The spectacle of the bad critic would be matter for pity were it not that he has some influence on the immediate fate of good writers. He cannot prevent the recognition of a Keats, but he can delay it. "Mr. Hunt," said Blackwood's, "is a small poet, but he is a clever man. Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities, which he has done everything in his power to spoil. We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture £50 upon anything he can write." The attacks on Keats, it has been contended, were animated by political rather than literary rivalry. But, whatever their origin, they were a crime against the spirit of disinterestedness, which is the holy spirit of criticism. Niggardliness with praise is as shabby a vice as niggardliness with money, and I have often noticed that the man who is a miser with the one is a miser with the other. It is the most unattractive form of selfishness. The critics, however, did not write down Keats: they succeeded only in writing down themselves. And yet, every now and then, we find someone clamouring for a return of the good old days of Blackwood's and the Quarterly. Are our own days, then, lacking in "foolish, trivial, almost ostentatiously dishonest" criticism? It would be pleasant to think so. But I suspect that folly and dishonesty have not disappeared but have merely changed their style. What is needed in criticism to-day, as always, is the sympathetic imagination. A fool with a sledge-hammer is of no service to literature. We need the comic sense to laugh at folly, the moral sense to make war on cant. There is no need for wrath in criticism except in presence of pretentiousness. The pretentious is the grand enemy of literature as of religion. But in regard to the small sins of literature, we may as well cultivate the same tolerance that a good-natured man feels towards the small sins of life. To be tolerant is not to resign either one's moral or artistic standards. The greatest moralists of the world have been the most tolerant. Intolerance, indeed, is only a part of the general cult of dullness. It would confine the arts to a coterie, and steal Shakespeare himself from the world at large, on the ground that the world cannot appreciate him. It would turn literature into a pedantic mystery, and make an end of it as a noble entertainment. But, alas, intolerance and dullness are immortal, and we shall always have a war between them, on the one hand, and the Keatses and the Molières on the other. And the Keatses and the Molières will go on writing, and it may be that they would not be so firmly rooted if it were not for the fierce wind of stupid words that so constantly assails them. All may be for the best. Without dullness to contend against, beauty and wit might succumb to Capua. |