaching, and by
implication its literature, to a very high standard;
it has put the canaille of sciolists and
fribbles into their proper place; while disciplining
energy it has directed it to fruitful objects;
it has revolutionized the study of the whole
subject.
Thus the condition and fortune of everything
which is affected by education depend on the
Universities. All that they do, or neglect to do,
passes into precedent. There is nothing susceptible
of educational impression which does
not take its colour and its characteristics from
them. They have made the subjects which are
represented in their schools what they are, and
every intelligent English citizen proud and
grateful.
But, owing to a disastrous confusion between
two branches of study which are radically and
essentially distinct,—Philology and Belles Lettres,—both
Oxford and Cambridge have not only
left unorganized, but assisted in the degradation
of studies, which are of as much concern, and
vital concern, to national life as any which are
represented in their Schools. To leave an important
department of education unrecognised
in their system, is sufficient cause for surprise
and regret; but that they should be doing all in
their power to prevent any possibility of such a
defect being supplied is deplorable. And yet
this is what is being done. That Chairs, Schools
and Degrees may be established in the interests
of Philology, Philology is, by a palpable fiction,
identified with Literature. As the result of what
the late Professor Huxley denounced as "a fraud
upon letters," a Chair founded in the interests of
Literature was at Oxford appropriated by the
philologists. This has been followed by the establishment
of a School, in which all that can
provide for the honour of Philology is blended
with all that contributes to the degradation of
Literature; while, to give further currency and
authority to this absurd complication, the approval
of a thesis, on some subject pertaining
purely to Philology, entitles the writer to the
diploma, not of a Doctor in Philology, but of a
Doctor in Literature!
Meanwhile, to make confusion worse confounded,
the Universities, or, to speak more
correctly, a party in the Universities, are undertaking
to provide the country with teachers
for the dissemination of literary culture,—for
the interpretation of Literature in the proper
sense of the term. Whether this is done competently
or incompetently depends, of course,
and must depend purely on accident, on the willingness
and ability, that is to say, of individual
teachers to educate themselves. Common standards
and common aims they have none. Each
does what is right in his own eyes. As some
have graduated in the classical schools, some in
the Mediæval and Modern Languages Tripos,
some in Modern History, some in Moral Science
or Theology, and some in nothing, there is
naturally much variety in their methods and
aims.
But it is when we turn to the works in
modern Belles Lettres, and more particularly
to those dealing with English Literature, which
the University Presses publish, that we realize
the full significance of this anarchy. It would
not be going too far to say, that all which is
worst in current literature, when at its worst
finds in some of these works comprehensive
illustration. It is indeed almost an even chance
whether a work issuing from those Presses is
excellent, whether it is indifferent, or whether
it is executed with shameful incompetence.[1]
All, therefore, so far as Belles Lettres are concerned
is chaos at the Universities, and all consequently
is chaos everywhere else.
The next appeal—for all appeals to the Universities
have been vain—must be made to those
who regulate the curriculums where Literature
is made a subject of teaching. Let them rigorously
exclude all but the best books. Let them
discourage the study of such Epitomes, Manuals,
and Histories as are the work of mere irresponsible
book makers, and prescribe in its
place the study of literary masterpieces. Without
excluding the best modern poetry and prose,
let most attention—for obvious reasons—be
paid to the writings of the older masters. Let
them lay special stress on the study of criticism,—of
works treating of its principles, of works
illustrating the application of its principles to
particular writers; and let no work be recognised
which is not of classical authority. Translations
should, of course, as a rule, be avoided;
but in such a subject as the principles of
criticism, there is not the smallest reason why
those works which are most excellent in other
languages, such as the Treatise on the Sublime,
and some portions of Aristotle's Poetic, such as
Lessing's Laocoon, Schiller's Letters on Æsthetics,
the best Essays of Sainte-Beuve should not
be included.[2] Nor can it be emphasized too
strongly that the theory on which all literary
teaching should proceed is that its object is not
so much to plant as to cultivate, not so much to
convey information, which, after all, is but its
medium, as to inspire, to refine, to elevate. I
cannot but think, too, that the foundations of
all this might be laid much earlier than they
are, especially in our classical schools, by
encouraging, as, according to Coleridge, Dr.
Boyer used to do, the study of some of our
greater writers, such as Shakespeare and Milton,
side by side with that of Homer and Sophocles.
But it is in criticism, in criticism competently,
honestly, and fearlessly applied, that
the chief salvation lies. There is probably
no review or newspaper in London which
does not number among its contributors men
of the first order of ability and intelligence,
men who are real scholars and real critics,
men who see through all that I have been
describing and are sick of it. Let them not
remain an impotent minority, but combine,
and become influential. If popular Literature
aspires to be ambitious, and trespasses on the
domains of scholarship and criticism, let them
submit it to the tests which it invites, let
them try it by the standards which it exacts.
There is no more reason for the co-existence
of two standards, as is now practically the
case, in the production of writings treating of
our own Literature than there is in the production
of writings dealing with Classical Literature.
The work of any one who meddles with
the last, even in the way of popularizing it, is
instantly called by scholars to a strict account,
and sciolism and charlatanry are exploded at
once. But in the case of our own Literature
there is no such solidarity. It seems to be
assumed that a scholar is one thing and a man
of letters another, that the difference between
work which appeals to connoisseurs and work
which appeals to the public is not simply a
difference in degree, but a difference in kind,
and that the criteria of the multitude need be
the only criteria of what is addressed to the
multitude. The manuscript of a History of
Greek or Roman Literature, or a monograph
on an ancient classic, if it were not at least
solid and trustworthy, would have no chance
of ever getting beyond a publisher's reader.
But a History of English Literature, or a monograph
on an English classic, teeming with
errors in fact and with absurdities in theory
and opinion, will not improbably be regarded
as an authority, and pass, unrevised, into more
than one edition.
The progressive degradation of Literature and
of what is involved in its influence is, and must
be, inevitable, unless criticism is prepared watchfully
and faithfully to do its duty. Let it guard
jealously the standards and touchstones of excellence
as distinguished from mediocrity, even
though it may be prudent to make great allowances
in applying them; let it institute a
rigorous censorship over books designed for the
use of students at the Universities and in other
educational establishments; let it permit no
writer to pose in a false position, and deliberately
trade on the ignorance and inexperience
of his readers; let it discourage in every way
the production of worthless and superfluous
books, whether in poetry or in prose; and
lastly, while fully recognising how much must
be conceded to professional authors writing
against time, having to court popularity or
being fettered by conditions imposed on them
by their employers, let it take care that their
productions shall at least not be mischievous,
either by disseminating error or by corrupting
taste.