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A HISTORY OF ENGLISH CRITICISM
UIT
“ All this subject is admirably discussed in Professor Saintsbury's great
History of Criticism.”—Mr A. J. BALFOUR, Romanes Lecture on Criticism
and Beauty, p. 10 (Oxford, 1910).
“The same editor's [Mr Saintsbury's] history, in three volumes, of
Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, from the earliest texts to the
present day, is a striking monument of literary enthusiasm, vastly exten-
sive learning, and much good suggestion.”—Lord MORLEY of Blackburn,
Presidential Address to the English Association, Jan. 2, 1911, p. 8.
A HISTORY
OF
.
ENGLISH CRITICISM
BEING THE ENGLISH CHAPTERS OF
A HISTORY OF CRITICISM AND
LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE
· REVISED, ADAPTED, AND SUPPLEMENTED
BY
50: B
emori
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
M.A. Oxon. ; Hon. LL. D. ABERD. ; HON. D.LITT. DURH.
HONORARY FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN
THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGE .
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD, '& COMPANY
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
1911
All Rights reserved
Printed by
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & Sons, Edinburgh, Scotland.
PREFACE.
My publishers having requested me to prepare a separate edition
of the English part of my History of Criticism, which appeared
in three volumes between 1900 and 1904, I saw no objection
to complying. One of my subordinate (and not so very sub-
ordinate) objects in writing the larger book was to vindicate
our literature from the charge of being second-hand and second-
rate in this matter: and while some reviewers had received
the old prejudice too obediently, and with too little knowledge
of the subject, to discard it, others were good enough to admit
that. I had made out no bad case. There can be no doubt
that, in the present drift of public opinion, an ever-dwindling
minority of students obtains the full liberal education of
Classics first, with English and Modern Languages to follow
in the natural order; but that is no reason why the majority
should be deprived of the meat they are prepared to digest.
At the same time, a reader who has no knowledge of ancient
criticism cannot understand the history of English; and one
who does not know something of the state of Italian criti-
cism at the beginning of ours—of that of French, German, and
French again later—will find himself constantly at a loss. He
requires, therefore, a new Introduction, to put him in a position
to comprehend the standpoint of Ascham and Gascoigne, as
-
.
PREFACE.
well as much that follows; while there should be, in place of
the old Interchapters, shorter links of the same kind, giving a
brief view of the new influences as they came in. Those who
desire more light still on these subjects can, and should, consult
the larger History.
The bulk of the matter may remain unaltered except for
careful revision and correction of slips, obscurities, and the
like. If some such things have escaped notice I can only ask
for pardon,
EDINBURGH, October 1911.
1 Since this book was in type, I
have received, by the great kindness
of Professor Bouton of New York
University, a full abstract of the rare
pamphlet on Fielding and Novel-writ.
ing (see Hist. Crit., ii. 497, note, or inf.,
p. 230, note). It is highly laudatory
of Fielding himself (with some gentle
strictures on morality, digressions,
&c.), but severe on his imitators and
followers, including Smollett. On
some general points of novel-writing,
and of criticism at large, the writer
is sound and almost original. The
piece is worth reprinting.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
PAGE
PAGE
.
.
15
..
The documents of criticism when
English praotice in it began .
Earliest Greek criticism to Plato.
Aristotle-his great importance.
Drawbacks to it . . . .
Later Greek Criticism: The De In.
terpretatione . .
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. .
The Rhetoricians . . . .
Plutarch. . . . . .
Lucian . . . . . .
Longinus . .
His principles and message .
The Gospel of Transport and the
rejection of Faultlessness, .
· Photius . . . . . .
Latin Criticism . . . .
Cicero . .
Horace—The Epistle to the Pisos
its consummate expression . .
9
9
10
Its plausibility .
Its superficial, desultory, and arbi-
trary character. . . . 16
Others-Petronius . . . . 17
Quintilian . . . . .
Great merits of his work generally. 17
Interesting shortcomings in his judg.
ment of authors . . . ... 18
Later Latin critics of the Empire
and the “Dark” Ages . .
Barrenness of the Middle Ages .
Except Dante . . . . .
The De Vulgari Eloquio .
Criticism revived in Italy at the
Renaissance : The strict Neo-
Classics : Vida . . . .
The innovators: Patrizzi .
French criticism: The Pléiade .
Earliest glimmerings of English .
.
.
13
13
14
CHAPTER II.
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
Backwardness of English Criticism
not implying inferiority . .
Its cause . . . . .
The influence of Rhetoric and other
matters . . . . .
Hawes . .
27 The first Tudor critics .
28 Wilson : his Art of Rhetoric .
His attack on “Inkhorn" term
29 | | His dealing with Figures .
..
.
.
viii
CONTENTS.
62
63
37
38
39
40
41
Cheke: his resolute Anglicism and
anti-preciosity . .
His criticism of Sallust . .
Ascham . . . . .
His patriotism . . . .
His horror of Romance . . .
And of the Morte d'Arthur .
His general critical attitude to Prose
And to Poetry
. .
The craze for Classical Metres
Special wants of English Prosody .
Its kinds : (1) Chaucerian .
(2) Alliterative . .
(3) Italianated .
Deficiencies of all three . .
The temptations of Criticism in this
respect . . .
Its adventurers: Ascham himself .
Watson and Drant. . .
Gascoigne . . .
His Notes of Instruction .
Their capital value. ,
Spenser and Harvey
The Puritan attack on Poetry
Gosson . . . . .
The School of Abuse . .
Lodge's Reply . .
Sidney's Apology for Poetry
Abstract of it. ,
Its minor shortcomings . .
And major heresies
The excuses of both
And their ample compensation
King James's Reulis and Cautelis.
43
Webbe's Discourse .
34 | Slight in knowledge . . .
But enthusiastic . . . .
If uncritical . . .
In appreciation .
Puttenham's (?) Art of English
Poesie . . .
Its erudition . .
Systematic arrangement. .
40 And exuberant indulgence in Figures
Minors : Harington, Meres, Web-
41 ster, Bolton, &c. . . .
Campion and his Observations ..
Daniel and his Defence of Rhyme ,
42 Bacon . . . . . ..
The Essays,
The Advancement of Learning .
43 Its denunciation of mere word-study
Its view of Poetry . . . .
Some obiter dicta . .
The whole of very slight importance
Stirling's Anacrisis . .
48 Ben Jonson: his equipment.
His Prefaces, &c. . . .
The Drummond Conversations *
The Discoveries . . .
Form of the book . .
54 Its date . . . . .
Mosaic of old and new . .
The fling at Montaigne . .
At Tamerlane. . . .
58 The Shakespeare passage . .
59 And that on Bacon
59 General character of the book
45
46
6
57
INTERCHAPTER I. .
.
.
93
CHAPTER III.
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Dead water in English Criticism . 105 | Its setting and overture . . . 116
Milton . . . .
105 Crites for the Ancients . . . 117
Cowley . . .
106 Eugenius for the “last age" . . 118
The Prefatory matter of Gondibert. 107 Lisideius for the French . . . 118
The "Heroic Poeni" .
108 Dryden for England and Liberty, 119
Davenant's Examen . .
109 Coda on rhymed plays, and con-
Hobbes's Answer. . ..
110 clusion .
Dryden. . . .
111 Conspicuous merits of the piece . 121
His advantages . .
112 The Middle Prefaces . .' .
The Early Prefaces.
113 The Essay on Satire and the Dedi.
- I'he Essay of Dramatic Poesy 116 | cation of the Æneis . . .
CONTENTS.
.
ix
- 138
138
139
127
The Parallel of Poetry and Paint Sprat . . . .
ing . . . .
126 Edward Phillips . . .
The Preface to the Fables
126 His Theatrum Poetarum .
Dryden's general critical position . 126 Winstanley's Livés. . ,
His special critical method
Langbaine's Dramatic Poets.
Dryden and Boileau . . 129 Temple . . . . .
Rymer. ; . . . .
Bentley . . . . .
The Preface to Rapin . . 132 Collier's Short View . .
The Tragedies of the Last dge . 134 Sir T. P. Blount o . .. .
The Short View of Tragedy. . 135 | Periodicals: The Athenian Mere
The Rule of Tom the Second . . 137 | cury, &c. . . . .
140
140
741
141
142
144
131
146
INTERCHAPTER II. , .
;
. 147,
L
CHAPTER IV.
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
167
203
170
207_
174
176
Criticism at Dryden's death. . 159 | Trapp . . . . . . 195
-- Bysshe's Art of English Poetry . 159 Blair . . .
195
Gildou . . . .
196
.
162 The Lectures on Rhetoric ..
Welsted . . . . . 163 The Dissertation on Ossian , 197
Dennis . . . . . 164 Kames . . . . . 198
On Rymer
165 The Elements of Criticism . . 199
On Shakespeare
Campbell . . . . .
On “Machines” .
168 The Philosophy of Rhetoric, . 203
His general theory of Poetry. 168 Harris . . . . . . . 206
Addison . . . .
The Philological Enquiries . .
The Account of the Best known “ Estimate " Brown: his History of
English Poets . ..
171 Poetry . . . . . 209
The Spectator criticisms. . 173 Johnson: his preparation for criti-
On True and False Witir .
cism . . . .
210
On Tragedy. . . .
174 The Rambler on Milton . . . 213
On Milton . .
On Spenser . .
215
The “Pleasures of the Imagina On History and Letter-writing 216
tion". . . .. .
On Tragi-comedy.
216
His general critical value
180
"Dick Minim” .
217
Steele . . . . .
181 Rasselas . . .
217
Atterbury · · · ·
The Shakespeare Preface
218
183 The Lives of the Poets .
219
The Battle of the Boolcs,
183 Their general merits . .. 220 V
The Tale of a Tub . .
184 The Cowley . . . . .
222
Minor works. .. .
184 The Milton . . .
222
Pope . . .
The Dryden and Pope . .
The Letters . . .
186 The Collins and Gray ..
224
The Shakespeare Preface
187 The critical greatness of the Lives
Spence's Anecdotes . . i 187 and of Johnson . . . . 226
The Essay on Criticism . . 188 Minor Criticism: Periodical and
The Epistle to Augustus . . 190
Remarks on Pope as a critic. . 190 Goldsmith , .
231
And the critical attitude of his group 193 Vicesimus Knox . . . . 232
Philosophical and Professional Critics 194 | Scott of Amwell . . . .
182
.......
185
223
other .
.
.
.
233
CONTENTS.
INTERCHAPTER III. .
.
.
.
. 235
CHAPTER V.
THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS OF ROMANTICISM.
247
.
249
254
The first group . . . . . 246
246 | Studies in Prosody . . . . 273
Mediæral reaction . . . 246 John Mason : his Power of Num-
Gray . . . .
bers in Prose and Poetry . . 274
Peculiarity of his critical position . 248 Mitford-his Harmony of Language 276
The Letters . . . . .. Importance of prosodic inquiry . 279
The Observations on Aristophanes Sterne and the stop-watch . . 279
and Plato · · · · · 25
Shaftesbury · ·
281
· ·
The Metrun .
.
253 Hume . . . .
. . 283
The Lydgate Notes . . . Examples of his critical opinions. 284
Shenstone . . .
256 His inconsistency . . . . 286
Percy . . . .
1. Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful 287
The Wartons . . . . 259 The Scottish æsthetic - empirics :
Joseph's Essay on Pope . . 259 Alison . . . . . .
The Adventurer Essays . . . 260 The Essay on Taste .
. 289
Thomas Warton on Spenser. . 261 Its confusions. . . . . .
His History of English Poetry 263 And arbitrary absurdities . . 291
Hurd : his Commentary on Addison 265 An interim conclusion on the æs-
The Horace . . .
266
thetic matter . . . .
The Dissertations . . . .
267 The study of Literature . . . 294
Other Works . . . . 268 The study of Shakespeare . . 295
The Letters on Chivalry and Ro Spenser . .
296
mance . . .
Chaucer.
297
Their doctrine .
. 269 | The Elizabethan minors . . 297
His real importance ..
Note : T. Hayward ..
Alleged imperfections of the group 272 | Middle and Old English .
.....
257 1
288
292
268
271
298
2098
INTERCHAPTER IV. . .
.
.
. 301
.
CHAPTER VI.
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES.
Wordsworth and Coleridge. .310 | Coleridge's examination of Words-
The former's Prefaces'
311 worth's views . ..
315
That to Lyrical Ballads, 1800 . 312. | His critical qualifications . . 316
Its history . . . . . 312 Unusual integrity of his critique. 317
The argument against poetic diction, Analysis of it. . . . . 317
and even against metre . . 313 The "suspension of disbelief” ..
The appendix: Poetic Diction again 314 Attitude to metre. .
The Minor Critical Papers . . 314 | Excursus on Shakespeare's Poems . 320v
318
318
CONTENTS.
on
357
358
367
327
328
.
.
320
331
330
332
333
Challenges Wordsworth on "real" Leigh Hunt: his somewhat inferior
and "rustic” life . . . 320 position . . . . 356
"Prose" diction and metre again. 321 Reasons for it. . . . . 356
Condemnation in form of Words-
His attitude to Dante . .
worth's theory. .
322 Examples from Imagination and
The Argumentum ad Gulielmum . 322 Fancy . . . . . .
The study of his poetry. . . 323 Hazlitt . . . . . . 361
High merits of the examination . 323 Method of dealing with him. . 361 :
Wordsworth a rebel to Longinus His surface and occasional faults:
and Dante . . . . . 324
Imperfect knowledge and method 362
The Preface compared more speci. Extra-literary prejudice . . . 363
ally with the De Vulgari . . 325 His radical and usual excellence : 364
And Dante's practice . . .
325 The English Poets . . . . 365
With Wordsworth's .
The Comic Writers . . . . 366
The comparison fatal to Words The Age of Elizabeth
worth as a critic . . . Characters of Shakespeare . 368
Other critical places in Coleridge. 328 The Plain Speaker . . .
369
The rest of the Biographia . . The Round Table, &c. .
371
The Friend . . . . . The Spirit of the Age
372
.
Aids to Reflection, &c. . .
Sketches and Essays . .
373
The Lectures on Shakespeare, &c. . Winterslow . . . .
373
Their chaotic character .
331 Hazlitt's critical virtue. . 373.-
And preciousness. .
In set pieces. .
374
Some noteworthy things in them : And universally . .
375
general
Blake . . .
· 376
And particular
334 His critical position and dicta . 377
Coleridge on other dramatists 334 The "Notes on Reynolds” .
The Table Tall . .
334 And Wordsworth. .
The Miscellanies . . . . 335 Commanding position of these 378
The Lecture On Style . . . 336
Sir Walter Scott commonly under.
The Anima Poetce . . .
valued as a critic . . .
The Letters . . ..
339 Injustice of this . .
381 .
. .
The Coleridgean position and qual Campbell: his Lectures on Poetry . 382
ity . . .
. . His Specimens . . . 382
He introduces once for all the Shelley : his Defence of Poetry
criterion of Imagination, realis Landor . . . .
386
ing and disrealising . . . 341 His lack of judicial quality . 386
The “Companions” .
342 In regular Criticism . . 386
Southey.
343 The Conversations . .
General characteristics of his Criti Loculus Aureolus . . .
cism . .
344 But again disappointing.
388
Reviews . .
345 The revival of the Pope quarrels 389
The Doctor .
345 | Bowles . . . . .
389
Altogether somewhat impar sibi 346
Byron . . .
391
. .
Lamb . . . .
347 The Letter to Murray, &c. . 391
His “occultisnı " . .
348 Others : Isaac Disraeli.
392
And alleged inconstancy . . 348 Sir Egerton Brydges .
393
The early Letters . . .
The Retrospective Review
393
The Specimens
350 The Baviad and Anti-Jacobin 396
The Garrick Play Notes . . . 351 With Wolcot and Mathias
Miscellaneous Essays . . ..
352 | The influence of the new Reviews,
Elic . . . . . .
&c. . . . . . .
398
The later Letters . . . 353 Jeffrey . . . . . . 399
Uniqueness of Lamb's critical style 354- His loss of place and its cause . 399
And thought . . . . . 355 | His inconsistency . . . .
337
380
340
384
387
388
.
.
349
.
.
352
400
xii
CONTENTS.
.
.
404
His criticism on Madame de | And defects . .
Staël . .
· 401 | In general distribution and treat-
Its lesson
403 ment . . . . . . 405
Hallam . . . . . .
403 In some particular instances. 406
His achievement . .
• 404 His central weakness . . • 407
Its merits
• 404 | And the value left by it. . . 408
INTERCHAPTER V. . .
.
.
. 409
CHAPTER VII.
BETWEEN COLERIDGE AND ARNOLD.
429
429
12
451
The English Critics of 1830-60 425 | His exceptional competence in some
Wilson . .
425 ways. . . . . . 443
Strange medley of his criticism . 426 The early articles . . . . 443
The Homer and the other larger His drawbacks . . . . 443
critical collections
426 The practical choking of the good seed 444
The Spenser . .
427 His literary surveys in the Letters, 445
The Specimens of British Critics i His confession . . . . 446
Dies Boreales . . . .
The Essays.
. . 446
Faults in all . . .
Similar dwindling in Carlyle . . 448
And in the republished work. 430 The earlier Essays . . . . 450
De Quincey: his anomalies ..
The later . . . . . 450
And perversities as a critic
432 The attitude of the Latter - day
In regard to all literatures
433 Pamphlets. .
Their causes . .
433 The conclusion of this matter . 452
The Rhetoric and the Style . . 434 Thackeray . . . . . 453
His compensations . .
435 His one critical weakness . 453
Lockhart
436 And his excellence. . . 454
Difficulty with his criticism . . 436 Blackwood in 1849 on Tennyson . 455
The Tennyson review not his . 436 George Brimley . . .
457
On Coleridge, Burns, Scott, and His Essay on Tennyson . . 458
Hook . . . . . . 437 His other work . . .
His general critical character. . 438 His intrinsic and chronological im.
Hartley Coleridge . . . . 438 portance . . . . .
Forlorn condition of his criticism .. 438 "Gyas and Cloanthus” . . 461
Its quality . . . .
439 Milman, Croker, Hayward
Defects . . . . .
Sydney Smith, Senior, Helps . 462
And examples . .
440
Elwin, Lancaster, Hannay .
463
Maginn . . . . .
440
| Dallas . . . . . .
464
His parody-criticisms. , 441 The Poetics .
·
464
And more serious efforts , · 441 The Gay Science . . . . 465
Macaulay . . . . . 443 | Others : J. S. Mill .
460
461
462
439
467
CHAPTER VIII..
ENGLISH CRITICISM FROM 1860–1900.
Matthew Arnold: one of the greater | The Preface of 1853 . . . 470
critics . . . .
Analysis of it. . . . . 470
His position defined early . . 469 | And interim summary of its gist , 473
.
. 468
CONTENTS.
.
.
474
475
500
483
484
Contrast with Dryden . . 4731 Pater
. . 497
Chair-work at Oxford, and contri His frank Hedonism .
498
butions to periodicals . . His polytechny and his style . . 498
On Translating Homer . . . His formulation of the new critical
“The grand style”. . . 475 attitude . . . . . 499
Discussion of it . .
476 The Renaissance . .
499
The Study of Celtic Literature . 479 Objections to its process . .
Its assumptions . .
480 Importance of Marius the Epicurean 500
The Essays : their case for Criticism 480 Appreciations and the Guardian
Their examples thereof . . 482 Essays
501
The latest work . . . . Universality of his method . . 504
The Introduction to Ward's English J. A. Symonds . .
504
Poets . . . . .
Thomson (“B. V.”)
.
.
505
. .
- Criticism of Life" .
484
William Minto :
· Poetic Subject or Poetic Moment . His books on English Prose and
Arnold's accomplishment and posi.
Poetry · · · · · 507
tion as a critic . . . .
H. D. Traill. . . .
507
.
The Carlylians . .
His critical strength . . . 508
Kingsley. .
. . .
491 On Sterne and Coleridge . . 508
Froude . . .
492 Essays on Fiction . . . .
Ruskin .
492 "The Future of Humour" . . 509
G. H. Lewes, ..
Others : Mansel, Venables, Stephen,
His Principles of Success in Litera-
Lord Houghton, Pattison, Church,
ture . . .
&c. . . . . . .
510
His Inner Life of Art . . . 495 Patmore. .
. . . . . 511
Bagehot . . . . .
495 Edmund Gurney . . . . 512
R. H. Hutton ...
496 The Power of Sound · · · 512
His evasions of literary criticism . 497 Tertium Quid. . . . 513
. 506
AK
.
.
490
.
509
493
493
CONCLUSION.
.
.
.
. 515 - .
APPENDIX.
THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
.
527
527
The holders . .
Eighteenth-century minors
Lowth . . .
Hurdis.
The rally: Copleston .
Couybeare . . .
Milman . . . .
Keble . . .
.
525 | The Occasional (English) Papers. 532
526 | The Prælections .
532
Garbett.
535
Claughton . . .
536
. 528 | Doyle ..
.
536
530
Shairp . . . . . 537
. 530 Palgrave . . . . .
6,38
531 Salutantur vivi . . . 539
.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
Besides the books on special authors, periods, and subjects which will
be found mentioned in the footnotes, the following general works of
reference may be tabulated here :-
(By the present writer.) A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in
Europe. 3 vols. Edinburgh and London, 1900-1904. The matrix of this
present volume.
(By the same.) Loci Critici. Boston, U:S. A., and London, 1903.
Gayley and Scott. Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary
Criticism. Boston, U.S.A., 1899.
Théry. Histoire des Opinions Littéraires. Paris, ed. 2, 1849.
Egger. Essai sur l'Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs. Paris., ed. 3, *---
1887.
Spingarn. History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. New York,
1899.
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH CRITICISM.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
THE DOCUMENTS OF CRITICISM WHEN ENGLISH PRACTICE IN IT BEGAN — EARLIEST
GREEK CRITICISM TO PLATO-ARISTOTLE : BIS GREAT IMPORTANCE-DRAWBACKS
TO IT LATER GREEK CRITICISM : THE 'DE INTERPRETATIONE'— DIONYSIUS OF
HALICARNASSUS — THE RHETORICIANS — PLUTARCH — LUCIAN — LONGINUS — HIS
PRINCIPLES AND MESSAGE -- THE GOSPEL OF TRANSPORT AND THE REJECTION
OF FAULTLESSNESS — PHOTIUS — LATIN CRITICISM — CICERO - HORACE : THE
'EPISTLE TO THE PISOS': ITS CONSUMMATE EXPRESSION — ITS PLAUSIBILITY —
ITS SUPERFICIAL, DESULTORY, AND ARBITRARY CHARACTER — OTHERS : PETRO-
NIUS - QUINTILIAN — GREAT MERITS OF HIS WORK GENERALLY -- INTERESTING
SHORTCOMINGS IN HIS JUDGMENT OF AUTHORS — LATER LATIN CRITICS OF THE
EMPIRE AND THE “DARK" AGES——BARRENNESS OF THE MIDDLE AGES—EXCEPT
DANTE — THE 'DE VULGARI ELOQUIO '— CRITICISM REVIVED IN ITALY AT THE
RENAISSANCE : THE STRICT NEO-CLASSICS : VIDA — THE INNOVATORS : PATRIZZI
-FRENCH CRITICISM—THE 'PLÉIADE'-EARLIEST GLIMMERINGS OF ENGLISH.
WHEN English literary criticism came (under the conditions
and circumstances to be stated in the next chapter) into an
o existence, tardy indeed, but not so very much
ments of crit- tardier than criticism in other modern languages,
in the subject itself was, of course, a very old one.
tice in it But though the documents of it, as a critic of the
began. mid-sixteenth century might know them, covered
something like two thousand years in dates of composition,
they were by no means evenly spread over that period. For
about half of it, indeed-say, roughly, the space covered by the
“Dark” and “Middle” Ages only, from a little after 500 A.D.
to a little before 1500_they were almost non-existent; the
few important exceptions will be noted later. But for seven
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
TY
or eight hundred continuous years, at least, in Greek and Latin
literature, they were abundant and various, while for some
forty or fifty years, at least, before the time of our English
beginning, they had been and were being produced in Italy.
Now classical literature was, in the opinion of every scholar of
the sixteenth century, the absolute canon of literature gener-
ally; and Italian was the modern literature which was
chiefly attracting subordinate study. Had not the labours of
Renaissance scholars and the printing-press together made
study of the classics not merely fashionable and almost imper-
ative but comparatively easy, English criticism might still
have lingered. Had not the Italians taken the subject up so
vigorously, it is certain that some--though it may be matter
of question how much—stimulus would have been lacking to
the prosecution of the new art.
But the Italians themselves, though they deviated more
widely than they knew or intended from classical principles
in some respects, never, at first, failed to start from the
classics. The “Ancient and Modern Quarrel” i did not arise
till the close of the sixteenth century or the beginning of
the next; and though men of intelligence (see the latter part
of this chapter) might be pretty early forced to acknowledge
that there were kinds of modern literature to which, inasmuch
as they had not existed in ancient times, ancient rules did
not apply, they themselves did not for some generations pro-
ceed to question the authority of these ancient rules in them-
selves. And in hardly any respect did the classical researches
and classical discoveries of the Renaissance provide so much
new matter, and treat it in so novel a fashion, as in regard to
the critical department of Greek and Latin letters. Idolised as
Aristotle had been in the Middle Ages, the Poetics had been
less studied than any other of his works, and the Rhetoric had
been obscured by later compilations. Plato had been little read,
and lay under suspicion of heresy. The great critic who is
usually called (and quite possibly was) Longinus, seems to have
been known to Greek contemporaries of Dante: but he exer-
cised no influence in the West till Robortelli printed him in
i V. inf., in the chapters concerning these centuries.
INTRODUCTORY.
inid-sixteenth century. The Greek rhetoricians were first made
accessible by Aldus. Horace had never been a very popular
author in the Middle Ages, and, with their knowledge of class-
ical literature, it was hardly possible to perceive the drift of the
Epistle to the Pisos. Quintilian was not completely known till
the beginning of the fifteenth century. But now all these and
others were eagerly studied, and a department of intellectual
exercise, which had before been absolutely unknown, or casu-
ally glimpsed only by men of the highest genius like Dante
and Chaucer, lay open. It was promptly occupied as far as
its ancient subjects went; and the exercise was almost as
promptly turned in application to the new literatures them-
selves.
The work so long neglected, and at last so greedily studied,
had certain general characteristics, not all of which were
equally applicable to the criticism of the newer
Greek critë- literatures. From a very early time it would seem
cism to that the restless intellect of the Greeks had de-
Plato.
voted itself to the subject, especially in reference
to the great national treasure of the Homeric poems. But,
very mainly owing, no doubt, to the absence of any other
literature for comparison—this study directed itself, as far as
the few and fragmentary remains of it that we possess go, to
questions of matter chiefly, and especially to the rather
dangerous division of allegorical interpretation. The growth
of oratory, however, and its political importance in the small
Greek communities, made technical analysis of “Rhetoric," and
instruction in it, a necessity. Rhetoric as necessarily involves,
and sometimes becomes almost identical with, Criticism, and as
the body of creative literature itself increased, it was impossible
that the Greek mind should not busy itself with that liter-
ature's forms and general phenomena. But neither the
Socrates of Plato nor the Socrates of Xenophon gives us the
idea of a man who would pay much attention to literary
criticism proper: all the more so because “the enemy”-the
Sophist-was, as a rule, a professional teacher of something
like it. And Plato himself, though one of the very greatest
men of letters of all time, and possessed of an intensely subtle
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
and powerful mind as well as of the keenest appreciation of
beauty, either caught from his master or developed for him-
self a positive aversion to poetry--then practically the only
original part of literature-as deceptive to the individual and
disastrous to the State. He in fact expresses, for the first
time, the curious mental attitude of distrust towards the pro-
ductions of great human art. And this has always held sway
over a large part of mankind since, though it has been expressed
by persons holding points of view so different from Plato's and
from each other's as those of all the Fathers of the Church and
some later orthodox theologians on the one side, and as the
Lollard and Puritan sectaries, with their English descendants,
on the other.
But if the greatest pupil of Socrates followed his master in a
direction antipathetic to criticism, the greatest pupil of Plato
Aristotle
te did not pursue a similar course. Despite his
his great im- ethical preoccupations, there is in Aristotle--if we
portance. except, perhaps, his attitude to Comedy and to mere
style-no sign of contempt or distrust in respect of literature.
The object of Poetry is to please by “imitating” nature; the
object of Oratory (hardly any other division of prose was yet
really recognised) is to "persuade,” but persuasion is largely
affected by the appropriate selection and arrangement of words.
In the Poetics and the Rhetoric we get these general principles
elaborated and applied after a fashion which laid down once for
all some of the greatest doctrines of criticism. The adequacy,
if not the accuracy, of his famous definition of tragedy, to be
found below, is still, and always must be, matter of controversy;
and so also must be his assignment of overpowering preponder-
ance to the "fable” or “action," his comparative depreciation
of character, and the like. But, on the other hand, the widest
changes of style in drama have only established more solidly
1 “Tragedy is an imitation of some
action that is serious, entire, and of
some magnitude, by language em
bellished and rendered pleasurable,
but by different means in different
parts in the way, not of narration,
but of action, effecting through pity
and terror the purgation of such [al.
these '] passions.” On the diffi-
culties of the word "purgation," and
indeed on the whole subject, see
Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry
and Fine Art, 3rd ed. London, 1902.
INTRODUCTORY.
his doctrine that the essence of tragic situation consists, not so
much in crime or in mere misfortune as in a certain “failing”
or "frailty,"1 perhaps not very bad in itself, but leading in
some cases to crime, in all to misfortune. Such, again, is his
recognition-constantly forgotten but essential to real criticism
—that each literary kind, if not each literary production, has
its “ peculiar pleasure,"? which, and which only, you are
entitled to demand from it. While in prose criticism, among
many other notable dicta, he has, in the same way, once
for all established the distinction between “staple"3 words,
which provide clearness and perspicuity,“foreign" or "strange"
words, which strike, affect, and elevate. Already we find in
him that irreconcilable objection to “frigidity,” bombast, &c.,
which distinguishes all ancient criticism; while sometimes he
flies higher and achieves a great philosophical as well as critical
truth, in opposition to Plato, by declaring that poetry is more
really “philosophical ” than history, and that a probable impos-
sibility can be more artistic and satisfactory than a possibility
which is not made probable.
But great as the advance apparently made by Aristotle was;
fundamental as (in a manner) his work must always be ;
almost imperative as it is that some direct know-
Drawbacks ledge of that work should precede any inquiries into
to it.
the later criticism which sometimes directly rests
on him and always touches questions first, as far as is known,
by him mooted there are two grave drawbacks, each of which
has done harm almost to the present day. The first arises
from the fact that, careful and philosophical as was Aristotle's
induction, it was almost inevitably based upon existing Greek
literature only, and is in fact based, in so far as we have it, not
even on the whole of that. When Dryden (v. inf.) said that
“if Aristotle had seen ours [i.e., our form of tragedy] he might
have changed his mind,” he not only hit a fatal blow against part,
but made a damaging innuendo against the whole of the great
Stagirite's criticism. When Aristotle wrote he had before him
abundant supplies of a certain kind of Tragedy and of a certain
kind of Comedy; but the kind of the tragedy was unnecessarily
1 &uaptía.
2 οικεία ηδονή.
3 kúpia and féva.
f
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
strict in one way and that of the comedy unnecessarily loose in
another. He had plenty of Epic, which unfortunately we have
not got, though we have the most important pieces; but most
of this epic again appears to have been of one type only. He
had great lyric--some of the greatest in the world's literature ;
but he says little about it, and one somehow gathers that he would
not have set it very high. He had again some, if not much, of
the very greatest history in the world: you can hardly go
beyond Thucydides in one direction; beyond Herodotus, and
perhaps even Xenophon, in another. But he deals with it,
directly, not at all. Worst of all, he probably had nothing that
can properly be called prose fiction—a few short tales, “mimes,"
&c., being the only possible exceptions. From this came the
disproportionate importance that he ascribes in poetry to the
mere fiction, the nere “imitation," as if it and nothing else were
poetry. He is, in fact, dealing with a literature magnificent
in partial accomplishment, but not (to use an excellent phrase
of De Quincey's) “ fully equipped,” and he is not dealing even
with the whole of what that literature gives him. Hence at
least a risk of error as to things that he sees, and almost
certainly of deception when his dealings are applied to other
things which he had not seen.
The other drawback-one which may not at first seem to
have much connection with the first, but which really works
together with it, disadvantageously, on nearly all ancient
criticism-is that Aristotle never, as a matter of fact, gives us
what in modern terms may be called an “appreciation” of a
single book, much less of a single author. We may find refer-
ences to books and authors, but they are always incidental and
illustrative, never thorough-going and all-embracing. It is
"the kind” in poetry, the several devices of the craft in
rhetoric, wherein he is interested. It is true that he never-he
was both too much of a philosopher and too much of a critic
to do so, even if he had not, by date and circumstance,
been spared such temptation - pushes this system, of
criticism by kinds or title-labels, to the damnatory extreme
of the neo-classics, who falsely alleged his principles in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But he goes near to it
INTRODUCTORY.
UT
sometimes, and the negative fault of nowhere giving a real
critical estimate of play or poem, of poet or prose - writer,
attaches itself to him throughout. And this drawback pursues
ancient criticism : with some exceptions, it is never entirely
removed. Dionysius of Halicarnassus to some extent, Quintilian
(perhaps relying on Dionysius), and Longinus nost of all, are
exceptions, but they are almost the only ones of importance.
Now even Johnson, no Romantic or rebel to the Classics, added to
the title of his projected but never written History of Criticism
the words, as it relates to Judging of Authours; and there can
be little doubt that this judging of "authours” and of books,
sometimes as preliminary to such judgment, sometimes as
sufficient in itself, is the most profitable and the most pleasant
part of the whole matter, if it is not even that matter's whole
end and aim.
The order of descent by pupilship is said to have been
further illustrated in the case of Theophrastus, the chief
disciple of Aristotle, in regard to criticism ; but the
Later Greek
criticism :
few and well-known remains which we have of his
The De work do not touch the subject. He has, how-
Interpre-
ever, been credited with the useful but tolerably
ta tione.
obvious division of styles into ornate, plain, and
middle. Nor have we much representing the later Greek age
before Christ. There are, however, two exceptions of note
the book usually called De Interpretatione, but more boldly
re-christened by its latest and best editor and translator,
Professor Roberts, On Style.S Perhaps this is going a little
too far, and “Of Expression ” would be the best rendering.
It is practically a rhetorical treatise on “ Composition," now
busying itself about very simple points of an almost schoolboy
kind, now ascending higher. But it seldom touches on really
critical questions, and still more seldom on criticism of partic-
ular books and authors. It used to be attributed to Demetrius
the Phalerean, a man famous both in letters and politics, and
it would so have come pot much later than Aristotle himself.
i All, or at least most, of what
there is will be duly found discussed
in the larger History of Criticism.
? Tepi è provelas.
3 Cainbridge, 1902.
· ENGLISH CRITICISM.
na.
But it is pretty certainly Alexandrian, though the practically
"common" name “Demetrius” has been kept for its author.
The busy literary courtiers of the Ptolemies must have dealt
largely with critical matters : it seems certain that the original
suggester of the doctrines of Horace's Epistle to the Pisos -
was a certain Neoptolemus of Parium, also Alexandrian; but.
we have no solid remains even of the grammarians and textual
critics who made Alexandria so famous,
On the other hand, the works by or ascribed to Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, a teacher of rhetoric and historian who lived
Dionysius at Rome from 50 B.C. to 7 B.C., are of the greatest
of Halicar, interest and importance, and rank with those of
S. Aristotle and Longinus as furnishing the chief
storehouse of Greek criticism proper. The remarks of
Dionysius on style and composition generally show much
originality, and we have from him the first distinct acknow-
ledgment of the immense importance of actual words, even of
actual letters. But he is almost of more value as giving us
detailed examinations of critical writers, some at length, as
of Plato, Thucydides, and Demosthenes, others more frag- !
mentary but precious, inasmuch as some of them are on
authors now lost.3
It does not matter that these estimates are sometimes
injured by the tendency of all times to regard, and be guided
by, sympathy with substance rather than appreciation of form,
and by the special parochialism of the Greeks. This leads-
Dionysius, as a Halicarnassian, to exalt Herodotus, his towns-
man, at the expense of Thucydides; just as it later led
Plutarch, a Bæotian, to depreciate Herodotus as too little
favourable to his countrymen. We cannot be too grateful to
Dionysius for such observations-truisms in a way, like all
observations worth making, but constantly ignored to the
present day-as that “ beautiful words are the cause of beauti-
ful phrase"; that “no rhythm whatsoever is banished from
* In fact, the whole body of ancient been edited, with annotations, by
Scholia on Greek, and Commentaries Prof. Roberts (Cambridge, 1901).
on Latin, literature is singularly bare 3 Extracts from Dionysius will be
of oriticism proper,
found in Loci Criticia
9 His Three Literary Letters have
INTRODUCTORY.
unmetred composition"; that Plato's style combines pel-
lucid freshness with peculiar charm of archaism ; that the
noblest style is that which has the greatest variety. We
owe him the actual quotation of Sappho's hymn to Aphrodite,
and of the only considerable passage we possess of Pindar's
Dithyrambic. And if we agree with him less here, we can
learn almost as much, and be almost as grateful for the
learning, from his repeated expression-in regard to Plato-
of that horror of gorgeousness in prose style which is so
characteristic of the ancients.
His successors in Greek criticism must be despatched
briefly, for we are here only concerned with the more im-
portant influences and supplies of matter which they could
furnish to English criticism when it started, or had furnished
to that Italian criticism which was to be so powerful on all
its modern successors. .
Of these, the whole mass of the strictly “rhetorical" writers
must be briefly set aside. They had, it has been said, no small
influence, by their publication at the Aldine press,
The Rheto-
O in determining the general resurrection of criticism:
ricians.
but they could give little assistance in detail, and
the chief special subject to which they helped to draw atten-
tion that of Figures—had much more bane than antidote in
it. Plutarch has, in his miscellaneous writings, a
Plutarch.
***e great deal of ostensibly critical or semi - critical
matter, and has been put forward by some as a possible
author of the great little book attributed (v. inf.) to Longinus.
But, except in the way of general exhortation to the study of
literature, made even then from a wrong point of view, it is
almost impossible to discover any real critical stuff in him.
