Reconstructive Criticism

NOWADAYS criticism runs to epigram on the one hand, or to philology on the other. Plain speaking in matters of art is rare and accounted for platitude ; intricacy has won the day. But it is worth while, even in bald language, to recapitulate ideas which every thoughtful reader must have in mind when he surveys our current criticism of the art — and we should use the word in its broadest sense — of times other than our own. The end of literature may not approach, but each decade we are farther from its beginning, and perhaps its prime, and more in doubt as to the principles which should guide us in judging the works of our fathers, our grandfathers, and our remoter ancestors. The mass of art grows overwhelming, and only a fraction of it lies historically within the limits of our complete sympathy and comprehension. The early cycles, like shores seen from afar on the sea, already grow indistinct, and only the great highlands preserve their prominence. Others we are just beginning to understand, as an intricate coast-line shows its fundamental contour from a distance not too remote. But certain it is that we can never figure accurately for ourselves the world that Titian saw, nor feel as they for whom Virgil wrote. Scarcely even, except by a warping effort, can we in maturity share Scott’s mood. Whole ages are dead behind us, and the magic key to their treasures is buried with them. What wonder that we discuss so much the theory of criticism ! It is for the touchstone of the past that our century is groping.

The simplest type of criticism is that which instinctively judges the art of the past from the point of view of the present. Such a method is not only natural, but to a certain extent scientific. Homer was not to Pope what he was to Plato; why should he not be to me still different ? Shakespeare, whom we think so universal, is surely not centuries deep in the appreciation of even a small part of the world. Men scarcely dead remem bered that in their youth Dante was almost unknown. There be idols that crumble, and there be idols, perhaps, that remain, but these are reverenced far differently in different ages, and he is not wise who would set a measure for our affection or a rule for our judgment. It sometimes seems, if we may guess the status of Christianity from the religious reviews or the condition of the theological seminaries, that Christianity has largely disappeared from current theology, fully absorbed in the minds and hearts of men, and reintegrated into new metaphysical and sociological products. Such a Nirvana most literature, however effective at its present time and in its native place, must eventually attain. How, then, can we be foolish if we examine frankly the flotsam and jetsam of the centuries, keeping quite simply for ourselves what suits our present use or pleases our present fancy ?

But the main impulse of our century has led us far in other directions than that of such a childlike attitude toward the art of the past. We have given ourselves over at times to laboriously scientific analysis. We have plotted curves and made averages. We have counted rhymes and endings, searched for parallels and sources, analyzed effects, and, hunting minutely for controlling ethical purposes, have ended in conceiving of Shakespeare, at least, as a calculating engineer of artillery, who mounted and trained his cannon with all the mathematics of the trajectory before him. Nor have we been less ardent in investigating the historical relations of the artists of the past with their times and their surroundings. Homer’s sources have been sifted, Shakespeare’s plots traced, and all the dull first ideas that led finally to Faust or the Divine Comedy brought into unnatural prominence. Sometimes the results of these two lines of research, scientific and historical, have been so effectively combined as almost to persuade us that we see and feel the art of a vanished epoch with more understanding than we could have done had we lived in the artists’ own circle.

There has been no more interesting recent example of such analysis and its apparent tendency away from a natural to a learned criticism than Mr. Berenson’s minute study of Lorenzo Lotto,¹ which, following the brilliant method of Morelli, proposes to revive in the crucible of science a painter of four hundred years ago, and present him for accurate judgment. Morelli’s theory, it is now almost superfluous to state, was that, in the identification of the painting, as in that of the criminal, it is the trivial detail that betrays, — “ the ears, the hands, the folds, certain idiosyncrasies of pose and certain settings and backgrounds, as pronest to be executed in a stereotyped fashion.” By a system based on such clues, detective critics, of whom Mr. Berenson is perhaps the most able, have ransacked the galleries and private collections of Europe, testing and comparing the whole mass of Italian pictures, named, unnamed, or wrongly named, according to the accidents of tradition and circumstance. In the history of painting as in the history of literature, light at last appears. We know more clearly what each artist produced and to what influences he had been subjected, where life touched life and method method. But Lotto’s work has been the first, we suppose, to undergo in such detail this searchingly minute series of tests. A new science, one that neglects not the painting of toes and eyebrows, that draws inferences from the phalanx of a thumb and from the curve of a nostril, has with prodigious industry accumulated and compared every jot and tittle of his extant work, recognizing it under other names, not accepting spurious work even when long attributed to him, if it bear not the imprint of his minute technical peculiarities. His contemporaries have not escaped. Signs not to be doubted are found likewise on them. And these signs, acquired, it seems, by the influence of others, separate Lotto’s contemporaries, when purified from the spurious and restored again to their own, into well-defined schools and groups and periods. Lotto, then, it results, was not the pupil of this master, as the historians of art have always blindly insisted, but of that. Impressionable and productive, he had been subjected to such an influence, and bore its traces to the last; man of a certain mould and form of thought, he had been only slightly touched by influences that were otherwise contagious. The world could, it would seem, scarcely be ransacked to better scientific advantage ; the erring tracks of a genius could scarcely be more unerringly followed, we can well suppose; no more striking example of the inevitable laws of environment could be more tangibly presented.

