The Common Reader
on that, were they to agree—which they show no signs of doing—half a
guinea is altogether too large a sum to squander upon contemporary
enthusiasms, and the case will be met quite adequately by a card to the
library. Still the question remains, and let us put it boldly to the
critics themselves. Is there no guidance nowadays for a reader who
yields to none in reverence for the dead, but is tormented by the
suspicion that reverence for the dead is vitally connected with
understanding of the living? After a rapid survey both critics are
agreed that there is unfortunately no such person. For what is their own
judgement worth where new books are concerned? Certainly not ten and
sixpence. And from the stores of their experience they proceed to bring
forth terrible examples of past blunders; crimes of criticism which, if
they had been committed against the dead and not against the living,
would have lost them their jobs and imperilled their reputations. The
only advice they can offer is to respect one’s own instincts, to follow
them fearlessly and, rather than submit them to the control of any
critic or reviewer alive, to check them by reading and reading again the
masterpieces of the past.
Thanking them humbly, we cannot help reflecting that it was not always
so. Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline,
which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now
unknown. That is not to say that the great critic—the Dryden, the
Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold—was an impeccable judge of
contemporary work, whose verdicts stamped the book indelibly and saved
the reader the trouble of reckoning the value for himself. The mistakes
of these great men about their own contemporaries are too notorious to
be worth recording. But the mere fact of their existence had a
centralising influence. That alone, it is not fantastic to suppose,
would have controlled the disagreements of the dinner-table and given to
random chatter about some book just out an authority now entirely to
seek. The diverse schools would have debated as hotly as ever, but at
the back of every reader’s mind would have been the consciousness that
there was at least one man who kept the main principles of literature
closely in view; who, if you had taken to him some eccentricity of the
moment, would have brought it into touch with permanence and tethered it
by his own authority in the contrary blasts of praise and blame.[15] But
when it comes to the making of a critic, nature must be generous and
society ripe. The scattered dinner-tables of the modern world, the chase
and eddy of the various currents which compose the society of our time,
could only be dominated by a giant of fabulous dimensions. And where is
even the very tall man whom we have the right to expect? Reviewers we
have but no critic; a million competent and incorruptible policemen but
no judge. Men of taste and learning and ability are for ever lecturing
the young and celebrating the dead. But the too frequent result of their
able and industrious pens is a desiccation of the living tissues of
literature into a network of little bones. Nowhere shall we find the
downright vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with his fine and natural
bearing, his profound insight and sanity, or Flaubert and the tremendous
power of his fanaticism, or Coleridge, above all, brewing in his head
the whole of poetry and letting issue now and then one of those profound
general statements which are caught up by the mind when hot with the
friction of reading as if they were of the soul of the book itself.
And to all this, too, the critics generously agree. A great critic, they
say, is the rarest of beings. But should one miraculously appear, how
should we maintain him, on what should we feed him? Great critics, if
they are not themselves great poets, are bred from the profusion of the
age. There is some great man to be vindicated, some school to be founded
or destroyed. But our age is meagre to the verge of destitution. There
is no name which dominates the rest. There is no master in whose
workshop the young are proud to serve apprenticeship. Mr. Hardy has long
since withdrawn from the arena, and there is something exotic about the
genius of Mr. Conrad which makes him not so much an influence as an
idol, honoured and admired, but aloof and apart. As for the rest, though
they are many and vigorous and in the full flood of creative activity,
there is none whose influence can seriously affect his contemporaries,
or penetrate beyond our day to that not very distant future which it
pleases us to call immortality. If we make a century our test, and ask
how much of the work produced in these days in England will be in
existence then, we shall have to answer not merely that we cannot agree
upon the same book, but that we are more than doubtful whether such a
book there is. It is an age of fragments. A few stanzas, a few pages, a
chapter here and there, the beginning of this novel, the end of that,
are equal to the best of any age or author. But can we go to posterity
with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the
whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for
our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully
put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.
At first the weight of pessimism seems sufficient to bear down all
opposition. Yes, it is a lean age, we repeat, with much to justify its
poverty; but, frankly, if we pit one century against another the
comparison seems overwhelmingly against us. _Waverley, The Excursion,
Kubla Khan, Don Juan, Hazlitt’s Essays, Pride and Prejudice, Hyperion_,
and _Prometheus Unbound_ were all published between 1800 and 1821. Our
century has not lacked industry; but if we ask for masterpieces it
appears on the face of it that the pessimists are right. It seems as if
an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and
extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. All honour, of course, to
those who have sacrificed their immortality to set the house in order.
But if we ask for masterpieces, where are we to look? A little poetry,
we may feel sure, will survive; a few poems by Mr. Yeats, by Mr. Davies,
by Mr. De la Mare. Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness,
but hours of something very different. Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is
perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages in _Far Away and Long Ago_
will undoubtedly go to posterity entire. _Ulysses_ was a memorable
catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster. And so, picking
and choosing, we select now this, now that, hold it up for display, hear
it defended or derided, and finally have to meet the objection that even
so we are only agreeing with the critics that it is an age incapable of
sustained effort, littered with fragments, and not seriously to be
compared with the age that went before.
But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip
service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly
conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. It is a
barren and exhausted age, we repeat; we must look back with envy to the
past. Meanwhile it is one of the first fine days of spring. Life is not
altogether lacking in colour. The telephone, which interrupts the most
serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has
a romance of its own. And the random talk of people who have no chance
of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often,
of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which
will weave itself into the moment for ever. But this is life; the talk
is about literature. We must try to disentangle the two, and justify the
rash revolt of optimism against the superior plausibility, the finer
distinction, of pessimism.
Our optimism, then, is largely instinctive. It springs from the fine day
and the wine and the talk; it springs from the fact that when life
throws up such treasures daily, daily suggests more than the most
voluble can express, much though we admire the dead, we prefer life as
it is. There is something about the present which we would not exchange,
though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in. And modern
literature, with all its imperfections, has the same hold on us and the
same fascination. It is like a relation whom we snub and scarify daily,
but, after all, cannot do without. It has the same endearing quality of
being that which we are, that which we have made, that in which we live,
instead of being something, however august, alien to ourselves and
beheld from the outside. Nor has any generation more need than ours to
cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our
predecessors. A shift in the scale—the war, the sudden slip of masses
held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom,
alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of
the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking
things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the
differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the
resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed. New books lure us
to read them partly in the hope that they will reflect this
rearrangement of our attitude—these scenes, thoughts, and apparently
fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so
keen a sense of novelty—and, as literature does, give it back into our
keeping, whole and comprehended. Here indeed there is every reason for
optimism. No age can have been more rich than ours in writers determined
to give expression to the differences which separate them from the past
and not to the resemblances which connect them with it. It would be
invidious to mention names, but the most casual reader dipping into
poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by
the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of
our time. But our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book
leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual
poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not
transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work
has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak
shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and
expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash
is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction. The
irritation is as acute as the pleasure was intense.
After all, then, we are back at the beginning, vacillating from extreme
to extreme, at one moment enthusiastic, at the next pessimistic, unable
to come to any conclusion about our contemporaries. We have asked the
critics to help us, but they have deprecated the task. Now, then, is the
time to accept their advice and correct these extremes by consulting the
masterpieces of the past. We feel ourselves indeed driven to them,
impelled not by calm judgement but by some imperious need to anchor our
instability upon their security. But, honestly, the shock of the
comparison between past and present is at first disconcerting.
Undoubtedly there is a dullness in great books. There is an unabashed
tranquillity in page after page of Wordsworth and Scott and Miss Austen
which is sedative to the verge of somnolence. Opportunities occur and
they neglect them. Shades and subtleties accumulate and they ignore
them. They seem deliberately to refuse to gratify those senses which are
stimulated so briskly by the moderns; the senses of sight, of sound, of
touch—above all, the sense of the human being, his depth and the