Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 3

men have been able to gather figs. The result of the
confusion has been that grave men and women have applied themselves

to investigate and judge Byron's private life, as if the exact manner of it,
the more or less of his outrages upon decorum, the degree of the
deadness of his sense of moral responsibility, were matter of minute
and profound interest to all ages. As if all this had anything to do with
criticism proper. It is right that we should know the life and manners of
one whom we choose for a friend, or of one who asks us to entrust him
with the control of public interests. In either of these two cases, we
need a guarantee for present and future. Art knows nothing of
guarantees. The work is before us, its own warranty. What is it to us
whether Turner had coarse orgies with the trulls of Wapping? We can
judge his art without knowing or thinking of the artist. And in the same
way, what are the stories of Byron's libertinism to us? They may have
biographical interest, but of critical interest hardly the least. If the name
of the author of Manfred, Cain, Childe Harold, were already lost, as it
may be in remote times, the work abides, and its mark on European
opinion. 'Je ne considère les gens après leur mort,' said Voltaire, 'que
par leurs ouvrages; tout la reste est anéanti pour moi.'
There is a sense in which biographical detail gives light to criticism,
but not the sense in which the prurient moralist uses or seeks it. The life
of the poet may help to explain the growth and prominence of a
characteristic sentiment or peculiar idea. Knowledge of this or that fact
in his life may uncover the roots of something that strikes, or unravel
something that perplexes us. Considering the relations between a man's
character and circumstance, and what he produces, we can from this
point of view hardly know too much as to the personality of a great
writer. Only let us recollect that this personality manifests itself
outwardly in two separate forms, in conduct, and in literary production,
and that each of these manifestations is to be judged independently of
the other. If one of them is wholly censurable, the other may still be the
outcome of the better mind; and even from the purely biographical
aspect, it is a plain injustice to insist on identifying a character with its
worse expression only.
* * * * *
Poetry, and not only poetry, but every other channel of emotional

expression and æsthetic culture, confessedly moves with the general
march of the human mind, and art is only the transformation into ideal
and imaginative shapes of a predominant system and philosophy of life.
Minor verse-writers may fairly be consigned, without disrespect, to the
region of the literature of taste; and criticism of their work takes the
shape of a discussion of stray graces, of new turns, of little variations of
shade and colour, of their conformity to the accepted rules that
constitute the technique of poetry. The loftier masters, though their
technical power and originality, their beauty of form, strength of flight,
music and variousness of rhythm, are all full of interest and instruction,
yet, besides these precious gifts, come to us with the size and quality of
great historic forces, for they represent the hope and energies, the
dreams and the consummation, of the human intelligence in its most
enormous movements. To appreciate one of these, we need to survey it
on every side. For these we need synthetic criticism, which, after
analysis has done its work, and disclosed to us the peculiar qualities of
form, conception, and treatment, shall collect the products of this first
process, construct for us the poet's mental figure in its integrity and just
coherence, and then finally, as the sum of its work, shall trace the
relations of the poet's ideas, either direct or indirect, through the central
currents of thought, to the visible tendencies of an existing age.
The greatest poets reflect beside all else the broad-bosomed haven of a
perfect and positive faith, in which mankind has for some space found
shelter, unsuspicious of the new and distant wayfarings that are ever in
store. To this band of sacred bards few are called, while perhaps not
more than four high names would fill the list of the chosen: Dante, the
poet of Catholicism; Shakespeare, of Feudalism; Milton, of
Protestantism; Goethe, of that new faith which is as yet without any
universally recognised label, but whose heaven is an ever-closer
harmony between the consciousness of man and all the natural forces of
the universe; whose liturgy is culture, and whose deity is a certain high
composure of the human heart.
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