The moral prepossession dominates everywhere. It is dif-
-
? They will be found fully treated
in the original History.
2 In one, half rhetorician, half
bellettrist, Philostratus (c. 200), occurs
a remarkable definition of partagia,
Imagination, as "fashioning what one
has not seen, supposing and conceiving
it on the analogy of the Real,” There
is nothing in any other ancient--not
even in Plato, not even in Longinus-
so like the Imagination of Shakespeare
in the famous " of Imagination all
compact,” and of Coleridge, v. inf.
(For Addison and his Imagination, v.
inf. likewise.)
10
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
Lucian.
ferent with Lucian. One of the shrewdest of men, possessed
himself of an admirable gift of writing; a trained rheto-
rician, though a deserter (not without good reason,
selle as 'things went) from Rhetoric's service; a born
miscellanist too, and a magazine-writer and reviewer a
millennium and a half before magazines and reviews
existed, — it would have been amazing if Lucian had not
touched the subject. He did: and the Vera Historia is partly
criticism of “wonder” voyages and travels; the Lexiphanes
a satire on accepted and outlandish phraseology; the "How
History should be Written” a half sober, half ironic tractate of
advice. “The Master of the Orators" and "The Twice-accused
Man" are skits on his old profession; and the very curious
little piece entitled “To one who said 'You are the Pro-
metheus of Prose,'” a tantalising but entirely baffling dis-
cussion of the writer's own attitude in Dialogue and literature
generally. In no author is this critical attitude more omni-
present than in Lucian; and from hardly any can a reader,
whom gods have made critical himself, learn more. But as a
direct teacher of the subject he can hardly be said to exist.
The greatest of late Greek critics --- a critic as great as
Aristotle, though in a slightly different kind — was the
author of the treatise commonly called on the
Longinus.
nusSublime, and long identified with Longinus, the
Minister of Zenobia. Of the doubts (sometimes too peremp-
torily turned into positive denials) of this identification, it is
not necessary to say any more here than that the evidence
for it is very weak, but that the evidence against it, of a
kind really to be called evidence, is non-existent. And the
contingent question whether the date is the first century
after Christ as some think, or that of Longinus (A. c. 250 A.D.)
himself, is of still less importance. The book, from its
references, cannot be earlier than the period of the Roman
1 IIepi "Tryous. The best edition of an Introduction by Mr A. Lang (Lon.
the Greek (with translation) is that of don, 1890) and by Mr A. O. Prickard
Prof. Rhys Roberts, uniform with (Oxford, 1906). The present writer
other books recently mentioned (Cam- has selected and translated the most
bridge, 1899). There are also valuable important passages in Loci Critici.
English versions by Mr H. R. Havell, with
I
.
INTRODUCTORY.
CD
Empire; how late it may be in that period is, from internal
evidence, quite uncertain. The only fact of importance for
us is that here – in Greek of a curious and rather difficult
but not barbarous type, and showing on the one hand a
knowledge of all classical Greek literature, on the other
a state of society such as only existed in the first three
centuries of the Christian era --- is a critical treatise which
adopts a remarkably different standpoint from that of almost
all its predecessors, and contains some of the most admirable
critical utterances to be found in all literature.
The great and distinguishing note of Longinus is that his
main critical object is “appreciation ” — the quest after the
Diemmin. great principle or quality of “Sublimity” and
ciples and the enjoyment of the “transport" which it causes.
message. It is on this quality that he lays his finger from
the first. It had been admitted, though by no means uni-
versally, that Art should delight, but almost always with
a caveat that it must at the same time instruct or profit.
Longinus cuts off this caveat, and insists wholly and solely
on the transport—the ecstasy-caused by great literary art.
He is not, indeed, wholly and unintelligibly "modern,”-he
would not be half so interesting or a tithe as important if
he were,—but he is surprisingly so. He still lays, and could
hardly but lay, if he was (as the historical Longinus
certainly was) a rhetorical teacher, stress—too much stress-
on the “Figures,” not only as useful tickets of nomenclature,
but as positive self-existing agents in the production of
Sublimity. He still has the excessive terror of gorgeous
style-of language poetically figurative in the other sense, and
the like. And, most noteworthy of all, though his usual
judgments are startlingly like our own, he is uncompronis-
ingly “ancient” in his dislike to the “Romantic" elements-the
adventures, the marvels, and so forth-of the Odyssey. Hence
he is no portent or sport, dissociated from his time and kind
by irreconcilable differences. He is simply one who has “gone
up higher,”—has transcended (like his own Sublime) the lower
rules, and roamed beyond the narrow inductions of his pre-
decessors; who has, above all, discovered that it is only the
I
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
intermediate business, if even that, of the critic to frame
rules and kinds for the production of great literature,—that
it is his highest and main business to enjoy and examine
the great literature that has been produced, and so to aid the
enjoyment of it by others.
Of this exaltation of view-point and alteration of attitude
his little book - it is, unfortunately, not only truncated at
The gospel the end, but presents numerous large and lament-
of Trans- able gaps in its actual continuity-provides con-
port and the stant
rejection of
estant examples. The substitution of “transport” for
Faultless- the old rhetorical shibboleth of“ persuasion” comes
ness,
at the very beginning, and would almost suffice of
itself. The decreased insistence on mere story or subject,
he does, of course, admit and insist that great thoughts will
make for great expression, but does not take it as matter of
course that they will effect it—is another. His heightening
of the expressions of Dionysius 1 into the final doctrines that
“ beautiful words are the very light of thought,” and that
critical judgment is "the last acquired fruit of long en-
deavour,” put, finally, important and, up to his time (whatever
it was), mostly neglected truths. Although all the best
critics had laid some proper stress on rhythmical harmony
in prose as well as verse, no one had been quite so emphatic
on the subject as he is. But the most important thing,
perhaps, to be noticed in his treatise, from the point of view
of critical progress, is its rejection-its positive treading
under foot — of “faultlessness” as a criterion of perfection.
For though it is not to be supposed for a moment that the
greater ancient critics -- that such a man as Aristotle, for
instance-would have definitely inculcated mere faultlessness
as constituting perfection, yet it cannot be denied that the
whole tendency of classical criticism-including, perhaps, some
of Longinus's own in the instance noted above-is in this
direction. The provision of large numbers of positive rules
inevitably suggests—to the feebler minds, at any rate—that if
0
i One of the conjectural attributions
in the MSS. is to “Dionysius” the
Halicarnassian being not so named,
though probably intended. But it is
a mere guess, with "Longinus” or
“Anon." for suggested alteruatives.
INTRODUCTORY.
13
you do not break these rules it will be all right with you.
The nervous terror of excess has an even stronger influence
in the same direction.
But Longinus, though he may have shared this last to
some extent, did not allow himself to be influenced by
it here; and more or less elaborately prefers the “faulty”
Homer, Sophocles, Demosthenes, Plato, 'to the “faultless”
Apollonius, Ion, Hypereides, Lysias. Now, as the reader
will see at once, this of itself involves judging of the
books in themselves and by the effect they produce, not
by reference to previously constructed rules of fault and
beauty.
Of later Greek criticism little need be said. The late
rhetoricians-Libanius, Themistius, Julian the Apostate, and
others-give not much in amount and still less in positive
. value; and from Byzantine times the really re-
Photius.
markable Bibliotheca of the Patriarch Photius (late
ninth century) is almost the only book that need be men-
tioned. From the special point of view of influence, indeed,
these writers hardly require notice here. Even Longinus,
though published in mid-sixteenth century, did not exercise
much till late in the seventeenth, when, by one of the oddest
coups of Fortune, he was taken up, translated, and treated
as an authority by the critic of the world (among persons not
dunces), who was probably most alien from him in spirit,
purpose, and creed-by Boileau.
Criting
The intrinsic importance of the Latin criticism which the
men of the English Renaissance had, or might have had, before
them is very much smaller than that of the Greek ;
Latin
liem and what it has is, as in other cases, almost wholly,
and not always intelligently, borrowed from Greek
itself. But it was handier of application, and so it happened
that, while Quintilian and Seneca and others almost dominated
the stubborn intelligence of Ben Jonson, Horace's medley of
secondhand and arbitrary dogma in the Epistle to the Pisos took
1 The reason why Photius appears is
that he gives us a large amount of in-
teresting estimate of books--especially
valuable considering his date.
14
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
early effect, and became pure gospel to the late seventeenth
and most of the eighteenth century.
Latin criticism itself began as late as might be expected,
and even later. There seems to have been hardly anything
deserving the name before. Varro, of whose work
Orcero. in the kind we have practically nothing left, and
Cicero, from whom we have a great deal, naturally enough
devoted mainly to his own division of oratory, but amounting
to very little in substance. Most of it is--again naturally
enough—concerned with actual technical rhetoric, and we have
seen that while this might promise something, it performed
very little for real literary criticism. Of his most famous and
interesting critical dictum of the proper kind, in reference to
his own contemporary, Lucretius, the text is uncertain and
the interpretations of that text hopelessly contradictory. And
the most interesting thing that can be extracted from him is
a list (which has been actually drawn up) of Latin technical
critical terms corresponding to those which had been previ-
ously evolved into something like a regular critical vocabulary
by the Greeks.
When, however, we pass from Cicero to Horace, the case is
not a little altered. There are numerous passages of criticism
cem in the Satires and Epistles, but they all yield in
The Epistle interest, and may even be said to be subsumed in
s substance, when we turn from them to the above-
its con-
summate ex- mentioned Epistle to the Pisos, commonly, unjusti- :
pression. fiably, and in almost every sense unfortunately
termed the Ars Poetica. Unjustifiably, for there is no evidence
that Horace ever called it so, and very little likelihood that so
shrewd a person, so well versed in the ways of the world,
Hon:
to t
i Ep. ad Quintum, ii. 11 (or 9):
Lucretii poemata, ut scribis, ita sunt i
multis luminibus ingenii multce tamen
artis. This is said to be the MS.
reading, and but for the stumbling
block of tamen would be wholly laud-
atory. But in that case tamen is
almost impossible to admit with its
usual meaning of "adversative quali-
fication”: and most editors, till re-
cently, have supposed that a non must
have slipped out either before multis
or before multce.
The present writer has inserted a
translated cento of this in Loci Critici,
The verse translations of Jonson and
of Lord Roscommon are in a inanuer
classics, and prose ones abound.
INTRODUCTORY.
15
would have attached such an ampulla of a title to a slight
tissue of hints on Dramatic Composition, thrown together in
what his own adorers in the eighteenth century might have
called an elegant dishabille, as by. a gentleman of parts and
spirit speaking to gentlemen of the like. But its singular
clarity and felicity of expression—the very triumph, on the
less poetical side, of its author's gifts in that way,—and the
manner in which it puts, with that confident and unhesitating
though urbane dogmatism which has such an effect on the
common run of readers, the opinions on the subject, and the
typical method of arriving at those opinions, common during
the whole classical period—these things naturally made it all-
powerful with the neo-classics. You wanted "rules," and you
had them here, in a form giving no trouble to the memory and
attractive to the taste, put forth, not by a mere “preceptist”
but by a craftsman of unsurpassed competence in more than
one branch of poetry itself, with no insolent dictation or irri.
tating pedantry, but in an easy take-for-granted manner, which
it might seem at once insolent and pedantic to resist.
The little piece is, indeed, full of plausible generalities, put
(as must again be noted) with the most unsurpassable and
hardly imitable literary neatness. Who can deny
$i- that “inconsistent things must not be joined"; that
excess of any quality is dangerous, and attempts at
constant variation teasing; that you should choose subjects
suitable to your strength; not endeavour to say everything you
can think of; stick (not without a little gentle attempt at
originality) to accepted diction and metre; abstain from dis-
gusting subjects; try to instruct or delight, or both? It is
true that all this is exceedingly obvious,—obvious (sometimes,
at any rate) not with the true and great obviousness noticed
above, but with a kind of superficiality which, when stripped of
Horace's exquisite expression, looks half puerile and half anile.
But, with that expression especially, it sounds exactly fitted to
provoke the sentiment which Tennyson has so excellently
formulated
“I thowt ’a said whot ’a owt to 'a said,"
and to encourage a mild intellectual satisfaction.
1
bility.
16
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
Yet when other passages—or even some of these same pass-
ages with context and second consideration — are studied,
Ite sommer perhaps the effect is not quite so satisfactory. In
ficial, desul- the first place, the whole is seen to be extremely
tory, desultory. There is not, as in Aristotle, any theory
of drama presented; and though there is, as in Aristotle and
on larger basis, a sort of induction from existing dramas as to
what will and will not“ do,” it is in the highest degree frag-
mentary and casual. But the greatest and most pervading
drawback is the extraordinary arbitrariness of many, indeed of
most, of the special precepts.
For instance, why lay down (without reason given except
as to usage) that certain metres have been irrevocably and
are finally assigned to certain kinds of poetry? Why
bitrary declare that the personages of mythology-Achilles,
character. Medea, &c.—are always to be presented in the same
way? Still worse (for some fight might be made, in the cases
just mentioned, for preserving types already famous in art),
why assign a slavish uniformity to ages, classes, &c., and in-
sist that boys shall always be boys, old men always testy and
avaricious, &c. For it is this which leads directly to such
ineffable absurdities as Rymer's contention that Iago ought not
to have been represented as a crafty traitor, because he is a :
soldier, and soldiers are always frank and open,
And the habit hardens on him. Why must plays always
have five acts, no more and no less? Why may there not be
a “tetragonist”? The experience of ages has shown that,
though it must be carefully managed, a murder on the stage
need not excite disgust; and that so far from “keeping out of
sight what can be presently narrated,” you will be much better
advised in keeping in sight whatever you can, and curtailing
mere narration as much as possible.
In short, Horace shows, with every possible advantage of
form but to considerable disadvantage of substance when care-
fully studied, the strictest classic, nay, neo-classic, creed of
order, restraint, positive rule.
There is, in proportion, far more critical matter, both of an
indirect and a direct purtenance, in post - Augustan than in
INTRODUCTORY.
earlier Latin; and the satiric poets-Juvenal to some extent,
Persius and Martial still more—are full of it. There is also a
good deal in the elder Seneca, some in Pliny, and
Others—
at least two passages in the Satyricon of Petronius
Petronius.
which attracted attention from the critics of the
seventeenth century. But most of the references which would
bear out this statement are so fragmentary, scattered, and in
their individual value minute, that it would be impossible to
give them in detail, and rather useless to summarise them here.1
It may, however, be said generally that while they indicate the
general tone of tendency mentioned above, they give us evidence
of a strong bent in the Roman taste, when it took to literature
at all, towards a semi-barbaric gorgeousness which was the
reverse of Attic.
But the most important Latin document of this period—the
most important document, indeed, of the whole of Latin
criticism—is furnished by the Oratorical Institutions
Quintilian.
11or Institutes of Oratory of Quintilian. It may in-
deed be said that a man's competence in criticism itself may
almost be measured by the estimate he holds of this remark-
· able book. It is not precisely a work of genius : its intentions
were too strictly practical for that. But it is the work of a
master in his own craft, who to professional knowledge and
practical experience added unusual common-sense, a sufficient
dose of originality, a saving sense of humour, acuteness, freedom
from any blinding or paralysing partiality, with at the same
time a sensible though not extravagant patriotism in regard to
the literature of his own country.
To those who have not read the book the oratorical pre-
cont monita occupation may seem likely to do harm,-indeed,
of his worke it has been said already more than once that
generally. Oratory and Rhetoric, while encouraging the exist-
ence, did somewhat damage the quality and range, of ancient
1 They will be found cited and dis- favourite one at Rome), but inculcate
cussed in the larger History. The the doctrine of furor poeticus, which
passages from the Satyricon are trans- was much taken up by the earlier nec, s
lated in full in Loci Critici. These classics to give licence to the restriction
latter condemn the practice of declama of their "rules,” but discountenanced
tions on imaginary subjects (a very by the later.
Grie
18
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
criticism. But Rhetoric had long acquired the nearly complete
sense of “literary education," and Quintilian's identification of
good writing and good speaking, though it may or may not be
excessive from the oratorical side, is wholly advantageous from
the literary. His description of a good Professor of Oratory is
applicable, with hardly a word changed, to a good reviewer or
critic; his judgments of Greek or Latin writers, whether
original or not, whether wholly sound or not, are almost
purely literary; his remarks on the linguistic peculiarities of
Greek and Latin, as contrasted with each other, are 'wholly
connected with literary effect; and while, of course, portions
(and large portions) of his work are of professional and technical
bearing only, almost the whole of the last five books might be
separated and (with nothing but verbal changes) made into a
Treatise of Criticism. On Figures Quintilian, though he may
pay disproportionate attention to them, still is perfectly aware
of the danger of the actually and constantly committed fault of
separating off some quite ordinary fashion of speech, ticketing
it with a long Greek name, and thenceforward regarding the
ticket as something real, the attaching of which to similar
phrases is an illuminative and profitable exercise of the critical
faculty.1 His remarks on the old divisions of style are sensible;
his criticism of Seneca the Younger--who represented the very
opposite school of writing to his own-is one of the fairest of
such things that we have from any ancient; and, in fact, his
whole voluminous work is full of enlightenment, judgment,
and intellectual instruction generally.
The chief point in which Quintilian comes short is the point
in which nearly all ancient critics except Longinus do come
.. short, the “judging of authors,” especially poets,
Interesting
ricomings from the appreciative point of view. That he to
in his judg- some extent subordinates his criticism to the
ment of Bob
authors.
rhetorical value of the author concerned is no
great matter. It was natural, it was constantly
done; and, odd as it seems to us, it was pushed to the most
extravagant extent by both Greeks (especially with regard to
1 His earlier observation that “it from Figures of Speech,” is also a far-
is often difficult to distinguish Faults reaching one, and worth meditating.
show
INTRODUCTORY.
19
Homer) and Latins (especially by Macrobius in regard to
Virgil). But we are somewhat disappointed, though not exactly
surprised, especially if we remember Longinus's selection of
this poet as a “faultless" foil to Homer, when we find that
Apollonius Rhodius has only “an evenly sustained mediocrity.”
For the charm of the Rhodian is a distinctly Romantic charm,
and to this (since even Longinus could be insensible to it in the
greater instance of the Odyssey) we could not expect Quintilian
to be open. The point of view is again obvious, again dis-
appointing, again instructive, when we find Theocritus allowed
to be admirable as far as he goes, but patronisingly dismissed
as “rustic and pastoral.” Alcæus “descends to amorous
subjects," Æschylus is bombastic and extravagant.
But the Greek judgments may be- to some extent they
certainly are–traditional: the Latin must be awaited with
more interest, as likely to be more at first hand. Disappoint-
ment, it is to be feared, will come here too. Virgil is not over-
praised-in fact, not merely the Virgiliomaniacs of the Renais-
sance, but some more modern adorers of the Mantuan, might
think Quintilian half-hearted. If he is, as some might expect,
nearer to Renaissance monomania on the prose side in his.
Ciceronianism, it is very pardonable. He is far from being as
enthusiastic as he might be about Ovid on the one hand, or
about Plautus on the other. But the sharpest, though very
far indeed from the most unexpected, contrast with modern
ideas is to be found in reference to Catullus and to Lucretius.
That Horace should be praised, and praised highly, is inevit-
able and well deserved ; but when we find that he is almost
the only Roman lyric poet worth reading, and that Catullus is
only mentioned for his “bitter iambics”-j.e., satires—then the
difference of the point of view does come before us unmis-
takably. And, on the other hand, that Lucretius-that the
furor arduus Lucreti which Statius, a contemporary of Quin-
tilian's and a poet, had covered himself with glory and almost
deserved his Middle-Age popularity by defending-should be
dismissed with the mere ticket “difficult” pinned to him,- this
is the most eloquent item in the whole catalogue of judgments.
It is pretty certain that Quintilian disapproved of the poet's
20
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
philosophical and religious ideas; it is pretty certain also, from
his remarks about Ennius and Plautus himself, that he did not
like his archaisms of language. The matter of even the De
Rerum Natura, putting these things aside, is certainly not
always "easy." And the poetry, as poetry, does not strike
Quintilian at all.
After Quintilian, the importance and interest of Latin
critical writing diminishes, if it does not actually come to
an end. Aulus Gellius and Macrobius provide
Later Latin
critics of the us
me us with a good deal of critical matter, not of
Empire and much value; and we continue to get indirect sup-
"plies from the poets, such as Ausonius. Moreover,
Ages.
there is a certain bulk, but not nearly so large
as that in Greek, of directly rhetorical writing, including a
treatise (pretty certainly spurious) assigned to St Augustine,
who was actually a teacher of the subject. On the verge
of the so-called “Dark” Ages, or over it, we have documents
of a certain attraction, because they show us the way in
which literary appreciation died off into the almost
absolute trance which we find in the “Middle” Ages. Such
are the numerous critical observations of the poet - bishop,
Sidonius Apollinaris, and the allegorical treatise on the Seven
Liberal Arts (among them very particularly Rhetoric) of
Martianus Capella, which retained a certain vogue for a
good thousand years. Both are of the fifth century. Later
still (sixth century), we find curious but substantially value-
less examples of indulgence in criticism based upon false
etymology, and mythology hopelessly muddled, from a group
of writers bearing, with various additions, the name of
“Fulgentius”; and a little from the theologian-encyclopædist
Isidore of Seville and the poet Venantius Fortunatus, both
of whom lived into the seventh century; while there is some-
thing of the sort in the “Venerable” Bede, who did not die
till the eighth had seen its first generation. We find, as the
various barbarian or at least provincial elements begin to
leaven the lump of the decaying Roman Empire, an increasing
taste for not very well chosen gorgeousness of language, an
increasing attention to the mere technical details of Rhetoric,
INTRODUCTORY.
21
and an increasing fancy for chasing the will-o'-the-wisps of
ethical - allegorical interpretation; but at the same time an
ever - decreasing grasp of anything that can be called real
criticism.
In the Middle Ages proper this grasp has relaxed itself
to such an extent that for the most part it hardly even
attempts to touch its object. A few technical
Barren-
ness of the treatises exist, and we meet, now and then, a
Middle more or less banal expression of approval of a
Ages.
writer. Even the earliest dawn of the Renaissance
in Italy and the renewed study (from at any rate textual
and subject points of view) of the classical authors, give us
little, if anything, of the kind; and from the year 1000 A.D.
-the rather imaginary line between “Dark” and “Middle”-
to the beginning of the sixteenth century, we meet practically
nothing 2 that can be called a critical treatise of substantive
importance, except the solitary and in some respects rather
puzzling, but extraordinarily valuable, document of the De
Vulgari Eloquio by Dante.3
The puzzles of this-or most of them- do not concern us.
The document itself does. In it we have—beyond all reason-
able doubt, from the pen of the greatest man of
letters between Homer and Shakespeare-a treatise
Dante.
of astonishing precision on the nature and con-
ditions of a standard literary language; and on the formal
(and something more than the formal) characteristics of Italian
poetry, extending incidentally to poetry at large. Dante
knows, with sufficient and almost scientific exactness, the actual
distribution of European speech. He recognises and deplores
the excessively dialectic character of Italian, and recommends-
i Those who are curious about these
matters will find them fully treated in
vol. i., bk. ii., chap. iv., and bk. üi.,
chap. i., of the larger History.
2 For what there is see Hist. Crit.,
the rest of the chapter just cited, and
chap. iii. of the same bk. and vol.
3 The original Latin can best be
read in Dr Moore's Opere di Dante
(Oxford, 1897); but there is a good
annotated English translation by Mr
Ferrers - Howell (London, 1890). A
catena of the most striking passages
is in Loci Critici. An interesting
article on Dante's critical attitude,
from a point of view different from
. that taken here, appeared in the
Quarterly Review for October 1910,
by Professor Herford.
22
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
what he was, in fact, himself to accomplish -- the selection
and construction, out of these dialects, of a standard form. And
then he goes on to the consideration of the special require-
ments and characteristics of poetry itself.
The critical interests of Dante's work are numerous, and
deserve thorough examination. In fact, every one who attacks
The De this subject seriously should read, in original or
Vulgari translation, the tractate, which is very short, as
Eloquio. a companion to Aristotle's two books, the Epistle
to the Pisos, Longinus, and some at least of Quintilian. As
a whole, its importance lies in the way in which this almost
greatest of poets-a poet of intense quality as regards choice
of subject as well as religious and philosophical attitude,-a
poet as different as even fancy can conceive from a mere
"idle singer of an empty day” or a mere versifier-insists
upon form, upon language. It is impossible to lay more stress
than Dante does on the necessity of specially selected and
“sifted” poetic diction, in which the finest words only shall
be permitted, -no childish talk or rustic phrase, no weak or
trivial term. It is impossible, again, to insist more peremp-
torily and perseveringly than he does on the importance of
the mere "numbers"--on the fact that the poet must not
expect harmony of versification to come to him of its own
accord, and as a sort of necessary accident inseparable from
his other gifts, but must choose the best example and follow
the best modes in order to attain it. It is not easy to think
of a greater contrast to the usual attitude of the ancients or
to that of some of the moderns, as in the cases especially of
Wordsworth and Mr Matthew Arnold. Attempts have in- .
deed been made to disprove this opposition, and the student
should form his own opinion after consulting them; but if
the comparison be made without preliminary prejudice, there
is no doubt in the mind of the present writer what the
result will be.
The book, though there are early references to its existence,
seems to have remained long unknown as an actual composi-
tion; and it was only when Italian was beginning to devote
1 See the sections on them post.
INTRODUCTORY.
23
itself largely to criticism that it at last (1529) appeared trans-
lated into the vernacular, and issued with rather ambiguous
attribution by the poet Trissino. But it was pub-
Criticism
revived in lished in the original form fifty years later (1577),
Italy at the and between the two dates a great critical efflor-
Renaissance :
The strict escence had taken place. Still in Latin, but in verse,
Neo-Class- was written the remarkable treatise of Girolamo
ics : Vida. V
e Vida (1527). In this the neo-classic system-of
not merely worshipping and imitating the ancients, but of
actually “stealing ”1 from them to the utmost possible, extent,
of adoration of Virgil, of dislike of conceit and of Romance-
is formulated in a fashion which extracted from Pope, as a
sympathiser, two centuries later, the epithet “Immortal,” and
which now remains the ne plus ultra of purely arbitrary
criticism. But the vernacular soon asserted its rights; and
from Daniello (1536) onwards a great herd of dissertators and
commentators 3 devoted themselves for more than two full
generations to the subject. Most of these took a more or less
classical line, and to one of the two greatest of them (which
actually deserves the doubtful honour is uncertain), Castelvetro
(1570) and Scaliger (1561), is assigned the establishment of -
those three Unities -- Action, Time, and Place --- of which
Aristotle had not so much as mentioned the third, and had
passed the second over as lightly as possible. Yet another,
Minturno (1559), spent great labour and considerable ability
on the subject, and has been supposed by some to have exercised
special influence on Sir Philip Sidney.
Some, however, of these critics, observing the difficulty of
accommodating Aristotle's rules-especially as tightened and
The
.
extended
extended by his new interpreters to the recent work,
innovators: especially in Romance, of which Italy was justly
Patrizzi. proud, began to hint, or even boldly to assert,
doctrines or positions which, though they hardly made many
disciples at the moment, were destined to inspire the great
1 Vida's own word.
tions of “British Poets."
2 In the Essay on Criticism. Vida's 3 The names of nearly all of them
Poetics were actually translated by will be found, and the work of nearly
Pitt, one of the Pope school, and all of any importance is analysed, in
figure in Chalmers's and other collec- the larger History.
1N
UUDU
24
ENGLISH CRITICISM.
Romantic revolt of the latest eighteenth century. They 1 asked
why times in which manners, morals, religion were so totally
different, should prescribe to comedy its lines and scenes and
atmosphere. They 2 pointed out that while classical Epic
might be a fine and legitimate kind, that supplied no reason
why modern Romance, with its different plan, should not be
equally fine and equally legitimate. They began, almost or
quite for the first time, to take a directly historical view of
literature,—a view which almost inevitably suggests to those
who take it that one part of the history cannot lay down the
law to another. And one of the most remarkable of them, the
Platonist philosopher Patrizzi (perhaps not in full conscious-
ness of the meaning of his words, but practically), anticipated 3
the whole modern Romantic doctrine on the matter by declaring
that “any subject that can be poetically treated is a fit subject
for poetry,” thereby at once transferring the criterion and con-
structive essence of poetry from the subject to the treatment.
But these innovators, who were followed up remarkably in Spain
on the special subject of the Drama, were on the whole in a
minority, and the general bent of Italian criticism was towards
the classical side, or rather the neo-classic-that is to say, the
strengthening and hardening of "classical” rules.
Considering the relations of France and Italy at the time, it
was inevitable that this Italian criticism should affect the
French critic-"Middle Kingdom” of the West before it came to
ism: The us; and it did, but not to so great an extent as might
Pléiade,
dee perhaps have been thought. The great Pléiade
school was indeed critical or nothing, and its two chief poets
each produced critical treatises 5 of note, the latter of which
undoubtedly had something to do with early prosodic criticism,
both in Southern and Northern English. But the effect was
not very strong or lasting, and it never amounted to anything
like that produced later, when Malherbe and Boileau had sup-
1 For instance, the comic writer and 4 V. inf., Interchapter I.
tale-teller, Grazzini (“Il Lasca”). . .5 The Défense et Illustration de la
? Especially the famous novel-writer Langue Française of Du Bellay (1549),
Cinthio and his pupil Pigna.
and the Abrégé de l’Art Poétique of
3 In his Della Poetica (1586).
Ronsard (1565).
INTRODUCTORY.
25
planted Ronsard and Du Bellay, with infinite loss to poetry
and not much gain to criticism.
From our own older writers the Elizabethans, when at last
they took to criticism, had very little to borrow or to criticise.
Darliest There never was a poet with much more of the
glimmerings critical spirit in him than Chaucer; and he shows
bisho it not merely in Sir Thopas, which is mainly a
parody-criticism of the sillier forms of Romance, but in a
hundred remarks, serious and comic, scattered about his work.
Yet he never dreamt of providing any regular critical work,
though a parallel to Dante's De Vulgari Eloquio from him is
not actually unthinkable, and would have been priceless.
More immediately before the Elizabethans themselves, Wyatt
and Surrey had gone about the work of Ronsard and Du Bellay,
but without manifesto or dogmatic utterance. It was all to
come: and at last it came.
TTT
1 The chief exceptions are some
interesting but very novice - like ob-
servations of Caxton's, in the Prefaces
to some of his translations and
editions.
26
CHAPTER II.
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
BACKWARDNESS OF ENGLISH CRITICISM NOT IMPLYING INFERIORITY—ITS
CAUSE-THE INFLUENCE OF RHETORIC AND OTHER MATTERS-HAWES-
THE FIRST TUDOR CRITICS—WILSON : HIS' ART OF RHETORIC'; HIS AT-
TACK ON “INKHORN TERMS”—HIS DEALING WITH FIGURES-CHEKE : HIS
RESOLUTE ANGLICISM AND ANTI-PRECIOSITY—HIS CRITICISM OF SALLUST
-ASCHAM--HIS PATRIOTISM-HIS HORROR OF ROMANCE, AND OF THE
'MORTE D'ARTHUR' — HIS GENERAL CRITICAL ATTITUDE TO PROSE,
AND TO POETRY—THE CRAZE FOR CLASSICAL METRES--SPECIAL WANTS
OF ENGLISH PROSODY-ITS KINDS : (1) CHAUCERIAN—(2) ALLITERATIVE
-(3) ITALIANATED—DEFICIENCIES OF ALL THREETHE TEMPTATIONS
OF CRITICISM IN THIS RESPECT-ITS ADVENTURERS : ASCHAM HIMSELF
-WATSON AND DRANT-GASCOIGNE-HIS 'NOTES OF INSTRUCTION -
THEIR CAPITAL VALUESPENSER AND HARVEY-THE PURITAN ATTACK
ON POETRY-GOSSON-'THE SCHOOL OF ABUSE'-LODGE'S 'REPLY'-
SIDNEY'S 'APOLOGY FOR POETRY'-ABSTRACT OF IT-ITS MINOR SHORT-
COMINGS AND MAJOR HERESIES—THE EXCUSES OF BOTH, AND THEIR
AMPLE COMPENSATION — KING JAMES'S 'REULIS AND CAUTELIS -
WEBBE'S 'DISCOURSE' -- SLIGHT IN KNOWLEDGE, BUT ENTHUSIASTIC,
IF UNCRITICAL, IN APPRECIATION_PUTTENHAM'S (?) “ART OF ENGLISH
POESIE'-ITS ERUDITION-SYSTEMATIC ARRANGEMENT AND EXUBERANT
INDULGENCE IN FIGURES — MINORS : KARINGTON, MERES, WEBSTER,
BOLTON, ETC.--CAMPION AND HIS OBSERVATIONS'-DANIEL AND HIS
'DEFENCE OF RHYME'-BACON—THE 'ESSAYS '-THE 'ADVANCEMENT
OF LEARNING'-ITS DENUNCIATION OF MERE WORD-STUDY-ITS VIEW
OF POETRY-SOME “OBITER DICTA”-THE WHOLE OF VERY SLIGHT
IMPORTANCE-STIRLING'S “ANACRISIS”-BEN JONSON : HIS EQUIPMENT
-HIS 'PREFACES, ETC. —THE DRUMMOND CONVERSATIONS---THE 'DIS-
COVERIES FORM OF THE BOOK-ITS DATE-MOSAIC OF OLD AND NEW
-THE FLING AT MONTAIGNE-AT TAMERLANE'—THE SHAKESPEARE
PASSAGE—AND THAT ON BACON-GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE BOOK.
THE fortune of England in matters political has often been
noticed; and it has at least deserved to be noticed, hardly less
BACKWARDNESS OF ENGLISH.
27
often, in matters literary. One of the luckiest of these chances
came at the time of the Renaissance; when the necessary
changes were effected with the minimum of direct foreign
influence, and so slowly that the natural force of the nation
and the language was able completely, or almost completely,
to assimilate the influences, both foreign and classical, that
rained upon it.
Nor was this least the case in respect of criticism. The
history of this part of English literary evolution has been,
Barlevard until recently, much neglected; and it can hardly
ness of be said even yet to have received comprehensive
English
attention. It is all the more necessary to bestow
Criticisin
not implying some time and pains on it here, with at least some
inferiority. fair hope of correcting an unfair depreciation. The
Baron of Bradwardine (displaying that shrewd appreciation of
contrast between English and Scottish characteristics which
belonged, if not to himself, to his creator) remarked to Colonel
Talbot that it was the Colonel's “humour, as he [the Baron] had
seen in other gentlemen of birth and honour" in the Colonel's
country,“ to derogate from the honour of his burgonet." Gentle-
men of the most undoubted birth and honour (as such things go
in literature), from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have displayed
this humour in regard to English criticism. But there has been
something too much of it; and it has been taken far too
literally by the ignorant. M. Brunetière has expressed his
opinion that Frenchmen would make un véritable marché de
dupe if they exchanged Boileau, Marmontel, La Harpe, and Co.
for Lessing and some others. I shall not in this place express
any opinion on that question directly. But, if this book does
what I shall endeavour to make it do, it will at least show
that to exchange, for any foreign company, our own critics,
from Sidney and Ben Jonson, through Dryden and Addison,
The two chief monographs on this
are J. E. Spingarn, Literary Criticism
in the : Renaissance, New York, 1899
(pp. 253-310), and Professor F. E.
Schelling, Poetic and Verse Criticism
of the Reign of Elizabeth, Philadelphia,
1891. Haslewood reprinted most of
the texts in Ancient Critical Essays,
2 vols., London, 1811-15, and Mr Arber
the most important in his English
Reprints. Professor Gregory Smith
has more lately edited the fullest
collection yet issued (2 vols., Oxford,
1904)..
28
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
Samuel Johnson and Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, to Mr Arnold
himself, would be “un véritable marché de”-Moses Primrose.
It will have been sufficiently seen in the last chapter that
the backwardness of English-a backwardness long exaggerated,
but to some extent real, and to no small extent healthy—was
nowhere exhibited more distinctly than in the department
which supplies the materials of this history. Until the close
of the fifteenth century, and for some decades afterwards, not
a single critical treatise on English existed in the English
language, or even in Latin; the nearest approach, even in
fragment, to any utterance of the kind being the naïf and
interesting, but only infantinely critical, remarks of Caxton
in his prefaces.
The fact is that, not only until a nation is in command of
a single form of “curial” speech for literary purposes, but
until sufficient experiments have been made in at
Its causé.
* least a majority of the branches of literature,
criticism is impossible, and would, if possible, be rather mis-
chievous than beneficial. (Now England, though it possessed
at least one very great author, and more than a fair number
of respectable seconds to him, was, up to 1500 at least, in
. neither case. Till the end of the fourteenth century it had
been practically trilingual; it was bilingual till past the end
of the fifteenth, if not till far into the seventeenth, so far. as
literature was concerned. Nor, till the towering eminence of
Chaucer had helped to bring the vernacular into prominence,
was there any one settled dialect of primacy in the vernacular
itself. Further, the fourteenth century was nearly at its end
before any bulk of prose, save on religious subjects, was written ;
and for another century the proportion of translation over
original work in prose was very large indeed.
At the same time the scholastic Rhetoric—which had always
played to criticism the part of a half-faithless guardian, who
keeps his pupil out of the full enjoyment of his property,
Such as those on the "fair language
of France," and the strictures passed
by Margaret of England and Burgundy
on the" default in mine Euglish” (His-
tory of Troy); on the "right good and
fair English ” of Lord Rivers (Dicts and
Sayings of the Philosophers), and the
prefatory observations on Chaucer.
HAWES.
29
yet preserves that property in good condition to hand over
The influen to him perforce at some future time -- was still
ence of faithfully taught.1 The enlarged and more accurate
Rhetoric
one other study of the classics at the Revival of Learning
matters. set classical criticism once more before students in
the originals; the eager study of those originals by Continental
scholars was sure to reflect itself upon England ; and, lastly,
religious zeal and other motives combined, here as elsewhere,
to make men determined to get the vernacular into as complete
and useful a condition as possible. Nowhere does the intense
national spirit, which is the glory of the Tudor period, appear
more strongly than in this our scholastic and “umbratile”
division of the national life.
Long, indeed, before this scholastic and regular criticism made
its appearance, and during the whole course of the fifteenth
century, critical appreciation, stereotyped and un-
Hawes.
methodised it may be, but genuine for all that, and
stimulating, had made its appearance. The extraordinary
quality of Chaucer, the amiable pastime-making of Gower,
and, a little later, the busy polygraphy and painful rhetoric
of Lydgate, had, almost from the moment of Chaucer's death,
attracted and inspired students. The pretty phrase about
Chaucer's “gold dew-drops of speech,” which justly drew the
approval of a critic so often unjustly severe on ante-Renais-
sance work as Mr Arnold, was, as is known even by tyros in
the study of English literature, repeated, expanded, varied by
almost every prominent writer for a century and a quarter at
least, till it reached, not exactly final, but most definite and
noteworthy, expression in the work of Stephen Hawes, that
curious swan-singer of English mediaeval poetry. In the to us
eccentric, if not positively absurd, exposition of the Trivium
and Quadrivium which diversifies the account of the courtship
1 There has been some disposition
to deny this, and to argue that de-
spite the constant use of the word
Rhetoric in the fifteenth century,
the teaching of the thing had declined.
I do not think there is much evidence
of this as regards England ; and the
long and curious passage of Hawes,
to be presently discussed, is strong
evidence against it. Rhetoric has no
less than eight chapters of the Pastime
Of Pleasure, as against one apiece for
Grammar and Logic.
30
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
of Grandamour and La Bell Pucell, the praise of the Three is
led up to by a discussion of Rhetoric and Poetics so elaborate
and minute that it occupies more space than is given to all the
other Arts together, and nearly double that which is given to all
the rest, except a largely extended Astronomy. Rhetoric her-
self, after being greeted by and greeting her pupil in the most
“aureate" style, divides herself into five parts, each of which
has its chapter, with a “Replication against ignorant Persons”
intervening, and many curious digressions, such as the descrip-
tion of a sort of Earthly Paradise of Literature with four rivers,
“ Understanding," “ Closely-Concluding," "Novelty,” and “ Car-
buncles," 2 and a “Tower of Virgil” in their midst. Lydgate
has been already praised for “versifying the depured 3 rhetoric
in English language," but he comes up once more for eulogy as
“my master” in the peroration, and has in fact considerably
more space than either Gower or Chaucer. Nor, confused and
out of focus as such things must necessarily appear to us, should
we forget that Hawes and his generation were not altogether
uncritically endeavouring at what was “important to them”—
the strengthening and enriching, namely, of English vocabulary,
the extension of English literary practice and stock.
Yet their criticism could but be uncritical: and the luck
above referred to appears first in the peculiar scholastic char-
The first acter of the criticism of the first English school of
Tudor critics deserving the name. No one of its members
was exactly a man of genius, and this was perhaps
lucky; for men of genius have rarely been observed to make
the best schoolmasters. All were fully penetrated with the
Renaissance adoration of the classics; and this was lucky again,
because the classics alone could supply the training and the
models just then required by English prose, and even to some
extent by English poetry. All were very definitely set against
Gallicising and Italianising; and yet again this was lucky,
because England had been overdosed with French influence
cs.
i The Pastime of Pleasure, ed.
Wright (Percy Society, London, 1845),
less startling "novelty" when the
illuminating power attributed to the
stone is remembered.
3 ="purified."
pp. 27-56.
2 This Fourth River will appear a
• WILSON.
31
for centuries, while their opposition to Italian did perhaps
some good, and certainly little harm. But all were thoroughly
possessed by the idea that English, adjusted to classical models
as far as possible, but not denationalised or denaturalised,
ought to be raised into a sufficient medium of literary, as
of familiar, communication for Englishmen. And—with that
intense Renaissance belief in education, and a high and noble
kind of education too, which puts to shame the chattering
and pottering of certain later periods on this unlucky subject
-all were determined, as far as in them lay, to bring English
up to this point. ✓ The tendency was spread over a great
number of persons, and a considerable period of time. Its
representatives ranged from healthy and large-souled, if not
quite heroic or inspired, scholars like Ascham to “acrid-
quack” pedants like Gabriel Harvey. But the chief of these
representatives were the well-known trio, of whom one has
just been mentioned—Siri Thomas Wilson, Sir John Cheke,
and Roger Ascham. They were all friends, they were all con-
temporary members (to her glory be it ungrudgingly said) of
one University, the University of Cambridge, and though the
moral character of all, and especially of the first two, had
something of the taints of self-seeking and of sycophancy,
which were the blemishes of the Tudor type of writers, all
had the merits of that type as exhibited in the man of the
study rather than of the field-intense curiosity and industry,
a real patriotism, a half-instinctive eagerness to action, a con-
sciousness how best to adorn the Sparta that had fallen to
their lot, and a business-like faculty of carrying their concep-
tions out. From various indications, positive and indirect, it
would seem that Cheke, who was the eldest, was also the most
“ magnetic," the most Socratically suggestive and germinal of
the three: but his actual literary work is of much inferior
importance to that of Ascham and Wilson.
Wilson's Art of Rhetoric 2 is, as the other dates given in the
1 Wilson has usually been dignified English, Leonard Coxe having pre-
in this way: but some authorities, in ceded him "about 1524" with an
cluding the Dict. Nat. Biog., deny him English adaptation, apparently, of
knighthood.
Melanchthon. But this is of no critical
? It was not actually the first in importance.
32
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM,
Rhetor
text and notes will show sufficiently, by no means the first
Wilson his book of the school; nor is it that which has, on the
Art of whole, the most interest for us. But it deserves
etorie; precedence historically because, as no other does, it
keys, or gears, the new critical tendency on to the old technical
rhetoric. The first edition appeared in 1553, dedicated to
Edward VI. Wilson dates his prologue to the second on the
7th December 1560; but it does not seem to have been pub-
lished till 1563. Between the date of the first edition and the
writing of this Prologue, Wilson, an exile at Rome, had fallen
into the claws of the Inquisition as author of the book and of
another on Logic; and, as he recounts with natural palpitation,
escaped literally “so as by fire,” his prison-house being in
flames.
His two first Books Wilson faithfully devotes to all the old
technicalities—Invention, Disposition, Amplification, “States,"
con and the rest. But his third Book, “ Of Elocution," 2
“Inkhorn announces from the first an interest in the matter
ns." very different from the jejune rehashings of the
ancients (and chiefly of those ancients least worth rehashing)
which the mediæval Rhetorics mostly give us. In fact, Wilson
had shown himself alive to the importance of the subject in
the very opening of the work itself 3 by recounting, with much
gusto, how “Phavorinus the Philosopher (as Gellius telleth the
tale) did hit a young man over the thumbs very handsomely
for using over-old and over-strange words.” And as soon as
he has divided the requirements of Elocution under the four
heads of Plainness, Aptness, Composition, and Exornation, he
opens the stop which has been recognised as his characteristic
one, by denouncing “strange inkhorn terms." He inveighs
against the "far-journeyed gentlemen ” who, on their return
home, as they love to go in foreign apparel, so they “powder
their talk with oversea language," one talking French-English,
another“ chopping in” with English-Italianated. Professional
men, lawyers and auditors, have their turn of censure, and a real
literary "document" follows in the censure of the “fine cour.
torney
i My copy is of this, which is the
fuller.
2 Fol. 82.
3 Fol. 1, verso, at bottom.
WILSON.
33
tier who will talk nothing but Chaucer.” Most copious is he
against undue “Latining” of the tongue, in illustration of
which he gives a letter, from a Lincolnshire gentleman, which
may owe royalty either to the Limousin Scholar of Rabelais, or
even to Master Francis' own original, Geoffroy Tory himself.
And he points the same moral (very much after the manner of
Latimer, for whom, as elsewhere appears, he had a great
admiration) by divers facetious stories from his experience,
“when I was in Cambridge, and student in the King's College,"
and from other sources. After which he falls in with Cicero
as to the qualifications of words allowable.
" Aptness" follows: and here Sir Thomas, without knowing
it, has cut at a folly of language revived three hundred years
His dealing and more later than his own time. For he laughs
with Figures. at one who, “seeing a house fair-builded," said to
his fellow, “ Good Lord, what a handsome phrase of building is
this!” Wilson's butt would have been no little thought of by
certain persons at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth. Indeed, one may seem to re-
member a sentence about the merits of a “passage” in a
marble chimney-piece, which is a mere echo, conscious or un-
conscious, of his “phrase.” The same temper appears in the
longer remarks on Composition ; but when we come to Exor-
nation, “a gorgeous beautifying of the tongue with borrowed
words and change of sentence,” Wilson's lease of originality
has run out. He is still in the bondage of the Figures, which
he describes ambitiously as a kind “not equally sparpled 1
about the whole oration, but so dissevered and parted as stars
stand in the firmament, or flowers in a garden, or pretty-
devised antiques in a cloth of Arras." The enumeration is
full of character and Elizabethan piquancy; but it still has
the old fault of beginning at the wrong end. When a man
writes even a good oration, much more that far higher thing
a good piece of prose (which may be an oration, if need serves,
or anything else), he does not say to himself, “Now I shall
1 One may regret “sparple" and
“disparple," which are good and pic-
turesque Englishings of e(s)parpiller.
The forms "sparkle” and “disparkle,"
which seem to have been commoner,
are no loss, as being equivocal.
2
34
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
throw in some hyperbaton; now we will exhibit a little ana-
diplosis ; this is the occasion, surely, for a passage of zeugma.”
\He writes as the spirit moves him, and as the way of art leads.
One could wish, in reading Wilson, for another Sir Thomas,
to deal with the Figurants as he has dealt with the Chaucerists
and the Lincolnshire Latinisers. But we must not expect too
much at once: and lucky are we if we often, or even some-
times, get so bold a striking out into new paths for a true end
as we find in this Art of Rhetoric.
Cheke has left no considerable English work, and he seems
-as it is perhaps inevitable that at least some of the leaders
in every period of innovation should seem—to have
Cheke : his
Pesolate in pushed innovation itself to and over the verge of
glicism crotchet. He was a spelling and pronouncing re-
and anti- formon both in
former both in Greek and English; and, classical
preciosity.
scholar and teacher as he was, he seems to have
fallen in with that curious survival of “Saxon” rendering of .
words not of Saxon origin, the great storehouse of which is
the work of Reginald Pecock a century earlier. But he ap-
pears to have been one of the main and most influential
sources of the double stream of tendency observable in Wilson
himself, and still more in Ascham-the tendency on the one
hand to use the classics as models and trainers in the forma-
tion of a generally useful and practicable English style, and
on the other to insist that neither from classical nor from
any other sources should English be adulterated by “inkhorn
terms," as Wilson calls them, of any kind—that is to say, by
archaisms, technicalities, preciousnesses, fished up as it were
from the bottom of the ink-pot, instead of simply and naturally
taken as they came from its surface to the pen. What Ascham
tells us that he said of Sallust is the spirit, the centre, the
kernel, of the criticism of the whole school-a dread that is
to say, and a dislike and a censure of what he calls the “un-
contented care to write better than he could.”2 And it must
? Not that the phrase is of his in-
vention. It seems to have been a
catchword of the time, and occurs in
Bale (1543), in Peter Ashton's version
of Jovius (1546), &c.
? Of course Cheke had in his mind
the passage of Quintilian concerning
Julius Florus (see Hist. Crit., i. 313).
CHEKE.
35
It is wat
for the.
se in the
be obvious that this sharply formulated censure is itself a
critical point de repère of the greatest value. It is well that
it was not too much listened to—for the greatest results of
English prose and verse in the great period, beginning a few
years after Cheke’s death and continuing for an old man's
lifetime, were the result of this “never contented care," which
still reached something better than content. But if, at this
early period, it had had too much way given to it, if the vigor-
ous but somewhat sprawling infancy of Elizabethan English
had been bid and let sprawl simply at its pleasure, the con-
sequences could not but have been disastrous.
This criticism of Sallust, which may be found at length in
Ascham's Schoolmaster, 1 is quite a locus in its kind. It is not
His criticism of the justest, for the prepossession of the sentence
of Sallust. quoted above (which stands in the forefront of it)
colours it all through. It has funny little scholastic lapses in
logic, such as the attempt to apply the old brocard Orator est
vir bonus dicendi peritus to the disadvantage of Sallust, as com-
pared not only with Cicero but with Cæsar, on the score of
morality. It would have been pleasant to observe the coun-
tenances of Fausta and Servilia if this had been argued in their
joint presence. And the dislike of Thucydides, to which a
disliker of Sallust is almost necessarily driven, argues a literary
palate not of the most refined. But the disposition of the
supposed causes of the faults of Sallust's style, when, having
sown his wild oats, he took to literature, and borrowed his
vocabulary from Cato and Varro, and his method from Thucy-
dides himself, is an exceedingly ingenious piece of critical
pleading. Even if it will not hold water, it shows us a stage
of criticism advanced, in some directions, beyond anything that
classical or medieval times can show. The other great “place”
of Cheke's writing occurs in his letter 2 to Hoby on that learned
knight's translation of Castiglione, with its solemn judgment
(the author, though but in middle age, was ill, and in fact
almost dying), “I am of this opinion, that our own tongue
1 Ed. Arber, pp. 154-159.
? This may be found in Arber's In-
troduction to the book just cited, p.
5; or in Professor Raleigh's ed. of
Hoby (London, 1900), pp. 12, 13.
36
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled
with borrowing of other tongues, wherein if we take no heed
betimes, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to
keep house as a bankrupt." The analogy, of course, is a false
one :--there is no need to pay, nor possibility of payment, any
more than a conquering monarchy needs to fear the repayment
of the tribute it draws from others, or than a sturdy plant
need dread bankruptcy because it owes nourishment to earth,
and air, and the rain of heaven. But once more the position
is a definite, and not a wholly untenable, critical position: and
Cheke shows himself here as at once engineer and captain of it.
The chief representative of this school is, however, beyond
question, the always agreeable, and but seldom other than
admirable, author of Toxophilus and The School-
Ascham.
e master himself. His positive achievements in Eng-
lish literature do not here directly concern us; nor does the
debate between those who regard him as a Euphuist before
Euphuism, and those who will have him to be the chief ex-
ample of the plain style in early Elizabethan literature. I
confess myself to be on the side of the latter; though I know
what the former mean. But it is with what Ascham thought
as a critic, not with what he did as a writer, that we are here
busy; and on this there is no reasonable opening for serious
difference of opinion. Ascham's critical position and opinions
are clear, not only from his two famous and pleasant little
books, but from the constant literary references in his letters,
ranging from elaborate lucubrations on the study of the classics
to an amusing little Cambridge fling at the older university,
where, as we learn from a letter of exactly the middle of the
century, taste was in so shocking a condition that Oxford men
actually paid more attention to Lucian and Apuleius than to
Cicero and Xenophon.?
For these two books Mr Arber's in Aula incidi in quendam illius Aca-
excellent reprints can hardly be bet- demiæ, qui nimium præferendo Luci-
tered. But for our purposes the Letters anum, Plutarchum ct Herodianum, Sene-
are also needed ; and these, with other cam, A. Gellium, et Apuleium, utramque
things, will be found in Giles's edition of linguam in nimis senescentem et effcetam
the Works, 3 vols. in 4, London, 1864-65. ætatem compingere mihi videbatur-
? Quid omnes Oxonienses sequuntur Giles, i. 190. The whole letter (ta
plane nescio, sed ante aliquot menses Sturm) is worth reading. I
ASCHAM.
37
The Toxophilus itself is a critical document in parts, both for
the initial manifesto of his desire “ to write this English matter
His in the English tongue for English men,” and for the
patriotism. more elaborate defence of the proceeding (a defence
repeated in the numerous Latin letters accompanying the copies
of the book he sent to his friends), as well as for one of those
hits at Romance which were characteristic of Renaissance
scholars too generally, and were particularly to be expected in
very moral and rather prosaic persons like Ascham. But we
necessarily turn to the Schoolmaster for a full exposition of
· Ascham's critical ethos, and we find it.
A tendency rather to slight poetry, one great heresy concern-
ing it (of which more presently), and the above - mentioned
His horror of contempt or even horror of romance — these are
Romance, the worst things to be noted here. All these are
connected with a wider critical heresy, which is prevalent in
England to this day, and which emerges most interestingly in
this infancy of English criticism. This heresy is the valuing of
examples, and even of whole kinds, of literary art, not according
to their perfection on their own artistic standards, not accord-
ing to the quantity or quality of artistic pleasure which they are
fitted to give; but according to certain principles-patriotic,
political, ethical, or theological—which the critic holds or does
not hold, as the case may be. This fallacy being one of those
proper—or, at least, inseparably accidental—to the human in-
tellect, is of course perceptible enough in antiquity itself. It is,
as we have seen, rife in Plato, and more rife in Plutarch; and
there is no doubt that the devotion of the Renaissance to the
greatest of Greek philosophers and prosemen, to the most enter-
taining of Greek biographers and moralists, had not a little to do
with its reappearance, though the struggle of the Reformation,
and the national jealousies which this struggle bred or helped,
had more. But no one has given more notable examples of it
than Ascham by his attack on “ books of feigned chivalry,” in
Toxophilus, and his well-known censure of the Morte d'Arthur
in The Schoolmaster.2
1 P. 19, ed. Arber. The passage con-
tains a stroke at monasticism.
P. 80, ed. Arber.
38
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
d'Artha
1
Than this book there was, at Ascham's date, no more exquisite
example of English prose in existence. There is not to this day
d of the a book, either in prose or in verse, which has more
Morte of the true Romantic charm. There are few better
ur. instances anywhere of subtly combined construction
of story than are to be found in some of its parts; and, to a
catholic judgment, which busies itself with the matter and spirit
of a book, there are few books which teach a nobler temper of
mind, which inculcate with a more wonderful blending of stern-
ness and sympathy the great moral that “the doer shall suffer,"
that “for all these things God shall bring us into judgment,"
or which display more accomplished patterns of man and
sweeter examples of woman. Yet Ascham (and he had read
the book) saw in it nothing but “open manslaughter and
bold bawdry.”
Apart from this somewhat Philistine prudery-which oc-
cupies itself more reasonably with Italian novelle, and the
translations of them into English-Ascham's criticism is of a
piece with that of the whole school in all but a very few points.
He differed with Wilson, and with most of the scholars of his
time, on the subject of translation, which he rightly enough
regarded as a useful engine of education, but as quite incapable
of giving any literary equivalent for the original.) He agreed
both with Wilson and with Cheke as to the impropriety of
adulterating English with any foreign tongue, ancient or
modern. ; He was, none the less, an exceedingly fervent Cicer-
onian and devotee of the golden age of Latin.) And when we
come in onel of his letters to Sturm on the name of Giovan-
battista Pigna, the rival of Cinthio Giraldi, there seems to be
established a contact, of the most interesting, between English
and Italian criticism. But (as indeed we might have expected)
no allusion to Pigna's view of the despised romances is even
hinted: it is his dealing with the aureolum libellum of Horace
that Ascham has read, his dealings with Aristotle and Sophocles
that he wishes to read.
Putting his theory and his practice together, and neglecting
1 Thought to be his last, and written correspondence with Sturm is, as we
in Dec. 1568; ed. Giles, ii. 189. The should expect, particularly literary.
CLASSICAL METRES.
39
-
for the moment his moral “craze," we can perceive in him a
seperol, tolerably distinct ideal of English prose, which he
critical atti- has only not illustrated by actual criticism of the
tude to Frose, reviewing sort, because the material was so scanty.
This prose is to be fashioned with what may be excusably called
a kind of squint-looking partly at Latin and Greek construc-
tion and partly at English vernacular usage. It does not seem
that, great as was his reverence for Cheke, he was bitten by
Cheke's mania for absolute Teutonism; nor does he appear to
have gone to the extreme of Latimer and Latimer's admirer,
Wilson, in caring to mingle merely familiar speech with his
ordered vernacular. But he went some way in this direction: he
was by no means proof against that Delilah of alliteration which,
like a sort of fetch or ghost of the older alliterative prosody,
bewitched the mid-sixteenth-century verse and prose of Eng-
land, and had not lost hold on Spenser himself. And he had
belief in certain simple Figures of the antithetic and parallel
kind. But he was, above all, a schoolmaster -- as even being
dead he spoke—to English literature; and his example and his
precepts together tended to establish a chastened, moderately
classical, pattern of writing, which in the next generation pro-
duced the admirable English prose of Hooker, and was not
without influence on the less accomplished, but more germinal
and protreptic, style of Jonson.
We must praise him less when we come to poetry. The
history of the craze for classical metre and against rhyme in
and to England, which practically supplies our earliest sub-
Poetry. ject of purely critical debate, is a very curious one,
and may—perhaps must—be considered from more points of
view than one, before it is rightly and completely understood.
At first sight it looks like mere mid-summer madness—the
work of some Puck of literature-if not even as the incursion
into the calm domains of scholarship and criticism of that
popular delirium tremens, which has been often illustrated in
politics. Shifting of the standpoint, and more careful con-
sideration, will discover some excuses for it, as well as much
method in it. But it must be regarded long, and examined
carefully, before the real fact is discovered — the fact that,
40
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
mischievous and absurd as it was in itself, unpardonable as
are the attempts to revive it, or something like it, at this time
of day, it was in its own day a kind of beneficent “ distemper"
-a necessary, if morbid, stage in the development of English
prosody and English criticism.
Inasmuch as the most obvious and indubitable, as well as
universal, cause of the craze was the profound Renaissance
ose admiration for the classics, it was inevitable that
for Classical something of the kind should make its appearance
Metres. in most European countries. But other and coun-
teracting causes prevented it from assuming, in any of them,
anything like the importance that it attained in England.
Unrhymed classical metres, like almost every literary inno-
vation of the time, had been first attempted in Italy; but
the established and impregnable supremacy of forms like the
Sonnet, the Canzone, the ottava and terza rima, put rhyme out
of real danger there. They were attempted in France. But
French had for centuries possessed a perfectly well-defined
system of prosody, adapted and adequate to the needs and
nature of the language. And, moreover, the singularly atonic
quality of this language, its want not only of the remotest
approach to quantity but even of any decided accent, made
the experiment not merely ridiculous, as indeed it mostly was
in English, but all but impossible. - Spanish was following
Italian, and did not want to follow anything else: and German
was not in case to compete.
With English the patient was very much more predisposed
to the disease. Not only two, but practically three, different
systems of prosody, which were really to some extent
wants of opposed to each other, and might well seem more op-
English posed than they actually were, disputed, in practice,
? the not too fertile or flourishing field of English
poetry. There was the true Chaucerian system of blended Eng-
lish prosody, the legitimate representative of the same composite
influences which have moulded English language throughout.
These influences had continued, and their results had been
slowly developed through the half - chaotic beginnings of
Middle English verse, and then, with almost premature sud-
CLASSICAL METRES.
41
cezicunr.
denness, perfected up to a certain stage by Chaucer himself.
This system combined—though not yet in perfect freedom-
ode: the strict syllabic foot-division of the French with
(1) Chau- the syllabic licence of Anglo-Saxon, so as to produce
M. a system of syllabic equivalence similar in nature
to, if not yet fully in practice freer than, that of the Greek
Iambic trimeter. It admitted a considerable variety of metres,
the base-integers of which were the octosyllable and deca-
syllable, with lines of six, twelve, and others occasionally, com-
bined in pairs or arranged in stanzas of more or less intricate
forms. But-by a historic accident which has even yet to be
rather taken as found than fully explained-nobody for more
than a hundred years had been able to produce really good
regular poetry in Southern English by this metre, and certain
changes in pronunciation and vocabulary—especially the disuse
of the final vocalised e— were putting greater and greater
difficulties in the way of its practice.
Secondly, there was the revived alliterative metre, either
genuine--that is to say, only roughly syllabic and not rhymed,
(2) Alliter- but rhythmed nearer to the anapæstic form than to
ative. any other — or allied with rhyme, and sometimes
formed into stanzas of very considerable intricacy. This,
which had arisen during the fourteenth century, no one
quite knows how or where, apparently in the North, and
which had maintained a vigorous though rather artificial
life during the fifteenth, had not wholly died out, being rep-
resented partly by the ballad metre, by doggerel twelves,
fourteeners, and other long shambling lines, and by a still
lively tendency towards alliteration itself, both in metred
verse and in prose. Latterly, during Ascham's own youth,
a sort of rapprochement between these two had made the
fourteeners and Alexandrines, rather less doggerelised, very
general favourites; but had only managed to communicate to
them a sort of folloping amble, very grievous and sickening to
the delicate ear.
Thirdly, and in close connection with this combination,
1 There had, of course, been some charming jets of folk-song in ballad, carol,
and what note
42
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM,
Wyatt, Surrey, and other poets had, by imitating Italian
(3) Italian- models, especially in the sonnet, striven to raise, to
ated. bind together, to infuse with energy and stiffen with
backbone, the ungainly shambling body of English verse: and
Surrey, again following the Italians, had tried, with some suc-
cess, the unrhymed decasyllable, soon to be so famous as blank
verse.
Now critical observation at the time might survey this field
with view as extensive and intensive as it could apply, and be
Deficiencies far from satisfied with the crops produced. To re-
of all three. present the first system there was nobody but
Chaucer, who, great and greatly admired as he was, was
separated from the men of 1550 by a period of time almost
as long as that which separates us from Pope, and by a much
greater gulf of pronunciation and accent. Nobody could write
like Chaucer-unless the Chaucerian Chorizontes are right in
attributing The Court of Love to this time, in which case there
was some one who could write very much like Chaucer indeed.
There was no Langland, and nobody who could write in the
least like Langland. In sheer despair, men of talent like
Skelton, when they were not Chaucerising heavily, were
indulging (of course with more dulcet intervals now and then)
in mere wild gambades of doggerel.
But it will be said, Was there not the new Italianated style
of poets of such promise as Wyatt and Surrey? There was.
Yet it must be remembered that Wyatt and Surrey themselves
are, after all, poets of more promise than performance; that
their promise itself looks much more promising to us, seeing
as we do its fulfilment in Spenser and onward, than it need
have done, or indeed could do, to contemporaries; that stalwart
Protestants and stout Englishmen feared and loathed the
Italianation of anything English; and lastly, that even the
prosody of Wyatt and Surrey is, in a very high degree, experi-
mental, tentative, incomplete. We laugh, or are disgusted, at
the twists and tortures applied by the hexametrists to our poor
mother tongue; but Wyatt at least puts almost as awkward
constraints on her.
It is not surprising that, in the presence of these unsatisfying
CLASSICAL METRES.
43
things, and in the nonage of catholic literary criticism, men
should have turned for help to those classics which
The tempta-
tions of t* were the general teachers and helpers of the time.
Criticism in There was indeed already published just as Ascham
this respect.
had attained his year of discretion-a treatise, by
the greatest man of letters for some fifteen hundred years
at least, which contained the germ of a warning. But it is
not likely that Ascham or any of his good Cambridge friends
had seen Trissino's translation of the De Vulgari Eloquio ; and, if
any had, it would have been a stroke of genius to carry Dante's
generalisation from the Romance tongues further. To almost any
man of the Renaissance it would have seemed half sacrilege and
half madness to examine ancient and modern literatures on the
same plane, and decide what was germane to each and what
common to all. Greek Prosody had been good enough, with
very minor alterations, for Latin ; how should any of these
upstart modern tongues refuse what had been good enough for
both ? And let it be remembered, too, that they were only half
wrong. Greek and Latin did provide up to a certain point-
that of the foot' as distinguished from the metre—examples
which, duly guarded, could be quite safely followed, which
indeed could not and cannot be neglected without loss and
danger for English. It was when they went further, and
endeavoured to impose the classical combinations of feet on
English, that they fell.
Yet even from the first they had glimpses and glimmerings.
of truth which might have warned them; while in
Its
adventurers : their very errors they often display that combination
scham of independence and practical spirit which is the
himself.
too often undervalued glory of English criticism.
Ascham himself—besotted as he is with wrath 1 against" our
C
It is curious that, in this very de- some critics still affect. “To follow
but of English criticism, the incivility the Goths in rhyming instead of the
with which critics are constantly and Greeks in versifying” is “to eat acorns
too justly charged makes its appear with swine, when we may eat wheat
ance. Ascham would seem to have bread among men.” Rhymers are "a
been a good-natured soul enough. Yet rude multitude," "rash, ignorant
he abuses rhyme and its partisans in heads," " wandering blindly in their
the true “Père Duchêne" style which foul wrong way,” &c.
44
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
A
rude beggarly rhyming," confident as he is that the doggerel of
his old friend Bishop Watson of Lincoln-
“All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men's manners, and saw many cities,”—
exhibits 1 as “right quantitie” of syllables and true order of
versifying as either Greek or Latin-yet saw 2 that “our English
tongue doth not well receive the nature of Carmen Heroicum,
because dactylus, the aptest foot for that verse, is seldom found
in English.” Truly it is not; your dactyl is apt to play the
“Waler”--to buck under an English rider, and either throw
him altogether, or force the alteration of the pace to anapæsts.
The best apparent dactylics in English–the verses of Kingsley's
Andromeda—are not really dactylic-hexameters at all, they are
five-foot anapæstics, with a very strong anacrusis at the be-
ginning, and a weak hypercatalectic syllable at the end. And
with this fatal confession of Ascham (who had not a very
poetical head), that of Campion, an exquisite poet and a keen
though warped critic, coincides, as we shall see, a generation
later. But the thing had to be done; and it was done, or at
least attempted.
When the craze first took form in England we do not exactly
know. Ascham observes vaguely that “this misliking of rhym-
Watson and ing beginneth not now of any newfangle singularity,
Drant. but hath been long been misliked, and that of men
of greatest learning and deepest judgment."3 We all think that
the persons who agree with us are men of great learning and deep
judgment, so that matter may be passed over. But apparently
the thing was one, and not the best, of the fruits of that study
of the classics, and specially of Greek, which, beginning at
Oxford, passed thence to Cambridge, and was taken up so
busily in Ascham's own college, St John's. Thomas Watson,4
1 Schoolmaster, ed. cit., p. 73. As- fusion of mind of the time is illus-
cham actually quotes the Greek and trated by Ascham's sheltering himself
the Latin of Homer and Horace, and behind Quintilian !
declares Watson's stuff to be made as 4 Not to be confounded with Thomas
"naturally" as the one and as “aptly” Watson, the author of the Hecatom-
as the other !
pathia, who came later, and was an
2 Ibid., p. 145.
Oxford man.
3 P. 147. The extraordinary cou-
GASCOIGNE.
45
the Bishop of Lincoln, above referred to, was Master of the
College; Ascham himself, it is hardly necessary to say, was a
fellow of it. And still descending in the collegiate hierarchy, it
was an undergraduate of St John's, Thomas Drant, who some
what later drew up rules for Anglo-Classic versifying-rules
that occupied Spenser and Harvey; producing some interesting
letters and some very deplorable doggerel. Drant seems to
have been the “legislator of Parnassus” to the innovators; but
his “rules” are not known to exist, and what we have of his
does not bear on the special subject.
Mischievous craze as it was, however, it had the merit of
turning the attention of Englishmen to really critical study of
poetry, and it appears, more or less, as the motif of most of the
group of critical writings, from Gascoigne's Notes of Instruction
to Daniel's Defence of Rhyme, which we shall now discuss.
In the most interesting little treatise 2 which heads or initials 3
the now goodly roll of books in English criticism, George
Gascoigne, though he was himself a Cambridge man,
Gascoigne.
"* does not make any reference to the craze. The tract
was written at the request of an Italian friend, Eduardo
Donati. It is exceedingly short; but as full of matter, and very
good matter, as need be. In duty bound Gascoigne begins with
insistence on fine invention, without which neither “ thundering
in rym ram ruff, quoth my master Chaucer," nor “rolling in
pleasant words," nor “abounding in apt vocables," will suffice.
But he passes over this very swiftly, as over trite and obvious
expressions,4 suitableness of phrase, &c., and attacks the great
literary question of the time, Prosody.
CD
UU
S
1 Some authorities have been much
too mild towards it. For instance,
the late Mr Henry Morley, who says,
“Thomas Drant, of course, did not
suppose that his rules were sufficient."
This is charitable, but outside, or rather
against, the evidence.
2 Certain Notes of Instruction con
cerning the making of verse or rhyme
in English, ed. Arber (with l'he Steel
Gluss, &c.), pp. 31-41, London, 1868.
Originally in the 4to edition of Gas-
coigne's Poems (London, 1575). Mr
Spingarn sees indebtedness in it to.
Ronsard.
3 The observations of Ascham, Wil-
son, and the others being incidental
merely.
4 "If I should undertake to write
in praise of a gentlewoman, I would
neither praise her crystal eye nor her:
cherry lip.”
46
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
He begins his attack by the modest and half - apologetic
request, “This may seem a presumptuous order," that, what-
His Notes of ever the verse chosen be, it be regular, and not
Instruction. wobbling backwards and forwards between twelve
and fourteen syllables on no principle. Then he enjoins
the maintenance of regular and usual accent or quantity ;
and in so doing insists on a standard in regard to which
not merely Wyatt and Surrey earlier, but even Spenser later,
were much less scrupulous.“ Treasure,” he says, you must
use with the first syllable long and the second short: you
must not make it "treasure." And then he makes a very
curious observation :-
"Commonly nowadays in English rhymes, for I dare not call
them English verses, we use none other order but a foot of
two syllables,” to wit, the Tamb. “We have,” he says, “in
other times used other kinds of metres," as
“No wight | in the world | that wealth | can attain," 1
(i.l., anapæsts), while “our Father Chaucer had used the same
liberty in feet and measures that the Latinists do use," that is to
say, syllabic equivalence of two shorts to a long. And he
laments the tyranny of the Iamb; but says, “we must take the
ford as we find it.”
Then, after some particular cautions,—a renewed one as to
quantifying words aright—"understånd,” not “understand,”
&c., as to using as many monosyllables as possible (it is amus-
ing to read this and remember the opposite caution of Pope),-
he comes to rhyme, and warns his scholar against rhyme without
reason. Alliteration is to be moderate : you must not “hunt a.
letter to death.” Unusual words are to be employed carefully
and with a definite purpose to“ draw attentive reading.” Be
clear and sensible. Keep English order, and invert substantive
and adjective seldom and cautiously. Be moderate in the use
i Gascoigne does not use this divi.
sion, or – and y, but' and 'for long
and short, ~ (circumflex) for com-
mon, and indented lines
and
SW W.) for dissyllabic and trisyllabic
foot arrangements.
?"For the haughty obscure verse
doth not much delight, and the verse
that is too easy is like a tale of a roasted
horse."
GASCOIGNE.
47
also of that “shrewd fellow, poetical licence," who actually reads
“heaven” for “heavn ” !1
As for the pause or Cæsura, Gascoigne is not injudicious.
“The pause,” he says, “will stand best in the middle” of an
octosyllable, at the fourth syllable in a “verse of ten," at the
sixth (or middle again) of an Alexandrine, and at the eighth
in a fourteener. But it is at the discretion of the writer
in Rhythm royal: “it forceth not where the pause be till
the end of the line”—and this liberty will assuredly draw
to more.
Next he enumerates stanzas:—Rhyme royal itself, ballades,
sonnets, Dizains, and Sixains, Virelays, and the “Poulter's
measure," of twelve and fourteen alternately, to which his own
contemporaries were so unfortunately addicted. You must
“finish the sentence and meaning at the end of every staff”: and
(by the way) he has “forgotten a notable kind of rhyme called
riding rhyme, which is what our father Chaucer used in his
Canterbury tales, and in divers other delectable and light enter-
prises.” It is good for “a merry tale," Rhyme royal for a
“grave discourse," Ballads and Sonnets for love-poems, &c., and
it would be best, in his judgment, to keep Poulter's measure for.
Psalms and hymns. And so he makes an end,“ doubting his
own ignorance."
The chief points about this really capital booklet are as
follows:-Gascoigne's recognition of the importance of overhaul-
Their cap- ing English Prosody; his good sense on the matter of
ital value. the cæsura, and of Chaucer's adoption of the prin-
ciples of equivalenced scansion; his acknowledgment, with regret,
of the impoverishment which, in the sterility of the mid-six-
teenth century before Spenser, was a fact, as resulting from the
tyranny of the iamb; the shrewdness of his general remarks ;
and, last but not least, his entire silence about the new versify-
ing, the “Dranting of Verses.” It is possible (for though
he was at Cambridge he seems to admit that he did not acquire
1 See Mitford, Harmony of Lan-
guage, p. 105, who thinks the licence
just the other way, and indeed roundly
pronounces the pronunciation in one
syllable "impossible." A little later,
again, Guest thinks the dis-syllable
"uncouth and vulgar.” A most docu.
mentary disagreement !
48
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
any great scholarship there) that he had not come into contact
with any one who took interest in this: but it is improbable
that it would have appealed to his robust sense of poetry,
unsicklied by Harvey's pedantry, and not misled by Spenser's
classical enthusiasm.
At this time, however, or not long after—the Notes must have
been written between 1572 and 1575, and the correspondence of
Spenser and Harvey actually appeared in 1579—these other
persons were thinking a great deal about the classical metres.
The Five Letters (“ Three” and “Two" _not to be confused
with the Four Letters which Harvey issued long afterwards
about Greene) are full of the subject, and of poetical criticism
generally. They, together with the controversy which arose
over Gosson's School of Abuse, and which indirectly produced
Sidney's Apology for Poetry, make the years 1579-1580 as
notable in the history of English criticism as the appearances
of Euphues and The Shepherd's Calendar make them in that of
creative literature.
Spenser's first letter informs Harvey that “they [Sidney
and Dyer] have proclaimed in their åpelwyr áry@ ? [the literary
Spenser and cénacle of Leicester House) a general surceasing and
Harvey. silence of bald rhymers, and also of the very best
too: instead whereof they have, by the authority of their
whole Senate, prescribed certain laws and rules of quantities
of English syllables for English verse, having had thereof
already great practice, and drawn me to their faction.” And
later, “I am more in love with English versifying than with
rhyming, which I should have done long since if I would have
followed your counsel.” He hints, however, gently, that
Harvey's own verses (these coterie writers always keep the
name "verses” for their hybrid abortions) once or twice “make
a breach in Master Drant's rules.” Which was, of course, a
very dreadful thing, only to be “condoned tanto poetoe." He
requites Harvey' with a few Iambics, which he “dare
warrant precisely perfect for the feet, and varying not one
i See Grosart's Works of Gabriel
Harvey, vol. i. pp. 6-150. Parts will be
found in the Globe edition of Spenser,
pp. 706-710.
? I am not responsible for the eccer.
tricities of this form.
SPENSER AND HARVEY.