Could there be a criticism mathematical and absolute, or did we desire the simulacrum of one, such a method would seem to lead us a long way towards it. Granted the premises in Lotto’s case, we can establish with some completeness the relation between him and the civilization of which he was a function, between him and the civilization which was in part a function of him. With natural tendencies specified, with early conditions stated, with relations of mastership and pupilship clearly indicated, with the resulting knowledge of methods and periods neatly classified, we might, if we would, — so seems to run Mr. Berenson’s theory,—attempt in any artist’s case a calculation of his absolute art value. But it is just here that the ordinary lover of the arts calls a halt. IIow much of all that is contained in this surprising method, he asks, is purely the dead learning of an expert, unattainable save by the few elect; how far are all these interesting facts but the minutiæ of the history of art, without real value for the real world ? The frank answer cannot be in the expert’s favor. What Mr. Berenson tells us of Lotto is what the philologists tell us of Shakespeare and Dante. His facts are interesting, but they hardly alter much the amount or the kind of our enjoyment. We know more of the trivial details of Lotto’s art; are we really more in sympathy with him or with his work ? And this objection Mr. Berenson himself seems to realize. He closes his book in a wholly different vein, — with a plain analysis, from a personal point of view, of the effect that, Lotto’s work has upon him, and with interesting and enlightening generalizations in regard to Lotto’s character and natural trend of mind that have little in common with the wilderness of details that precede. “ Taken all together,” he says, “ Lotto’s portraits are full of meaning and interest to us, for he paints people who seem to feel as we do about many things, who have already much of our spontaneous kindness, much of our feeling for humanity, much of our conscious need of human ties and sympathy. The charity of Lotto’s spirit gives us a very different idea of the sixteenth century from that which our fancy conjures up when we concentrate our attention upon the murder of Lorenzino de’ Medici, or the tragic end of the Duchess of Palliano. Indeed, the study of Lotto would repay if it did no more than to help us to a truer and saner view of the sixteenth century in Italy than has been given by popular writers, from Stendhal downwards, — writers who too exclusively have devoted themselves to its lurid side. That side, it is true, is the prominent one, yet we feel a generous suspicion that another side must have existed, and Lotto helps to restore that human balance without which the Italy of the sixteenth century would be a veritable pandemonium.” It is a remark like this that gives Lotto’s work a fresh meaning for us, and it is in such a mode that the new school of art criticism must mend its ways, or lose its chances of influence and success. The new critics have before them the splendid task of rewriting the history of art. They must show themselves too wise habitually to throw prominence on insignificant details. Facts, crucial facts, are never to be omitted or trifled with, but they may well be relegated, in a full and satisfactory piece of critical work, to convenient corners, to footnotes and appendices, in complete subordination to whatever will most induce in the lover or student of art the clearest knowledge of the artist’s character and of the civilization of which he was a part.

Mr. Berenson reconstructs Lotto’s method : he gives us the clue to the traits by which his work can be most easily recognized. To reconstruct Lotto himself — the growth and decay of his art. his thoughts, his philosophy, his tastes — lay somewhat outside his primary purpose. With a broader subject,² Mr. Wendell has chosen a plan of action still bolder. Philological and historical research have already done for Shakespeare what Mr. Berenson is doing for Lotto. The whole mass of lifeless facts, familiar to those much read in Shakespearean “literature” Mr. Wendell seizes hold of imaginatively, and so reconstructs, not. Shakespeare’s method, but Shakespeare himself.

