On Criticism
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
The following brief remarks on the critical faculty are chiefly intended
to show that, for the most part, there is no such thing. It is a rara avis;
almost as rare, indeed, as the phoenix, which appears only once in five
hundred years.
When we speak of taste—an expression not chosen with any regard for
it—we mean the discovery, or, it may be only the recognition, of what is
right aesthetically, apart from the guidance of any rule; and this, either
because no rule has as yet been extended to the matter in question, or else
because, if existing, it is unknown to the artist, or the critic, as the case may
be. Instead of taste, we might use the expression aesthetic sense, if this
were not tautological.
The perceptive critical taste is, so to speak, the female analogue to the
male quality of productive talent or genius. Not capable of begetting great
work itself, it consists in a capacity of reception, that is to say, of recognizing as such what is right, fit, beautiful, or the reverse; in other words, of discriminating the good from the bad, of discovering and appreciating the one and condemning the other.
In appreciating a genius, criticism should not deal with the errors in his
productions or with the poorer of his works, and then proceed to rate him
low; it should attend only to the qualities in which he most excels. For in
the sphere of intellect, as in other spheres, weakness and perversity cleave
so firmly to human nature that even the most brilliant mind is not wholly
and at all times free from them. Hence the great errors to be found even in
the works of the greatest men; or as Horace puts it, quandoque bonus
dormitat Homerus.
That which distinguishes genius, and should be the standard for judging
it, is the height to which it is able to soar when it is in the proper mood and
finds a fitting occasion—a height always out of the reach of ordinary talent.
And, in like manner, it is a very dangerous thing to compare two great men
of the same class; for instance, two great poets, or musicians, or philosophers, or artists; because injustice to the one or the other, at least for the moment, can hardly be avoided. For in making a comparison of the kind the critic looks to some particular merit of the one and at once discovers that it is absent in the other, who is thereby disparaged. And then if the process is reversed, and the critic begins with the latter and discovers his
peculiar merit, which is quite of a different order from that presented by the
former, with whom it may be looked for in vain, the result is that both of
them suffer undue depreciation.
There are critics who severally think that it rests with each one of them
what shall be accounted good, and what bad. They all mistake their own
toy-trumpets for the trombones of fame.
A drug does not effect its purpose if the dose is too large; and it is the
same with censure and adverse criticism when it exceeds the measure of
justice.
The disastrous thing for intellectual merit is that it must wait for those to
praise the good who have themselves produced nothing but what is bad;
nay, it is a primary misfortune that it has to receive its crown at the hands of
the critical power of mankind—a quality of which most men possess only
the weak and impotent semblance, so that the reality may be numbered
amongst the rarest gifts of nature. Hence La Bruyère's remark is, unhappily,
as true as it is neat. Après l'esprit de discernement, he says, ce qu'il y a au
monde de plus rare, ce sont les diamans et les perles. The spirit of
discernment! the critical faculty! it is these that are lacking. Men do not
know how to distinguish the genuine from the false, the corn from the chaff,
gold from copper; or to perceive the wide gulf that separates a genius from
an ordinary man. Thus we have that bad state of things described in an old
fashioned verse, which gives it as the lot of the great ones here on earth to
be recognized only when they are gone:
Es ist nun das Geschick der Grossen fiier auf Erden,
Erst wann sie nicht mehr sind; von uns erkannt zu werden.
When any genuine and excellent work makes its appearance, the chief
difficulty in its way is the amount of bad work it finds already in possession
of the field, and accepted as though it were good. And then if, after a long
time, the new comer really succeeds, by a hard struggle, in vindicating his
place for himself and winning reputation, he will soon encounter fresh
difficulty from some affected, dull, awkward imitator, whom people drag in,
with the object of calmly setting him up on the altar beside the genius; not
seeing the difference and really thinking that here they have to do with
another great man. This is what Yriarte means by the first lines of his
twenty-eighth Fable, where he declares that the ignorant rabble always sets
equal value on the good and the bad:
Siempre acostumbra hacer el vulgo necio
De lo bueno y lo malo igual aprecio.
So even Shakespeare's dramas had, immediately after his death, to give
place to those of Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and to
yield the supremacy for a hundred years. So Kant's serious philosophy was
crowded out by the nonsense of Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, Hegel. And even
in a sphere accessible to all, we have seen unworthy imitators quickly
diverting public attention from the incomparable Walter Scott. For, say
what you will, the public has no sense for excellence, and therefore no
notion how very rare it is to find men really capable of doing anything great
in poetry, philosophy, or art, or that their works are alone worthy of
exclusive attention. The dabblers, whether in verse or in any other high
sphere, should be every day unsparingly reminded that neither gods, nor
men, nor booksellers have pardoned their mediocrity:
mediocribus esse poetis
Non homines, non Dî, non concessere columnae.
