CRITICISM OR GOSSIP?

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1168, 1 July 1911, Page 10

CRITICISM OR GOSSIP?

If publishers continue to have their way, the critics of the future will .not lack biographical facts in the case of the writers over whom they sit in judgment. Far from needing to dig in e, river-bed inr a lost identity, or to play the sleuth with anonymous pages, the indications are that they will have to close their ears to a bombardment of trifles. Not only will' they he told whether future Beatrices and Lauras are phantoms or real women, they will be furnished with their town and country addresses, • if such there be, together with tho ladies' medal scores and animal pets. Future Shakespeares will be asked to confess bei'r.rehnnd as to what they mean by a Hamlet, and also in how many corporation? they are directors. Tho amount of ehit-cnat that publishers send out week by week is indeed appalling. Wo ■read that one writer has been travelling in the Malay Peninsula, where the temperature in his carriage was 112 degrees; that tho brother of another.writer purchased by cable, without having seen it, a furnished castle; and that still another owns a dog which is fond having its mistress read her works aloud. The publishers' purpose in unloading so much gush is obvious enough. It is tho stuff that fads are mado ef. The custom' suggests, however, a larger, more important issue: What is its effect upon criticism, both popular and expert?

It is has always been said that to be just to a work of literature, a critic should be able to put himself in the position of the writer, and should relate biography to,literary expression. The fullest application of tho principle that occurs to us is tho great bulk of Goethe criticism. The meagro.st incidents of his life have been ferreted out and are held priceless. Who suggested to Goethe the conception of Werther, what poems were inspired by I.ili Schonemann, when he last saw Lotte —all these details and others are accounted jewelled facts in a soul's awakening, without a knowledge of which his literary output would be far less intelligible. One must surely go part way in such a belief, especially in the case of a poet who was so subjective. Acquaintance with biography is apt to lend a sense of reality to the art which reste upon it. And yet there is a danger heTe. too. Much of the larger portion of Goetho criticism is biography, and nothing else- Goethe saw a peasant girl walking across a field, her frock was open at her threat, she smiled, it was just after he had run away from Lili, he wondered at her strong ankles, the next day ho started for Weimar, jotting down en route tho poem that is thus criticised.

True criticism, wo take it, should whatever else it dors, measure the work in fiiiesMon hv the literary fvpe to v.-hioh it belongs. "Paradise Lost" enn rightly he called grca l . not simply because it is the sincere and powerful utterance of one fUhtin? for his religious creed, but finite as much because it ei'nhodies an almost perfect assimilation of elements as huge and diverse as those of the world' of TTomer or Virgil, to the literary typo known as the epic. Formless as Shakespeare is, compared, say, with liacinc, the demands of gre.it traredy as a typo are Well cp.oii<?)i established to make possible, inevitable, the appraisal of "Macbeth" or "Othello" as tragedies, rogerdInss' of Iho question whether their author was onco a youth who poached on the preserves of Sir Thomas T.ncv, or was later to be a great judge- with peculiar notions abonf the acceptance of silver plate from a defendant. One of the grav-

est dangers which criticism meets to : day is the tendency to evade looking a literary type in the face. It is much easier to toy with its frills and even to make ' one's self believe—so completely is the historical method upon us —that they are the essentials. The conditions out of which a tvork giew, what books the author had access to, where he got his ide-a —these circumstances have been magnified to ten times their real meaning. The habit has been fortified by a hast of amateur critics whose interest in literature is purely antiquarian, who, however admirable their love of books may bo, are not competent to deliver literary judgments. Meanwhile, the confusion of standards goes on apace. A hopeful writer works in a coal mine for a year and puts forth a book. His publishers vouch for tho experience, the public for itself senses first-hand testimony, and behold! a great realistic novel is before us. A playwright seeks tho slums of Cherry Street, presents his picture; again the credentials are examined, and he is proclaimed the Antoine of America. Where's the use in comparing his work with similar themes expressed a century or two before—conditions have changed too much for the comparison to be profitable? The truth is that, with the feeling for the controlling importance.of literary types gone, tho sense of emphasis has (led too. Take a play which had a successful run in New York this past season, and which critics were chary about censuring—"Havoc." Tts plot is fundamentally the same as that of Sardon's "Divorcdns." A paramour proves to be a huge failure when he becomes husband, and tho husband eminently acceptable to his former wife when he later turns lover. By every artistic precedent of value, "Havoc" should have been treated as a fantasy, with a light imaginative touch throughout. Instead of so doing, (he author, seeing the possibility for tragic moments and dwelling upon'them, mixed types and took away from his piece all literary meaning. That' a few fears fell in tho audience is no argument. The author might have studied to advantage Shakespeare's conduct of another fantasy—"A Midsummer Night's Dream." 'He'would have found that the real liuman beings' in the play were permitted to be shadowy that they might not intrude reality upon a purely poetic conception. We see little chance for present-day criticism until the sense of literary type is recovered. ...Nothing, we, believe; could bo of greater value to public-and authors alike, than n resolute habit of classifying'our countless novels and plays, etc.; according to the literary types long ago built up by master bands. . The danger'qf dog-' matism—such .'.is the confusion at present —would not arise for many a day.—New York "Nation.", •