The attempt has been made before, but never with such learning, such skill, such sympathy. The method is a simple one. What we know of Shakespeare’s life is almost nothing ; even as an artist he is extraordinarily impersonal. But the body of literature which is his, or has been attributed to him, is large ; the mass of extant literature belonging to his time is enormous. The work of the searchers and gleaners is almost done — and has been almost without result. Shakespeare’s plays have become a great literary standard ; Shakespeare himself has become the type of his time, the symbol of what is great in English literature. And yet we know Dante’s personality more intimately, have a greater hold on the individuality of men even more alien in race and remote in time. Hence, bewildered people readily accept theories that deny Shakespeare’s existence, or deprive him of the glory of his works. Mr. Wendell’s method is the forlorn hope. We know Shakespeare’s language, we share his blood. May not our sympathy and our experience determine, not on the basis of learning, but by sheer effort of imagination, what manner of man he was, and reconstruct his frame from his very ashes ?

The result of Mr. Wendell’s attempt will be, to most readers, extraordinarily suggestive. The host of statistical details falls quietly into line ; chaos takes on order. Shakespeare the man has left few traces apparent to human knowledge, but Shakespeare the artist we can follow step by step in bis mastery of his profession, and through the artist we can dimly imagine the man, — the principles of his development, his strength, his weakness, his success, his failure, the growth and the decay of his imagination. Of course, such conclusions must be vague, but as far as they go they are satisfactory, and they could not have been more definite and still have kept close to the facts that serve for premises. To state the results here would be to pass beyond the limits of our space, to deprive the reader of a real privilege, and to lead us away from our main thought; but let the following quotation from one of Mr. Wendell’s own summaries serve as a type. “ Over and over again,” he says, “ in endless variety of substance and detail, of conception and of phrase alike, these plays show themselves the work of one who at least sympathetically has sounded the depths of human suffering. . . . Throughout is a profound fatalistic sense of the impotence of man in the midst of his environment; now dispassionate, now fierce with passion, this sense — which we called a sense of irony — pervades every play from Julius Cæsar to Coriolanus. In the second place, from All’s Well that Ends Well to Antony and Cleopatra, there is a sense of something in the relations between men and women at once widely different from the ideal, romantic fascination expressed by the comedies, and yet just what should normally follow from such a beginning. Trouble first, then vacillating doubt, then the certainty that woman may be damningly evil, succeed one another in the growth of this mood which so inextricably mingles with the ironical. Finally, from Hamlet to Macbeth, along with the constant irony, and the constant trouble which surrounds the fact of woman, we found equally constant traces of deep sympathy with such abnormal, overwrought states of mind as, uncontrolled by tremendous power both of will and of artistic expression, might easily have lapsed into madness.” These are broad statements, but, like mathematical formulæ, they are valuable, because all accidental detail is eliminated from them. Through such phases of life and thought, thus generally stated, Shakespeare — if Mr. Wendell’s premises be right — must once have passed. We are the gainers by a series of broadly human and philosophical propositions.

Even the most sympathetic reconstructions, however, may be far from helpful as criticism. The knowledge of the past is science. To be permanent, the work of art must be capable of taking on new meanings continually for changing generations of changing men and women. To know what Shakespeare was is helpful to the student. His ghosts and witches are explicable, his deeds of violence become natural conventions, as we learn to force ourselves into accepting his historical point of view. But in the end Shakespeare must come to us, and not we to him. Great art is tested by its power of seeming congruous and significant to all men alike, including those who cannot be expected to send a reconstructing imagination up and down the ages at the beck of their pleasure. Thus it may come to pass the old types fail. It would not be strange if men should again grow indifferent to Dante. It is not hard to imagine a generation that should not care deeply for Hamlet, with its hero rich in words and poor in action, with its enigmatic plot, its bloody deeds, its inconceivable apparition, its long orations ; nor for Macbeth, with its impossible happenings, its unimaginable haste of action. And here is where criticism may exercise an important influence. The history of art is a noble pursuit, an interesting branch of science. History that reconstructs is perhaps its highest point, its most difficult task. But what the people of to-day need most is criticism which helps them to distinguish in the art of yesterday that which to-day is most beautiful and most true.