Are they not the weeds that prevent the corn coming up, so that they
may cover all the ground themselves? And then there happens that which
has been well and freshly described by the lamented Feuchtersleben,14 who
died so young: how people cry out in their haste that nothing is being done,
while all the while great work is quietly growing to maturity; and then,
when it appears, it is not seen or heard in the clamor, but goes its way
silently, in modest grief:
"Ist doch"—rufen sie vermessen—
Nichts im Werke, nichts gethan!"
Und das Grosse, reift indessen
Still heran.
Es ersheint nun: niemand sieht es,
Niemand hört es im Geschrei
Mit bescheid'ner Trauer zieht es
Still vorbei.
[ Translator's Note.—Ernst Freiherr von Feuchtersleben (1806-49), an
Austrian physician, philosopher, and poet, and a specialist in medical
psychology. The best known of his songs is that beginning "Es ist bestimmt
in Gottes Rath" to which Mendelssohn composed one of his finest
melodies.]
This lamentable death of the critical faculty is not less obvious in the
case of science, as is shown by the tenacious life of false and disproved
theories. If they are once accepted, they may go on bidding defiance to truth
for fifty or even a hundred years and more, as stable as an iron pier in the
midst of the waves. The Ptolemaic system was still held a century after
Copernicus had promulgated his theory. Bacon, Descartes and Locke made
their way extremely slowly and only after a long time; as the reader may
see by d'Alembert's celebrated Preface to the Encyclopedia. Newton was
not more successful; and this is sufficiently proved by the bitterness and
contempt with which Leibnitz attacked his theory of gravitation in the
controversy with Clarke. Although Newton lived for almost forty years
after the appearance of the Principia, his teaching was, when he died, only
to some extent accepted in his own country, whilst outside England he
counted scarcely twenty adherents; if we may believe the introductory note
to Voltaire's exposition of his theory. It was, indeed, chiefly owing to this
treatise of Voltaire's that the system became known in France nearly twenty
years after Newton's death. Until then a firm, resolute, and patriotic stand
was made by the Cartesian Vortices; whilst only forty years previously, this
same Cartesian philosophy had been forbidden in the French schools; and
now in turn d'Agnesseau, the Chancellor, refused Voltaire the Imprimatur
for his treatise on the Newtonian doctrine. On the other hand, in our day
Newton's absurd theory of color still completely holds the field, forty years
after the publication of Goethe's. Hume, too, was disregarded up to his
fiftieth year, though he began very early and wrote in a thoroughly popular
style. And Kant, in spite of having written and talked all his life long, did
not become a famous man until he was sixty.
Artists and poets have, to be sure, more chance than thinkers, because
their public is at least a hundred times as large. Still, what was thought of
Beethoven and Mozart during their lives? what of Dante? what even of
Shakespeare? If the latter's contemporaries had in any way recognized his
worth, at least one good and accredited portrait of him would have come
down to us from an age when the art of painting flourished; whereas we
possess only some very doubtful pictures, a bad copperplate, and a still
worse bust on his tomb. And in like manner, if he had been duly honored,
specimens of his handwriting would have been preserved to us by the
hundred, instead of being confined, as is the case, to the signatures to a few
legal documents. The Portuguese are still proud of their only poet Camoëns.
He lived, however, on alms collected every evening in the street by a black
slave whom he had brought with him from the Indies. In time, no doubt,
justice will be done everyone; tempo è galant uomo; but it is as late and
slow in arriving as in a court of law, and the secret condition of it is that the
recipient shall be no longer alive. The precept of Jesus the son of Sirach is
faithfully followed: Judge none blessed before his death. He, then, who
has produced immortal works, must find comfort by applying to them the
words of the Indian myth, that the minutes of life amongst the immortals
seem like years of earthly existence; and so, too, that years upon earth are
only as the minutes of the immortals.
This lack of critical insight is also shown by the fact that, while in every
century the excellent work of earlier time is held in honor, that of its own is
misunderstood, and the attention which is its due is given to bad work, such
as every decade carries with it only to be the sport of the next. That men are
slow to recognize genuine merit when it appears in their own age, also
proves that they do not understand or enjoy or really value the long
acknowledged works of genius, which they honor only on the score of
authority. The crucial test is the fact that bad work—Fichte's philosophy, for
example—if it wins any reputation, also maintains it for one or two
generations; and only when its public is very large does its fall follow
sooner.