49
inch from the Rule. And then follows the well-known piece
beginning,
“Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,"
where certainly the state must have been bad if it was as
infelicitous as the verse.
Not such was Gabriel Harvey that he might take even a
polite correction; and his reply is a proper donnish setting-
down of a clever but presumptuous youth. He respects the
Areopagus-indeed they were persons of worship, and Harvey
was a roturier--more than Spenser can or will suppose, and he
likes the trimeters (indeed, though poor things, they were
Spenser's own after all, and such as no man but Spenser could
have written in their foolish kind) more than Spenser “can or
will easily believe.” But-and then follows much reviewing
in the now stale hole-picking kind, which has long been aban-
doned, save by the descendants of Milbourne and Kenrick, and
a lofty protestation that “myself never saw your gorbellied
master's rules, nor heard of them before.”
The Three Letters which follow 1 are distributed in subject
between an Earthquake (which has long since ceased to quake
for us) and the hexameters. They open with a letter from
Spenser, in which he broaches the main question, “Whether
our English accent will endure the Hexameter ?” and doubts.
Yet he has a hankering after it, encloses his own-
“See ye the blindfolded pretty god, that feathered archer," &c.,
and prays that Harvey would either follow the rules of the
great Drant, indorsed by Sidney, or else send his own. Harvey
replies in double. The first part is some very tragical mirth
about the earthquake; the second, " A Gallant Familiar Letter,"
tackles the question of versification.
This gallant familiarity might possibly receive from harsh
critics the name of uneasy coxcom bry; but it is at any rate
clear that the author has set about the matter very seriously.
He expresses delight that Sidney and Dyer, “the two very
diamonds of her Majesty's Court,” have begun to help forward
1 In order of composition, not of publication.
· 50
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
"the exchange of barbarous and balductuml rhymes with
artificial verses”; thinks their “lively example” will be much
better than Ascham's “dead advertisement” in the Schoolmaster.
He would like (as should we) to have Drant's prosody. His
own Rules and Precepts will probably not be very different;
· but he will take time before drafting them finally. He thinks
(reasonably enough) that before framing a standard English
Grammar or Rhetoric (therein including Prosody), a standard
orthography must first be agreed upon. And he suggests that
"we beginners” (this from the author of these truly “ barbarous
and balductum” antics to the author of the Faerie Queene is
distinctly precious) have the advantage, like Homer and
Ennius, of setting examples. "A New Year's Gift to M.
George Bilchaunger," in very doleful hexameters, follows, and
after a little gird at Spenser's “See ye the Blindfolded,” another
sprout of Harvey's brain in the same kind, which has been,
perhaps, more, and more deservedly, laughed at than any of
these absurdities, except the scarcely sane jargon-doggerel of
Stanyhurst,
“What might I call this tree ? a Laurell ? o bonny Laurell !
Needs to thy boughs will I bow this knee, and veil my bonetto ;"
with yet another-
“Since Galateo 2 came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp."
He thinks that the author of this last "wanted but some
delicate choice elegant poesy” of Sidney's or Dyer's for a good
pattern. After some further experiments of his own, or his
brother's, in hexametring some of Spenser's own “emblems”
in the Calendar, he turns to Spenser himself, whom, it seems,
he ranks next the same “incomparable and miraculous genius
in the catalogue of our very principal English Aristarchi." He
1 This word, which is certainly a Reprint in the English Scholars
cousin of “balderdash," is a good Library, No. 10, London, 1880), are,
example of the slang and jargon so thanks partly to their astounding lingo,
often mixed with their preciousness by among the maddest things in English
the Elizabethans. Nash borrowed it literature ; but his prose prefatory
from Harvey to use against him; and matter, equally odd in phrase, has
the eccentric Stanghurst even employs some method in its madness.
it in his Virgil. Stanghurst's hexa- 2 La Casa's book of etiquette and
meters, by the way (vide Mr Arber's behaviour.
SPENSER AND HARVEY.
51
proceeds to speak of some of that earlier work which, as in
The Dying Pelican, is certainly, or in the Dreams, possibly, lost.
After which he writes himself down for all time in the famous
passage about the Faerie Queene, which he had “once again
nigh forgotten,” but which he now sends home “in neither
better nor worse case than he found her.” “As for his judg-
ment,” he is "void of all judgment if Spenser's Nine Comedies
[also lost] are not nearer Ariosto’s than that Elvish Queene is
to the Orlando, which " Spenser “seems to emulate, and hopes
to overgo.” And so he ends his paragraph with the yet more
famous words, “If so be the Faery Queene be fairer in your eye
than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the
garland from Apollo, mark what I say, and yet I will not say
what I thought, but there an end for this once, and fare you
well till God or some good Angel put you in a better mind!”
Which words let all who practise criticism grave in their
memories, and recite them daily, adding, “Here, but for the
grace of God !" if they be modest and fear Nemesis.
After an interval, however, Harvey returns to actual
criticism, and shows himself in rather better figure by pro-
testing, in spite of “five hundred Drants," against the altera-
tion of the quantity of English words by accenting “ Majesty"
and “Manfully," and "Carpenter” on the second syllable.
And he falls in with Gascoigne on the subject of such words
as “Heaven.” Nor could he, even if he had been far less of a
pedant and coxcomb, have given better or sounder doctrine
than that with which he winds up. “It is the vulgar and
natural mother Prosody, that alone worketh the feat, as the
only supreme foundress and reformer of Position, Diphthong,
Orthography, or whatsoever else; whose affirmatives are
nothing worth if she once conclude the negative." And for
this sound doctrine, not unsoundly enlarged upon, and tipped
with a pleasant Latin farewell to “mea domina Immerita, mea
bellissima Collina Clouta,” let us leave Gabriel in charity."
1 The further letters to Spenser, portant deliverances. In the later
which Dr Grosart bas borrowed from (1592) Four Letters, the embroidery
the Camden Society's Letter - book of of railing at the dead Greene and the
Gabriel Harvey, touch literary matters living Nash has almost entirely hidden
not seldom, but with no new im- the literary canvas.
52
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
Meanwhile the strong critical set of the time--so interesting,
if not so satisfying, after the absolute silence of criticism in
The Puritan English earlier—was being shown in another direc-.
attack on tion by a different controversy, to which, as we have
l. seen, Spenser makes allusion. The points which
chiefly interested him at the moment were formal; those to
which we now come were partly of the same class though
of another species, partly transcending form.
Stephen Gosson is one of the persons of whom, as is by
no means always the case, it would really be useful to know
more than we do know about their private history
Gosson.
and character. What disgust, what disappointment,
what tardy development of certain strains of temper and dis-
position he underwent, we do not know; but something of
the kind there must have been to make a young man of four-
and-twenty, a fair scholar, already of some note for both
dramatic and poetical writing, and obviously of no mean in-
tellectual powers, swing violently round, and denounce plays,
and poems, and almost literature generally, as the works of
the Devil. It is quite insufficient to ejaculate “Puritanism !""
or “Platonism !” for neither of these was a new thing, and
the question is why Gosson was not affected by them earlier
or later.
Let us, however, now as always, abstain from speculation
when we have fact; and here we have at least three very
notable facts -- Gosson's School of Abuse, 1 with its satellite
tractates, Lodge's untitled Reply, and the famous Defence of
Poesy or Apology for Poetry 3 which Sidney (to whom Gosson
had rashly dedicated his book) almost certainly intended as a
counterblast, though either out of scorn, as Spenser hints, or
(more probably from what we know of him) out of amiable.
.
i Reprinted by Mr Arber, with its
almost immediately subsequent Apol-
ogy. I wish he had added the Ephem-
crides of Phialo which accompanied
the Apology, and the Plays Confuted of
three years later ; for these books-
very small and very difficult of access
--add something to the controversy.
? Several times reprinted ; as for in-
stance by the present writer in Eliza-
bethan and Jacobean Pamphlets (Lon.
don, 1892).
3 Also frequently indeed oftener)
reprinted, as by Arber, London, 1868;
Shuckburgh, Cambridge, 1891; Cook,
Boston (U.S.A.), 1890.
GOSSON.
53
and courteous dislike to requite a compliment with an insult,
he takes no direct notice of Gosson at any time.
The School of Abuse (which is written in such a style as
almost to out-Euphuise the contemporary Euphues itself) is
The School critical wholly from the moral side, and with refer-
of Abuse. ence to the actual, not the necessary or possible,
state of poetry. There are even, the author says, some good
plays, including at least one of his own; but the whole of
ancient poetry (he says little or nothing of modern) is infected
by the blasphemy and immorality of Paganism, and nearly the
whole of the modern stage is infected by the abuses of the
theatre-of which Gosson speaks in terms pretty well identical
with those which Puritan teachers had for some years past
been using in sermon and treatise. But outside of the moral
and religious line he does not step: he is solely occupied with
the lies and the licence of poets and players.
Lodge's reply (the title - page of it has been lost, but
it may be the Honest Excuses to which Gosson refers as
Lodige's having been published against him) is almost en-
Reply tirely an appeal to authority, seasoned with a little
personal invective. Lodge strings together all the classical
names he can think of, with a few mediæval, to show that
Poétry, Music (which Gosson had also attacked), and even
the theatre, are not bad things. But he hardly attempts any
independent justification of them as good ones, especially from
the purely literary point of view. In fact, his pamphlet-
though interesting as critical work from the associate of great
creators in drama, himself a delightful minor poet and no
contemptible pioneer of English prose fiction-is merely one
of the earliest adaptations in English of an unreal defence to an
attack, logically as unreal, though actually dangerous. The
charlatan-geniuses of the Renaissance, with Cornelius Agrippa ?
at their head, had refurbished the Platonic arguments for the
sincere but pestilent reformers of the Puritan type. Lodge
and his likes, in all countries from Italy outward and from
Boccaccio downward, accept the measure of the shadowy daggers
of their opponents, and attempt to meet them with weapons
1 In his De Vanitate Scientiarum (1527).
54
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
being eene
ded by free fro
of similar temper. The only reality of the debate is in its
accidents, not in its main purport. But the assailants, in
England at least, had for the time an unfair advantage, because
the defence could point to no great poet but Chaucer. The
real answer was being provided by one of themselves in the
shape of The Faerie Queene.
Sidney's book, though pervaded by the same delusion, is one
of far more importance. It is not free from faults—in fact, it
Silmesite has often been pointed out that some of Sidney's doc-
Apology for trines, if they had been accepted, would have made
Poetry. the best efforts of Elizabethan literature abortive.
But the defects of detail, of which more presently, are mixed
with admirable merits; the critic shows himself able, as Gosson
had not been able, to take a wide and catholic, instead of a
peddling and pettifogging, view of morality. Instead of merely
stringing authorities together like Lodge, he uses authority
indeed, but abuses it not; and while not neglecting form he
does not give exclusive attention to it.
His main object, indeed (though he does not know it), is the
defence, not so much of Poetry as of Romance. He follows
the ancients in extending the former term to any prose fiction :
but it is quite evident that he would have, in his mimesis, a
quality of imagination which Aristotle nowhere insists upon,
and which is in the best sense Romantic. And of this poetry, or
romance, he makes one of the loftiest conceptions possible.
All the hyperboles of philosophers or of poets, on order, justice,
harmony, and the like, are heaped upon Poetry herself, and all'
the Platonic objections to her are retorted or denied.1
It has been said that there is no direct reference to Gosson
i Our two chief English - writing
authorities, Mr Symonds and Mr Spin-
garn, are at odds as to Sidney's indebt
edness to the Italians. He quotes them
but sparingly – Petrarch, Boccaccio,
Landino, among the older writers, Fra-
castoro and Scaliger alone, I think, of
the moderns-and Mr Symonds thought
that he owed them little or nothing.
Mr Spingarn, on the other hand, repre-
sents him as following them all in
general, and Minturno in particular.
As usual, it is a case of the gold and
silver shield. My own reading of the
Italian writers of 1530-80 leaves me in
no doubt that Sidney knew them, or
some of them, pretty well. But his
attitude is very different from theirs
as a whole, and already significant of
some specially English characteristics
in criticism.
SIDNEY.
55
in the Apology, though the indirect references are fairly clear.
Abstract Sidney begins (in the orthodox Platonic or Cicer-
of it. onian manner) somewhat off his subject, by telling
how the right virtuous Edward Wotton, and he himself, once
at the Emperor's Court learnt horsemanship of John Pietro
Pugliano, the Imperial Equerry, and recounting with pleasant
irony some magnifying of his office by that officer. Whence,
by an equally pleasant rhetorical turn, he slips into a defence of
his office-his “unelected vocation” of poet. Were not the
earliest and greatest authors of all countries, Musæus, Homer,
Hesiod, in Greece (not to mention Orpheus and Linus), Livius
Andronicus and Ennius among the Romans, Dante, Boccaccio,
and Petrarch in Italy, Chaucer and Gower for “our English ”_
were they not all poets ? Even the philosophers in Greece used
poetry, and Plato himself is a poet almost against his will.
Herodotus called his nine books after the Muses; and he and
all historians have stolen or usurped things of poetry. Wales,
Ireland, “ the most barbarous and simple Indians,” are cited.
Nay, further, did not the Romans call a poet vates, a “prophet”?
and, by presumption, may we not call David's psalms a divine
poem? Whatever some may think, it is no profanation to do
so. For what is a poet ? What do we mean by adopting that
Greek title for him? We mean that he is a maker. (All other
arts and sciences limit themselves to nature; the poet alone
transcends nature, improves it, nay, brings himself (" let it not
be deemed too saucy a comparison ") in some sort into competi-
tion with the Creator Himself whom he imitates.)
The kinds of this imitation are then surveyed—“Divine,"
“Philosophical," and that of the third or right sort, who only
imitate to invent and improve, which neither divine nor philos-
ophic poets can do. These classes are subdivided according to
their matter-heroic, tragic, comic, &c.—or according to the
sorts of verses they liked best to write in, "for, indeed, the
greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions
in that numerous kind of writing which is called verse—indeed
but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no cause to
poetry.” And again, “it is not rhyming and versing that
? Savonarola, probably.
56
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
maketh a poet.” Xenophon and Heliodorus were both poets
in prose.
Now let us “weigh this latter part of poetry first by works
and then by parts,” having regard always to the “ Architec-
tonice or mistress-knowledge," the knowledge of a man's self,
ethically and politically. Philosophy, history, law, &c., are
then “weighed” against poetry at some length: and the judg-
ment of Aristotle that Poetry is philosophoteron and spoudaio-
teron than history, is affirmed chiefly on the odd ground of
poetical justice,—the right always triumphing in poetry though
not in fact. Instances of the moral and political uses of poetry
follow. Then for the parts. Pastoral, comedy, tragedy, &c., are
by turns surveyed and defended ; and it is in the eulogy of
lyric that the famous sentence about Chevy Chase 1. occurs.
After this, and after a stately vindication of Poetry's right to
the laurel, he turns to the objections of the objectors. Although
repeating the declaration that “rhyming and versing make not
poetry," he argues that if they were inseparable,2 verse is the
most excellent kind of writing, far better than prose. As to
the abuses of poetry, they are but abuses, and do not take away
the use, as is proved by a great number of stock examples.
Why, then, has England grown so hard a stepmother to
poets ? They are bad enough, as a rule, no doubt; though
Chaucer did excellently considering his time. The Mirror for
Magistrates is good; so is Surrey; and The Shepherd's Calendar
“ hath much poetry,” though“ the old rustic language” is bad,
since neither Theocritus, nor Virgil, nor Sannazar has it. And.'
what is the reason of our inferiority? The neglect of rule..
From this point onwards Sidney certainly “exposes his legs to
the arrows” of those who ignore the just historic estimate. He
pours ridicule on all our tragedies except Gorboduc, and still
more on our mongrel tragi-comedies. We must follow the
Unities, which, as it is, are neglected even in Gorboduc,“ how
much more in all the rest ?” Whence he proceeds (uncon-
KT
1 "I must confess my own barbar-
ousness : I never heard the old song of
Percy and Douglas that I found not
my heart moved more than with a
trumpet."
? "As indeed it seemeth Scaliger
judgeth.” i
SIDNEY.
57
scious how cool the reductio ad absurdum will leave us) to the
famous ridicule of “ Asia on the one side and Africa on the
other,” of “ three ladies walking to gather flowers,” and how the
same place which was a garden becomes a rock, and then a cave
with a monster, and then a battlefield with two armies-of the
course of two lives in two hours' space, &c. And he concludes
with some remarks on versification, which we should gladly
have seen worked out. For he does not now seem to be in that
antagonistic mood towards rhyme which Spenser's letters to
Harvey discover in him. On the contrary, he admits two
- styles, ancient and modern, the former depending on quantity,
the latter depending on “number,” accent, and rhyme. He
indeed thinks English fit for both sorts, and denies “neither
sweetness nor majesty” to rhyme, but is, like almost all his
contemporaries and followers (except Gascoigne partially), in a
fog as to "numbers” and cæsura. The actual end comes a very
little abruptly by an exhortation of some length, half humorous,
half serious, to all and sundry, to be “no more to jest at the
reverent title of a rhymer."
The importance of this manifesto, both symptomatically and
typically, can hardly be exaggerated. It exhibits the ternper
Its minor of the generation which actually produced the first-
shortcomings fruits of the greatest Elizabethan poetry; it served
as a stimulant and encouragement to all the successive genera-
tions of the great age. That Sidney makes mistakes both in
gross and detail-that he even makes some rather serious mis-
takes from the mere “point of view of the examiner”—is of
course undeniable. He has a good deal of the merely tradi-
tional mode of Renaissance respect for classical--and for some
modern—authority. That, for instance, there is a good deal to
be said, and that not only from the point of view of Ben Jonson,
against Spenser's half-archaic half-rustic dialect in the Calendar,
few would refuse to grant. But Theocritus did use dialect: it
would not in the least matter whether either he or Virgil did
not; and if it did, what has the modern and purely vernacular
name of Sannazar to do with the matter? It can only be
replied that Spenser, by permitting “ E. K.'s" annotation, did
much to invite this sort of criticism; and that Englishmen's re-
58
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
luctance to rely on the inherent powers of the English language
was partly justified (for hardly any dead poet but Chaucer and
no dead prose-writers but Malory and perhaps Berners deserved
the title of “great"), partly came from very pardonable ignorance.
It has been already observed that Sidney is by no means
peremptory about the “new versifying”; and in particular has
absolutely none of the craze against rhyme as rhyme which
animated persons of every degree of ability, from Stanyhurst to
Milton, during more than a century. His remarks on versifica-
tion are, however, too scanty to need much comment.
There remain his two major heresies, the declaration that
verse is not inseparable from poetry, and the denunciation of
and major tragi-comedy. In both the authority of the ancients
heresies. must again bear good part of the blame, but in both
he has additional excuses. As to the “pestilent heresy of prose
poetry,” he is at least not unwilling to argue on the hypothesis
that verse were necessary to poetry, though he does not think it.
is. He is quite sure that verse is anyhow a nobler medium
than prose. As for the plays, there is still more excuse for
him. His classical authorities were quite clear on the point;
and as yet there was nothing to be quoted on the other side-
at least in English. Spanish had indeed already made the
experiment of tragi-comic and anti-unitarian treatment; but I
do not think any of the best Spanish examples had yet appeared,
and there is great difference between the two theatres. In
English itself not one single great or even good play certainly
existed on the model at Sidney's death; and, from what we have
of what did exist, we can judge how the rough verse, the clumsy
construction, or rather absence of construction, the entire ab-
sence of clear character-projection, and the higgledy-piggledy
of huddled horrors, and horseplay, must have shocked a taste
delicate in itself and nursed upon classical and Italian litera-
The excuses ture. And it is noteworthy that even Gorboduc,
of both, with all its regularity and “Senecation,” does not
bribe Sidney to overlook at least some of its defects. He is
here, as elsewhere,—as indeed throughout,-neither blind nor
bigoted. He is only in the position of a man very imperfectly
supplied with actual experiments and observations, confronted
KING JAMES I.
59
1920
with a stage of creative production but just improving from a
very bad state, and relying on old and approved methods as
against new ones which had as yet had no success.
And had his mistakes been thrice what they are, the tone
and temper of his tractate would make us forgive them three
in times over. That “moving of his heart as with a
ample com- trumpet” communicates itself to his reader even
pensation. now, and shows us the motion in the heart of the
nation at large that was giving us the Faerie Queene, that was
to give us Hamlet and As You Like It. What though the
illustrations sometimes make us smile ? that the praise of the
moral and political effects of poetry may sometimes turn the
smile into a laugh or a sigh? Poetry after all, like all other
human things, has a body and a soul. The body must be
fashioned by art-perhaps the body is art; but the soul is
something else. The best poetry will not come without careful
consideration of form and subject, of kind and style; but it will
not necessarily come with this consideration. There must be
the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the aflatus, the glow; and they
are here in Sidney's tractate.) Nor must we fail to draw atten-
tion, once more, to the difference of the English critical spirit
here shown as regards both Italian and French. . .
In the decade which followed,1 three notable books of English
criticism appeared, none of them exhibiting Sidney's afflatus, but
King James's all showing the interest felt in the subject, and one
Reulis and exceeding in method, and at least attempted range,
*. anything that English had known, or was to know,
for more than a century. These were King James the First's
(as yet only “the Sixth's ") Reulis and Cautelis to be observit
and eschewit in Scottis Poesie, 1585; William Webbe's Discourse
of English Poesie, next year; and the anonymous Arte of English
Poesie, which appeared in 1589, and which (on rather weak
evidence, but with no counter-claimant) is usually attributed to
George or to Richard Puttenham.
1 It may be desirable to note that author's death.
Sidney's book, though very well known, ? All three are included in Mr Arber's
as was the wont then, in MS., to all Reprints and Prof. Gregory Smith's
who cared to know, was never printed collection, with due biographical and ...
till 1595, nearly ten years after the bibliographical apparatus.
Cautelis
60
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
The first is the slightest; but it is interesting for more than
its authorship. It was attached to James's Essays of a Prentice
in the Divine Art, of which it gives some rules: it shows that
Buchanan had taken pains with his pupil; and it also exhibits
that slightly scholastic and “peddling,” but by no means un-
real, shrewdness and acumen which distinguished the British
Solomon in his happier moments. It is characteristic that
James is not in the least afraid of the charge of attending to
mint, anise, and cumin. He plunges without any rhetorical
exordium into what he calls “just colours ”-do not rhyme on
the same syllable, see that your rhyme is on accented syllables
only, do not let your first or last word exceed two or three
syllables at most. This dread of polysyllables, so curious to us,
was very common at the time : it was one of the things from
which Shakespeare's silent sovereignty delivered us by such
touches of spell-dissolving mastery as
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.".
Then he passes to feet, of which he practically allows only the
iamb; while he very oddly gives the word “ foot” to the syllable,
not the combination of syllables; and lays down the entirely
arbitrary rule that the number of “feet"_.l., syllables-must
be even, not odd. There is to be a sharp section (" cæsura") in
the middle of every line, long or short; and the difference of
long, short, and“ indifferent” (common) feet or syllables is dwelt
upon, with its influence of “flowing," as the King calls rhythm.
Cautions on diction follow, and some against commonplaces,
which look as if the royal prentice had read Gascoigne, a sugges-
tion confirmed elsewhere. Invention is briefly touched; and the
tract finishes with a short account of the kinds of verse: “rhyme”
—i.e., the heroic couplet,“quhilk servis onely for lang historieis”;
a heroical stanza of nine lines, rhymed aabaabbab; ottava rima,
which he calls “ballat royal”; rhyme royal, which he calls
“Troilus verse”; “rouncifals," or "tumbling verse” (doggerel
alliterative, with bob and wheel); sonnets; "common” verse
(octosyllable couplets); “all kinds of broken or cuttit verse," &c.
The tract is, as has been said, interesting, because it is an
1 It is, however, excessive to represent James as a mere copyist of Gascoigne.
WEBBE.
61
honest, and by no means unintelligent, attempt to make an
English prosody, with special reference to a dialect which had
done great things in its short day, but which had been specially
affected not to say specially disorganised by the revived and
bastard alliteration of the fifteenth century. Probably it was
the study of French (where the iamb had long been the
only foot) which, quite as much as mere following of Gas-
coigne, induced James to extend that crippling limitation to
English; and the same influence may be seen in his insist-
ence on the hard-and-fast section. These things (the latter of
which at least rather endeared him to Dr Guest)1 are, of course,
quite wrong; but they express the genuine and creditable
desire of the time to impose some order on the shambling
doggerel of the generation or two immediately preceding. We
find the same tendency even in Spenser, as far as rigid dis-
syllabic feet and sections are concerned; and it is certainly
no shame for the Royal prentice to follow, though unknow-
ing, the master and king of English poetry at the time when
he wrote.
One would not, however, in any case have expected from
James evidence of the root of the matter in poetry. There is
Webbe's more of this root, though less scholarship and also
Discourse. more " craze," in the obscure William Webbe, of
whom we know practically nothing except that he was a Cam-
bridge man, a friend of Robert Wilmot (the author of Tancred
and Gismund) and private tutor to the sons of Edward Sulyard
of Flemyngs, an Essex squire. The young Sulyards must have.
received some rather dubious instruction in the classics, for
Webbe, in his inevitable classical exordium, thinks that Pindar
was older than Homer, and that Horace came after—apparently
a good while after-Ovid, and about the same time as Juvenal
and Persius. He was, however, really and deeply interested in
English verse; and his enthusiasm for Spenser — "the new
ever lived,” is, if not in every case quite according to know-
ledge, absolutely right on the whole, and very pleasant and
? Who also caught at James's stigmatisation for the true English.
stumbling verse” as a convenient equivalenced liberty.
62
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
refreshing to read. It is, indeed, the first thing of the kind
that we meet with in English ; for the frequent earlier praises
of Chaucer are almost always long after date, always uncritical,
and for the most part 1 much rather expressions of a conven-
tional tradition than of the writer's deliberate preference.
It was Webbe's misfortune, rather than his fault, that, like
his idol (but without that idol's resipiscence), and, like most
loyal Cambridge men, with the examples of Watson, Ascham,
and Drant before them, he was bitten with “the new versify-
ing." It was rather his fault than his misfortune that he seems
to have taken very little pains to acquaint himself with the
actual performance of English poetry. Even of Gower he
speaks as though he only knew him through the references of
Chaucer and others : though three editions of the Confessio-
Caxton's one and Berthelette's two were in print in his time.
His notice of Chaucer himself is curiously vague, and almost
limited to his powers as a satirist; while he has, what must
seem to most judges,2 the astonishing idea of discovering “good
proportion of verse and meetly current style” in Lydgate,
though he reproves him for dealing with “superstitious and odd
matters.” That he thinks Piers Plowman later than Lydgate
is unlucky, but not quite criminal. He had evidently read it
-indeed the book, from its kinship in parts to the Protestant,
not to say the Puritan, spirit, appealed to Elizabethan tastes,
and Crowley had already printed two editions of it, Rogers a
third. But he makes upon it the extraordinary remark,“ The first
I have seen that observed the quantity of our verse without the
Slight in curiosity of rhyme.” What Webbe here means by
knowledge, “quantity," or whether he had any clear deliberate
meaning at all, it is impossible to see: it is needless to say that
Langland is absolutely non-quantitative in the ordinary sense,
that if" quantity” means number of syllables he observes none,
i Occleve- no genius, but a true
man enough—deserves exception per-
haps best. .
? Some Germaps-in this, as in other
matters, more hopelessly to seek in Eng-
lish now than, teste Porson, they were a
century ago in Greek-have followed
Webbe, as indeed Warton had strangely
done ; and of course some Englishmen
have followed the Germans. Lydgate
himself knew better, though some of
the shorter poems attributed to him
are metrically, as well as in other ways,
not contemptible.
WEBBE.
63
and that he can be scanned only on the alliterative-accentual
system. For Gascoigne Webbe relies on “E. K."; brackets
“the divers works of the old Earl of Surrey” with a dozen
others; is copious on Phaer, Golding, &c., and mentions
George Whetstone and Anthony Munday in words which
would be adequate for Sackville (who is not named), and
hardly too low for Spenser; while Gabriel Harvey is deliber-
ately ranked with Spenser himself. Yet these things, rightly
valued, are not great shame to Webbe. If he borrows from
“E. K.” some scorn of the "ragged rout of rakehell rhymers,".
and adds more of his own, he specifies nobody; and his de-
preciation is only the defect which almost necessarily accom-
panies the quality of his enthusiasm.
His piece, though not long, is longer than those of Gas-
coigne, Sidney, and King James. After a dedication (not more
but enthusi- than excusably laudatory) to his patron Sulyard,
astic, there is a curious preface to “The Noble Poets of
England," who, if they had been inclined to be censorious,
might have replied that Master Webbe, while complimenting
them, went about to show that the objects of his compliment
did not exist. “It is,” he says, “to be wondered of all, and is
lamented of many, that, while all other studies are used
eagerly, only Poetry has found fewest friends to amend it."
We have “as sharp and quick wits” in England as ever were
Greeks and Romans: our tongue is neither coarse nor harsh,
as she has already shown. All that is wanted is “some perfect
platform or Prosodia of versifying: either in imitation of
Greeks and Latins, or with necessary alterations. So, if the
Noble Poets would “look so low from their divine cogitations,
and “run over the simple censure” of Master Webbe's “weak
brain,” something might, perhaps, be done.
The treatise itself begins with the usual etymological de-
finition of poetry, as “making," and the usual comments on
the word “Vates”; but almost immediately digresses
if uncritical,
wdrs into praise of our late famous English poet who
wrote the Shepherd's Calendar and a wish to see his “English
Poet” (mentioned by “E. K."), which, alas ! none of us have
ever seen. This is succeeded, first by the classical and then by
64
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
the English historical sketches, which have been commented
upon. It ends with fresh laudation of Spenser.
Webbe then turns to the general consideration of poetry
(especially from the allegoric-didactic point of view), of subjects,
kinds, &c.; and it is to be observed that, though he several
times cites Aristotle, he leans much more on Horace, and on
Elyot's translations from him and other Latins.) He then
proceeds to a rather unnecessarily elaborate study of the
Æneid, with large citations both from the original and from
Phaer's translation, after which he returns once more to Spenser,
and holds him up as at least the equal of Virgil and Theocritus.
Indeed the Calendar is practically his theme all through,
though he diverges from and embroiders upon it. Then, after
glancing amiably enough at Tusser, and mentioning a trans-
lation of his own of the Georgics, which has got into the hands
of some piratical publisher, he attacks the great rhyme-ques-
tion, to which he has, from the Preface onwards, more than
once alluded. Much of what he says is borrowed, or a little
advanced, from Ascham; but Webbe is less certain about the
matter than his master, and again diverges into a consideration
of divers English metres, always illustrated, where possible,
from the Calendar.) Still harking back again, he decides that
“the true kind of versifying” might have been effected in
English: though (as Campion, with better wits, did after him)
he questions whether some alteration of the actual Greek and
Latin forms is not required." He gives a list of classical feet
(fairly correct, except that he makes the odd confusion of a
trochee and a tribrach), and discusses the liberties which
must be taken with English to adjust it to some of them. ?
Elegiacs, he thinks, will not do: Hexameters and Sapphics go
best. And, to prove this, he is rash enough to give versions
of his own, in the former metre, of Virgil's first and second
eclogues, in the latter, of Spenser's beautiful
“Ye dainty nymphs that in this blessed brook.”
It is enough to say that he succeeds in stripping all three of
every rag of poetry. A translation of Fabricius'1 prose sylla.
+ V. Hist. Crit., ii. 354.
POTTENHAM ?
65
bus of Horace's rules, gathered not merely out of the Ep. ad
Pisones but elsewhere, and an "epilogue,” modest as to
himself, sanguine as to what will happen when “the rabble
of bald rhymes is turned to famous works,” concludes the
piece.
On the whole, to use the hackneyed old phrase once more,
we could have better spared a better critic than Webbe, who
in appreci- gives us in a fashion invaluable to map-makers of
ation. the early exploration of English criticism — the
workings of a mind furnished with no original genius for
poetry, and not much for literature, not very extensively or
accurately erudite, but intensely interested in matters literary,
and especially in matters poetical, generously enthusiastic for
such good things as were presented to it, not without some
mother-wit even in its crazes, and encouraged in those crazes
not, as in Harvey's case, by vanity, pedantry, and bad taste,
but by its very love of letters. Average dispositions of this
kind were, as a rule, diverted either into active life—very much
for the good of the nation-or-not at all for its good-into
the acrid disputes of hot-gospelling and Puritanism. Webbe,
to the best of his modest powers, was a devotee of literature: ..
for which let him have due honour.
Puttenham-or whosoever else it was, if it was not Put-
tenham 4_has some points of advantage, and one great one
of disadvantage, in comparison with Webbe. In
Putten-
ham's (?) poetical faculty there is very little to choose be-
Art of Eng- tween them—the abundant specimens of his own
lish Poesie.
powers, which the author of The Art of English
Poesie gives (and which are eked out by a late copy of one of
the works referred to, Partheniades), deserve the gibes they
receive in one of our scanty early notices of the book, that by
Sir John Harington (v. infra). On the other hand, Puttenham
has very little of that engaging enthusiasm which atones for
i The whole of the documents in the
case will be found, clearly put, in Arber
and Gregory Smith : also in Mr Her-
bert Croft's edition of The Governor
of Sir Thomas Elyot, the Puttenhams'
uncle. The first attribution is in
Bolton (v. infra) some fifteen years
later than the date of the book, and
not quite positive ("as the Fame is ").
Whether it was George or whether it
was Richard, non liquet.
66
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
so much in his contemporary. But this very want of enthu-
siasm somewhat prepares us for, though it need not necessarily
accompany, merits which we do not find in Webbe, considered
as a critic. The Art of English Poesy, which, as has been said,
appeared in 1589, three years later than Webbe's, but which,
from some allusions, may have been written, or at least begun,
before it, and which, from other allusions, must have been the
work of a man well advanced in middle life, is methodically
composed, very capable in range and plan, and supported with
a by no means contemptible erudition, and no inconsiderable
supply of judgment and common - sense. It was unfortunate
for Puttenham that he was just a little too old: that having
been-as from a fairly precise statement of his he must have
been-born cir. 1530-35, he belonged to the early and uncertain
generation of Elizabethan men of letters, the Googes and
Turbervilles, and Gascoignes, not to the generation of Sidney
and Spenser, much less to that of Shakespeare and Jonson.
But what he had he gave: and it is far from valueless.
The book is “to-deled” (as the author of the Ancren Riwle
would say) into three books—“Of Poets and Poesie,” “Of Pro-
portion,” and “Of Ornament." It begins, as usual,
Its erudition. ?
with observations on the words poet and maker,
references to the ancients, &c.; but this exordium, which is
fitly written in a plain but useful and agreeable style, is com-
mendably short. The writer lays it down, with reasons, that
there may be an Art of English as of Latin and Greek poetry;
but cannot refrain from the same sort of “writing at large” as to
poets being the first philosophers, &c., which we have so often
seen. Indeed we must lay our account with the almost
certain fact that all writers of this period had seen Sidney's
Defence at least in MS. or had heard of it. He comes closer to
business with his remarks on the irreption of rhyme into Greek
and Latin poetry; and shows a better knowledge of leonine and
other medieval Latin verse, not merely than Webbe, but even
than Ascham. A very long section then deals with the
question—all-interesting to a man of the Renaissance—in what
1 Harington, a person of humour, this as well as other things in his fling
and a typical Englishman, perstringes at the Art.
PUTTENHAM ?
67
reputation poets were with princes of old, and how they be
now. contemptible (wherein Puttenham shows a rather re-
markable acquaintance with modern European literature), and
then turns to the subject or matter of poesy and the forms
thereof, handling the latter at great length, and with a fair
sprinkle of literary anecdote. At last he comes to English
poetry; and though, as we might expect, he does not go
behind the late fourteenth century, he shows rather more know-
ledge than Webbe and (not without slips here and elsewhere)
far more comparative judgment. It must, however, be admitted
that, engaging as is his description of Sir Walter Raleigh's
“ vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate,” he does not show
to advantage in the patronising glance in passing at “that other
gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd's Calendar," contrasted
with the description of the Queen our Sovereign lady, “whose
Muse easily surmounteth all the rest in any kind on which
it may please her Majesty to employ her pen.” But here the
allowance comes in: the stoutest Tory of later days can never
wholly share, though he may remotely comprehend, the curious
mixture of religious, romantic, patriotic, amatory, and interested
feelings with which the men of the sixteenth century wrote
about Gloriana.
The second book deals with Proportion, in which word
Puttenham includes almost everything belonging to Prosody
Systematic in its widest sense-staff, stanza, measure, metres,
arrangement and feet, “ cæsure," rhyme, accent, cadence, situation
(by which he means the arrangement of the rhymes), and pro-
portion in figure. On most of these heads he speaks more
or less in accordance with his fellows (though he very notice-
ably abstains from extreme commendation or condemnation of
rhyme), save that, for the moment, he seems to neglect the
“new. versifying.” It is, however, but for a moment. After
his chapters on “proportion” in figure (the fanciful egg, wheel,
lozenge, &c., which he himself argues for, and which were to
make critics of the Addisonian type half-angry and half-sad),
he deals with the subject.
| About this “new versifying” he is evidently in two minds.
He had glanced at it before (and refers to the glance
68
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
now) 1 as "a nice and scholastic curiosity." However, “ for the
information of our young makers, and pleasure to those who
be delighted in novelty, and to the intent that we may not seem
by ignorance or oversight to omit," 2 he “will now deal with it.”
Which he does at great length; and, at any rate sometimes,
with a clearer perception of the prosodic values than any other,
even Spenser, had yet shown. But he does not seem quite
at home in the matter, and glides off to a discussion of feet-
classical feet in the usual rhymed English verse.
The third book is longer than the first and second put
together, and is evidently that in which the author himself
took most pleasure. It is called “Of Ornament,”
and ex-
uberant but practically deals with the whole question of
indulgence lexis or style, so that it is at least common to
in Figures.
*** Rhetoric and Poetics. In one respect, too, it belongs
more specially to the former, in that it contains the most
elaborate treatment of rhetorical figures to be found, up to its
time, in English literature. Full eighty pages are occupied
with the catalogue of these “Figures Auricular” wherein
Puttenham (sometimes rather badly served by his pen or his
printer) ransacks the Greek rhetoricians, and compiles a list
(with explanations and examples) of over one hundred and
twenty. It is preceded and followed by more general remarks,
of which some account must be given.
