SIR W. HARCOURT ON CRITICS.
WE forget who it was—it sounds like Mr. Disraeli—but is not, we think, his epigram,—who said of Sir Robert Peel that so wedded was he to the ordinary and the accustomed, "that he never introduced even a quotation to the notice of the House which had not been repeatedly honoured with its approval," but the malicious jest might occasionally be flung at Sir William Har- court. He is not wedded to the ordinary indeed, or to anything else that implies habit of mind, for he would say the newest thing in the world, if only it occurred to him and seemed effective ; but he is often intellectually lazy, and then repeats, disguised by the 'happiest diction, the stalest of platitudes. His only distinctive sentence, for example, at the dinner of the Artists' Benevolent Society was a repetition, in attractive phrases, of the oldest of charges against critics,—charges repeated till they have become stale to offensiveness, and have ceased to excite among critics even the wish to refute them. That modern critics form mutual-admiration societies ; that critics set up ideals as idols, and change them as if they were fashions ; that criticism lacks -entirely the quality of catholicity, and is "intolerably intolerant," —these are accusations repeated for the last two centuries, till we expect them only from boys wounded because their first -efforts have not set the world on fire. Sir William Har- court is not wounded, we admit, is probably—to his great -comfort, as artist in taking oratory — incapable of being wounded ; but he is lazy, and so gave the benevolent artists the benefit of the idea which occurred to him most easily, and which be was sure would be agreeable. It is always safe to say to those who produce that those who only criticise are a bad lot. It is no business of ours, of course, if Sir William Harcourt likes to scamp his work, except so far as that we like to see every first-class artist—and he is nearly that in manufacturing piquant sentences—do his very best, but we notice his opinion because of its intense ordinariness, its wide acceptation, and its rank injustice. If ever there was an age in the world in which "intolerable intoler- -ance " wtts not the note of critics, it is the present. In art, in literature, in politics, with a reserve about one or two ques- tions, the modern critic is, like the modern everything elee,—a -great deal too doubtful, a great deal too fond of novelty, a great deal too hungry for experiment, even if the experiment be vivisection, to be either intolerant or bitter. That he is not sufficiently appreciative may be true. Appreciation, and espe- cially that kind of appreciation which reveals a merit not on the surface demands not only study—and critics are often apt to be lazily careless of aught but a momentary effect—but a belief that some good may be gained out of the study ; and they, like the rest of the world, are doubtful if anything good is forthcoming, whether from Nazareth—which is old—or from Nazareth and Jerusalem together, which is a new impedi- ment to energy. But that either laziness or incapacity of earnestness tempts the modern critic into intolerable intolerance, we absolutely deny. His habit, when he is in any way incom- petent, or is momentarily indisposed to give his powers full play, is to be too tolerant, to pass over bad work, to say smooth things, to pick out something that can be praised, and especially to rejoice in crudeness as a relief to the monotony of mediocrity, which is his torture. Like one of Mr. Disraeli's personages—a boy, if we remember right—he fancies himself so bored with good wine, that he is tempted to praise claret for being rough. If the book or the art-product is immoral, it is realistic ; if it is violent, it has energy, in conception at least ; if it is full of bad workmanship, it is "unforced and careless ;" and if it is inane, it has in it "nothing to which the most conscientious can object." So far from intolerance being the critics' foible, their weakness is conscious pity. The book is bad, but still what a thing it is that it should be written at all ! The picture is without force or colour, but think of the days and nights bestowed on it ! The design for the competition, perhaps for a national building, is inept, but "why spoil the poor fellow's chances ?" The play is damnable, but just reflect on the money the lessee must have spent, and the trouble Miss Overdo must have lavished upon her part! We read criticisms every day with the weary certainty that we shall not find in them one word of that sharp and clear condemnation which, as the critics well know, their subjects thoroughly deserve. So piti- ful are they all, so full of excuses, so full, let us add, often of genuine though rather contemptuous kindliness, that a crude bit of abuse, of downright hard-hitting, if only it is directed at the right place and is free of personal malignity, is a positive relief.
No doubt these are the small-fry of critics, but it is at the small- fry, of course, that Sir William directs his scorn ; and the higher critics also feel, and feel for evil, though the evil is not what the orator deems it to be, the influence of the age. They grow too lazily tolerant. There is no work harder, as there is none more useful, than real criticism from the objecting side, criticism which has for its object to remind artists that, after all, every art has its own ultimate and unimpugnable ideal, call that ideal, if you will, only perfect harmony ; that wilful neglect of this is bad, that lazy neglect of it is contemptible, that while no man can be asked for more than is in him, no man with a thimbleful of genius can beneficially be lauded for the brimming fullness of the cup he carries. Intolerable intolerance ! Why, a poet or a painter, a historian or a raconteur, cannot show the faintest sign of the dirinns afflatus, the most flickering and momentary spark of the eternal fire, but it is in- stantly acknowledged, made much of, cherished, till one is some- times tempted to say of the critic, as Lord Alvanley said of the great confectioner's fidgetty horse, that the best thing would be "to ice him." Intolerable intolerance ! Why, the very notion of criticising workmanship seems to have been given up, till if the critic says that an annual exhibition is full of careless drawing, or that a building might have been properly pointed, or that a novel is original, but defective in grammar, his publisher is besieged with complaining letters, not from the victims, but from people who think the rules of toleration have been outraged. It chanced to the writer—who is not a critic—on a recent holiday, to read through a collection of novels he had recently seen reviewed. Some were bad, some good, usually his judgment coincided with
the reviewer's, but he was mainly struck with this—that in every case, defective workmanship, undigested sentences, abominable digressions, outrageous grammar, had been passed over as if form, completeness, artistic character of work were of no account whatever. So far from intolerance being the char- acteristic of the critics, their special idea had apparently been to
tolerate any defect, and especially any divergence from a true standard, if only there could be found some little reward for the labour of observation. The critic scarcely even laughed at the frog trying to swell to the bull's size, rather he admired the colour, and sheen, and articulation of the over-stretched brown cuticle.
He doubted, we suspect, as Sir William Harcourtwonld doubt, if he were telling truth upon the rack, whether the frog was ridiculous at all, whether it was not his nature to puff himself out, and whether the point of observation for the true critic was not whether or not he puffed himself with sufficient resolution—abandon, they call it now—to make the most of the elasticity of his skin. Sir William Harcourt may say he was thinking of art criticism in a very limited sense, and not of literary criticism, but his thought applies to all, and if his words have limitations, and if his boundaries were indeed exact in his own mind, his utterance is specially in- accurate. Art criticism to-day is intolerably tolerant, pardons everything to everybody, be it painter, architect, or actor, if he has only a little "go," and will never hear of depreciation of a musician, unless it be of Wagner, who is not yet popular, and who unfairly attacked the Jews. The art critics are all so genial, that the beat of them, reluetant to use language they know would be considered brutal, have abandoned destructive criti- cism; and one, perhaps the beat of all, at least the one we read with most intellectual pleasure, confines himself to telling the world what and why it should admire. They seem to imagine that, like modern surgeons, their art should be "repara- tive," and that any patching, however dangerous, is better than any mutilation, however safe. Criticism of the old and cutting kind is for the moment almost as dead as satire, and a review like Macaulay's of Montgomery would be pronounced by almost all English critics as at once a brutality and a needless waste of thinking-power. So far is intolerance from critics, that half of them would prononnee Sir W. Harcourt's oratory as the finer for the want of conviction it evinces, and if remonstrated with, defend themselves by declaring that the gladiator school of oratory has as much right as any other to its meed of appreciation.
Previous page