Now, just as the sun cannot shed its light but to the eye that sees it, nor
music sound but to the hearing ear, so the value of all masterly work in art
and science is conditioned by the kinship and capacity of the mind to which
it speaks. It is only such a mind as this that possesses the magic word to stir
and call forth the spirits that lie hidden in great work. To the ordinary mind
a masterpiece is a sealed cabinet of mystery,—an unfamiliar musical
instrument from which the player, however much he may flatter himself,
can draw none but confused tones. How different a painting looks when
seen in a good light, as compared with some dark corner! Just in the same
way, the impression made by a masterpiece varies with the capacity of the
mind to understand it.
A fine work, then, requires a mind sensitive to its beauty; a thoughtful
work, a mind that can really think, if it is to exist and live at all. But alas! it
may happen only too often that he who gives a fine work to the world
afterwards feels like a maker of fireworks, who displays with enthusiasm
the wonders that have taken him so much time and trouble to prepare, and
then learns that he has come to the wrong place, and that the fancied
spectators were one and all inmates of an asylum for the blind. Still even
that is better than if his public had consisted entirely of men who made
fireworks themselves; as in this case, if his display had been extraordinarily
good, it might possibly have cost him his head.
The source of all pleasure and delight is the feeling of kinship. Even
with the sense of beauty it is unquestionably our own species in the animal
world, and then again our own race, that appears to us the fairest. So, too, in
intercourse with others, every man shows a decided preference for those
who resemble him; and a blockhead will find the society of another
blockhead incomparably more pleasant than that of any number of great
minds put together. Every man must necessarily take his chief pleasure in
his own work, because it is the mirror of his own mind, the echo of his own
thought; and next in order will come the work of people like him; that is to
say, a dull, shallow and perverse man, a dealer in mere words, will give his
sincere and hearty applause only to that which is dull, shallow, perverse or
merely verbose. On the other hand, he will allow merit to the work of great
minds only on the score of authority, in other words, because he is ashamed
to speak his opinion; for in reality they give him no pleasure at all. They do
not appeal to him; nay, they repel him; and he will not confess this even to
himself. The works of genius cannot be fully enjoyed except by those who
are themselves of the privileged order. The first recognition of them,
however, when they exist without authority to support them, demands
considerable superiority of mind.
When the reader takes all this into consideration, he should be surprised,
not that great work is so late in winning reputation, but that it wins it at all.
And as a matter of fact, fame comes only by a slow and complex process.
The stupid person is by degrees forced, and as it were, tamed, into
recognizing the superiority of one who stands immediately above him; this
one in his turn bows before some one else; and so it goes on until the
weight of the votes gradually prevail over their number; and this is just the
condition of all genuine, in other words, deserved fame. But until then, the
greatest genius, even after he has passed his time of trial, stands like a king
amidst a crowd of his own subjects, who do not know him by sight and
therefore will not do his behests; unless, indeed, his chief ministers of state
are in his train. For no subordinate official can be the direct recipient of the
royal commands, as he knows only the signature of his immediate superior;
and this is repeated all the way up into the highest ranks, where the under
secretary attests the minister's signature, and the minister that of the king.
There are analogous stages to be passed before a genius can attain
widespread fame. This is why his reputation most easily comes to a
standstill at the very outset; because the highest authorities, of whom there
can be but few, are most frequently not to be found; but the further down he
goes in the scale the more numerous are those who take the word from
above, so that his fame is no more arrested.
We must console ourselves for this state of things by reflecting that it is
really fortunate that the greater number of men do not form a judgment on
their own responsibility, but merely take it on authority. For what sort of
criticism should we have on Plato and Kant, Homer, Shakespeare and
Goethe, if every man were to form his opinion by what he really has and
enjoys of these writers, instead of being forced by authority to speak of
them in a fit and proper way, however little he may really feel what he says.
Unless something of this kind took place, it would be impossible for true
merit, in any high sphere, to attain fame at all. At the same time it is also
fortunate that every man has just so much critical power of his own as is
necessary for recognizing the superiority of those who are placed
immediately over him, and for following their lead. This means that the
many come in the end to submit to the authority of the few; and there
results that hierarchy of critical judgments on which is based the possibility
of a steady, and eventually wide-reaching, fame.
The lowest class in the community is quite impervious to the merits of a
great genius; and for these people there is nothing left but the monument
raised to him, which, by the impression it produces on their senses, awakes
in them a dim idea of the man's greatness.
Literary journals should be a dam against the unconscionable scribbling
of the age, and the ever-increasing deluge of bad and useless books. Their
judgments should be uncorrupted, just and rigorous; and every piece of bad
work done by an incapable person; every device by which the empty head
tries to come to the assistance of the empty purse, that is to say, about nine
tenths of all existing books, should be mercilessly scourged. Literary
journals would then perform their duty, which is to keep down the craving
for writing and put a check upon the deception of the public, instead of
furthering these evils by a miserable toleration, which plays into the hands
of author and publisher, and robs the reader of his time and his money.
If there were such a paper as I mean, every bad writer, every brainless
compiler, every plagiarist from other's books, every hollow and incapable
place-hunter, every sham-philosopher, every vain and languishing poetaster,
would shudder at the prospect of the pillory in which his bad work would
inevitably have to stand soon after publication. This would paralyze his
twitching fingers, to the true welfare of literature, in which what is bad is
not only useless but positively pernicious. Now, most books are bad and
ought to have remained unwritten. Consequently praise should be as rare as
is now the case with blame, which is withheld under the influence of
personal considerations, coupled with the maxim accedas socius, laudes
lauderis ut absens.
It is quite wrong to try to introduce into literature the same toleration as
must necessarily prevail in society towards those stupid, brainless people
who everywhere swarm in it. In literature such people are impudent
intruders; and to disparage the bad is here duty towards the good; for he
who thinks nothing bad will think nothing good either. Politeness, which
has its source in social relations, is in literature an alien, and often injurious,
element; because it exacts that bad work shall be called good. In this way
the very aim of science and art is directly frustrated.
The ideal journal could, to be sure, be written only by people who
joined incorruptible honesty with rare knowledge and still rarer power of
judgment; so that perhaps there could, at the very most, be one, and even
hardly one, in the whole country; but there it would stand, like a just
Aeropagus, every member of which would have to be elected by all the
others. Under the system that prevails at present, literary journals are
carried on by a clique, and secretly perhaps also by booksellers for the good
of the trade; and they are often nothing but coalitions of bad heads to
prevent the good ones succeeding. As Goethe once remarked to me,
nowhere is there so much dishonesty as in literature.
But, above all, anonymity, that shield of all literary rascality, would
have to disappear. It was introduced under the pretext of protecting the
honest critic, who warned the public, against the resentment of the author
and his friends. But where there is one case of this sort, there will be a
hundred where it merely serves to take all responsibility from the man who
cannot stand by what he has said, or possibly to conceal the shame of one
who has been cowardly and base enough to recommend a book to the public
for the purpose of putting money into his own pocket. Often enough it is
only a cloak for covering the obscurity, incompetence and insignificance of
the critic. It is incredible what impudence these fellows will show, and what
literary trickery they will venture to commit, as soon as they know they are
safe under the shadow of anonymity. Let me recommend a general Anti
criticism, a universal medicine or panacea, to put a stop to all anonymous
reviewing, whether it praises the bad or blames the good: Rascal! your
name! For a man to wrap himself up and draw his hat over his face, and
then fall upon people who are walking about without any disguise—this is
not the part of a gentleman, it is the part of a scoundrel and a knave.
An anonymous review has no more authority than an anonymous letter;
and one should be received with the same mistrust as the other. Or shall we
take the name of the man who consents to preside over what is, in the strict
sense of the word, une société anonyme as a guarantee for the veracity of
his colleagues?
Even Rousseau, in the preface to the Nouvelle Heloïse, declares tout
honnête homme doit avouer les livres qu'il public; which in plain language
means that every honorable man ought to sign his articles, and that no one
is honorable who does not do so. How much truer this is of polemical
writing, which is the general character of reviews! Riemer was quite right in
the opinion he gives in his Reminiscences of Goethe: An overt enemy, he
says, an enemy who meets you face to face, is an honorable man, who will
treat you fairly, and with whom you can come to terms and be reconciled:
but an enemy who conceals himself is a base, cowardly scoundrel, who has
not courage enough to avow his own judgment; it is not his opinion that he
cares about, but only the secret pleasures of wreaking his anger without
being found out or punished. This will also have been Goethe's opinion, as
he was generally the source from which Riemer drew his observations.
And, indeed, Rousseau's maxim applies to every line that is printed. Would
a man in a mask ever be allowed to harangue a mob, or speak in any
assembly; and that, too, when he was going to attack others and overwhelm
them with abuse?
Anonymity is the refuge for all literary and journalistic rascality. It is a
practice which must be completely stopped. Every article, even in a
newspaper, should be accompanied by the name of its author; and the editor
should be made strictly responsible for the accuracy of the signature. The
freedom of the press should be thus far restricted; so that when a man
publicly proclaims through the far-sounding trumpet of the newspaper, he
should be answerable for it, at any rate with his honor, if he has any; and if
he has none, let his name neutralize the effect of his words. And since even
the most insignificant person is known in his own circle, the result of such a
measure would be to put an end to two-thirds of the newspaper lies, and to
restrain the audacity of many a poisonous tongue.