Beginning with an exordial defence of ornament in general,
Puttenham proceeds to argue that set speeches, as in Parlia-
ment, not merely may but ought to be couched in something
more than a conversational style. This added grace must be
given by (1) Language, (2) Style, (3) Figures. On diction he
has remarks both shrewd and interesting, strongly commending
the language of the Court and of the best citizens, not pro-
1 Here as elsewhere we may note
evidences of possible revision in the
book. That there was some such re-
vision is certain ; for instance, Ben
Jonson's copy (the existence of which
is not uninteresting) contains a large
cancel of four leaves, not found in
other copies known. For this and
other points of the same kind, see the
editions cited.
2 “Reviewing" was as yet in its
infancy—a curiously lively one though,
with Nash and others coming on.
Puttenham seems to have understood
its little ways rather well.
MINORS.
69
vincial speech, or that of seaports, or of universities, or in other
ways merely technical. “The usual speech of the court, and
that of London and the shires lying about London, within ten
miles and not much above” is his norm. There is also a
noteworthy and very early reference to English dictionaries,
and a cautious section on neologisms introduced from other
tongues to fill wants. Style he will have reached by “a con-
stant and continual tenor of writing,” and gives the usual
subdivision of high, low, and middle. And so to his Figures.
The details and illustrations of the long catalogue of these
invite comment, but we must abstain therefrom. When the
list is finished, Puttenham returns to his generalities with a dis-
cussion of the main principle of ornament, which he calls Decorum
or“Decency," dividing and illustrating the kinds of it into choice
of subject, diction, delivery, and other things, not without good
craftsmanship, and with a profusion of anecdotes chiefly of the
Helotry kind. He then (rather oddly, but not out of keeping
with his classical models) has a chapter of decorum in behaviour,
turns to the necessity of concealing art, and ends with a highly
flattering conclusion to the Queen.
We have yet to mention some minorities ; less briefly, the
two champions-Campion and Daniel, who brought the question
of “ Rhyme v. ' Verse”” to final arbitrament of battle; the great
name (not so great here as elsewhere) of Francis Bacon ; and
lastly, Ben Jonson, who, if he long survived Elizabeth, is far
the greatest of Elizabethan critics, and perhaps the only English
critic who deserves the adjective “great” before Dryden.
The earliest (1591) of these is Sir John Harington, in the
Minors : prefatory matter of his translation of the Orlando,
Harington, which contains the gibe at Puttenham above re-
Webster, ferred to. It is otherwise much indebted to Sidney,
Bolton, &c. from whom, however, Harington differs in allowing
more scope to allegorical interpretation. Then comes Francis
i Reprinted by Haslewood. Whet-
stone's Preface to Promos and Cassano
dra (1578) and A. Fraunce's Arcadian
Rhetoric (1588) are earlier still. The
former anticipates Sidney in objecting
to the irregularity of English plays :
the latter is a strong partisan of classi-
cal metres, his practice in which is
sufficiently roughly treated by Ben
Jonson in his Conversations, v. infra,
p. 82.
70
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
(
Meres, whose Palladis Tamia? (1598) is to be eternally men-
tioned with gratitude, because it gives us our one real document
about the order of Shakespeare's plays, but is quite childish in
the critical characterisation which it not uninterestingly at-
tempts. Webster's equally famous, and universally known,
epitheting of the work of Shakespeare and others in the Pre-
face to The White Devil (1612) adds yet another instance of the
short sight of contemporaries; but tempting as it may be to
comment on these, it would not become a Historian of Criticism
to do so in this context. William Vaughan in The Golden Grove
(1600) had earlier dealt, and Bolton 2 in his Hypercritica (1616),
and Peacham in his Complete Gentleman (1622), were later to
deal, with Poetry, but in terms adding nothing to, and probably
borrowed from, the utterances of Sidney, Webbe, and Putten-
ham. Their contributions are “sma'sumas," as Bailie Nicol
Jarvie says, and we must neglect them.
The most interesting literary result of the “new versifying"
craze is to be found, without doubt, in the Observations in the
Art of English Poesy of Thomas Campion 3 and the
Campion
and his subsequent Defence of Rhyme of Samuel Daniel. The
Observar former was issued in 1602, and the latter still later ;
tions.
—that is to say more than twenty years after Spen-
ser's and Harvey's letters, and more than thirty after the ap-
pearance-let alone the writing-of Ascham's Schoolmaster.
In the interval the true system of English prosody had put
itself practically beyond all real danger; but the critical craze
had never received its quietus. Nay, it survived to animate
Milton: and there are persons whom we could only name for
the sake of honour, who would not appear to see that it is dead
even yet. Both the writers mentioned were true poets: and
i Reprinted (in its critical section) Skelton, can "endure” Gascoigne,
by Mr Arber, English Garner, ii. 94 sq., praises Elizabeth and James (of
aud in Gregory Smith.
course), Chapman, Daniel, Drayton,
2 Bolton's criticism of his contempor Constable, Southwell, Sackville, Sur-
aries is extracted in Warton (iv. 204 rey, Wyatt, Raleigh, Dupne, and Gre-
sq., ed. Hazlitt). The writer, who is ville, but gives the palma for “vital,
dealing with History, and speaking judicious, and practicable" language to
directly of language, disallows most Jonson.
of Spenser (excepting the Hymns) and 3 Ed. Bullen, Works of Campion,
all Chaucer, Lydgate, Langland, and London, 1889, and in Gregory Smith.
CAMPION.
71
-
the curious thing is that the more exquisitely romantic poet of
the two was the partisan of classical prosody. But Campion-
who dedicated his book to Lord Buckhurst, the doyen (except
poor old Churchyard) of English poetry at the time, and one
whose few but noble exercises in it need hardly vail their crest
to any contemporary poetry but Spenser's and Shakespeare's
- was far too wise a man, as well as far too good a poet, to
champion any longer the break-neck and break-jaw hexameters
of Harvey and Stanghurst. We have seen that, almost from
the first, there had been questions of heart among the partisans
of the New Versifying. That English is not tolerant of dactyls
--that dactyls, do what you will, in English, will tilt themselves
up into anapæsts with anacrusis is a truth which no impartial
student of metre with an ear, and with an eye to cover the
history of English poetry, can deny. Some even of these
pioneers had seen this: Campion has the boldness to declare it
in the words, “ It [the dactylic hexameter) is an attempt alto-
gether against the nature of our language." But though he was
bold so far, he was not quite bold enough. He could not sur-
mount the queer Renaissance objection to rhyme. That all the
arguments against the “barbarism” of this tell equally against
Christianity, chivalry, the English constitution, the existence
of America, gunpowder, glass-windows, coal-fires, and a very
large number of other institutions of some usefulness, never
seems to have occurred to any of these good folk. But no man
can escape his time. Campion, not noticing, or not choosing
to notice, the intensely English quality of the anapæst, limits,
or almost limits, our verse to iambs and trochees. It was pos-
sible for him—though it still appears to be difficult for some-
to recognise the tribrach, the mere suggestion of which in Eng-
lish verse threw Dr Guest into a paroxysm of “! ! ! !'s," but
which exists as certainly as does the iamb itself. On the con-
trary he shows himself in advance of Guest, and of most be-
hind Guest to his own time, by admitting tribrachs in the third
and fifth places. Nay, he even sees that a trochee may take
the place of an iamb (Milton's probably borrowed secret) in
the first place, though his unerring ear (I think there is no
verse of Campion's that is unmusical) insists on some other foot
72
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
than an iamb following — otherwise, he says, “it would too
much drink up the verse.” But, on the whole, he sets himself
to work, a self-condemned drudge, to make iambic and trochaic
verses without rhyme. And on these two, with certain licences,
he arranges schemes of English elegiacs, anacreontics, and the
rest. Some of the examples of these are charming poems, notably
the famous “Rose-Cheeked Laura,” and the beautiful “ Constant
to None,” while Campion's subsequent remark on English
quantity are among the acutest on the subject. But the whole
thing has on it the curse of “flying in the face of nature.” You
have only to take one of Campion's own poems (written mostly
after the Observations) in natural rhyme, and the difference will
be seen at once. It simply comes to this that the good rhyme-
less poems would be infinitely better with rhyme, and that the
bad ones, while they might sometimes be absolutely saved by
the despised invention of Huns and Vandals, are always made
worse by its absence.
In the preface of Daniel's answering Defence of Rhyme to
all the worthy lovers and learned professors thereof] within
Daniel and His Majesty's dominions," he says that he wrote
his Defence it “about a year since," upon the “great reproach”
yme. given by Campion, and some give it the date of
1603 or even 1602 ; but Dr Grosart's reprint is dated five
years later. The learned gentleman to whom it was specially
written was no less a person than William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, whom some of us (acknowledging that the matter is
no matter) do not yet give up as “Mr W. H.” The advocate
affects, with fair rhetorical excuse (though of course he must have
known that the craze was nearly half a century old, and had at
least not been discouraged by his patron's uncle nearly a genera-
tion before), to regard the attack on rhyming as something new,
as merely concerned with the “measures" of Campion. Daniel,
always a gentleman, deals handsomely with his antagonist,
whoin he does not name, but describes as “this detractor whose
commendable rhymes, albeit now an enemy to rhyme, have
given heretofore to the world the best notice of his worth," and
as a man "of fair parts and good reputation." And having put
i In Chalmers's Poets, Grosart's Works of Samuel Daniel, and Gregory Smith.
DANIEL.
73
himself on the best ground, in this way, from the point of view
of morals and courtesy, he does the same in matter of argument
by refusing to attack Campion's “numbers ” in themselves (“We
could,” he says, “well have allowed of his numbers, had he not
disgraced our rhymes'), and by seizing the unassailable position
given by custom and nature—“Custom that is before all law;
Nature that is above all art.” In fact, not Jonson himself, and
certainly none else before Jonson, has comprehended, or at least
put, the truth of the matter as Daniel puts it, that arbitrary
laws imposed on the poetry of any nation are absurd—that the
verse of a language is such as best consorts with the nature of
that language. This seems a truism enough perhaps; but it
may be very much doubted whether all critics recognise it, and
its consequences, even at the present day. And it is certain
that we may search other early English critics in vain for a
frank recognition of it. With an equally bold and sure foot he
strides over the silly stuff about “invention of barbarous ages"
and the like. Whatever its origin (and about this he shows a
wise carelessness), it is “an excellence added to this work of
measure and harmony, far happier than any proportion quantity
could ever show.” It “gives to the ear an echo of a delightful
report,” and to the memory “a deeper impression of what is
delivered.” | He is less original (as well as, some may think, less
happy) in distinguishing the accent of English from the quantity
of the classical tongues ; but the classicisers before Campion, if
not Campion himself, had made such a mess of quantity, and
had played such mavoc with accent, that he may well be
excused. The universality of rhyme is urged, and once more
says Daniel (with that happy audacity in the contemning of
vain things which belongs to the born exploders of crazes),
-“ If the barbarian likes it, it is because it sways the affections of
the barbarian ; if civil nations practise it, it works upou their
hearts; if all, then it has a power in nature upon all.” But it
will be said, “Ill customs are to be left." No doubt: but the
question is begged. Who made this custom “ill”? (Rhyme
aims at pleasing and it pleases. Suffer then the world to enjoy
that which it knows and what it likes, for all the tyrannical
rules of rhetoric cannot make it otherwise. Why are we to be
74
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
1:
a mere servum pecus, only to imitate the Greeks and Latins ?
Their way was natural to them: let ours be so to us. “Why
should laboursome curiosity still lay affliction on our best
delights ?” Moreover, “to a spirit whom nature hath fitted
for that mystery," rhyme is no impediment, “ but rather giveth
wings to mount." The necessary historical survey follows, with
a surprising and very welcome justification of the Middle Ages
against both Classics and Renaissance. "Let us," says this true
Daniel come to judgment, “go not further, but look upon the
wonderful architecture of the State of England, and see whether
they were unlearned times that could give it such a form ?"
And if politically, why not poetically ? Some acute and, in the
other sense, rather sharp criticism of Campion's details follows,
with a few apologetic remarks for mixture of masculine and
feminine rhymes on his own part: and the whole concludes in
an admirable peroration with a great end-note to it. Not easily
shall we find, either in Elizabethan times or in any other, a
happier combination of solid good sense with eager poetic senti-
ment, of sound scholarship with wide-glancing intelligence, than.
in this little tractate of some thirty or forty ordinary pages,
which dispelled the delusions of two generations, and made the
poetical fortune of England sure.
The contributions of “large-browed Verulam” to criticism
have sometimes been spoken of with reverence: and it is not un-
common to find, amid the scanty classics of the subject,
Bacon.
wanne which until recently have been recommended to the
notice of inquirers, not merely a place, but a place of very high
honour, assigned to The Advancement of Learning. Actual,
unprejudiced, and to some extent expert, reference to the works,
however, will not find very much to justify this estimate : and,
indeed, a little thought, assisted by very moderate knowledge,
would suffice to make it rather surprising that Bacon should give
us so much, than disappointing that he should give us little or
nothing. A producer of literature who at his best has few
superiors, and a user of it for purposes of quotation, who would
deserve the name of genius for this use alone if he had no other
title thereto-Bacon was yet by no means inclined by his main
interests and objects, or by his temperament, either towards
BACON.
75
-
great exaltation of letters, or towards accurate and painstaking
examination of them. (Indeed, it is in him-almost first of all
men, certainly first of all great modern men—that we find that
partisan opposition between literature and science which has
constantly developed since.) It is true that his favourite
method of examination into "forms” might seem tempting as
applied to literature; and that it would, incidentally if not
directly, have yielded more solid results than his Will-o'-the-
wisp chase of the Form of Heat. But this very craze of his
may suggest that if he had undertaken literary criticism it
would have been on the old road of Kinds and Figures and
Qualities, in which we could expect little but glowing
rhetorical generalisation from him.
Nor is the nature of such small critical matter as we actually
have from him very different. The Essays practically give us
nothing but the contents of that Of Studies, a piece
The Essays.
*** too well known to need quotation; too much in the
early pregnant style of the author to bear compression or
analysis; and too general to repay it. For the critic and
the man of letters generally it is, in its own phrase, to be not
merely tasted, nor even swallowed, but chewed and digested ;
yet its teachings have nothing more to do with the critical
function of “study” than with all others.
The Advancement 1 at least excuses the greatness thrust upon
it in the estimates above referred to, not merely by the
done apparent necessity that the author should deal with
ment of Criticism, but by a certain appearance of his
earning. actually doing so. Comparatively early in the
First Book he tackles the attention to style which sprang up
at the Renaissance, opening his discussion by the ingenious but
slightly unhistorical attribution of it to Martin Luther, who
was forced to awake all antiquity, and call former times to his
succour, against the Bishop of Rome. Not a few names, for the
best part of two centuries before the great cause of Martinus v.
1 It ought to be, but from certain
signs perhaps is not, unnecessary to say
that the De Augmentis is itself no mere
Latin version of the Advancement, but
a large expansion of it. There seems,
however, no necessity here to dea]
with both.
76
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
.
Papam was launched, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Erasmus
and Reuchlin, will put in evidence before the tribunal of
chronology against this singular assertion; and though the
Italian Humanists of the fifteenth century might not (at least
in thought) care anything for the Pope except as a source of
donatives and benefices, it is certain that most of them were
as constitutionally disinclined to abet Luther as they were
chronologically disabled from in any way abetting him..
Bacon's argument and further survey are, however, better than
this beginning. To understand the ancients (he says justly
enough) it was necessary to make a careful study of their
language. Further, the opposition of thought to the School-
men naturally brought about a recoil from the barbarisms of
Scholastic style, and the anxiety to win over the general
imprinted care and elegance and vigour on preaching and
writing. All this, he adds as justly, turned to excess. Men
began to “hunt more after words than matter;
ation of mere more after the choiceness of the phrase and the
word-study. round and clean composition of the sentence, and
the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustra-
tion of their words with tropes and figures, than after the
weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument,
life of invention, or depth of judgment.” The Ciceronianism of
Osorius, Sturm,“ Car of Cambridge,” and even Ascham, receives
more or less condemnation; and Erasmus is, of course, cited
for gibes at it. On this text Bacon proceeds to enlarge in his
own stately rhetoric, coolly admitting that it “is a thing not
hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity
even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.”
But he very quickly glides off into his usual denunciations of
the schoolmen. Nor have I found anything else in this First
Book really germane to our purpose ; for one cannot cite
as such the desultory observations on patronage of literature
(among other branches of learning) which fill a good part of it.
The Second Book is somewhat more fruitful in quantity, if not
very much; but the quality remains not very different. The
opening “ Address to the King" contains, in an interesting first
draft (as we may call it), the everlasting grumble of the
>
A
JU
BACON.
7 7
scientific man, that science is not sufficiently endowed, the
further grumble at mere book-learning, the cry for the pro-
motion-by putting money in its purse-of research. The
Second and Third Chapters contain some plans of books drawn
up in Bacon's warm imaginative way, especially a great series of
Histories, with the History of England for their centre. And
then we come, in the Fourth Chapter, to Poesy.
But except for Bacon's majestic style (which, however, by
accident or intention, is rather below itself here) there is
Its view of absolutely nothing novel. (The view (which, as we:
Poetry have seen, all the Elizabethan critics adopted, prob-
ably from the Italians)--the view is that poetry is just a part of
learning licensed in imagination; a fanciful history intended to:
give satisfaction to the mind of man in things where history is.
not; something particularly prevalent and useful in barbarous.
ages; divisible into narrative, representative and allusive;
useful now and then, but (as Aristotle would say) not a thing
to take, very seriously. Yet poetry, a vinum dæmonum at the
worst, a mere illusion anyhow, is still, even as such, a refuge
from, and remedy for, sorrow and toil. Of its form, as dis-
tinguished from its matter, he says, “Poetry is but a character
of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent
for the present.” He attempts no defence of it as of other
parts of learning, because “ being as a plant that cometh of the
lust of the earth without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and
spread abroad more than any other kind.” And he turns from
it to philosophy, with the more than half-disdainful adieu, “It:
is not good to stay too long in the theatre.”
We might almost quit him here with a somewhat similar
leave-taking; but for his great reputation some other places
Some obiter shall be handled. At XIV. 11 there are some
dicta. remarks on the delusive powers of words; at XVI.
4, 5 some on grammar and rhetoric, including a rather interest--
ing observation, not sufficiently expanded or worked out, that.
“in modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new
measures of verses as of dances”; in XVIII. a handling of
strictly oratorical rhetoric, with a digression to these “ Colours:
1 Advancement of Learning, Bk. II. iv.
78
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
of Good and Evil” which interested Bacon so much; in XX.
another descant on the same art; in XXI. a puff of the
Basilikon Doron ; in XXXII. observations on the morai
influence of books; in XXXV. some general observations on
literature; and, just before the close, a well-known and often-
quoted eulogy, certainly not undeserved, of the eloquence of the
English pulpit for forty years past.
If it were not for the singular want of a clear conception
of literary Criticism, which has prevailed so long and so widely,
The whole of it would hardly be necessary to take, with any
very slight seriousness at all, a man who has no more than this
em portance. to say on the subject. It is most assuredly no
slight to Bacon to deny him a place in a regiment where he
never had the least ambition to serve. That he was himself
a great practitioner of literature, and so, necessarily if in-
directly, a critic of it in his own case, is perfectly true; the
remarks which have been quoted above on the Ciceronians
show that, when he took the trouble, and found the oppor-
tunity, he could make them justly and soundly. But his
purpose, his interests, his province, his vein, lay far elsewhere.
To him, it is pretty clear, literary expression was, in relation
to his favourite studies and dreams, but a higher kind of pen-
and-ink or printing - press. (He distrusted the stability of
modern languages, and feared that studies couched in them
might some day or other come to be unintelligible and lost to
the world.' This famous fear explains the nature and the
limits of his interest in literature. "It was a vehicle or å
treasury, a distributing agent or a guard. Its functions and
qualities accorded: it was to be clear, not disagreeable, solidly
constructed, intelligible to as large a number of readers as
possible. The psychological character and morphological def-
1 Those who wish to see what has
been said for Bacon will find references
in Gayley and Scott. The panegyrists
—from Professor Masson to Mr Wors
fold-chiefly rely on the description of
poetry above referred to, as "Feigned
History," with what follows on its
advantages and on poetical justice, &c.
All this seems to me, however admir-
ably expressed, to be very obvious and
rudimentary. Recently Mr Spingarn,
in Cambridge History of Eng. Lit., vol.
vii., has claimed for Bacon an appreci-
ation of literary history which I also
cannot fully grant.
STIRLING.
79
<
inition of poetry interested him philosophically. But in the
art and the beauty of poetry and literature generally, for their
own sakes, he seems to have taken no more interest than he
did in the coloured pattern-plots in gardens, which he com-
pared to “tarts." To a man so minded, as to those more
ancient ones of similar mind whom we have discussed in the
first volume, Criticism proper could, at the best, be a pastime
to be half ashamed of-a" theatre” in which to while away the
hours; it could not possibly be a matter of serious as well as
enthusiastic study. -
Between Bacon and Ben may be best noticed the short
Anacrisis or Censure of Poets, Ancient and Modern, by Sir
Stirlino's William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. It has re-
Anacrisis. ceived high praise ;2 but even those who think by
no means ill of Aurora, may find some difficulty in indorsing
this. It is simply a sort of “Note," written, as the author
says, to record his impressions during a reading of the poets,
which he had undertaken as refreshment after great travail
both of body and mind. He thinks Language " but the apparel
of poesy,” thereby going even further than those who would
assign that position to verse, and suggesting a system of
“Inarticulate Poetics," which he would have been rather put
to it to body forth. He only means, however, that he judges
in the orthodox Aristotelian way, by “the fable and contex-
ture." A subsequent comparison of a poem to a garden sug-
gests the French critic Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, whom he may
have read. Alexander is a sort of general lover in poetry; he
likes this in Virgil, that in Ovid, that other in Horace; defends
Lucan against Scaliger, even to the point of blaming the con-
clusion of the Æneid ; finds “no man that doth satisfy him
more than the notable Italian, Torquato Tasso”; admits the
1 To be must readily found in Rogers's mond's Works; and to have been
Memorials of the Earl of Stirling (vol. written in 1634, between Bacon's death
ii. pp. 205 - 210; Edinburgh, 1877), and Ben's. (It has since been given in
where, however, it appears merely as Mr 0. Smeaton's Scots Essayists.)
one of the Appendices to a book of 2 From Park, and from Messrs
more or less pure genealogy, without Gayley and Scott. I did not always
the slightest editorial information as to agree with my late friend Dr Grosart:
date or provenance. It seems to be but I think he was better advised when
taken from the 1711 folio of Drum- be called it " disappointing.”
80
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
historical as well as the fictitious poetic subject; but thinks
that “the treasures of poetry cannot be better bestowed than
upon the apparelling of Truth; and Truth cannot be better
apparelled to please young lovers than with the excellences
of poetry.” Disrespectful language neither need nor should
be used of so slight a thing, which is, and pretends to be,
nothing more than a sort of table-book entry by a gentleman
of learning as well as quality. But, if it has any “importance"
at all, it is surely that of being yet another proof of the rapid
diffusion of critical taste and practice, not of stating “theory
and methods considerably in advance of the age." If we could
take extensively his protest against those who “would bound
the boundless liberty of the poet,” such language might indeed
be justified; but the context strictly limits it to the very
minor, though then, and for long before and after, commonly
debated, question of Fiction v. History in subject.
Save perhaps in one single respect (where the defect was not
wholly his fault), Ben Jonson might be described as a critic
Ben Jonson, armed at all points. His knowledge of literature
his equip was extremely wide, being at the same time solid
ment.
and thorough. While he had an understanding
above all things strong and masculine, he was particularly
addicted, though in no dilettante fashion, to points of form.
His whole energies, and they were little short of Titanic, were
given to literature. And, lastly, if he had not the supremest
poetic genius, he had such a talent that only the neighbour-
hood of supremacy dwarfs it. Where he came short was not
in a certain hardness of temper and scholasticism of attitude:
for these, if kept within bounds, and tempered by that enthu.
siasm for letters which he possessed, are not bad equipments
for the critic. It was rather in the fact that he still came too
early for it to be possible for him, except by the help of a
miracle, to understand the achievements and value of the
vernaculars. By his latest days, indeed, the positive per-
i These days carried him far beyond was first written, the classical straio
the 16th century. His solidarity with of the Discoveries has been indicated
the Elizabethans proper, however, with much learning, but with excessive
makes his inclusion here imperative. stress of unfavourable reference, by a
It may be added that since this book French critic, M. Castellain.
BEN JONSON.
81
formance of these was already very great. Spain has hardly
added anything since, and Italy not very much, to her share
of European literature; France was already in the first flush
of her “classical” period, after a long and glorious earlier
history: and what Ben's own contemporaries in England had
done, all men know. But mediæval literature was shut from
him, as from all, till far later; he does not seem to have been
much drawn to Continental letters, and, perhaps in their case,
as certainly in English, he was too near—too much a part of
the movement-to get it into firm perspective.
In a sense the critical temper in Jonson is all-pervading. It
breaks out side by side with, and sometimes even within, his
His sweetest lyrics; it interposes what may be called
Prefaces, parabases in the most unexpected passages 1 of his
dec. plays. The Poetaster is almost as much criticism
dramatised as The Frogs. But there are three “places,” or
groups of places, which it inspires, not in mere suggestion, but
with propriety—the occasional Prefaces, or observations, to and
on the plays themselves, the Conversations with Drummond, and,
above all, the at last fairly (though not yet sufficiently) known
Discoveries or Timber.
To piece together, with any elaboration, the more scattered
critical passages would be fitter for a monograph on Jonson
than for a History of Criticism. The “Address to the Readers”
of Sejanus, which contains a reference to the author's lost Obser-
vations on Horace, his Art of Poetry (not the least of such
I Take this interesting passage in
the masque of The New World Dis-
covered in the Moon
In which there is no torrent, nor scarce
stream."
Chro. Is he a man's poet or a woman's
poet, I pray you?
On this Gifford discovered in Theo-
bald's copy the note : "Woman's Poet,
his soft versification-Mr P- "
The Induction to Every Man out of
His Humour, a very large part of
Cynthia's Revels, not a little of The
Silent Woman, and scores of other
places, might be added. (Since this
was written Dr David Klein has made
a good collection, Literary Criticism
from the Elizabethan Dramatists (New
York, 1910), including Ben and draw.
ing on others.)
2nd Her. Is there any such difference?
Fact. Many, as betwixt your man's tailor
and your woman's tailor.
1st Her. How, may we beseech you?
T'act. I'll show you: your man's poet may
break out strong and deep i' the mouth, ...
but your woman's poet must flow, and stroke
the ear, and as one of them said of himself
sweetly-
"Must write a verse as smooth and calm as
cream,
82
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
losses) is a fair specimen of them: the dedication of Volpone
to "the most noble and most equal sisters, Oxford and Cam-
bridge," a better. In both, and in numerous other passages of
prose and verse, we find the real and solid, though somewhat
partial, knowledge, the strong sense, the methodic scholarship
of Ben, side by side with his stately, not Euphuistic, but
rather too close-packed style, his not ill-founded, but slightly
excessive, self-confidence, and that rough knock-down manner
of assertion and characterisation which reappeared in its most
unguarded form in the Conversations with Drummond.
The critical utterances of these Conversations are far too
interesting to be passed over here, though we cannot discuss
The Drame them in full. They tell us that Ben thought all
mond Con- (other) rhymes inferior to couplets, and had written
versations. a treatise (which, again, would we had !) against both
Campion and Daniel (see ante). His objection to "stanzas and
cross rhymes” was that." as the purpose might lead beyond them,
they were all forced.” Sidney “ made every one speak as well as
himself,” and so did not keep“ decorum” (cf. Puttenham above).
Spenser's stanzas and language did not please him. Daniel
was no poet. He did not like Drayton's “long verses,” nor Syl-
vester's and Fairfax's translations. He thought the translations
of Homer (Chapman's) and Virgil (Phaer's) into “long Alexan-
drines” (i.e., fourteeners) were but prose: yet elsewhere we hear
that he “had some of Chapman by heart." Harington's Ariosto
was the worst of all translations. Donne was sometimes
“profane," and "for not keeping of accent deserved hanging";
but elsewhere he was "the first poet of the world in some
things,” though, “through not being understood, he would
perish.”1 Shakespeare “wanted art”: and “Abram Francis
(Abraham Fraunce) in his English Hexameters was a fool."
"Bartas was not a poet, but a verser, because he wrote not
fiction.” He cursed Petrarch for reducing verses to sonnets,
“which were like Procrustes' bed.” Guarini incurred the
1 These dicta, thus juxtaposed,
should make all argument about ap-
parently one-sided judgments super-
fluous. If Drummond had omitted
almost any single one, we should have
been utterly wrong in arguing from
the remainder.
BEN JONSON.
..
same blame as Sir Philip: and Lucan was good in parts only.
“The best pieces of Ronsard were his Odes." Drummond's
own verses “were all good, but smelled too much of the
schools.” The “silver” Latins, as we should expect, pleased
him best. “To have written Southwell's 'Burning Babe,' he
would have been content to destroy many of his.”
These are the chief really critical items, though there are
others (putting personal gossip aside) of interest; but it may be
added, as a curiosity, that he told Drummond that he himself
“ writ all first in prose" at Camden's suggestion, and held that
“ verses stood all by sense, without colours or accent” (poetic
diction or metre), "which yet at other times he denied,” says
the reporter, a sentence ever to be remembered in connection
with these jottings. Remembering it, there is nothing shocking
in any of these observations, nor anything really inconsistent.
A true critic never holds the neat, positive, “ reduced-to-its-
lowest-terms” estimate of authors, in which a criticaster de-
lights. His view is always facetted, conditioned. But he may,
in a friendly chat, or a conversation for victory, exaggerate this
facet or condition, while altogether suppressing others; and
this clearly is what Ben did.
For gloss on the Conversations, for reduction to something
like system of the critical remarks scattered through the works,
and for the nearest approach we can have to a formal present-
ment of Ben's critical views, we must go to the Discoveries.1
The fact that we find no less than four titles for the book-
Timber, Explorata, Discoveries, and Sylva — with others of its
The peculiarities, is explained by the second fact that
· Discoveries. Jonson never published it. It never appeared in
print till the folio of 1641, years after its author's death. The
Discoveries are described as being made “upon men and matter
as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux
to his peculiar notions of the times.” They are, in fact, notes
. i The best separate edition is that of trace the passage in complete editions
Prof. Schelling of Philadelphia (Bos. of the Works such as Cunningham's
ton, U.S.A., 1892). I give the pp. of Gifford. It is strange that no one
this, as well as the Latin Headings of has numbered these sections for con.
sections, which will enable any one to venience of reference.
84
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
S
unnumbered and unclassified (though batches of more or fewer
sometimes run on the same subject), each with its Latin head-
ing, and varying in length from a few lines to that of his friend
(and partly master) Bacon's shorter Essays. The influence of
those “silver” Latins whom he loved so much is prominent:
large passages are simply translated from Quintilian, and for
some time I the tenor is ethical rather than literary. A note on
Perspicuitas-elegantia (p. 7) breaks these, but has nothing
noteworthy about it, and Bellum scribentium (p. 10) is only a
satiric exclamation on the folly of “writers committed together
by the ears for ceremonies, syllables, points," &c. The longer
Nil gratius protervo libro (pp. 11, 12) seems a retort for some per-
sonal injury, combined with the old complaint of the decadence
and degradation of poetry. There is just but rather generał
stricture in Eloquentia (p. 16) on the difference between the
arguments of the study and of the world. “I would no more
choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school,” says Ben, “than I
would choose a pilot for rowing in a pond.”3 Memoria (p. 18)
includes a gird at Euphuism. At last we come to business.
Censura de poetis (p. 21), introduced by a fresh fling at
Euphuism, in De vere argutis, opens with a tolerably confident
note, “Nothing in our age is more preposterous than the
running judgments upon poetry and poets," with much more to
the same effect, the whole being pointed by the fling, “If it
were a question of the water-rhymer's 4 works against Spen-
ser's, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages.” The.
famous passage on Shakespeare follows: and the development
of Ben's view, “would he had blotted a thousand,” leads to a
more general disquisition on the differences of wits, which in-
cludes the sentence already referred to. “Such [i.e., haphazard
and inconsistent] are all the Essayists, even their master Mon-
<<
? It may be observed that the
shorter aphorismas rise to the top-at
least the beginning.
? "He is upbraidingly called a poet.
... The professors, indeed, have made
the learning cheap."
3 It is here that Ben borrows from
Petronius not merely the sentiment but
the phrase, “umbratical doctor"-(see
Hist. Crit., i. 244 note)..
4 “Taylor the Water - Poet," cer-
tainly bad enough · as a poet-though
not as a man. But the selection of
Spenser as the other pole is an invalu-
able correction to the sweeping attack
in the Conversations.
BEN JONSON.
85
taigne." The notes now keep close to literature throughout in
substance, though their titles (e.g., Ignorantic animce), and so
forth, may seem wider. A heading, De Claris Oratoribus (p.
26), leads to yet another of the purple passages of the book
—that on Bacon, in which is intercalated a curious Scriptorum
catalogus, limited, for the most part, though Surrey and Wyatt
are mentioned, to prose writers. And then for some time ethics,
politics, and other subjects, again have Ben's chief attention."
· We return to literature, after some interval (but with a
parenthetic glance at the poesis et pictura notion at p. 49),
on p. 52, in a curious unheaded letter to an unnamed
Lordshịp on Education, much of which is translated directly
from Ben Jonson's favourite Quintilian; and then directly
accost it again with a tractatule De stilo et optimo scribendi
genere, p. 54, hardly parting company thereafter. Ben's pre-
scription is threefold : read the best authors, observe the best
speakers, and exercise your own style much. But he is well
aware that no "precepts will profit a fool," and he adapts old
advice to English ingeniously, in bidding men read, not only
Livy before Sallust, but also Sidney before Donne, and to
beware of Chaucer or Gower at first. Here occurs the well-
known dictum, that Spenser "in affecting the ancients writ no
language; yet I would have him read for his matter.” A fine
general head opens with the excellent version of Quintilian,
“We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of
Difficulty,” and this is followed by some shrewd remarks on
diction—the shrewdest being that, after all, the best custom
makes, and ever will continue to make, the best speech--with a
sharp stroke at Lucretius for “scabrousness," and at Chaucer-
isms. Brevity of style, Tacitean and other, is cautiously com-
mended. In the phrase (Oratio imago animi), p. 64, "language
most shows a man,” Ben seems to anticipate Buffon, as he
later does Wordsworth and Coleridge, by insisting that style is
not merely the dress, but the body of thought.2 All this dis-
Perhaps, indeed, an exception and their contraries” on the part of
should be made in favour of the the poet.
section De malignitate Studentium, p. ? He may have taken this from the
34, which reiterates the necessity of Italians.
“the exact knowledge of all virtues
86
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
cussion, which enters into considerable detail, is of the first
importance, and it occupies nearly a quarter of the whole book.
It is continued, the continuation reaching till the end, by a
separate discussion of poetry.
It is interesting, but less so than what comes before. A
somewhat acid, though personally guarded, description of the
present state of the Art introduces the stock definition of
“making," and its corollary that a poet is not one who writes
in measure, but one who feigns-all as we have found it
before, but (as we should expect of Ben) in succincter and more
scholarly form. Yet the first requisite of the poet is ingenium
-goodness of natural wit; the next exercise of his parts---
“bringing all to the forge and file” (sculpte, lime, cisèle !); the
third Imitation to which Ben gives a turn (not exactly new,
for we have met it from Vida downwards), which is not an
improvement, by keeping its modern meaning, and understand-
ing by it the following of the classics. “But that which we especi-
ally require in him is an exactness of study and multiplicity
of reading." Yet his liberty is not to be so narrowly circum-
scribed as some would have it. This leads to some interesting
remarks on the ancient critics, which the author had evidently
meant to extend: as it is, they break off short. We turn to the
Parts of comedy and tragedy, where Ben is strictly regular—the
fable is the imitation of one entire and perfect action, &c. But
this also breaks off, after a discussion of fable itself and episode,
with an evidently quite disconnected fling at “hobbling poems
which run like a brewer's cart on the stones.”
These Discoveries have to be considered with a little general
care before we examine them more particularly. They were, it
Form of has been said, never issued by the author him-
the book. self, and we do not know whether he ever would
have issued them in their present form. On the one hand, they
are very carefully written, and not mere jottings. In form
(though more modern in style) they resemble the earlier essays
of that Bacon whom they so magnificently celebrate, in their
This is one of the most lacrimable
of the gaps. Ben must have known
other authorities besides Quintilian
well: he even quotes, though only in
part, the great passage of Simylus
(see Hist. Crit., i. 25 note).
- BEN JONSON.
. 87
deliberate conciseness and pregnancy. On the other hand, it is
almost impossible to doubt that some at least were intended for
expansion; it is difficult not to think that there was plenty
more stuff of the same kind in the solidly constructed and well-
stored treasuries of Ben's intelligence and erudition. It is most
difficult of all not to see that, in some cases, the thoughts are co-
ordinated into regular tractates, in others left loose, as if for
future treatment of the same kind.
Secondly, we should like to know rather more than we do of
the time of their composition. Some of them—such as the
retrospect of Bacon, and to a less degree that of
Its date.
* Shakespeare—must be late; there is a strong pro-
bability that all date from the period between the fire in Ben's
study, which destroyed so much, and his death-say between
1620 and 1637. But at the same time there is nothing to
prevent his having remembered and recopied observations of
earlier date.
Thirdly, it is most important that we rightly understand the
composition of the book. It has sometimes been discovered 1 in
Mosaic of these Discoveries, with pride, or surprise, or even
old and new. scorn, that Ben borrowed in them very largely from
the ancients. Of course he did, as well as something, though
less, from the Italian critics of the age immediately before his
own. But in neither case could he have hoped for a moment
--and in neither is there the slightest reason to suppose that he
would have wished if he could have hoped—to disguise his
borrowings from a learned age. When a man—such as, for
1 Not by Dr Schelling, whose own
indagations of Ben's debts are most
interesting, and always made in the
right spirit, while, like a good farmer
and sportsman, he has left plenty for
those who come after him to glean and
bag. For instance, the very curious
passage, taken verbatim from the elder
Seneca, about the Platonic Apology
(cf. Hist. Crit., i. 237). As for M.
Castellain, he does, I think, exaggerate
the want of originality."
