United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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8 VOX Classic Literature “Firstly, as facing classic litera¬ ture, the critic has a passive and an active duty. Perhaps it would be better to say, as regards the litera¬ ture of the past, he is both recep¬ tive and creative. “In all great literatures we find common ground. The Antigone of Sophocles, written more than 2,000 years ago, is as living today as it was when first produced. Let us hesitate and ponder that fact. It is one of the most remarkable and astounding facts with which we can meet. Even granting—as I am only too willing to grant—that human nature is essentially the same today as it was then—since, in literary art, the appeal to that human nature is made through con¬ crete things, through happenings conditioned by laws and usages that are no longer laws and usages to us—how is it that the acciden¬ tals of these concrete happenings— antiquated accidentals that have not even a counterpart in the life as we live it—do not drown out the possible thin, quiet voice of the spirit which speaks through them. The critic answers, Because Anti¬ gone is a work of art. For Art is essentially that activity of the hu¬ man mind which converts the con¬ crete fact into a spiritual experience which has eternal life. “I cannot expatiate. I will, there¬ fore, briefly say that, in his recep¬ tive mood, the critic is the man whose own spiritual life has arisen through, has reacted to , and is nourished by, the spiritual experi¬ ences of the past as embodied in the great works of literary art accumu¬ lated through the centuries. This is, of course, merely another way of saying that the critic stands in what I call the great tradition. If he does not, he may possibly be an advo¬ cate; he cannot be a critic. Classic Tradition Upheld “I said that, in facing classic lit¬ erature, the critic has, besides this passive duty—-the duty of nourish¬ ing himself by the great tradition —an active one or one which might be called creative. That duty con¬ sists in keeping alive what is liv¬ ing; for in literature, that which is not lived, dies as too much of an¬ cient literature has died to us for the want of critics in what we have come to call the dark ages, which were dark for the very reason of that want. By the mere fact that he himself stands in that great tra¬ dition which is traceable through¬ out the centuries he must keep it alive; it must be present in every sentence he speaks or writes; if not explicitly, at least implicitly; as a spiritual presence; as a background out of which his voice sounds forth as from a cavern. Critic Faces Author “Secondly, we said, the true critic faces the contemporary au¬ thor. “What is the attitude in which he faces him? It is the attitude of reason as distinguished from that of passion. There is, in the fight of the day, passion not only in poli¬ tics, in the warfare between classes, in the schisms of creeds, but also in the disagreements between schools of art. The critic knows that there is nothing new under the sun. At all times little details of procedure, inessentials, have been made the subject of contention; even the art¬ ist is only human and inclined to quarrel with his neighbor about free verse or so-called realism. But over against him stands reason in the person of the critic. In the past,

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vox A Milestone in Canadian Criticism It Needs to Be Said ... by FREDERICK PHILIP GROVE (Macmillans in Canada, 1929.) In the year 1864. Matthew Ar¬ nold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford, published an epoch-mak¬ ing essay entitled “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” To the parochial England of his day, Arnold proclaimed the need for absolute standards in literature, for the impregnation of the creative mind of ideas, and for the propaga¬ tion by the critic of “the hest that is known and thought in the world.” There followed a neces¬ sary familiarity on the critic’s part with the literatures not merely of Greece, Rome, and Judea, but also of contemporary Europe. Only thus could there be produced such a current of true and living ideas as would inspire the creative mind to work of enduring worth. In the year 1929, Mr. Frederick Philip Grove, perhaps the most dynamic creative writer in Canada today, has published a volume of essays, It Needs to be Said, with a similar emphasis on the abiding value of the absolute in art. It is a timely book. Matthew Arnold’s essay seems unknown in Canada, except perhaps to college Sopho¬ mores—in that vague way in which all prescribed texts are re¬ luctantly peered into. Here and there across the country, some aca¬ demic Jeremiah tries, with a wry face, to preach a gospel of high se¬ riousness in literature, to insist that standards of truth and beauty still have cogency. But so far as things published are concerned, most of our book-reviewers are blind lead¬ ers of blind book-writers and book- readers. It would be hard to name more than one or two professed critics in the whole Dominion who have a competent knowledge of any modern literature other than Eng¬ lish, still less of the great literatures of antiquity. Much of the imma¬ turity and ephemerality of Cana¬ dian writing is traceable to this lack of stern, enlightened leadership. Mr. Grove, nourished on six modern and two ancient literatures, and himself a writer with thirty years’ apprenticeship, now presents our generation with critical theory in the great tradition. Of the eight essays in the book, one, on “Na¬ tionhood,” is partly sociological in substance; the rest are al l critical; (1) “A Neglected Function of a Certain Literary Association,” (2) “Literary Criticism,” (3) “Real¬ ism in Literature,” (4) “The Happy Ending,” (5) “The Aim of Art,” (6) The Value of Art,” and (7) “The Novel.” The clearest statement of his lit¬ erary creed is to be found in “Lit¬ erary Criticism” and so pertinent are his remarks that large-scale quo¬ tation seems to be called for. His basic declaration is that the real critics have always faced in three directions: “They faced, firstly, that vast accu¬ mulated mass of literature which has stood the test of the centuries and which, in what follows, I shall call classic, no matter whether it was written in ancient Greece or in modern Italy, England, France, or Germany. They faced, secondly, the contemporary authors. And they faced, thirdly, the contempo¬ rary public. Let us, then, see what may be the functions of the critic facing in these various directions.

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vox 9 the great works of art—no matter whether they were produced in an¬ cient Greece, in the Italy, the France, the England of the Renais¬ sance, in 17th-century Holland, or in modern Germany or Scandina¬ via, or in Russia—have always shown a certain conformity of aim and even of method; their totality offers—in its essentials, though not in its accidentals—the spectacle of an almost timeless, ageless congre¬ gation of great minds and spirits in which the various members, from Homer down to Goethe and even Ibsen, have merely happened to take their seats at different stages of the proceedings. The critic, when he speaks to the contemporary au¬ thor, speaks from their midst, un¬ moved by the fleeting slogans of the day. Essential Art This is particularly important at the present time when we are un¬ der what I venture to call the delu¬ sion of science. Because science has made us comfortable without mak¬ ing us happy, and we are apt to forget that, neither in the life of the individual nor in the life of a nation or a race, are economic prob¬ lems the most important problems of our existence. Wealth in Eliza¬ bethan times would be poverty to¬ day. But happiness then, is hap¬ piness still. Tragedy then, is trag¬ edy still. Yet many moderns think because, in the inessentials of life, we have ideas different from those of the Greeks, Greek art is as an- tiauated as their methods of fur¬ nishing a house or of travelling over the road. That is ignorance, nothing else. Greek art is as living todav as it ever was, to him who has learned to strip it and, above all, himself of the inessentials. Now, a work produced today may hold a great appeal through its inessentials; through the accu¬ racy, for instance, with which it re¬ produces certain aspects of modern life: through a sort of mimicry by which it fits itself into the demands of modern prejudices; or through a partisan boldness with which it defies idiosyncrasies in the hostile camp, in the warfare of schools. The critic faces it with eternal ques¬ tions. Does this work, or does it not, reveal a new corner of the timeless human soul? Does it or does it not sail into an uncharted sea of spiritual experience? Or, fail¬ ing that, does it or does it not ex¬ press something that has been ex¬ pressed before in a more cogent, more convincing way than it has ever been expressed before? In other words, does it or does it not stand within the great tradition, no mat¬ er what the accidental antics of its inessential form may be? Critic an Ideal Audience “In all those countries where lit¬ erary criticism is a reality, its atti¬ tude towards the contemporary au¬ thor who produces or tries to pro¬ duce works of literary art gives him what he needs more than anything else except the God-given talent and the God-imposed task—the urge which will not be denied; and that thing which in addition to these he needs is an ideal audience to which he can address himself, se¬ cure in the feeling that, if he have the eye to see and the voice to speak, he will be heard. For no matter what, no matter who may say, he says it to somebody; thus the writer when he writes writes for somebody. The critic is neces¬ sary, is indispensable to the author because, without him, barring for¬ tunate accidents, he does not know to whose capacity to adjust his ut-