Fashions in Literature | Page 6

when the latter
published his edition of Boswell, Macaulay saw his opportunity, and
exclaimed before he had looked at the book, as you will remember,
"Now I will dust his jacket." The standard of criticism does not lie with
the individual in literature any more than it does in different periods as
to fashions and manners. The world is pretty well agreed, and always
has been, as to the qualities that make a gentleman. And yet there was a
time when the vilest and perhaps the most contemptible man who ever
occupied the English throne,--and that is saying a great deal,--George
IV, was universally called the "First Gentleman of Europe." The
reproach might be somewhat lightened by the fact that George was a
foreigner, but for the wider fact that no person of English stock has
been on the throne since Saxon Harold, the chosen and imposed rulers
of England having been French, Welsh, Scotch, and Dutch, many of
them being guiltless of the English language, and many of them also of
the English middle-class morality. The impartial old Wraxall, the
memorialist of the times of George III, having described a noble as a
gambler, a drunkard, a smuggler, an appropriator of public money, who
always cheated his tradesmen, who was one and sometimes all of them
together, and a profligate generally, commonly adds, "But he was a
perfect gentleman." And yet there has always been a standard that
excludes George IV from the rank of gentleman, as it excludes Tupper
from the rank of poet.
The standard of literary judgment, then, is not in the individual,--that is,
in the taste and prejudice of the individual,--any more than it is in the
immediate contemporary opinion, which is always in flux and reflux
from one extreme to another; but it is in certain immutable principles
and qualities which have been slowly evolved during the long historic
periods of literary criticism. But how shall we ascertain what these
principles are, so as to apply them to new circumstances and new
creations, holding on to the essentials and disregarding contemporary
tastes; prejudices, and appearances? We all admit that certain pieces of

literature have become classic; by general consent there is no dispute
about them. How they have become so we cannot exactly explain.
Some say by a mysterious settling of universal opinion, the operation of
which cannot be exactly defined. Others say that the highly developed
critical judgment of a few persons, from time to time, has established
forever what we agree to call masterpieces. But this discussion is
immaterial, since these supreme examples of literary excellence exist in
all kinds of composition,--poetry, fable, romance, ethical teaching,
prophecy, interpretation, history, humor, satire, devotional flight into
the spiritual and supernatural, everything in which the human mind has
exercised itself,--from the days of the Egyptian moralist and the Old
Testament annalist and poet down to our scientific age. These
masterpieces exist from many periods and in many languages, and they
all have qualities in common which have insured their persistence. To
discover what these qualities are that have insured permanence and
promise indefinite continuance is to have a means of judging with an
approach to scientific accuracy our contemporary literature. There is no
thing of beauty that does not conform to a law of order and
beauty--poem, story, costume, picture, statue, all fall into an
ascertainable law of art. Nothing of man's making is perfect, but any
creation approximates perfection in the measure that it conforms to
inevitable law.
To ascertain this law, and apply it, in art or in literature, to the changing
conditions of our progressive life, is the business of the artist. It is the
business of the critic to mark how the performance conforms to or
departs from the law evolved and transmitted in the long- experience of
the race. True criticism, then, is not a matter of caprice or of individual
liking or disliking, nor of conformity to a prevailing and generally
temporary popular judgment. Individual judgment may be very
interesting and have its value, depending upon the capacity of the judge.
It was my good fortune once to fall in with a person who had been
moved, by I know not what inspiration, to project himself out of his
safe local conditions into France, Greece, Italy, Cairo, and Jerusalem.
He assured me that he had seen nothing anywhere in the wide world of
nature and art to compare with the beauty of Nebraska.

What are the qualities common to all the masterpieces of literature, or,
let us say, to those that have endured in spite of imperfections and local
provincialisms?
First of all I should name simplicity, which includes lucidity of
expression, the clear thought in fitting, luminous words. And this is true
when the thought is profound and the subject