-2 Yet in re-reading Jonson, just after
a pretty elaborate overhauling of the
Italians, I find very little certain in-
debtedness of detail. Mr Spingarn
seems to me to go too far in tracing,
p. 88, "small Latin and less Greek"
to Minturno's "small Latin and very
small Greek," and the distinction of
poeta, poema, poesis to Scaliger or
Maggi. Fifty people might have inde-
pendently thought of the first; and the
second is an application of a “common
form" nearly as old as rhetoric. Ben,
however, owes a good deal to Heinsius.
88
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
instance, Sterne-wishes to steal and escape, he goes to what
nobody reads, not to what everybody is reading. And the
Latins of the Silver Age, the two Senecas, Petronius, Quintilian,
Pliny, were specially favourites with the Jacobean time. In
what is going to be said no difference will be made between
Ben's borrowings and his original remarks: nor will the fact of
the borrowing be referred to unless there is some special critical
reason. Even the literal translations, which are not uncommon,
are made his own by the nervous idiosyncrasy of the phrase,
and its thorough adjustment to the context and to his own
vigorous and massive temperament.
Of real “ book-criticism” there are four chief passages, the
brief flings at Montaigne and at “ Tamerlanes and Tamer-
chams," and the longer notices of Shakespeare and Bacon.
The flirt at “all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne,"
is especially interesting, because of the high opinion which
The fling at Jonson elsewhere expresses of Bacon, the chief, if
Montaigne ; not the first, English Essayist of his time, and
because of the fact that not a few of these very Discoveries are
“Essays," if any things ever were. Nor would it be very easy
to make out a clear distinction, in anything but name, between
some of Ben's most favourite ancient writers and these despised
persons. It is, however, somewhat easier to understand the
reason of the condemnation. Jonson's classically ordered mind
probably disliked the ostentatious desultoriness and incomplete-
ness of the Essay, the refusal, as it were out of mere insolence,
to undertake an orderly treatise. Nor is it quite impossible
that he failed fully to understand Montaigne, and was to some
extent the dupe of that great writer's fanfaronade of promis-
cuousness.
The “ Tamerlane and Tamercham”i fling is not even at
first sight surprising. It was quite certain that Ben would
seriously despise what Shakespeare only laughed at—the con-
1 P. 27. “The Tamerlanes and
Tamerchams of the late age, which
had nothing in them but the scenical
strutting and furious vociferation to
warrant them." It is just worth
noting that Jonson thought there was
more than this in Marlowe; and that
the early edd. of Tamburlaine are
anonymous.
BEN JONSON.
89
fusion, the bombast, the want of order and scheme in the
at Tamer- “University Wits”-and it is not probable that he
lane, was well enough acquainted with the even now
obscure development of the earliest Elizabethan drama to
appreciate the enormous improvement which they wrought.
Nay, the nearer approach even of such a dull thing as
Gorboduc to “the height of Seneca his style," might have a
little bribed him as it bribed Sidney. He is true to his side
-to his division of the critical creed-in this also.
The train of thought-censure of the vulgar preference-
runs clear from this to the best known passage of the whole,
the section De Shakespeare Nostrat. It cannot be
speare necessary to quote it, or to point out that Ben's
Passage, eulogy, splendid as it is, acquires tenfold force from
the fact that it is avowedly given by a man whose general literary
theory is different from that of the subject, while the censure
accompanying it loses force in exactly the same proportion.
What Ben here blames, any ancient critic (perhaps even
Longinus) would have blamed too: what Ben praises, it is not
certain that any ancient critic, except Longinus, would have
seen. Nor is the captious censure of “Cæsar did never wrong
but with just cause” the least interesting part of the whole.
The paradox is not in our present texts: and there have, of
course, not been wanting commentators to accuse Jonson of
garbling or of forgetfulness. This is quite commentatorially
gratuitous and puerile. It is very like Shakespeare to have
written what Ben says: very like Ben to object to the paradox
(which, pace tanti viri, is not “ridiculous” at all, but a de-
liberate and effective hyperbole); very like the players to have
changed the text; and mast of all like the commentators to
make a fuss about the matter.
What may seem the more unstinted eulogy of Bacon is not
less interesting. For here it is obvious that Ben is speaking
and that with fullest sympathy, and with all but a full ac-
on Bacon. knowledgment of having met an ideal. Except the
slight stroke, “when he could spare or pass by a jest," and the
gentle insinuation that Strength, the gift of God, was what
n
NU
90
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
U17
Bacon's friends had to implore for him, there is no aclmixture
whatever in the eulogy of “him who hath filled up all.
numbers,1 and performed that in our tongue which may be
compared or preferred to insolent Greece or haughty. Rome.”
Indeed it could not have been—even if Ben Jonson had not
been a friend, and, in a way, follower of Bacon—but that he
should regard the Chancellor as his chief of literary men.
Bacon, unluckily for himself, lacked the “unwedgeable and
gnarled” strength of the dramatist, and also was without his
poetic fire, just as Ben could never have soared to the vast, if
vague, conceptions of Bacon's materialist-Idealism. But they
were both soaked in "literature," as then understood; they
were the two greatest masters of the closely packed style that
says twenty things in ten words: and yet both could, on
occasion, be almost as rhetorically imaginative as Donne or
Greville. It is doubtful whether Bacon's own scientific scorn
for words without matter surpassed Jonson's more literary
contempt of the same phenomenon. Everywhere, or almost
everywhere, there was between them the idem velle et idem
nolle.
A limited précis, however, and a few remarks on special
points, cannot do the Discoveries justice. The fragmentary
character of the notes that compose it, the pregnant and
deliberately “astringed” style in which these notes are written,
so that they are themselves the bones, as it were, of a much
larger treatise, defy such treatment. Yet it is full of value, as
it gives us more than glimpses
“Of what a critic was in Jonson lost,"
or but piecemeal shown. We shall return, in the next chapter,
to his relative position; but something should be said here of
his intrinsic character.
pity or glee, according to mood and
temperament - how the Bacon-Shake -
speare-maniacs have actually taken this
in the sense of poetic "numbers." But
much in haughty Rome and its lan-
guage, or to have led them either to
Petronius and his omnium nume[ro]rum,
or to Seneca and his insolenti Græcice.
BEN JONSON.
91
He does not, as must have been clearly seen, escape the
“classical" limitation. With some ignorance, doubtless, and
General doubtless also some contempt, of the actual achieve-
character of ments of prose romance, and with that stubborn
Dok. distrust of the modern tongues for miscellaneous
prose purposes, which lasted till far into the seventeenth
century, if it did not actually survive into the eighteenth, he
still clings to the old mistakes about the identity of poetry and
“fiction,” about the supremacy of oratory, in prose. We hear
nothing about the "new versifying,” though no doubt this
would have been fully treated in his handling of Campion and
Daniel: but had he had any approval for it, that approval
must have been glanced at. His preference for the (stopped)
couplet 1 foreshadowed that which, with beneficial effects in
some ways, if by no means in all, was to influence the whole
of English poetry, with the rarest exceptions, for nearly two
centuries. The personal arrogance which, as in Wordsworth's
case, affected all Ben's judgment of contemporaries, and which
is almost too fully reflected in the Drummond Conversations,
would probably have made even his more deliberate judgments
of these—his judgments " for publication”-inadequate. But
it is fair to remember that Ben's theory (if not entirely his
practice, especially in his exquisite lyrics and almost equally
exquisite masques) constrained him to be severe to those con-
temporaries, from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne down-
wards. The mission of the generation may be summed up in
the three words, Liberty, Variety, Romance. Jonson's tastes
were for Order, Uniformity, Classicism.
He is thus doubly interesting-interesting as putting both
with sounder scholarship and more original wit what men from
Ascham to Puttenham, and later, had been trying to say before
him, in the sense of adapting classical precepts to English: and
far more interesting as adumbrating, beforehand, the creed of
Dryden, and Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Many of his in-
dividual judgments are as shrewd as they are one-sided; they
are always well, and sometimes admirably, expressed, in a
i Daniel had frankly defended enjambement.
92
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
style which unites something of Elizabethan colour, and much
of Jacobean weight, with not a little of Augustan simplicity
and proportion. He does not head the line of English critics ;
but he heads, and worthily, that of English critics who have
been great both in criticism and in creation,1
i It seemed unnecessary to enlarge
the space given to the men of Eliza
and our James, by including the merer
grammarians and pedagogues, from
Mulcaster to that fervid Scot, Mr
Hume, who, in 1617, extolled the
“Orthography and Congruity" of his
native speech (ed. Wheatley, E.E.T.S.,
1865). Of Mulcaster, however, it de-
serves to be mentioned that, not so
much in his Positions (1581 : ed. Quick,
London, 1887), which have been, as in
his Elementarie, which should be, re-
printed, he displays a more than
Pléiade enthusiasm for the vernacular.
Unluckily this last is not easy of ac-
cess, even the B.M. copy being a
“Grenville” book, and hedged round
with forms and fears. As to Ben him-
self, it is perhaps desirable to repeat
that, in the opinion of the present
writer, far too much stress has been
laid (even by Mr Spingarn in Camb:
Hist. of Eng. Lit. as above) on the
recent exhibition by a French critic
(also named supra) of his indebtedness
to the ancients, Heinsius, &c. This in-
debtedness ought always to have been
known to all and was known to some :
nor does it in any material degree
interfere with Jonson's position. His
selection and arrangement is some-
thing : his application to Shakespeare,
Bacon, Spenser, more : and after all,
in the vulgar sense of “originality,"
how much original criticism is there
in the world?
INTERCHAPTER I.
The proper appreciation of Renaissance criticism is hardly
second in importance to that of the criticism of pure An-
tiquity. And without it, in regard to English criticism more
particularly, the appreciation of what follows in our own
language -- of our “Augustan” criticism - is practically im-
possible. It is true that, except as regards Jonson, and perhaps
even in his case to all but a small extent, our critics, from
Dryden onwards, knew little of, and cared less for, their
English predecessors. It is true also that the work of those
predecessors, as exhibited in the last chapter, does not come
to very much. But the total critical advance in Europe,
though it had strayed into doubtful roads, had been consid-
erable, indeed immense; and it had substituted an abundant
literature of the subject for a practically entire neglect and
ignoring of it. This literature began in Italy. But Italian
criticism, active and voluminous as it was, settled very early
into certain well-marked limits and channels, and almost wholly
confined itself within them, though these channels underwent.
no infrequent intersection or confluence.
The main texts and patterns of the critics of the Italian
Renaissance were three-the Ars Poetica of Horace, the Poetics
of Aristotle, and the various Platonic places dealing with
poetry. These latter had begun to affect Italian thought,
directly or by transmission through this or that medium,
before the close of the fourteenth century; and the mainten-
ance of the Platonic ban, the refutation of it, or the more
or less ingenious acceptance and evasion of it, with the help-
of the Platonic blessing, had been a tolerably familiar exer-
uwUU
94
SUMMARY OF
cise from the time of Boccaccio to the time of Savonarola.
But Horace and Aristotle gave rules and patterns of much
more definiteness. Of the writers of the abundant critical
literature which has been partly surveyed, some directly com-
ment these texts; others follow them with more or less selec-
tion or combination; many take up separate questions sug-
gested by them; very few, if any, face the subject without
some prepossession derived from them. There is the almost
abject “Ancient-worship” and exhortation to "steal” of Vida ;
there are the doubts as to Romance being subject, or not,
to the rules of Epic; there is the attempt at historic' estimate.
But between all the schools, and from among the welter of
the individuals, there arises, in the mysterious way in which
such things do arise, and which defies all but shallow and
superficial explanation, a sort of general critical creed, every
particular article of which would probably have been signed
by no two particular persons—perhaps by no one-but which
is ready to become, and in the next century does become,
orthodox and accepted as a whole. And this creed runs
soniewhat as follows:-
On the higher and more abstract questions of poetry
(which are by no means to be neglected) Aristotle is the
guide ; but the meaning of Aristotle is not always self-
evident even so far as it goes, and it sometimes requires
supplementing. Poetry is the imitation of nature : but
this imitation may be carried on either by copying nature
as it is or by inventing things which do not actually
exist, and have never actually existed, but which conduct
themselves according to the laws of nature and reason.
The poet is not a public nuisance, but quite the contrary,
He must, however, both delight and instruct.
As for the kinds of poetry, they are not mere working
classifications of the practice of poets, but have technically
constituting definitions from which they might be inde-
pendently developed, and according to which they ought
to be composed. The general laws of Tragedy are given
by Aristotle ; but it is necessary to extend his prescrip-
tion of Unity so as to enjoin three species-of Action,
RENAISSANCE CRITICISM.
95
Time, and Place. Tragedy must be written in verse,
which, though not exactly the constituting form of poetry
generally, is almost or quite inseparable from it. The
illegitimacy of prose in Comedy is less positive. Certain
extensions of the rules of the older Epic may be admitted,
so as to constitute a new Epic or Heroic Poem; but it is
questionable whether this may have the full liberty of
Romance, and it is subject to Unity, though not to the
dramatic Unity. Other Kinds are inferior to these.
In practising them, and in practising all, the poet is to
look first, midmost, and last to the practice of the
ancients. “The ancients” may even occasionally be con-
tracted to little more than Virgil; they may be extended
to take in Homer, or may be construed much more widely.
But taking things on the whole, “the ancients" have an-
ticipated almost everything, and in everything that they
have anticipated have done so well that the best chance
of success is simply to imitate them. The detailed pre-
cepts of Horace are never to be neglected; if supple-
mented, they must be supplemented in the same sense.
It is less the business of the historian, after drawing up this
creed, to criticise it favourably or unfavourably, than to point
out that it had actually, by the year 1600, come very near to
formulated existence. We shall find it in actual formulation in
the ensuing chapter; we have already seen it in more than
adumbration, governing the pronouncements of a scholar and a
man of genius like Ben Jonson, thirty years later than the close
of the sixteenth century. A full estimate of its merits and
demerits would not be in place at this juncture. But it
may be observed at once that it is, prima facie, not a per-
fect creed by any means. It has (and this, I think, has
been too seldom noticed) a fault, almost, if not quite, as
great on the a priori side as that which it confessedly has
on the a posteriori. It does not face the facts; it blinks
all medieval and a great deal of existing modern liter-
ature. But, then, to do it justice, it does not pretend
to do other than blink them. The fault in its own more
special province is much more glaring, though, as has been
96
SUMMARY OF
said, it has, by a sort of sympathy, been much more ignored.
There is no real connection between the higher and the lower
principles of Neo-Classicism. There is not merely one crevasse,
not easily to be crossed, in this glacier of Correctness; there
are two or three.
Yet it would be an act of the grossest injustice and ingrati-
tude to refuse or to stint recognition of the immense services
that the Italians rendered to criticism at this time. It was, in
their own stately word, a veritable case of risorgimento; and of
resurrection in a body far better organised, far more gifted, than
that which had gone to sleep a thousand years before.
It is something—nay, it is very much to have created a
Kind. Up to their time Criticism had been a mere Cinderella
in the literary household. Aristotle had taken her up as he
had taken all Arts and Sciences. The Rhetoricians had found
her a useful handmaid to Rhetoric. Roman dilettanti had
dallied with her. The solid good sense and good feeling of
Quintilian had decided that she must be “no casual mistress
but a wife” (perhaps on rather polygamic principles) to the
student of oratory. Longinus had suddenly fixed her colours
on his helmet, and had ridden in her honour the most astonish-
ing little chevauchée in the annals of adventurous literature.
The second greatest poet of the world—Dante—had done her
at once yeoman's service and stately courtesy. And yet she
was, in the general literary view, not so much déclassée as not
classed at all—not “out," not accorded the entrées.
This was now all over. The country which gave the literary
tone and set the literary fashions of Europe had adopted
Criticism in the most unmistakable manner--whether in the
manner wisest or most perfect is not for the present essential.
Rank thus given is never lost; at any rate, there is no
recorded instance of a literary attainder for Kinds, whatever
there may be for persons.
When this criticism passes the Alps, a curious difference is
to be perceived. French criticism, soon to be the most import-
ant of all, is at first by much the least important. Not only
does it begin late ; not only does it fail to be very fertile; but its
RENAISSANCE CRITICISM.
97
individual documents require a certain kindness to speak very.
highly of their virtues, and a good deal of blindness to conceal
their shortcomings. The criticism of Du Bellay and Ronsard
is, indeed, extremely germinal. Those who contend that the
classical French criticism of the seventeenth century was only
the Pléiade criticism of the sixteenth, denying its masters,
omitting some, if not always the worst, parts of their creed,
narrowed in range, and perfected in apparent system, have a
great deal to say for themselves. But this criticism is exceed-
ingly limited ; and it tends almost exclusively to the promo-
tion, not the grouping, of literature.
Again, in such work as Vauquelin de la Fresnaye's 1 we have
the whole of the Italian teaching that had commended itself
to the French mind up to this time, with such additions and
corrections as the vernacular needed. We see in it the obses-
sion of the “long poem,” which France was not to outgrow for
two centuries, and which weighed not a little on England. We
see the tendency to burden criticism with innumerable petty
“rules” and “licences," which was also to beset the nation.
But once more, there is little real criticism in it.
11
Crossing the Channel, as we just now crossed the Alps, we do
not find a simple transmission of indebtedness. It would have
been surprising, considering the strong intellectual interests of
the Colet group, and the early presence in England of such a
critical force as Erasmus, if this country had waited to receive
a current merely transmitted through France from Italy. It
is possible that, later, Gascoigne may have derived something
from Ronsard, and it is quite certain that "E. K.'s” notes on
the Calendar show symptoms of Pléiade influence, even in the
bad point of contempt, or at least want of respect, for Marot.
But it is exceedingly improbable that Ascham derived any
impulsion from Du Bellay: it is certain, as we have seen, that
he knew Italian critics like Pigna directly; and it is equally
i It may be noted here, once for all,
that further and generally full infor-
mation, on all foreign critics men-
tioned, will be found in the larger
History if the student cares to seek
it. Only necessary matter as to foreign
drifts and influences is given here.
98
SUMMARY OF
certain that, either by his own studies or through Cheke, his
critical impulses must have been excited humanistically long
before the French had got beyond the merely rhétoriqueur
standard.
Hence, as well as for other reasons, English criticism de-
velops itself, if not with entire independence, yet with sufficient
conformity to its own needs. That practical bent which we
have noticed in the French shows itself here also; but it is con-
ditioned differently. We had, as they had in France, to fashion
a new poetic diction ; but it cannot be said that the critics did
much for this : Spenser, as much as Coriolanus, might have
said, “ Alone I did it.” They did more in re metrica, and it so
happened that they had, quite in their own sphere, to fight an
all-important battle, the battle of the classical metres, which
was of nothing like the same importance in French or in
Italian. In dealing with these and other matters they fall into
certain generations or successive groups.
In Ascham and his contemporaries the critical attitude was
induced, but not altogether favourably conditioned, by certain
forces, partly common to them with their Continental contem-
poraries, partly not. They all felt, in a degree most creditable
to themselves (and contrasting most favourably with the rather
opposite feeling of men so much greater and so much later as
Bacon and Hobbes), that they must adorn their Sparta, that it
was their business to get the vernacular into as good working
order, both for prose and verse, as they possibly could. And
what is more, they had some shrewd notions about the best
way of doing this. The exaggerated rhetoric and “aureateness”
of the fifteenth century had inspired them, to a man, with a
horror of “inkhorn terms,” and, if mainly wrong, they were
also partly right in feeling that the just and deserved popularity
of the early printed editions of the whole of Chaucer threatened
English with an undue dose of archaism.
Further, they were provided by the New Learning, not
merely with a very large stock of finished examples of litera-
ture, but also with a not inconsiderable library of regular
criticism. They did their best to utilise these; but, in thus
endeavouring, they fell into two opposite, yet in a manner com-
f
RENAISSANCE CRITICISM.
99
plementary, errors. In the first place, they failed altogether to
recognise the continuity, and in a certain sense the equipollence,
of literature—the fact that to blot out a thousand years of
literary history, as they tried to do, is unnatural and destructive.
In the second place, though their instinct told them rightly that
Greek and Latin had invaluable lessons and models for English,
their reason failed to tell them that these lessons must be
applied, these models used, with special reference to the nature,
the history, the development of English itself. Hence they fell,
as regards verse, into the egregious and fortunately self-correct-
ing error of the classical metres, as regards prose, into a fash-
ion of style, by no means insalutary as a corrective and reaction
from the rhetorical bombast and clumsiness of the Transition,
but inadequate of itself, and needing to be counterdosed by the
fustian and the familiarity which are the worst sides of Euphu-
ism, in order to bring about the next stage. Lastly, these men
looked too much to the future, and not enough to the past :
they did not so much as condescend to examine the literary
manner and nature even of Chaucer himself, still less of
others.
In the next generation, which gives us Gascoigne, Webbe,
Puttenham, and Sidney, the same tendencies are perceived;
but the Euphuist movement comes in to differentiate them on
one side, and the influence of Italian criticism on the other.
The classical metre craze has not yet been blown to pieces by
the failure of even such a poet as Spenser to do any good
with it, the fortunate recalcitrance of the healthy English
spirit, and at last the crushing broadside of Daniel's Defence of
Rhyme. But it does no very great practical harm: and prose
style is sensibly beautified and heightened. Some attempts are
made, from Gascoigne downwards, to examine the actual wealth
of English, to appraise writers, to analyse methods--attempts,
however, not very well sustained, and still conditioned by the
apparent ignorance of the writers that there was anything be-
hind Chaucer, though Anglo-Saxon was actually studied at the
time under Archbishop Parker's influence. Further, the ex-
ample of the Italian critics deflects the energy of our writers
from the right way, and sends them off into pretty Platonisinge -
100
SUMMARY OF
about the proud place due to poetry, the stately status of the
singer, and other agreeable but unpractical aberrations. This
tendency is much strengthened by the Puritan onslaught on
poetry generally and dramatic poetry in particular. In all this
there is a great deal of interest, and many scattered aperçus of
much value. Gascoigne's little treatise is almost priceless, as
showing us how English prosody was drifting on the shallows
of a hard-and-fast syllabic arrangement, when the dramatists
came to its rescue. Sidney, wrong as he is about the drama,
catches hold of one of the very lifebuoys of English poetry in
his praise of the ballad. Daniel's Defence puts the root of the
rhyme - matter in the most admirable fashion. But we see
that the classics are exercising on all the men of the time in-
fluences both bad and good, and in criticism, perhaps, rather
bad than good; that the obsession of Latin in particular is
heavy on them; and that the practice, both Latin and Greek,
of what we have called beginning at the wrong end lies
heaviest of all.
Nothing will show this more curiously than the words in
which Sidney anticipated (and perhaps suggested) Ben's censure
of Spenser's diction as to the Shepherd's Calendar, especially if
we remember that they proceeded from a personal friend and by
an ardent lover of poetry. That there is something to be said
against the dialect of the Calendar all reasonable critics will
allow. As a poetic language it is, at its best, but a preliminary
exercise for the glorious medium of The Faerie Queene; it is
awkwardly and in some cases incorrectly blended ; and, above
all, the mere rusticity – the “hey - ho” and the rest — is a
dangerous and doubtful expedient. But observe that Sidney
says nothing of this kind. He “looks merely at the stop-
watch.” Theocritus did not do it; Virgil did not do it;
Sannazar did not do it; therefore Spenser must not do it.
That his own elevation of a mere modern like Sannazar to
this position of a lawgiver of the most tyrannic kind — of
an authority not merely whose will is law, not merely whose
prohibition is final, but whose bare abstention from some-
thing taboos that something from the use of all mankind for
ever and ever, that this did not strike Sidney as preposter-
U
RENAISSANCE CRITICISM.
101
ous in itself, and as throwing doubt on the whole method,
is wonderful. But even if he had stopped at Theocritus and
Virgil, he would have been wrong enough. Here once more
is the false Mimesis, the prava imitatio. Not only is the
good poet to be followed in what he does, but what he
does not do serves as a bar to posterity in all time from
doing it.
There is another point in which Sidney and Ben are alike,
and in which they may even seem to anticipate that general
adoption of “Reason,” of “Good Sense” as the criterion, which
the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed as their
own, and which some recent critics have rather kindly allowed
them. Sidney's raillery of the Romantic life - drama, Ben's
reported strictures on the sea-coast of Bohemia, and his certain
ones on “Cæsar did never wrong," &c., express the very spirit
of this cheap rationalism, which was later to defray a little even
of Dryden's criticism, almost the whole of Boileau's, and far too
much of Pope's. The ancients, to do them justice, are not
entirely to be blamed for this. There is very little of it in
Aristotle, who quite understands that the laws of poetry are not
the laws of history or of science. But there is a great deal of
it in Horace: and, as we shall see, the authority of the great
Greek was, during the three centuries which form the subject of
this volume, more and more used as a mere cloak for the
opinions of the clever Roman. Meanwhile, such books as those
of Webbe and Puttenham, such an ordeal by battle as that
fought out by Campion and Daniel, even such critical jaculata
as those of Meres and Bolton, were all in different ways doing
1 Yet even he does condescend to it
too much in his notices of " objections"
towards the end of the Poetics.
2 These judgments might of course
be reinforced enormously by extracts
from letters and poems commendatory,
as well as from substantive examples,
of Elizabethan literature, prose or
verse. But this is just one of the
points in which the constantly increas
ing pressure of material makes abstin-
ence, or at least rigid terperance,
necessary as we come downwards.
Some very notable passages in creative
works — Shakespeare's remarks ou
drama among the more, and Ben's
on “men's and women's poets” among
the less -- are glanced at elsewhere :
Webster's famous “catalogue dérais-
onné” (yet not wholly so) of his great
companions, and his odd confession of
inability to manage the passionate
and weighty nuntius," tempts fuller
notice. But one must refrain.
102
SUMMARY OF
work, mistaken sometimes in kind, but always useful in general
effect.
On the general Elizabethan position, as we have seen, Jonson
himself made no great advance: in fact, he threw fresh intrench-
ments around it and fresh forces into its garrison. We may
even, contrary to our wont in such cases, be rather glad that he
did not enter upon a more extensive examination of his own
contemporaries, because it is quite clear that he was not at the
right point of view for making it. But it does not follow from
this that he was not a critic, and a great critic. No one who
was not this could have written the Shakespeare and the Bacon
passages in fact, in the former case, only a great magnanimity
and a true sense of critical truth could have mixed so generous
an acknowledgment with the candid avowal of so much dis-
approval. And, as we have said above, even where Ben was
wrong, or at least insufficient, his critical gospel was the thing
needed for the time to come, if not for the actual time. By a
few years after his own death-by the middle of the century,
that is to say-seventy years and more of such a harvest as no
other country has ever had, had filled the barns of English to
bursting with the ripest crops of romantic luxuriance-its
treasure-houses with the gold and the ivory and the spices—if
sometimes also with the apes and the peacocks—of Romantic
exploration and discovery. There was no need to invite further
acquisition — the national genius, in Ben's own quotation,
sufflaminandus erat. It was his task to begin the sufflamina-
tion: and he did it, not perhaps with a full apprehension of
the circumstances, and certainly with nothing like a full
appreciation of what the age, from its “ Tamerlanes and
Tamerchams” onwards, had done; but still did it. In his
most remarkable book we see the last word of Elizabethan
criticism, not merely in point of time, but in the other sense.
Ben is beyond even Sidney, much more Webbe and Puttenham,
not to mention Ascham and Wilson, in grasp; while, if we
compare him with the Continental critics of his own time, he
shows a greater sense of real literature than almost any of
them. But, at the same time, he has not occupied the true
standing-ground of the critic; he has not even set his foot on it,
RENAISSANCE CRITICISM.
103
as Dryden, born before his death, was to do. In him, as in all
these Renaissance critics, we find, not so much positive errors
as an inability to perceive clearly where they are and what
their work is.
But between Ben and Dryden, though the actual interval
of time was small, a great change of influence took place,
and the position of European countries, in regard to its exer-
cise, changed even more remarkably. Although there is
still a large body of Italian criticism belonging to the seven-
teenth century, it includes among its authors no single name
of great authority; and its contents are for the most part
negligible. The “ Ancient and Modern ” quarrel is indeed
started in Italy; but it does not acquire European position
till it has been restarted in France. . And in France, much
earlier and to much greater purpose, the “Neo-classic” creed,
formulated above, reinforces, concentrates, and entrenches it-
self in the most remarkable fashion. The establishment of
the French Academy embodies this critical tendency in a
world-noticeable fashion; the quarrel over the Cid illustrates
'it; and after the strictures of Malherbe (as condemning the
Romantic element that lurked in the Pléiade), the half
recalcitrant, half Unitarian utterances of Corneille himself;
the obscurantist neo-classicism (in drama, if not elsewhere)
of Chapelain and the lesser names of La Mesnardière, Mambrun,
the Abbé d'Aubignac, and others,—the neo-classic attitude
found its greatest expression in Boileau, with his deification
of “Nature” and “Good Sense” in general, and his thousand
arbitrary prescriptions and prohibitions in particular. This
movement partly preceded, partly coincided with, the earlier
English writers to be noticed in the next chapter ; but it
undoubtedly exercised influence in England, and Dryden
may be taken as partly expressing, partly resisting and
revolting from, the ideas of Boileau (1669) himself and of
his contemporaries or successors, Rapin (1674) and Le Bossu
(1680).
France, however, had not been won for Neo-Classicism with-
out something of a struggle; and in the earlier seventeenth
century a few person's (such as the little known Jean de
104
SUMMARY OF RENAISSANCE CRITICISM.
Schélandre, author of Tyr et Sidon) made endeavours at the
English-Spanish tragi-comic or romantic-tragic pattern of drama.
While in Spain itself, partly under the influence of the
national theatre, partly in pursuance of the protests of some
Italians earlier, a remarkable series of expressions adverse
to the Neo-classic theories can be gleaned from Alfonso
Sanchez (1618), Tirso de Mollina (1624), and Gonzales de
Salas (1633), all arguing for liberty in drama; rules adjusted
to, not a priori controlling, work; and a “nature” which
is not the Bolæan convention. But despite an unconfirmed
and late assertion (quite contrary to all likelihood) that
Dryden was acquainted with Spanish criticism, these views
seem to have attracted no notice, and exerted no influence,
outside of Spain itself.1
found in
Loci
i Characteristic examples of the
French and Spanish criticisms re-
ferred to will be
Critici.
105
CHAPTER III.
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
DEAD WATER IN ENGLISH CRITICISM-MILTON-COWLEY-THE PREFATORY
MATTER OF 'GONDIBERT' -- THE “BEROIC POEM" — DAVENANT'S 'EX-
AMEN --HOBBES'S ANSWER-DRYDEN-HIS ADVANTAGES—THE EARLY
PREFACES — THE 'ESSAY OF DRAMATIC POESY' — ITS SETTING AND
OVERTURE – CRITES FOR THE ANCIENTS — EUGENIUS FOR THE “LAST
AGE" - LISIDEIUS FOR THE FRENCH -- DRYDEN FOR ENGLAND AND
LIBERTY_CODA' ON RHYMED PLAYS, AND CONCLUSION-CONSPICUOUS
MERITS OF THE PIECE - THE MIDDLE PREFACES -- THE 'ESSAY ON
SATIRE' AND THE DEDICATION OF THE ÆNEIS' - THE PARALLEL OF
POETRY AND PAINTING - THE "PREFACE TO THE FABLES' - DRYDEN'S
GENERAL CRITICAL POSITION-HIS SPECIAL CRITICAL METHOD-DRYDEN
AND BOILEAU—RYMER-THE 'PREFACE TO RAPIN 'THE TRAGEDIES
OF THE LAST AGE'—THE SHORT VIEW OF TRAGEDY'-THE RULE OF TOM
THE SECOND-SPRAT-EDWARD PHILLIPS—HIS THEATRUM POETARUM'
-WINSTANLEY'S 'LIVES -LANGBAINE'S 'DRAMATIC POETS --TEMPLE-
BENTLEY-COLLIER'S 'SHORT VIEW'-SIR T. P. BLOUNT_PERIODICALS :
THE 'ATHENIAN MERCURY, ETC.
THE middle third, if not the whole first half, of the seventeenth
century in England was too much occupied with civil and re-
Dead water ligious broils to devote attention to such a subject
in English as literary criticism, Between the probable date of
Criticism. Jonson's Timber (1625-37) and the certain one of
Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) we have practically
nothing substantive save the interesting prefatory matter to
Milton.
Gondibert (1650). Milton, the greatest man of letters
wholly of the time, must indeed during this time
have conceived, or at least matured, that cross-grained prejudice
against rhyme, which is more surprising in him than even in Cam-
106
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
pion, and which was itself even more open to Daniel's strictures.
For not only is Milton himself in his own practice a greater
and more triumphant vindicator of rhyme than Campion, but
Daniel's strongest and soundest argument, “Why condemn this
thing in order to establish that?” applies far more strongly to
blank verse than to Campion's artificial metres. Custom and
Nature, those greater Cæsars to whom Daniel so triumphantly
appealed, had already settled it, as they were to confirm it later,
that rhymed and unrhymed verse, each obeying the natural
evolution of English prosody, should be the twin horses to
draw its car. But Milton never developed his antipathy to
rhyme (which in all probability arose, mainly if not merely,
from the fact that nearly all the most exquisite rhymers
of his time, except himself, were Cavaliers) in any critical
fashion, contenting himself with occasional flings and obiter
dicta."
Another poet of the time, Cowley, ought to have given us
criticism of real importance. He had the paramount, if not
in exclusive, literary interests which are necessary to
Cowley.
' a great critic; he had the knowledge; and he
was perhaps the first man in England to possess the best
kind of critical style-lighter than Daniel's, and less pregnant,
involved, and scholastic than Jonson's—the style of well-bred
1 The chief critical loci in Milton are
all among the best known passages of
his work. They are the peremptory
anathema on rhyme in the prose note
added to Paradise Lost, in what Pro-
fessor Masson has settled to be the
“Fifth Form of the First Edition”;
the short Defence of Tragedy (wholly
on Italian principles but adapted to
Puritan understandings) prefixed to
Samson Agonistes ; the first description
of his own studies in The Reason of
Church Government; the more elaborate
return upon that subject-a singular
mixture of exquisite phrasing and lit-
erary appreciation with insolent abuse
--in the Apology for Smectymnuus
(which is not, as some have thought,
the same thing as The [Platonic]
Apology) and divers clauses in the
Tractate of Education, especially the
reference to “Castelvetro, Tasso, and .
Mazzoni,” whom he credits with "sub-
lime art," and puts on a level with
Aristotle and Horace. We might add
a few casual girds, such as that at the
supposed cacophony of Hall's “Teach
each” in the Apology for Smectymnuus,
which has been compared to Malherbe's
vellications of Desportes (Hist. Crit., ii,
245). A complete critical treatise from
him (if only he could have been pre-
vailed upon to write in a good temper)
would have been of supreme interest :
it is not so certain that it would have
been of supreme value, even if he had
been in that temper.
COWLEY.
107
conversational argument. But he was a little bitten with the
scientific as opposed to the literary mania, and, in his own
person, he was perhaps too much of a Janus as regards
literary tastes to be able to give-or indeed to take-a clear
and single view. There were, as in Lope, two poets in Cowley,
and each of these was wont to get in the way of the other.
The one was a “metaphysical” of the high flight, who at
least would, if he could, have been as intensely fantastic as
Donne, and as gracefully fantastic as Suckling. The other
was a classical, “sensible,” couplet-poet, who was working
out Ben Jonson's theories with even less admixture of
Romanticism than that which tinged Ben Jonson's practice.
The entanglement of these was sufficiently detrimental to his
poetry; but it would have been absolutely fatal to his criti-
cism, which must either have perpetually contradicted itself
or else have wandered in a maze, perplexing as perplexed.
It is with Davenant's Preface to Gondibert, in the form of
a Letter to Hobbes, and with Hobbes's answer to it,2 that
England strikes once more into the main path of
The
Prefatory European critical development. And it is of capital
matter of importance that, both the writers being exiled
Gondibert.
royalists, these documents were written at Paris
in the year 1650. There was much interest there in English
affairs, while, as we have seen, the habit of literary discussion
1 He has practically given us nothing
but a slight apology for sacred verse
(common in his time and natural
. from the author of the Davideis);
with a slighter seasoning of the also
familiar defence of poetry from being
mere “lying," in the Preface to the
folio edition of his Poems ; some still
slighter remarks on Comedy in that to
Cutter of Coleman Street ; and hardly
more than a glance at literary education
in his Proposition for the Advancement
of Experimental Philosophy. In this
last we may feel a sort of gust of the
same spirit which appears in his dis-
ciple Sprat's History of the Royal Society
(v. infra).
? Both these will be found in Chal.
mers' Poets, vi. 349 - 372. Hobbes's
Answer is also in Molesworth's ed. of
the Works, iv. 443-458. It is there
followed by a short literary letter to
Edward Howard of the British Princes,
the most egregious of Dryden's egregi.
ous leash of brothers-in-law. To these
may be added the brief literary pass-
age in the chapter of “Intellectual
Virtues” in the First Part of Leviathan
(ibid., iii. 58) and the “ Brief” of the
Rhetoric (compare Hist. Crit., i. 40);
ibid., vi. 416-510. I have a copy of
the first edition of this, anonymous
and undated, but assigned to 1655-57
by bibliographers. It does not contain
the shorter Art of Rhetoric, which fol.
lows in Molesworth.
108
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
S
had, for more than a generation, become ingrained in French-
men. When Davenant set himself to write Gondibert, he was
doing exactly what Chapelain and Desmarets and the rest were
doing; and when he and his greater friend exchanged their
epistles, they were doing exactly what all the French literary
world had been doing, not merely, as is commonly thought,
from the time of the Cid dispute, but from one much earlier.
Taking all things together, it was natural that the subject
should be the Heroic Poem, which had been a favourite of
Italian and French critics for some seventy years and more,
but had been little touched in England, though the conclusion
of Ben's Discoveries shapes a course for it. It was at the
moment interesting France immensely, and producing those
curious epics or quasi-epics of Chapelain, Scudéry, St Amant,
the Père Le Moyne, and others, which were before very long
to incur the bitter, not entirely just, but partly justified and
almost destructive answer of Boileau.
The “ Heroic Poem” was to be neither pure Romance nor
pure Epic, but a sort of medley between the two. Or, rather, it
The " Heroic was to be a thing of shreds and patches, strictly epic
Poem.” (or at least Virgilian-epical) in theory and rules, but
borrowing from Romance whatever it could, as our Elizabethans
would say, "convey cleanly” enough in the way of additional
attractions. The shreds and patches, too, were not purely
poetical: they were not taken simply from Homer and Virgil,
nor even from Horace, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, and the rest down
to that Musæus whom Scaliger thought so superior to the Chian.
A great deal of ancient critical dictum was brought in, and as
Aristotle and Horace had said less about Epic than about
Drama, they were to be supplemented from others, especially
by that treacherous and somewhat obscure passage of Petronius
which has been referred to above (chap. i.) In fact the whole
of this Heroic-Poem matter is a sort of satire on criticism by
Kinds, in its attempt—and failure to discover a Kind. If the
founders of the novel (who, indeed, in some notable cases were
by no means free from the obsession) had persisted in coffstruct-
ing it on the lines of the Heroic Poem, it would indeed have
DAVENANT.
109
been all up with Fiction. To read Tasso (who, as we might
expect, is not the least reasonable) and others, from Ronsard
and Du Bellay down to Desmarets and Le Bossu (both of
whom, let it be remembered, wrote some time after Davenant)
-to find even Dryden a Martha of “machinery," and com-
forting himself with a bright new idea of getting the deorun
ministeria out of the limited intelligences of angels, so that you
might not know at once which side was going to win, as you do
in the ordinary Christian Epicl_is curious. Nay, it is more--
humorous, with that touch of “the pity of it” which humour
nearly always has.
The ingenious knight, in explaining his performance and its
principles to his friend the philosopher, takes a very high tone.
Davenant's Homer, Virgil, Lucan, and Statius are passed success-
Examen. ively in review, and receive each his appropriate com-
pliment, put with dignified reserves, especially in the two latter
cases: Only two moderns are admitted— Tasso of the Italians
_“for I will yield to their opinion 'who permit not Ariosto-
no, not Du Bartas–in this eminent rank of the heroicks, rather
than to make way by their admission for Dante, Marino, and
others” 2_and Spenser of our own men. But Tasso is roundly
taken to task for his fairy-tale element, Spenser for his allegory
and his archaism. And the faults of all from Homer down-
wards are charged against "the natural humour of imita-
tion." 3
After a by no means despicable, but somewhat rhapsodical,
i See the Discourse on Satire-Scott
(in the edition revised by the present
writer) (London, 1882-93), xiii. 24 sq.,
or Ker (ed. cit. post), ii. 33 sq.
? I do not smile so much as some
may over "no, not Du Bartas." But
though oases are far from rare in what
may seem, to those who know it not,
this thirsty land of criticism, I hardly
know a more delightful "diamond of
the desert" than the refusal to admit
somebody else lest you should have
to admit Dante, and the subsequent
“Dante, Marino, and others.” When
the eye is weary of italic print, or of a
too closely packed quarto page, or of
François Hédelin, Abbé d'Aubignac, in
any type or format, it is pleasant half
to shut it, and let the dream of these
“others” wave before one. I see that
they must have written in Italian; but
other common measure, other link to
bind them both to the Commedia and
to the Adone, is yet to seek for me.
3 Lest the last note should lead any
one to think that I wish to make
inept and ignoble game of Davenant,
let me observe that he can write ad.
110
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
digression on this it is to be observed that Davenant uses
“Imitation” in the frank modern sense and an apology for it
as “the dangerous fit of a hot writer," he gives reasons, partly
no doubt drawn from Italian and French sources, why he has
made his subject (1) Christian, (2) antique but not historical,
(3) foreign, (4) courtly and martial, (5) displaying the distem-
pers of love and ambition. Then he expounds in turn his
arrangement of five books (to correspond to acts), with cantos
to answer to scenes,1 his arguments, his quatrain-stanza. He
asserts that“ the substance is Wit," and discusses that matter at
some length, and with a noteworthy hit at conceits, which re-
minds us that Davenant was à cheval between the First and
the Second Caroline period. He indulges in not unpardon-
able loquacity about his poetic aspiration's, with a fresh
glance at the great poets of old, and brings in thereby, with
some ingenuity but at too great length as a finale, the old
prefatory matter of the Arts Poetic about the importance
and dignity of poetry in the world, concluding exactly where
most begin, with Plato and that “divine anger” of his
which some have turned to the “unjust scandal of Poesie.”
And so a pleasant echo of Sir Philip blends agreeably
with the more prosaic tone, and time, and temper of Sir
William.
Hobbes, as we should expect, is much briefer; and those
bronze sentences of his (though he had not at this time quite
Hobbes's brought them to their full ring and perfect circum-
Answer. scription) give no uncertain sound. He is not, he
says, a poet (which is true), and when he assigns to Gondibert
“ various experience, ready memory, clear judgment, swift and
well-governed fancy,” it is obvious enough that all these might
be there and yet poetry be absent. He divides the kinds of
mirable things, worthy a son, in double
sense, of Oxford. Could anything be
happier than this of Spenser : “His
noble and most artful hands”? The
mere selection of the epithets is good,
the combination of them famously so.
i This attempt to get Epic as close
as possible to Drama-to work all the
kinds of Imitation back into one arch-
kind-appears more or less fitfully in
the whole Neo-Classic school. And we
shall never quite understand the much
discussed “Heroic Play," till we take
it in conjunction with the “Heroio
Poen" (see the present writer's Caro.
line Poets (Oxford, 1905-6)).
HOBBES.
111
1
poetry “swiftly” enough, and ranges himself with his customary
decision against those who “take for poesy whatsoever is writ
in verse;" cutting out not merely didactic poetry, but sonnets,
epigrams, and eclogues, and laying it down that “the subject of
a poem is the manners of men.” “They that give entrance to
fictions writ in prose err not so much,” but they err. And
accordingly he begins the discussion of verse. He does not
quarrel with Davenant, as Vida would have done, for deliber-
ately eschewing Invocation; and rapidly comments on the plot,
characters, description, &c., of the poem. On the head of diction
he would not be Hobbes if he could or did spare a sneer at words
of no sense, words “contunded by the schools," and so forth.
And since he is Hobbes, there is piquancy in finding him at
one with Walton in the objection to “strong lines." He is
rather striking on a subject which has been much dwelt on of
late, the blunting of poetic' phrase by use. And when he says
that he "never yet saw poem that had so much shape of art,
health of morality, and vigour of beauty and expression” as
Gondibert—when, in the odd timorousness he had caught from
Bacon, he adds, that it is only the perishableness of the modern
tongues which will prevent it from lasting as long as the Æneid
or the riad-let us remember that, though criticism is one
thing and compliment another, they sometimes live in a rather
illicit contubernium. At any rate, there is criticism, and real
criticism, in the two pieces; and they are about the first sub-
stantial documents of it in English of which as much can be
said for many years.
Thus, although two of these four were of the greatest of our
writers, the third an interesting failure of greatness, and the
fourth far from contemptible, they were in all cases prevented,
by this or that disqualification, from doing much in criticism.
Dryden, on the contrary, started with every advantage, ex-
cept those of a body of English criticism behind him,
Dryden. cep
* and of a thorough knowledge of the whole of Eng-
lish literature. He was a poet nearly, if not quite, of the first
AICI
i There is, of course, critical matter
in Howell's Letters, and in a score or
scores of other places; but it is of the
kind that we must now neglect, or select
from with the most jealous hand.
112
DRYDEN AND HIS
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
ONTEMPORARIES.
class: and though his poetry had a strong Romantic spirit in /
virtue of its perennial quality, it took the form and pressure of
the time so thoroughly and so kindly that there was no internal
conflict. Further, he had what by no means all poets of the
first class have had, a strong, clear, common-sense judgment, and
a very remarkable faculty of arguing the point. And, finally,
if he had few predecessors in English, and perhaps did not know
much of those few except of Jonson, he was fairly, if not exactly
as a scholar, acquainted with the ancients, and he had profited,
and was to profit, by the best doctrine of the moderns.
Moreover, from a certain not unimportant point of view, he
occupies a position which is only shared in the history of
His criticism by Dante and (in some estimations, though
advantages. not in all) by Goethe,—the position of the greatest
man of letters in his own country, if not also in Europe, who is
at the same time the greatest critic, and who is favoured by
Fortune with a concentration of advantages as to time and
circumstance. His critical excellence has indeed been never
wholly overlooked, and, except by the unjuster partisanship of
the early Romantic movement in England, generally admitted
with cheerfulness. The want, however, of that synoptic study
of the subject, which it is the humble purpose of this book to
facilitate, has too often prevented his full pre-eminence from
being recognised. It may even be said that it is in criticism
that Dryden best shows that original faculty which has often
been denied him elsewhere. He borrows, indeed, as freely as
everywhere: he copies, with a half ludicrous deference, the stock
opinions of the critics and the criticasters in vogue; he gives us
pages on pages of their pedantic trivialities instead of his own
shrewd and racy judgments. But, despite of all this, there is in
him (and with good luck we may perhaps not fail to disengage
i Of the great critical men of letters his successor and opponent, a great
of 1800-1850 only Leigh Hunt- the admirer of Dryden's style, and one who
least of them -- was just to Dryden ; expresses just regret at the want of
even Hazlitt is inadequate on him. common knowledge of it, is very severe
Among our preceptistas of the same or (Prcel. x.) on his want of philosophical
a little later date, Keble (Prcel. v.) profundity and sincerity. But the
mildly perstringes Dryden's inconsist- reverend Professor had found nearly as
ency (" male sibi constat D.”), but much fault on this score with Longinus.
rather as poet than as critic. Garbett,
DRYDEN.
113
it) a vein and style in “judging of Authours” which goes
straight back to Longinus, if it is not even independent of that
great ancestry. 1
This vein is perceptible 2 even in the slight critical essays
which precede the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, though of course it
The Darly is much more evident in the Essay itself. In the
Prefaces. preface to the Rival Ladies (written, not indeed when
Dryden was a very young man, but when, except for Juvenilia,
he had produced extremely little) we find his critical path clearly
traced, and still more in the three years later Preface to Annus
Mirabilis. The principles of this path-making are as follows:
Dryden takes—without perhaps a very laborious study of them,
but, as has been said already, with an almost touching docility
in appearance—the current theories and verdicts of the French,
Italian (and Spanish ?) critics (sufficient survey of whom may
be sought in the larger History). He does not-he never did to,
the date of the glorious Preface to the Fables itself-dispute the
general doctrines of the sages from Aristotle downwards. But
(and this is where the Longinian resemblance comes in) he never
can help considering the individual works of literature almost
without regard to these principles, and simply on the broad, the
sound, the unshakable ground of the impression they make on
him. Secondly (and this is where the resemblance to Dante
comes in), he is perfectly well aware that questions of diction,
metre, and the like are not mere catchpenny or claptrap after-
thoughts, as ancient criticism was too apt to think them, but at
the root of the pleasure which literature gives. Thirdly (and
1 Dryden made no mistake about still bulky and not excessively common,
Longinus. He calls him, in the Apology edition of the Prose, has recently been
prefixed to The State of Innocence, “the given, with quite admirable editorial
greatest critic among the Greeks after matter, by Professor Ker (2 vols.,
Aristotle," cites him often, and parades Oxford, 1900). I wish he had in.
and uses a long passage of the lIepi cluded the Heads of an answer to
"Tyous in the Preface to Troilus and Rynier ; but the authenticity of these
Cressida. The references are con is not absolutely certain, and the cor-
veniently collected in Mr Ker's index rect text still less 80. See note on
(v. inf.)
Rymer infra, and my edition of Scott,
2 Dryden's critical work, which xv. 378 sq., for text and history.
until recently was accessible with ease (There is a fair selection from Dryden
only in Scott's elaborate edition of his in Loci Critici.)
works, or in Malone's less bulky, but
H
114
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
this is where, though Aristotle did not deny the fact, the whole
criticism of antiquity, except that of Longinus, and most of that
of modern times, swerves timorously from the truth), he knows
that this delight, this transport, counts first as a criterion.
Literature in general, poetry in particular, should, of course,
instruct: but it must delight.
The “ blundering, half-witted people," as in one of his rare
bursts of not absolutely cool contempt2 he calls his own critics,
who charged him with plagiarising from foreign authors, entirely
missed these differences, which distinguish him from every
foreign critic of his day, and of most days for long afterwards.
He may quote-partly out of that genuine humility and
generosity combined which make his literary character so
agreeable; partly from an innocent parade of learning. But
he never pays for what he borrows the slavish rent, or royalty,
of surrendering his actual and private judgment.
In the Preface to the Rival Ladies the poet-critic takes (as
indeed he afterwards himself fully acknowledged) a wrong line,
--the defence of what he calls “verse” (that is to say, rhymed
heroic couplets, not blank verse) for play-writing. This was his
mistress of the time; he rejoiced in her caresses, he wore her
colours, he fought for her beauty—the enjoyment authorising
the argument. But as he has nothing to say that has not been
better said in the Essay, we may postpone the consideration of
this. There is one of the slips of fact which can be readily
excused to (and by) all but bad critics,--and which bad critics
are chiefly bound to avoid, because accuracy of fact is their only
title to existence--in his mention of "Queen" Gorboduc and his
addition that the dialogue in that play is rhymed; there is an
interesting sigh for an Academy (Dryden, let it be remembered,
1 Defence of an Essay of Dramatic against the half-witted blunderers.
Poesy. Scott, ed. cit., xi. 295: Ker, But I am not quite so much inclined as
i. 113.
even Mr Ker is to father his critical
? Preface to Miscellanies, ii.; Scott, style on Chapelain and La Mesnardière,
ed. cit., xii. 295; Ker, i. 263. I wish Sarrasin and Scudéry, or ou Corneille
that Dryden were alive for many himself. It is not till Saint-Evreunond,
reasons: not least because he would perhaps even till Fénelon, that I can
certainly pay the debt that he owes to find in French the indescribable omne
my friend Mr Ker magnificentissime. tulit punctum as in him. And both
No one has vindicated him better are his inferiors.
DRYDEN.
115
was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society); and there
is the well-known and very amiable, though rather dangerous,
delusion that the excellence and dignity of rhyme were never
known till Mr Waller taught it, and that John Denham's
Cooper's Hill not only is, but ever will be, the exact standard of
good writing. But he knows Sidney and he knows Scaliger,
and he knows already that Shakespeare “had a larger soul of
poesy than any of our nation.” And a man who knows these
three things in 1664 will go far.
The Preface to Annus Mirabilis 1 is again submissive in
form, independent in spirit. Dryden obediently &ccepts the
prescription for epic or “Heroic” poetry, and though he makes
another slip of fact (or at least of term) by saying that
Chapman's Homer is written in “Alexandrines or verses of
six feet" instead of (as far as the Niad is concerned) in the
fourteener, he is beautifully scholastic on the differences
between Virgil and Ovid, the Heroic and the Burlesque, “Wit
Writing” and “Wit Written.” But he does it with uncon-
querable originality, the utterance of his own impression, his
own judgment, breaking through all this school-stuff at every
moment; and also with a valuable (though still inadequate)
account of “the Poet's imagination.” 2
Yet another point of interest is the avowed intention (carried
out in the poem, to the disgust or at least distaste of Dr
Johnson) of using technical terms. This, one of the neo-
classic devices for attaining propriety, was, as we have seen,
excogitated in Italy, and warmly championed by the Pléiade;
but it had been by this time mostly abandoned, as it was
later by Dryden himself.
of the others · easy, without turning
the lower part of the page into a kind
1 I have not thought it necessary to
encumber the page with references in
the case of the shorter Essays, where
anyone can discover the passages
.cited, whether he uses Scott, Malone,
the originals, or Mr Ker's special col-
lection, with no more labour than is
good for him and deserved by them.
In the case of the longer pieces the
references will be given at least suf-
ficiently often to make the locating
? As including Invention, Fancy, and
Elocution, but in itself merely con-
sidered as synonymous with “Wit.”
It was probably from this that Addi-
son (see below) started that Imagina-
tion theory of his which has been so
much overrated.
116
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
The Essay of Dramatic Poesy is much better known than
it was only two or three decades ago, and it is perhaps super-
The Essay of fluous to say that it is a dialogue in form, and that
Dramatic the interlocutors are Dryden himself (Neander), his,
Poesy. brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard (Crites), Sir
Charles Sedley (Lisideius), and Lord Buckhurst (Eugenius).
The two last, though at the time the wildest of scapegraces,
were men of distinct poetic gift and varied literary faculty.
And Howard, though no great poet, and possessing something
of the prig, the coxcomb, and the pedant in his composition,
was a man of some ability, of real learning of a kind, and
of very distinct devotion to literature.
1 The Essay was first published in 1668, but had been written,
according to Dryden's statement in his Preface to Lord Buck-
Its setting hurst, “in the country” (at his father-in-law Lord
and overture. Berkshire's seat of Charlton near Malmesbury),
when the author was driven out of London by the Great
Plague three years before. He had, he says, altered some
of his opinions; but it did not much matter in an Essay
“where all I have said is problematical.” The “Address to
the Reader” promises a second part dealing with Epic and
Lyric, which never appeared, and of which only the Epic part
is represented by later works. This is a pity, for while we
have treatises on Drama and Epic ad nausean, their elder
and lovelier sister has been, "poor girl! neglected.” It begins
with a picturesque setting, which represents the four inter-
locutors as having taken boat and shot the bridge, attracted by
the reverberation of the great battle with the Dutch in the
early part of June 1665, when Admiral Opdam's flag-ship was
I When the present writer began
his revision of Scott's Dryden in the
year 1881 there were no separate
editions of the Essay since the orig-
inals. There are now, of annotated
issues of it, either by itself or with
more or less of its author's related
work, no less than five known to me,-
those of Mr Thomas Arnold (Oxford,
1886), Mr Strunk (New York, 1898),
Mr Low (London, n. d.), Mr Nichol
Smith (Glasgow, 1900), and Professor
Ker's. The study of English litera-
ture in schools and colleges has been
much abused, very foolishly talked.
about by some of its advocates, and
no doubt not always wisely directed.
But it is at least something to be.
said for it that it has made such.
a masterpiece as this known to proba
ably a hundred persons for every
one who knew it thirty years ago.
DRYDEN.
117
blown up. Eugenius augurs victory from the gradual dying
away of the noise; and Crites observes (in character) that
he should like this victory better if he did not know how
many bad verses he should have to read on it. Lisideius adds
that he knows some poets who have got epinikia and funeral
elegies all ready for either event, and the dialogue proceeds
for some time in the same way of literary banter, especial
set being made at two poets (one of whom is certainly Wild,
while the other may be Flecknoe) with incidental sneers at
Wither(s) and Cleveland. At last Crites brings it to some-
thing like the quarrel of Ancient v. Modern. Eugenius picks
up the glove, but consents, at Crites' suggestion, to limit the
discussion to dramatic poetry, and so the “ dependence" is
settled.
Eugenius thinks that though modern plays are better than
Greek or Roman, yet those of “the last age” (1600-1660) are
Crites for better than “ours.” As for epic and lyric, the last
the Ancients. age must yield. And all the quartette agree that
“the sweetness of English - verse was never understanded or
practised” by our fathers, and that some writers yet living
first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy and significant
words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and to make
our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should never
mislead the sense. Lisideius having (with the consent of the
company, subject to a slight scholastic objection from Crites)
defined or described a play as “A just and lively image of
human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the
changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and
instruction of mankind,” Crites takes up his brief for the
ancients. His speech is a set one, extolling the classical con-
ception of drama, and especially the modern-classical Unities,
1 One of the very earliest evidences argument of it true, which the Doctor
of the interest in dramatic criticism denied.” The question, on the very
felt in England, immediately after the English terms of another dinner and a
Restoration, must be Pepys' note that bet, was to be settled by Pepys himself
on September 1, 1660, when he was three days later. He does not tell us
dining at the Bullhead, there "rose whether he read up for it; but on the
... a dispute between Mr Moore and 4th he decided for the Doctor (Diary,
Dr Clerke-the former affirming that it ed. Wheatley, i. 233).
was essential to a tragedy to have the
118
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
but rather a panegyric than an argument, and particularly weak
in this—that it takes no critical account of the modern drama
at all. Except Ben Jonson, “ the greatest man of the last age,"
not a single modern dramatic writer of any country is so much
as named.
Eugenius, though his discourse is livelier, falls into some-
thing the same fault, or at least the counterpart of it. He
mine rallies the ancients unmercifully, and has very good
for the game of the stock plots and characters in Terence;
last age. but his commendation of the moderns has a dis-
appointing generality, and he lays himself rather open to the
good-humoured but forcible interruption of Crites that he and
Eugenius are never likely to come to an agreement, because
the one regards change as in itself an improvement, and the
other does not.
Still, Lisideius gives a new turn to the discussion by asking
Eugenius why he puts English plays above those of other
Lisideius for nations, and whether we ought not to submit our
the French. stage to the exactness of our next neighbours.
Eugenius in reply commits the further and especial defence of
the English to Neander, and Lisideius begins his part as
eulogist of the French. For some forty years, he says, we have
not had leisure to be good poets. The French have: and, by
Richelieu's patronage and Corneille's example, have raised their
theatre till it now surpasses ours, and the rest of Europe.
Who have kept the Unities so well? Who have avoided “that
absurd thing,” the English tragi-comedy, so completely? In
tragedy they take well-known stories, and only manageable
parts of them, while Shakespeare crams the business of thirty
or forty years into two hours and a half. They make only one
person prominent, they do as much as possible behind the
scenes, keep dying off the stage altogether, and never end their
plays with a conversion, or simple change of will. Nobody,
with them, appears on the stage, unless he has some business
there: and as for the beauty of their rhyme, why, that is
" already partly received by us,” and it will, no doubt, when we
write better plays, “exceedingly beautify them.”
To him, Neander—that is to say-Dryden himself.
DRYDEN.
119
There is a reminder (though the matter is quite different) of
Daniel, and a comforting augury for English criticism, in the
Druden for swift directness with which " the new critic” (as a
England and Webbe of his own day might have called him)
strikes at the heart of the question. The French
are more regular, he grants, and our irregularities are, in some
cases, justly taxed. But, nevertheless, he is of opinion that
neither our faults nor their virtues are sufficient to place them
above us. For Lisideius himself has defined a play as a lively
imitation of nature. And these beauties of the French stage
are beauties, not natural, but thoroughly artificial. Before
Molière, where are the humours of French comedy, save,
perhaps, in Le Menteur and a few others? Elsewhere they
work in comedy only by the old way of quarrels and reconcilia-
tions, or by the conventions of Spanish intrigue-drama. “On
which lines there is not above one play to be writ: they are
too much alike to please often."
Then, as to tragi-comedy. What is the harm of this? why
should Lisideius “imagine the soul of man more heavy than his
senses ?” The eye can pass, and pass with relief, from an
unpleasant to a pleasant object, in far less time than is re-
quired on the stage. . He must have stronger arguments before
he concludes that compassion and mirth destroy each other:
and in the meantime he will hold that tragi-comedy is a more
pleasant way than was known to the ancients, or any moderns
who have eschewed it.
Next, and closely connected, as to single - plot v. plot +
underplot. Why is the former to be preferred to the latter ?
Because it gives a greater advantage to the expression of
passion ? Dryden can only say that he thinks “their” verse the
“coldest” he has ever read, and he supports this by a close and
pleasant beating-up-the-quarters of Cinna and Pompey, “not
so properly to be called plays as long discourses on reason
of state”; of Polyeucte, “as solemn as the long stops on an
organ," of their mighty tirades and récits. “Whereas in
tragedy it is unnatural for any one either to speak or listen
long, and in comedy quick repartee is the chiefest grace.”
Yet again "they” are praised for making only one person con-
120
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
siderable. Why? If variety is not mere confusion, is it not
always pleasing ?1
The question of narrative against represented action is
treated with less boldness, and, therefore, with less success:
I but he comes to the sound, if not very improving, conclusion
(that, if we show too much action, the French show too little.
He has an interesting rebuke, however, here to Ben Jonson, for
reprehending “the incomparable Shakespeare.” 2 And he rises
again, and makes a capital point, by citing Corneille's own
confession of the cramping effect of the Unities, enlarging
whereon himself, he has an admirable exposure of the utterly
unnatural conditions which observance of these Unities brings
about. Then, after some remarks on prosody and the earlier
use of rhyme in English-remarks partly true, partly vitiated
by imperfect knowledge—he undertakes to produce plays as
regular as theirs and with more variety, instancing The Silent
Woman. Of this he is proceeding to a regular examen when
Eugenius requests a character of the author: and Neander, after
a little mannerly excuse, not only complies with this request,
but prefixes similar characters of Shakespeare and Fletcher.
The first of these is universally, the second and third should
be pretty well known. It must be sufficient to say here that
nothing like even the worst of the three (that of
Coda on
rhymed Beaumont and Fletcher, which wants the adequacy
plays, and and close grip of the other two) had previously been
conclusion.
"** seen in English, and not many things in any other
language, while to this day, with all faults, the character of
Shakespeare is one of the apices of universal criticism. The
characters are followed by the examen- also admirable and
quite new in English, though with more pattern elsewhere.
And he ends with a short peroration, the keynote of which is,
“I ask no favour from the French.” Lisideius is going to reply;
but Crites interrupting, diverts the discussion to a particular
point already glanced at—the use of rhyme in plays. He (sen-
1 Here, to glance at the matter of Que aquesta variedad deleyta mucho :
Dryden and the Spaniards (v. Hist.
Crit., ii. 331, 332, and inf., on Spence),
Que por tal variedad tiene belleza.
is a possible reminiscence of Lope's 2 Scott, xv. 337 ; Ker, i. 75.
Arte Nuevo, 178-180-
Buen exemplo nos da naturaleza,
DRYDEN.
121
sibly enough) declines to investigate very carefully whether this
was a revival of the old English custom or an imitation of the
French, but attacks its legitimacy with the usual, obvious, and
fairly sound argument that since no man without premeditation
speaks in rhyme, he ought not to do it on the stage, anticipating
the retort, “neither does he speak blank verse" by urging that
this at any rate is “nearest nature” or less unnatural. Neander,
taking up the glove for “his new-loved mistress," practically
admits the weakness of his case by first advancing the very
argument as to blank verse which Crites has disallowed by
, anticipation. The rest of his answer is a mixture of true and
not so true, of imperfect knowledge and ingenious argument,
constantly open to reply, but always interesting as a specimen
of critical advocacy. He represents himself as pursuing the
discourse so eagerly that Eugenius had to remind him that “the
boat stood still,” and that they had come to their destination at
Somerset stairs. And with a pleasant final patch of description
the dialogue closes.
In reading it we should keep in mind what he says a quarter
of a century later to the same correspondent,1 that he was at this
Comeni time seeking his way “in a vast ocean" of criticism,
merits of without other help than the pole-star of the ancients,
the piece. and the rules of the French stage amongst the
moderns. He has given the readings of the pole-star to Crites,
and has pointed out the dangers of reckoning solely by it!
He has put into the mouth of Sedley (with a touch of malice
which that ingenious good-for-nothing must have noticed, and
which it is to his credit that he did not resent) a similar read-
ing of the bearings of the different French lights, and has
'shown how little they assisted the English mariner-indeed,
how some of them actually led to rocks and quicksands, instead
of warning off from them. In the mouth of Buckhurst, and in
his own, he has put the patriotic apology, inclining it in the
former case towards laudation of the past, and in the latter to
defence of the present: and he has allowed divers excursions
from the immediate subject--especially that on “verse," or
rhymed heroics, as a dramatic medium. One of the chief of
1 In the Discourse on Satire. Scott, xii. 3 ; Ker, ii. 17.
122
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
the many merits of the piece is precisely this, that at the time
Dryden had read less than at a later, and was less tempted to
add quotations or comments. He was following chiefly a very
safe guide-Corneille—and he bettered his guide's instruction.
It may be said boldly that, up to the date, nothing in the way of
set appreciation—no, not in Longinus himself—had appeared
equal to the three characters of Shakespeare, Jonson, and
Fletcher; while almost greater still is the constant application
of the “leaden rule,” the taking of book, author, kind, as it is,
and judging it accordingly, instead of attempting to force every-
thing into agreement or disagreement with a prearranged
schedule of rules.
After the publication of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden
(English literature can hardly give too many thanks for it) had
The Middle more than thirty well-filled years of life allowed
Prefaces. him; and to the very last, and at the very last,
criticism had its full share of his labours. The “Prefaces of
Dryden” never fail to give valuable matter; and we shall have
to notice most, if not all of them, though the notices may be of
varying length. The immediate successor and, in fact, appendix
to the Essay, the Defence thereof, was only printed in one edition,
the second, of The Indian Emperor, and is very far from being
of the best. Sir Robert Howard was, as has been said, a
man conceited and testy, as Shadwell's nickname for him in
The Sullen Lovers, Sir Positive Atall, hints. He seems to
have been nettled by his part of Crites, and replied with
some heat in a Preface to his own play, The Duke of Lerma.
Dryden, who never quite learned the wisdom of Bacon's
dictum, “Qui replicat multiplicat," and who at this time
liad not yet reached the easy disdain of his later manner,
riposted (1668) with more sense but with not much more temper.
The piece (which was practically withdrawn later) contained,
besides not too liberal asperities on Sir Robert's own work, a
further “defence of Rhyme," not like Daniel's, where it should
be, but where it should not. It is redeemed by an occasional
admission, in Dryden's usual and invaluable manner, that he is
quite aware of the other side, and by an unhesitating assertion
of the primacy of Delight among the Objects of Poetry.
DRYDEN.
123
In none of the next three or four of the pieces do we find
him quite at his best. For some few years, indeed, the popu-
larity of his splendid, if sometimes a little fustianish, heroics,
the profits of his connection with the theatre (which, added to
other sources of revenue, made him almost a rich man in his
way), and his association with the best society, seem to have
slightly intoxicated him. He saw his error, like other wise
men, all in good time, and even the error itself was not more
than human and pardonable.
The Preface to An Evening's Love promises, but for the time
postpones, an extension of the criticism of “the last age,"
and intersperses some valuable remarks on the difference
between Comedy and Farce, between Wit and Humour, with
a good deal of egotism and some downright arrogance.1
The Essay of Heroic Plays prefixed to The Conquest of
Granada (1672) is as yet unconverted as to rhyme on the
stage; but contains some interesting criticism of Davenant's
essays in the kind, and a curious defence (recurred to later)
of supernatural “ machinery.” The main gist of the Preface,
besides its excuse of the extravagances of Almanzor, is an
elaborate adjustment of the Heroic Play to the rules of the
much-talked-of Heroic Poem. But though there is a good
deal of self-sufficiency here, it is as nothing to the drift of the
Epilogue to the second part of the play, and of an elaborate
Prose “Defence” of this Epilogue. Here Dryden takes up the
position that in " the last age,” when men were dull and con-
versation low, Shakespeare and Fletcher had not, while Jonson
did not avail himself of, access to that higher society which de-
lighted to honour him, Dryden. Divers flings at the “solecisms,"
“flaws in sense,” “ mean writing,” “lame plots," “ carelessness,"
“luxuriance," "pedantry” of these poor creatures lead up to a
statement that “Gentlemen will now be entertained with the
foibles of each other." Never again do we find Dryden writing
like this; and for his having done it at all Rochester's “Black
1 "I have further to add that I with nothing so dull as what is there."
seldom use the wit and language of But he makes ample amends by a bold
any romance or play which I under- challenge to the advocates of "the
take to alter ; because my own inven- subject." “ The story is the least
tion, as bad as it is, can furnish me part."
124
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
1
Will with a cudgel” exacted sufficient, as suitable, atonement
in the Rose Alley ambuscade, even from the lowest point of
view. From a higher, he himself made an ample apology to
Shakespeare in the Prologue to Aurungzebe, and practically
never repeated the offence.
The curious State of Innocence (1677) (a much better thing
than rigid Miltonists admit) is preceded by an equally curious
Apology of Heroic Poetry, in which, yet once more, we find the
insufficient sense in which Imagination (here expressly limited
to “Imaging") was used; while the Preface to All for Love (1678)
is a very little ill-tempered towards an anonymous lampooner,
who was, in fact, Rochester, Troilus and Cressida (1679) was
ushered by a set preliminary Discourse on the Grounds of Criti-
cism in Tragedy. No piece illustrates more remarkably that
mixed mode of criticism in Dryden, to bring out which is our
chief design. On a canvas, not it must be confessed of much
interest, woven out of critical commonplaces from Aristotle and
Longinus down to Rymer and Le Bossu, he has embroidered a
great number of most valuable observations of his own, chiefly
on Shakespeare and Fletcher, which culminate in a set descrip-
tion of Fletcher as “a limb of Shakespeare”-a thing happy in
itself and productive of happy imitations since. The Preface to
the translation of Ovid's Epistles (1680) chiefly consists of a
fresh defence of that ingenious writer (for whom Dryden had no
small fancy), and the Dedication to Lord Haughton of The
Spanish Friar (1681) is mainly notable for an interesting con-
fession of Dryden's changes of opinion about Chapman and Du
Bartas (Sylvester rather), and a sort of apology for his own
dallying with these Delilahs of the theatre in the rants of
Almanzor and Maximin.
But that to the Second Miscellany, five years later, after a
period chiefly occupied with the great political satires, ranges
with the Essay, and not far below the Fables Preface, among
Dryden's critical masterpieces. The thing is not long-less
than twenty pages. But it gives a coherent and defensible, if
also disputable, theory of translation, a singularly acute, and, it
would appear, original contrast of the faire of Ovid and of Claud-
ian, more detailed studies of Virgil, Lucretius (singularly good)
DRYDEN.
125
Horace, and Theocritus, and the best critical stricture in
English on “Pindaric” verse. After it the note of the
same year on Opera, which ushered Albion and Albanius, is of
slight importance.
The Dedication of the Third Miscellany (specially named
Examen Poeticum, as the second had been sub-titled Sylvce)
contains some interesting protests against indiscriminate critical
abuse, the final formulation of a saying sketched before the
corruption of a poet is the generation of a critic”), illustrated
from Scaliger in the past and (not obscurely though not nomi-
natim) from Rymer in the present; and, among other things,
some remarks on prosody which might well have been fuller.
Between this and the Fables, besides some lesser things,
there appeared two of the longest and most ambitious in
The Essay appearance of Dryden's critical writings, the Essay
on Satire" [strictly Discourse] on Satire prefixed to the Juvenal,
and the on
on and the Dedication of the Æneis, with, between them,
Dedication
of the the first writing at any length by a very distinguished
Aneis. Englishman of letters, on the subject of pictorial art,
in the shape of the Parallel of Poetry and Painting prefixed to
the translation of Du Fresnoy De Arte Graphica. All, being
Dryden's, are, and could not but be, admirably written and full
of interest. But the Juvenal and Virgil Prefaces are, in respect
of permanent value, both intrinsically and representively injured
by an excess of critical erudition. The time was perhaps not
yet ripe for an honest and candid address straight to the English
reader. The translator was bound to recommend himself to
classical scholars by attention to the paraphernalia of what
then regarded itself as scholarship (“other brides, other para-
phernalia” no doubt), and to propitiate wits, and Templars, and
the gentlemen of the Universities, with original or borrowed
discourses on literary history and principle. Dryden fell in
with the practice, and obliged his readers with large decoctions
of Rigaltius and Casaubon, Dacier and Segrais, which are at
any rate more palatable than the learned originals, but which
? Lesser, but far from negligible ; for
the Character of Saint-Evremond is both
personally and critically interesting,
and the critical biographies of Lucian
and Plutarch lead straight to Johnson.
126
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
an
T
make us feel, rather ruefully, that boiling down such things was
not the work for which the author of Absalom and Achitophel'
and of The Essay on Dramatic Poesy was born.
As for the Parallel, it is of course interesting as being nearly
our first Essay, and that by a master hand, in a kind of criticism
The Parallel
, which has later given excellent results. But Dryden,
of Poetry as he most frankly admits, did not know very much
about the matter, and his work resolves itself very
Painting.
9. mainly into a discussion of the principles of Imita-
m
tion in general, applied in an idealist manner to the two arts in
particular. Again we may say, "Not here, 0 Apollo !”
We have nothing left but the Preface to the Fables, the extra-
ordinary merit of which has been missed by no competent critic
The Preface from Johnson to Mr Ker. The wonderful ease and
to the Fables. urbanity of it, the artfully varied forms of reply to
the onslaughts of Collier and others, are not more generally
agreeable than are, in a special division, the enthusiastic eulogy
of Chaucer (all the more entertaining because of its lack of
mere pedantic accuracy in places), and the interesting, if again
not always rigidly accurate, scraps of literary history. It winds
up, as the Essay had practically begun, a volume of critical
writing which, if not for pure, yet for applied, mixed, and sweet-
ened criticism, deserves to be put on the shelf—no capacious one
---reserved for the best criticism of the world.
We have seen, over and over again, in individual example;
have already partially summed more than once; and shall have
to re-sum with more extensive view later, the character and the
faults of the critical method which had been forming itself for
some hundred and fifty years when Dryden began his critical
work. It would be absurd to pretend that he was entirely supe-
rior to this “Spirit of the Age”-which was also that of the age
Dryden's
. behind him, and (with rare exceptions) of the age to
general come for nearly a hundred years. But, although it
critical
may be paradoxical, it is not absurd at all, to
position.
express satisfaction that he was not so entirely
superior. He was enabled by his partial—and, in so far as his
consciousness went, quite sincere — orthodoxy, to obtain an
access to the general hearing in England, and even to influence,
DRYDEN.
127
long after his death, important literary authorities, as he never
could have done if he had set up for an iconoclast. Further-
more, it was not yet time to break these idols. Apollo winked
at the neo-classical ignorance and heresy because it was useful.
We are so apt--so generously and excusably apt to look at the
Miltons without considering the Clevelands, that we forget how
absolutely ungoverned, and in some cases how near to puerility,
the latest Elizabethan school was. We forget the slough of
shambling verse in which true poets, men like Suckling in.
drama, men like Lovelace in lyric, complacently wallowed.
The strait waistcoat was almost necessary, even after the fine
madness, much more after the madness not so fine, of mid-
seventeenth-century verse, and, in a less degree, prose. And so,
when we find Dryden belittling the rhymes of Comus and
Lycidas, shaking his head over Shakespeare's carelessness, un-
able with Chapman, as Ben had been with Marlowe, to see the
fire for the smoke, we need not in the least excite ourselves, any
more than when we find him dallying with the Dowsabels of
Renaissance school-criticism. In the first place, the thing had
to be done; and in the second place, his manner of doing it
went very far to supply antidote to all the bane, as well as to
administer the “corsives," as they said then, in the mildest
and most innocuous way possible.
