Contemporary portraits. Second series

Contents

, PAGE

George Bernard Shaw 1

Rudyard Kipling 45

Foreword To The Second

SERIES OF PORTRAITS ,

ITERATURE learns so unwillingly from life that it, is not surprising that it should learn so reluctantly from the methods of science and yet it might learn a good deal. For example, a biologist finds a new sort of bird, let us say, and sits down to describe it.

He is far more than impartial ; he knows that his description must be so perfectly accurate that another biologist ten thousand miles away should be able to classify the bird from it as well as if he had the bird before him.

How many literary critics are there who reach such high detachment and show such scrupulous care?

The biologist knows, too, that length of feather or peculiarity of coloring is not so important as structural differences in the skeleton, or such organic modifications as will affect the creature's chances of surviving and propagating

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his kind. Accordingly he is on the lookout for peculiarities in proportion to their vital importance to the race or species.

But what literary critic uses such an enduring standard of values?

And when the man of science approaches the chief part of his task he is even more careful : he must classify the specimen, decide what species it belongs to, and whether it is more nearly akin to this family or to that. A mistake here would expose him to the derision of every biologist in the world, whereas if he performs his work beyond possibility of fault-finding he will only have done what is expected of every competent craftsman.

When will literary criticism even seek to attain such excellence?

You have a Sainte Beuve comparing Flaubert with Madame Sand and Eugene Sue, regretting that the author of "Salambb" does not write so well as the author of "Mauprat," and that the creator of "Madame Bovary" has not such fertility of imagination as the author of "The Wandering Jew" !

Or your Sainte Beuve will tell you that Balzac's fame will be drowned in the sea of his impurities, that the most extraordinary specimen

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of man it was ever the good fortune of a Frenchman to meet was so little out of the common that he was fated soon to be forgotten.

In much the same way your Matthew Arnold will call Byron a great poet and put him far above Heine and will condemn Keats for writing sensual letters to his love and for consequent "ill-breeding," apparently without even a suspicion that Keats is a greater poet than Milton and Heine incomparably the first of all the moderns. Yet Arnold as a poet should have known that the "Hyperion" is dowered with a richness of rhythm and a magnificence of music to which Paradise Lost can lay no claim; while Heine's position is beyond dispute.

But for brainless prejudice and shameful blundering that would ruin the reputation of any first year's student in biology, these so-called masters of literary criticism are not even blamed. And accordingly we find a Meredith at seventy declaring that his works have never been criticised, that no one in England has even tried to describe his productions fairly, much less classify him correctly.

While attempting to rival scientific exactitude and detached impartiality the literary critic has viii FOREWORD

still a further height to climb. His description may be exact, his classification fairly correct, yet we shall not be satisfied unless he reveals to us the ever-changing soul of his subject and its possibilities of growth. In this way art asserts its superiority to science.

When this ultimate domain is reached a new

% question imposes itself. The portrait painter is

always drawn by two divergent forces ; he must

catch the likeness of his sitter and yet make his

portrait a work of art.

This world-old dispute in portraiture between realism and art was settled for the artist by Michelangelo. Some one who watched him working on his great statue of Lorenzo dei Medici kept on objecting that it was not like Lorenzo, that he had known that great man for years, and that he would not have recognized him from the sculptor's presentment.

At length Michelangelo turned on his buzzing critic : "Who will care whether it's like him or not a thousand years hence?"

In other words, the obligation on the artist is to "produce a great work of art," and there is no other.

At the same time, the great portaits of the world such as the picture of Charles V. on horse-

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back by Titian and the Meniflas of Velasquez and the Syndics of Rembrandt manage to reconcile to some extent both requirements.

Likeness is caught most easily by exaggeration of characteristic features; but such exaggeration is apt to offend the modesty of truth and fall into caricature; whereas the work of art is always founded on truth as a beautiful figure demands a perfect skeleton, and any heightening even of the truth must have beauty or some strange and profound significance as justification. How far then is exaggeration or modification of the fact allowed? I solved the riddle rather loosely in my own way. When my subject is really a great man, a choice and master-spirit, I try to depict him in his habit as he lived with absolute fidelity to fact. In the case of Carlyle and Browning, Meredith, Burton and Davidson in my first volume of portraits, just as in the case of Shaw and Thomson and Walt Whitman in this volume, I have taken no liberties wittingly with the fact; the real is good enough for me when it is halocrowned; but when I am dealing with smaller men whose growth has been dwarfed or warped or thwarted T permit myself a certain latitude of interpretation, or even of artistic presentment. Browning's Rabbi was right: