United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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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-

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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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10 vox terance. If the literary criticism of a given nation is worthy of its name, its authors will never be at a loss; in speaking to it, they will speak to that invisible, yet real au¬ dience of the ages to which alone they should not think it below their dignity to speak when they take pen in hand, and presume to set that vast machinery going which is needed to produce a print¬ ed book. This I consider the second in importance among the functions of the critic; of the first I shall speak anon. For, unless the author has this audience, how can he be blamed for going astray in the clamor of the day? It is a strange but indisputable fact that a work of art presupposes at least two, the one who speaks and the one who listens—the one who creates and the one who recreates. Art is es¬ sentially the play of one soul on another. Just as surely as vibra¬ tions created on a desert island by the fall of a tree cannot become sound without being heard by an ear, the work of an artist cannot become art without the reaction of an answering soul. So, unless there is an ideal audience like the one I have tried to sketch, the temotation of the writer to speak to that concrete, ever-present audi¬ ence which wants only to be cheat¬ ed by having something given to it to beguile its time and which is sufficiently and nauseatingly rep¬ resented by the newsmongery of the press—that temptation, I say, is so enormously great as to be al¬ most irresistible. No genius was ever born as such. He was born as a talent. A genius he became by taking pains, by striving after per¬ fection. But it is hard to go on working with incessant care” when there is none to perceive that care and to appreciate it. It is hard to go on striving after perfection, never to be attained, if the work of art is drowned in the ocean of me¬ diocre productions designed for no purpose but to satisfy the demand of the public to be entertained— which means distracted from itself. Yet art aims at the very oppo¬ site: not to distract the hearer from himself but to lead him into the very recesses of his soul and to force him to face the world, not with the periphery of the inessential ac¬ quisitions of his day, but with the innermost essence of his soul which is the same as that of Abraham. Most people go through life in the blissful ignorance of the very fact that they have a soul; how, then, should a young writer even dream of appealing to it, of evoking it, were it not for the fact that at all times there is that ideal audience, represented by literary criticism, to remind him of the fact that, at what he does, the ages look on. Literary criticism—or the body of literary critics—should be to the writer what the Roman Senate was to the general in the field: an un¬ seen presence sitting sternly in judg¬ ment over his blunders, but also voting him a triumph if he did his duty well. Shall I indulge in the sarcasm of the question, Is that what literary criticism is in Can¬ ada today? Critic and the Public I must hurry on to the third point. The critic, facing Classic literature and facing the contempo¬ rary author, also faces the concrete public. What, in this direction, is his function? Edmund Gosse says somewhere something to this effect, ‘It is ex¬ traordinary but very fortunate that (Continued on page 5 6)