Dryden's moly, an herb so powerful that-herein excelling
its original-it not only prevented men like Addison from be-
coming beasts like Rymer, but had the virtue of turning beasts
into men,-of replacing the neo-classic jargon by the pure lan-
guage of criticism,—was that plan of actual comparison and
examination of actual literature which is not merely the via
prima but the via sola of safety for the critic. By his time
there was assembled a really magnificent body of modern
Hie special letters, in addition to classical and mediæval. But
critical nobody in the late seventeenth century, except
method. Dryden, really utilised it. Italy and Spain were
sinking into premature senility. The French despised or
1 "In his Juvenilia ... his rhyme
is always constrained or forced."-Dis-
course on Satire.
2 Chapelain might like the early ro.
mances (Hist. Crit., ii. 260). But here
Boileau was the spokesman of France.
128
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
-
-
-
+
ignored all modern literatures but their own, and despised and
ignored almost equally their own rich and splendid mediæval
stores.
Dryden's freedom from this worst and most hopeless vice is
all the more interesting because, from some of his utterances, we
might have expected him not to be free from it. That theory
of his as to Mr Waller; that disastrous idea that Shakespeare
and Fletcher were low people who had not the felicity to
associate with gentlemen,-might seem likely to produce the
most fatal results. But not so. He accepts Chaucer at once,
rejoices in him, extols him, just as if Chaucer had taken lessons
from Mr Waller, and had been familiar with my Lord Dorset.
Back his own side as he may in the duel of the theatres, he
speaks of the great lights of the last age in such a fashion
that no one has outgone him since. He cannot really take an
author in hand, be he Greek or Latin, Italian or French or Eng-
lish, without his superiority to rules and systems and classifica-
tions appearing at once, however he may, to please fashion and
fools, drag these in as an afterthought, or rather (for Dryden
never “ drags” in anything save the indecency in his comedies)
draw them into the conversation with his usual adroitness.
And he is constantly taking authors in hand in this way,-we
are as certain that this, and not twaddling about unities and
machines, was what he liked doing, as we are that he wrote
comedies for money, and satires and criticism itself for love.
Now this,--the critical reading without theory, or with theory
postponed, of, masses of different literatures, and the formation
and expression of genuine judgment as to what the critic liked
and disliked in them, not what he thought he ought to like and
dislike,—this was what was wanted, and what nobody had yet
done. Dryden did it-did it with such mastery of expression
as would almost have commended a Rymer, but with such
genuine critical power and sympathy as would almost have
1 They have deceived the very elect, enragé. But M. Rigault is at a wrong
e.g., M. Rigault, who in not altogether angle in most of the English part of
unnatural amazement at the dictum, his book, --so much so as to strike a
"Spenser wanted only to have read chill into any one who has to criticise
the rules of Bossu," classes (Q. des A. a foreign literature, lest, lacking the
et des M., p. 311) Dryden as an ancien grace of the Muses, he too go astray
DRYDEN AND BOILEAU.
129
carried off the absence of merits of expression altogether. He
established (let us hope for all time) the English fashion of
criticising, as Shakespeare did the English fashion of dramatis-
ing,—the fashion of aiming, at delight, at truth, at justice, at
nature, at poetry, and letting the rules take care of them-
selves.
Perhaps in no single instance of critical authorship and
authority does the great method of comparison assist us so
Dryden and well as in the case of Dryden and Boileau. This
Boileau. comparison is absolutely fair. The two were almost
exact contemporaries; they represented-so far at least as their
expressed and, in both cases, no doubt conscientious, literary
creed went—the same sect. Enfin Malherbe vint is an exact
parallel, whether as a wonderful discovery or a partly mis-
chievous delusion, to the exploits on our numbers by Mr Waller.
Both were extremely powerful satirists. Both, though not com.
parable in intrinsic merit, were among the chief men of letters
of their respective countries. Both had a real, and not merely
a professional or affected, devotion to literature. Both applied,
with whatever difference of exclusiveness and animus, a peculiar
literary discipline, new to the country of each. And in the case
of both-it has been decided by a consensus of the best judges,
with all the facts before them up to the present time there was
an insufficient looking before and after, a pretension to limit
literature to certain special developments.
The defects of Boileau in carrying out the scheme are worth
contrasting with the merits of Dryden.
That, though he makes mistakes enough in literary history,
these mistakes are slight in comparison with Boileau's, matters
not very much; that, though his satiric touch was more wither-
ing even than the Frenchman's, he has no love of lashing merely
for the sport, and never indulges in insolent flings at harmless
dulness, suffering poverty, or irregular genius; that, though
quite prone enough to flatter, he declined to bow the knee
to William of Orange, while Boileau persistently grovelled at
the feet of William's enemy,—these things matter even less to
i For a very full account of Boileau see Hist. Crit., ii. 280-300.
130
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
us. The fact, the critical fact, remains that the faults of his
time and his theory did the least harm to Dryden of all men
whom we know, while they did the most to Boileau. And the
| reason of the fact is more valuable than the fact itself. Boileau,
| beyond controversy, has left us not a single impartial and appre-
ciative criticism of a single author, ancient or modern. Dryden
simply cannot find himself in presence of a man of real genius,
whether he belongs to his own school or another, without
having his critical lips at once touched by Apollo and Pallas.
He was sadly ignorant about Chaucer,—a board-school child
might take him to task; but he has written about Chaucer with
far more real light and sympathy than some at least of the
authors of the books from which the board-school child derives
its knowledge have shown. His theory about Shakespeare,
Fletcher, and Jonson was defective; but he has left us criticisms
of all three than which we have, and are likely to have, no
better. About the ancients he borrows from both ancients and
moderns; but it is remarkable that while Boileau's borrowings
are his best, Dryden's are infinitely his worst part. So the
consequence is that while Boileau is merely a point de repère, a
historical document which men simply strive to bring to some
relation with the present and the future, Dryden is and will
remain at once a source and a model for ever. And he is these
because he had the wisdom to ask himself the question, “Do I
think this good or bad ?” and the wit to answer it, instead of
asking and answering the other, “ Is it good or bad according
to this or that scheme and schedule ?”
We have, in short, in Dryden the first very considerable
example in England, if not anywhere, of the critic who, while
possessing fairly wide knowledge of literature, attributes no
arbitrary or conventional eminence to certain parts of it, but at
least endeavours to consider it as a whole; of the critic who is
never afraid to say " Why ?”; of the critic who asks, not whether
he ought to like such and such a thing, but whether he does
like it, and why he likes it, and whether there is any real reason
why he should not like it ; of the critic, finally, who tries, with-
out prepossession or convention, to get a general grasp of the
book or author, and then to set forth that grasp in luminous
RYMER.
131
language, and with a fair display of supporting analysis and
argument. Dryden, of course, is far- very far-from being a
faultless monster of criticism. The application of his own pro-
cess to his own theory will discover in it many mistakes, inde-
pendent of the imperfect knowledge which has been already
admitted, of the inconsistencies which are more of a virtue than
of a defect, and of the concessions to tradition and fashion which
are almost wholly unfortunate. Nay, more, it may be granted
that Dryden did not escape the dangers of the process itself, the
dangers of vagueness, of desultoriness, of dilettantism. But he
has the root of the matter in him. He knows that art exists to
give pleasure, and when he says “I am pleased with this,” he
insists on strong reasons being given to show that he ought not
to be so. He admits also—nay, insists on-nature, variety, in-
dividuality. He will “connoisseur no man out of his senses,” 1
and refuses to be so connoisseured by any, while he will give
good reasons for his own and others' pleasure. These are the
marks of the true and catholic criticism; and Dryden has
them.
Let us pass from him directly to one who has them not.
There are few English critics who require to be dealt with at
once more carefully and more faithfully than does
Rymer.
Thomas Rymer. He has become a name, and to
become a name is to be at least on the way to becoming a
legend, if not a myth. Moreover, as his legend is (for good
reasons) far from a favourable one, it has been made more
legendary by those generous or wayward revolts against it
which are not uncommon. It has even been held proper, for
some time, to shake the head of deprecation over Macaulay's
" the worst critic that ever lived.” Moreover, Rymer is by no
means very accessible in his critical works, of course, for we
speak not here of the Federa. Whether these were originally
published in very small numbers; whether the common-sense
of mankind rose against them and subjected them in unusual
proportions to the “ martyrdom of pies”; or whether (by one of
Time's humorous revenges) the copies have been absorbed into
special collections relating to that altissimo poeta whom Rymer
A phrase of Blake's.
132
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
blasphemed, I cannot say. But it is certain that very good
libraries often possess either none or only a part of them, and
that on the rare occasions on which they appear in catalogues
they are priced at about as many pounds as they are intrinsic-
ally worth farthings. I think I have seen notices of Rymer
which evidently confused The Tragedies of the Last Age (1678)
with A Short View of Tragedy (1693). Besides these two,
Rymer, independently of smaller things and reissues, had pro-
duced, earlier than the earlier, in 1674, a preface to his own
translation of Rapin's Reflections, which completes the trinity
of his important criticism. No one of the three is long; in fact,
The Tragedies of the Last Age is a very tiny book, which, short
as it is, seems to have exhausted the author before he could
carry out half his scheme.
A careful and comparative reading of all three has given me
a settled, and I think a just, conception of Rymer as of a man
of remarkable learning for his age and country, but intensely
stupid to begin with, and Puck - led by the Zeitgeist into a
charcoal-burner's faith in “ the rules.” In the Preface 2 he is
less crabbed than in the two booklets; and, though he already
The Preface uses the would-be humorous hail-fellow-well-met
to Rapin. colloquialism characteristic of the lower Restoration
style, and employed even by such a man of letters as L'Estrange
and such scholars as Collier and Bentley, he does not push it to
the same lengths of clumsy ass-play as later. He thinks that
“poets would grow negligent if Critics had not a strict eye
i Parts, but parts only, are given
in Mr Spingarn's extremely useful
Critical Essays of the 17th Century (3
vols.: Oxford, 1908-9), which takes up
the ball from Professor Gregory Smith's
collection, and will illustrate this and
part of the last and next chapters
with texts. I do not think Mr Spin-
garn very happy in his attempts to
“whitewash " Rymer and others; but
the student can easily judge for himself.
2 Vol. ii. pp. 107-130 of the 1706
edition of Rapin in English. At p.
113 Rymer says that he will not here
examine the various qualities which
make English fit above all other
languages for Heroic Poesy, “the
world expecting these matters learn-
edly and largely discussed in a par-
ticular treatise on the subject." This
apparently important announcement is
marginally annotated "Sheringham."
I presume this was Robert S., a Nor-
folk man (as his name imports), of
Caius College, and Proctor at Cam.
bridge just before the Commonwealth
ejection. I suppose the world was
disappointed of this work by his sud-
den death in May 1678, four years
after Rymer wrote.
RYMER.
133
on their miscarriages,” yet he admits that this eye sometimes
squints, and compares some critics to“ Wasps that rather annoy
the Bees than terrify the drones.” Then he skims the past,
noticing Castelvetro, Malherbe, and others, but thinks that till
lately “England was as free from Critics as from Wolves,” Ben
Jonson having all the critical learning to himself. After praise
of Aristotle and a short notice of his actual author, he then pro-
ceeds to consider the history of English poetry independently.
As for Chaucer, “our language was not then capable of any heroic
character," nor indeed was the most polite wit of Europe “suffi-
cient for a great design.” Spenser had “ a large spirit, a sharp
judgment, and a genius for Heroic poetry perhaps above any
that ever wrote since Virgil,” but “wanted a true idea," and
was misled by Ariosto. “They who can love Ariosto will be
ravished with Spenser, but men of juster thoughts,” &c. His
stanza is “nowise proper for our language."
Davenant and Cowley are criticised with politeness, but not
very favourably; the faults of both, as well as their designs,
were what Rymer was capable of understanding, and neither
provokes him to any rudeness on the one hand or stupidity on
the other, though there is an occasional ripple betraying an
undercurrent of asperity. Then, after some more general re-
marks, he takes the accepted test of the Description of Night,
and applies it with mixed commendation to Apollonius Rhodius,
with rather independent criticism to Virgil, slightingly to Ari-
osto, and rather cavillingly to Tasso, with a good deal of censure
to Marino, and with more to Chapelain, with about as much to
Père Le Moyne, and then with very considerable praise to that
passage of Dryden's in the Conquest of Mexico to which Words-
worth was afterwards nearly as unjust as Rymer himself to far
greater things. And with this rather patronising “Well done
our side !” he stops.
Had Rymer done nothing more than this in criticism it would
indeed be absurd to call him our best critic, but it would be
still more absurd to call him our worst. There is fair know-
.I do not think that Rymer ever
intended to be rude to Dryden, though
his clumsy allusions to “ Bays ” in
the Short Vicw naturally rubbed the
discrowned Laureate the wrong way for
a time.
134
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
ledge, there is fair common-sense judgment; the remarks on
Chaucer are merely what might be expected, and on Spenser
rather better than might be expected; the detailed censure is
correct enough; and though there cannot be said to be any
great appreciation of poetry, there is interest in it. Above all,
if the piece stood alone, we should hardly think of detecting in
it even a murmur of the pedantic snarl which is the one un-
pardonable sin of a critic.
In The Tragedies of the Last Age Rymer ruit in pejus. He
had, in the interval, received some praise, which is always bad
The time for an ill - conditioned man and dangerous for a
gedies of the stupid one; he had conceived the idea of being
Last Age.. bee as well as wasp; and he undertook to show
Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare and Jonson, their errors,
though as matter of fact he lost his wind in belabouring the
twins, and had to leave the others till he had taken fifteen
years' breath. He shows himself at once in a mood of facetious
truculence and self-importance. He is not going to emulate
“the Remarks and eternal triflings of French Grammaticasters."
But he is going to set the “quibble-catching” of his country-
men right, and to put an end to "the Stage-quacks and Em-
pirics in poetry” who despise the rules. “Fancy leaps and
frisks, and away she's gone; while Reason rattles the chain, and
follows after,” in which flight Rymer, as often, does not seem to
perceive that he is not exactly giving Reason and himself
the beau rôle. Then he sets to work on three plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher. In Rollo there is nothing to move
pity and terror, nothing to delight, nothing to instruct. In A
King and No King Panthea actually suggests kissing !2 Arbaces
is so bad that he really made Rymer think of Cassius—a wither-
ing observation which foretells what the critic was going to
say about Shakespeare, though on this occasion he was too ex-
hausted to say it.
1 Rymer's elaborate directions for ? Rymer knew something of Old
removing the Romantic offence of this French. How borrified he would have
play, and adjusting it to Classical been if he had come across the lines in
correctness and decorum, are among Floriant et Florete (2904, 2905)—
the most involuntarily funny things in
"Si samble qu'enfès voit disant
criticism (pp. 19-24).
Baise, baise, je voil baisier !'”
RYMER.
135
He said it fifteen years later with no uncertain voice. The
one redeeming feature of the Short View is its remarkable, if
The Short not quite impeccable, learning. Rymer really knows
View of something about “Provencial” poetry, though he
ragedy. confuses it (and thereby made Dryden confuse it)
with old French, and actually regards Philippe Mouskès--not
even a Frenchman but a Fleming—as a “troubadour.”. Still, his
knowledge is to be praised, and his ignorance forgiven. Less
forgivable, but still not fatal, are the singular want of method
with which he flings the result of his learning, pell-mell with
his own remarks, on the reader, and (in a yet further degree of
culpability) the vulgar jeering of his style. But all this might
still pass. His mistakes are much less, and his knowledge
much greater, than those of any critic of his age. Others have
lacked method; and Bentley was quite, Collier very nearly, as
coarsely rude. On some general points, such as the utility of
the chorus in keeping playwrights to the rules, he is not un-
intelligent. He is a great admirer of dumb-show, and thinks
that many of the tragical scenes, not merely in Shakespeare, but
in Jonson, would go better without words.
More than half the little book 1 is occupied with a display of
his learning—first in some general remarks on the drama, and
then in a history of it which is, with all its mistakes, better in-
formed than anything of the kind earlier. And then Rymer
falls on Othello. He grants it “a phantom of a fable.” But it
is a very bad phantom. Ridiculous that Desdemona should
love a blackamoor at all; more ridiculous that she should be
attracted by his stories of adventure; most that Othello should
be made a Venetian general-and so on throughout. But the
characters are worse. Rymer simply cannot away with Iago;
and this on grounds exquisitely characteristic, not merely of
him but of the whole system, of which he is the reductio ad ab-
surdum. It is not nearly so much Iago's theriotes by which
Rymer is shocked, as his violation of the type and the general
D
1 It has (excluding an appended ex-
tract from the Registers of the Parlia-
ment of Paris about Mysteries) only
168 pages of perhaps 200 words each ; '
and much of it is quotation. But it is
far longer than The Tragedies of the
Last Age.
136
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
law. “He would pass upon us a close, dissembling, false, in.
sinuating rascal instead of an open-hearted, frank, plain-dealing
soldier--a character constantly worn by them for some thousand
years in the world.” 1 Again, “Philosophy tells us it is a
principle in the nature of Man to be grateful. . . . Philosophy
must be [the poet's] guide,” 2 therefore Iago is a poetical impos-
sibility. Rymer knows that historically all men are not grate-
ful: but never mind. The Type! the Type! the Type ! 3 One
need hardly go farther, but in going we cannot, in one sense,
fare worse. “Godlike Romans” (as Mr Dryden had already
called them) are, in Julius Cæsar, “put in fools' coats and made
jack-puddings of,” which, says Tom justly, “is a sacriledge."
Brutus and Cassius “play a prize, a tryal of skill in huffing and
swaggering like two drunken Hectors.” In Tragedy Shake-
speare “appears quite out of his element; his brains are
turned; he raves and rambles without any coherence, any
spark of reason, or any rule to control him, and set bounds to
his frenzy." Nor does Ben fare much better. He indeed
“knew to distinguish men and manners at another rate." In
Catiline “we find ourselves in Europe, we are no longer in the
land of Savages," sighs Rymer with relief. Still Ben, too,
“gropes in the dark, and jumbles things together without
head and tail ;" he, though not "in the gang of the strolling
fraternity," like Shakespeare, “must lie a miserable heap of
ruins for want of architecture;" he “sins against the clearest
light and conviction” by “interlarding fiddle-faddle comedy
and apocryphal matters.” And so forth.
That Rymer was utterly deaf to the poetry of Othello
1 Short View, p. 94.
2 Ibid., p. 144.
3 Rymer has been defended as an
apostle of " Common Sense.” But
this is sheer nonsense.
4 It may be not unamusing to give
an instance or two of the way in which
Nemesis has made poor Tom speak
truth unconsciously,
“They who like this author's writing
will not be offended to find so much
repeated from him ” [Shakespeare]. -
P. 108.
“Never in the world had any pagan
Poet his brains turned at this mon-
strous rate.”—P. 111.
“No Pagan poet but would have
found some machine for her deliver-
ance.”—P. 134.
“Portia is . . . scarce one remove
from a Natural. She is the own
cousiu - germau ... with Desde.
mona."-P. 156..
RYMER.
137
e Rule
and of Julius Caesar, that he thinks “ the neighing of a horse
ute or the howling of a mastiff possesses more meaning"
of Tom than Shakespeare's verse, merely demonstrates that
The second. he understood the language of the beasts and did not
understand that of the man. It disqualifies him for his busi-
ness, no doubt, hopelessly and of itself. But in the nature of
the case we cannot quarrel with him for this Judgment of God;
and, on his own theory, mere poetry is of so little consequence
that it does not much matter. But where he is.cast hopelessly
on his own pleadings, where he shows himself (as he has been
called) utterly stupid, is in his inability to understand the fable,
the characters themselves. He cannot see that the very points
which he blunderingly picks out are the adunata pithana of his
own law - giver - the improbabilities or impossibilities made
plausible by the poet's art; and that the excess of this or
that quality in Iago, in Desdemona, in Othello, is utterly lost
in, or is unerringly adjusted to, their perfect humanity. He is
not bound to feel “the pity of it”-which he quotes, much as
the pig might grunt at the pearl. But he is bound, on Aris-
totelian, no less than on the most extreme Romantic, principles,
to feel that universality which Dryden had ascribed a quarter
of a century before, and for all time to come. Therefore, for
once, though no Macaulayan, I venture to indorse my unim-
portant name on a dictum of Macaulay's. I have read several
critics — I trust this book may show sufficiently that this
is no idle boast. I have known several bad critics from Ful-
gentius to the Abbé d'Aubignac, and from Zoilus to persons of
our own day, whom it is unnecessary to mention. But I never
came across a worse critic than Thomas Rymer.1
Between its King and its Helot, our Sparta of the last forty
years of the seventeenth century does not offer many persons
for exornation, with crown or with stripe, as the case may be.
1 His best deed was to elicit from
Dryden, in Heads of an Answer to Rymer
(Works, xv. 390), the memorable ob-
servation that "if Aristotle had seen
ours [i.e., “our plays "] he might have
changed his mind.” One may add
that, if Dryden had worked these
"Heads” out, he might have solved the
whole mystery of criticism as far as in
all probability it ever can be solved, or
at the very least as far as it could be
solved with the knowledge of literature
at his disposal. (The most notable of
them are in Loci Critici.)
138
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Sprat in the famous passage of his History of the Royal Society;
Phillips and Winstanley and Langbaine in their attempts at
literary history; Sir Thomas Pope Blount in his other attempt
at a critical summary of literature; Collier in his moral chev-
auchées against the ethical corruption of the Drama,—these we
may legitimately notice, but at no great length. Dennis, Gildon,
and Bysshe will come better in the next Book; and it is hoped
that no reader will be so insatiable as to demand the inclusion
of Milbourn or of Hickeringill.
The Sprat passage 1 is of the very first importance in the
History of English Literature, and has at last been recognised
Sprat.
as being so. In it the gorgeous, floriated, conceited
p e style of the earlier century is solemnly denounced,
and a “naked natural style of writing” enjoined. But Sprat is
careful to point out that this was for the purposes of the Society
—for the improvement not of literature but of science; and he
does not attempt to argue it out at all from the literary side.
The pronouncement expresses the whole sense of the time; it.
is epoch-making in the history of literary taste; but it does
not give itself out as literary criticism, though the spirit of it
may be seen in half the literary criticism that follows for nearly
a hundred and fifty years.
The infant historians 2 also may be pretty briefly despatched..
Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew, was by all accounts a most
Edward respectable person ; and considering the prevalence
Phillips. of Royalist opinions (especially as he shared them),
he says quite as much about his uncle as could be expected..
Besides, it is just possible that Milton was no more engaging as
an uncle and schoolmaster than he was as a husband and father.
He was not alive when Theatrum Poetarum 3 appeared in the
winter of 1674-75, but the dignity of the opening " Discourse of
1 History of the Royal Society, 4to, of the Poets very much earlier, and
London, 1667, p. 111 sq. It may be some sanguine souls have hoped that
found conveniently extracted at vol. it may yet turn up. But the famous
iii. pp. 271, 272 of Sir Henry Craik's passage about poets' nicknames, as well
English Prose Selections (London, as the whole cast of Heywood's work,
1894).
suggests that, though biography may
? It is well known that Thomas have lost something, criticism has not
Heywood, the dramatist, had planned, lost much.
if he did not actually execute, a Lives 3 London, 12mo.
PHILLIPS.
139
Poetarum
the Poets and Poetry in general” has made some think that he
had had a hand in it. I am not so sure of this. That it is
addressed to Thomas Stanley and Sir Edward Sherburne (each,
for all the learning of the former and the literary merits of
both, among those “rhyming amorists” and Cavaliers whom
Milton certainly disliked, and at least affected to disdain) need
not much matter. But the style, though often ambitious, does
not seem to me above the reach of a man of some learning and
moderate ability, who had been about Milton in his youth for
years, and at intervals afterwards. Such a man would naturally
take the noble-sentiment view of Poetry, talk of the melior
natura and “that noble thing education," and the like; nor
would he be at a loss for Miltonic precedents of another kind
when he felt inclined to speak of “every single-sheeted pie-
His
corner poet who comes squirting out an Elegy.” The
Theatrum piece is creditable as a whole, and ends with a hesi-
im. tating attribution of poetic merit to Spenser and
Shakespeare, in spite of the “rustic obsolete words," the “rough-
hewn clowterly verse ” of the one, and the “unfiled expressions,
the rambling and undigested fancies” of the other. The body
of the book-an alphabetical dictionary, first of ancient then of
modern poets, and lastly of poetesses, alphabetically arranged in
a singularly awkward fashion by their pronomina or Christian
names when Phillips knows these, and by others when he does
notmis much less important. Here again the nephew has been
robbed to give to the uncle the notices of Marlowe and Shake-
speare, in both of which the most noticeable expressions, “ Clean
and unsophisticated wit” and “unvulgar style," apply to Shake-
speare himself. Phillips has undoubted credit for appreciation
of Drummond (whom he had partially edited from the papers
of Scot of Scotstarvit many years earlier) and for singling out
from the work of Wither (which was then a by-word with
Cavalier critics) The Shepherd's Hunting for admiration. But
he is much more of a list-maker than of a critic.
William Winstanley (who brought out his Lives of the Most
Famous English Poets? some dozen years later, and levied con-
tributions on Phillips himself in the most nonchalant manner)
* 8vo, London, 1686.
140
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Da
was a mere bookmaker, to whom is assigned the post of
Winstanley's manufacturer for years of “Poor Robin's Almanack,"
Lives. and who did other hack-work. His book is chiefly
an unmethodical compilation of anecdotes; and as the lives ·
of men of letters have always had more attraction than their
works, Winstanley has been found readable. His place here
is simply due to the fact that, putting archaics like Bale and
Pits aside, he is the second English Historian of Poets, if not ·
of Poetry..
In connection with Phillips and Winstanley (whom he
avowedly follows and acridly comments, accusing them at the
obaine's same time of having stolen. his thunder from a pre-
Dramatic viously published Catalogue) it may be well to notice
Gerard Langbaine, the somewhat famous author of
the Account of the English Dramatic Poets. Of real criticism
there is hardly even as much in Langbaine as in his two Esaus
or Jacobs, taking it which way you please. But he is the
spiritual ancestor of too many later critics; and there are still
too many people who confuse his method with that of criticism
for him to be quite left out. That he had a particular animosity
to Dryden 2 is less to his discredit than to that of the class to
which he belongs. This kind of parasite usually fastens on the
fattest and fairest bodies presented to it. Langbaine is first of
all a Quellenforscher. Having some reading and a good memory,
he discovers that poets do not as a rule invent their matter, and
it seems to him a kind of victory over them to point out where
they got it. . As a mere point of literary history there is of course
nothing to object to in this: it is sometimes interesting, and need
never be offensive. But, as a matter of fact, it too often is made so,
and is always made so in Langbaine. “I must take the freedom
to tell our author that most part of the language is stolen.”
“ Had Mr W. put on his spectacles he would have found it
printed thus,” &c., &c. This hole-picking generally. turns to
hole-forging; and one is not surprised to find Langbaine, after
1 1691 : but pirated earlier.
? I do not know whether this was
cause or consequence of his being a
friend of Shadwell. But I am bound
to note, though with much surprise,
that my friend Sir Sidney Lee finds
(D. N. B.) “no malice" in Langbaine.
LANGBAINE-TEMPLE-BENTLEY.
141
quoting at great length Dryden's cavillings at the men of
the last age, huddling off as “some praises” the magnificent
and immortal eulogies 1 which atone for them. I am afraid that
Dante, if he had known Langbaine, would have arranged a
special bolgia for him; and it would not have lacked later
inhabitants.
The only too notorious quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns
produced some deservedly famous literature of the critical kind
. in England, but its greatest result in that way, The
Temple.
* Battle of the Books, will be best noticed, together
with its author's other works, and in the order rather of its own
publication than of its composition. Nor need the earlier prot-
agonists, Temple and Bentley, occupy us much; though the
latter will give an opportunity of paying at least respects to a
kind of Criticism of which we have perforce said little. Temple,
a charming writer, and the author, at the close of his critical
Essay on Poetry, of one of the most exquisite sentences in
- English, is simply a critic pour rire. The hundred pages of .
his Works, which are devoted to literature, invited the exercise
of Macaulay's favourite methods by the enormity of their ignor-
ance, the complacency of their dogmatism, and the blandness
of their superficiality. Temple has glimmerings-he intimates
pretty plainly some contempt of at least the French “rules”;
but he will still be talking of what he has given himself hardly
the slightest pains to know.
This could not be said of Bentley, and the Phalaris Disser-
tation has been not undeservedly ranked as one of the repre-
sentative pieces of critical literature. It is only
Bentley.
e unfortunate that Bentley has meddled so little with
the purely literary side of the matter; and the sense of this mis-
fortune may be tempered by remembrance of his dealings with
1 This is the odder, and the more have charitably found in Temple
discreditable, because one of the few better knowledge of the Moderns,
things to be counted to Langbaine for whom he scorned, than of the An.
righteousness is a distinct admiration cients, whom he championed, on
of Shakespeare. '
the strength of his references to
2 Ed. 1757, vol. iii., pp. 394-501, “Runes” and “Gothic Dithyrambics."
containing the Poetry, the Ancient and I cannot be so amiable. It is all a
Modern Learning, and the Thoughts mere parade of pretentious sciolism
upon Reviewing that Essay. Some varnished by style.
142
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Vio
Milton. He is, however, perfectly right in at least hinting?
that the Pseudo-Phalaris might have been convicted on literary
counts, as well as on linguistic and chronological, and that, on
grounds of style, the theory of those half-sceptics who attributed
the Letters to Lucian was almost worse than the error of the
true believers. That Lucian could have written a line of this
skimble-skamble stuff is simply impossible; and it must always
remain an instance of the slight sense of style possessed by the
Humanists that a really great man of letters, like Politian,
should have given countenance to the absurdity.
From any point of critical consideration Collier's famous
book? must be à most important document in the History of
ime Criticism; and though from some such points it may
Short be of even greater importance than it is to us, we
W. can in no wise omit it. For it is probably the
earliest instance in our history where a piece of criticism has
apparently changed, to a very great extent, the face of an
important department of literature, and has really had no small
part in bringing about this change. It is, however, indirectly
rather than directly that it concerns us; for it is only here and
there that Collier takes the literary way of attack, and in that
way he is not always, though he is sometimes, happy. Curiously
enough, one of his felicities in this kind has been imputed to
him for foolishness by his great panegyrist. It is not necessary ·
to feel that sympathy with his opinions on ecclesiastical and
political affairs which Macaulay naturally disclaimed, and
which some others may cheerfully avow, in order to see that '
the Tory critic was quite right, and the Whig critic quite
wrong, in regard to the dissertations on the Greek and Latin
Drama. What may be thought of their technical scholarship
does not matter. But Macaulay's undoubted familiarity with
i Diss., § xvi. My copy is the rejoinder to his victims next year con-
London ed. of 1817.
tains good things, but is of less import-
? A Short View of the Profanencssance. And it does not matter much to
and Immorality of the English Stage. us whether he originally drew anything
London, 1898. The great popularity from the Prince de Conti's pietist Traile
of the book caused it to be quickly sur la Comédie (1667). The Ancients,
repripted: my copy, though of the and the Fathers, and the Puritans were
first year, is the third edition. Collier's in any case quite sufficient sources.
OOLLIER.
143
!
the classics must have had a gap in it, and his wide knowledge
of modern literature several much greater gaps, if he did not
know-first, that Collier had ancient criticism on his side, and
secondly, that the allegation of ancient authority and practice
where favourable, the arguing-off of it where inconvenient,
were exactly the things, to influence his generation. When
everybody was looking back on the Vossian precept, “Imitate
the Ancients, but imitate them only in what is good," and
drawing forward to the Popian axiorn,
“To copy Nature is to copy them,"
" dissertations on the Greek and Latin Drama" were not otiose
at all, they were absolutely necessary.
But for the most part, as is notorious, Collier is as ethical as
Plutarch or Plato. It was desirable that he should be so, and
nobody but a paradoxer will ever defend the style of play-writ-
ing which produced such things as Limberham, and The Old
. Bachelor, and even The Relapse though the first be Dryden's,
and contain some good things in the characters of Prudence and
Brainsick, though the second show us the dawn of Congreve's
wit, and though the third contain handfuls of the sprightliest
things in the English language. It is in reference to this last,
by the way, that Collier chiefly quits the path of ethical criti-
cism, and takes to that of literary, or at least dramatic. There
is hardly a sharper and more well-deserved beating-up of the
quarters of a ragged dramatic regiment anywhere than that (at
p. 212 sq.) on the glaring improbabilities of Vanbrugh's plot, the
absolute want of connection between the title part of it and the
real fable-Tom Fashion's cheating his brother of Hoyden-and
the way in which the characters are constantly out of character
in order that the author may say clever things. But Collier
has serious matters on his mind too much to give us a great deal
of this; and the other definitely literary points which I have
noted, in a very careful re-reading of the piece for this book, are
not numerous. I wish he had not called Love's Labour's Lost (p.
125) "a very silly play"; but how many people were there
.. then living who would have thought differently? I wish he
had worked out his statement (rather rash from his own point
144
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
of view) at p. 148, “Poets are not always exactly in rule.” He
might have developed his views on the Chorus (p. 150) interest-
ingly. I have some other places; but they are not important..
The sum is, that though Collier evidently knew most critical
authorities, from Aristotle and Horace, through Heinsius and
Jonson, to Rapin, and Rymer, and Dryden himself, very well;
though he could (pp. 228, 229) state the Unities, and even argue
for them—this was not his present purpose, which was simply
to cleanse the stage. His interest in other matters in fact
blunted what might have been a keen interest in literature
proper. And this is thoroughly confirmed by study of his
interesting and characteristic Essays," where, out of more than
five hundred pages, exactly four are devoted to literature, and
these give us nothing but generalities.
That Collier's victory was very mainly due to the fact that
he struck in at the right moment, as spokesman of an already
Sir T. P. formed popular opinion, would be a matter of reason-
· Blount. able certainty in any case ; but the certainty is here
historical. One of many proofs at hand is in the curious lighter-
full of critical lumber which Sir Thomas Pope Blount launched
four (or eight?) years before Collier let his fireship drive into
the fleet of the naughty playwrights. In this book, dedicated
to Mulgrave, that noble poet himself, Roscommon, Cowley, and
the lately published and immensely influential Whole Duty of
Man, are quoted to support the argument that “A poet may
write upon the subject of Love, but he must avoid obscenity.” 3.
Sir Thomas, however, comes within the inner, and not merely
the outer, circle of criticism for his aims and his collections,
though certainly not for any critical genius that he displays.
i Essays upon Several Moral Subjects
(3rd ed., 2 vols., London, 1698). Nor
can one make out an entirely good
case (though something may be done)
for Collier in the matter of that de-
scription of Shakespeare, which Mr
Browning has maliciously chosen, as a
motto for Perishtah's Fancies, from the
Historical Dictionary: "His genius
was jocular, but, when disposed, he
could be very serious."
3 De Re Poetica, or Remarks upon
Poetry, &c., 4to, London, 1694. It is
even said to have first appeared in 1690.
3 Both Roscommon and Mulgrave
were critics in their way, and the
former's Essay on Translated Verse is.
one of those numerous documents
which would have been of the utmost
service to us it directly preceptist
criticism in prose had not now been
plentiful.
SIR THOMAS POPE BLOUNT.
145
-
His “Remarks upon Poetry," no less than the “Characters and
Censures” which make up the other part of his work, are the
purest compilation : and though we are certainly not without
compilers in these days (what indeed can a Historian of
Criticism do but compile to a great extent ?), there are very few
of us who are at once honest enough and artless enough to
follow the method of Blount. Whether he is arguing that
good humour is essentially necessary to a poet (how about the
genus irritabile ?) or that a poet should not be addicted to
flattery, or discussing the “Eglogue, Bucholic [sic], or Pastoral,”
whether he is following Phillips and Winstanley and borrowing
from both, in compiling a dictionary of poets, he simply empties
out his common - place book..“ Dryden remarks,” “Rapin
observes," "Mr Cowley tells us,” “Mr Rymer can nowise allow”
(this is happy, for it was habitual with Mr Rymer “nowise to
allow”), such are the usherings of his paragraphs. He is not
uninteresting when he is original (cf. his remarks on Waller);
but one is almost more grateful to him for his.collections, which
put briefly, and together, the critical dicta of a vast number of
people. Here we may read, with minimum of trouble, how
Julius Scaliger could not see anything in Catullus but what is
common and ordinary; how Dr Sprat said that till the time of
Henry the Eighth there was nothing wrote in the English
language except Chaucer that a man would care to read twice ;-
how Scaliger once more, and Petrus Crinitus, and Johannes
Ludovicus Vives, and Eustatius Swartius, thought Claudian
quite in the first rank of poets; how Tanneguy le Fèvre shook
his head over Pindar as having "something too much the air
of the Dithyrambick”; and how Cælius Rhodiginus was good
enough to find that same Dantes Aligerus, who displeased
others, a “poet not contemptible.” These things are infinitely
pleasant to read, and give one a positive affection for Sir Thomas
Pope Blount as one turns them in the big black print of bis
handy quarto; yet perhaps it would be excessive to call him a
great critic. What he does, besides providing this gazophylacium
i The remark may with more propor-
tion be made of Cælius himself, a
very worthy Humanist, whom Lilius
Giraldus pronounces to be multifariam
eruditus, parum tamen in pangendis
versibus versatus.
K
146
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Me
for the connoisseur, is to show how wide the interest in
criticism was.
A further turn, and the last in this walk, may be furnished
to us by one of his own quotations (p. 137 of the Characters
Periodicals: and Censures) of an answer to the question,
The Athenian “Whether Milton and Waller were not the best
Y, &C. English poets, and which was the better of the
two ?” from The Athenian Mercury, vol. V., No. 4. For this
curious and interesting medley of Dunton's, and Samuel
Wesley's, and others', was almost the first to provide something
in English answering, or that might have answered, to the
Journal des Savants and the Mercure Galant. Actually, the
Mercury was not very literary. I do not pretend to have
examined the original volumes with any very great care. But
in the three copious books which were either directly compiled
out of it, or composed in imitation — the Athenian Oracle,
Athenian Sport, and The British Apollo- literature holds no
very large place. The Oracle does indeed give at p. 438 a
very elaborate answer to the question, “Whether the Dramatic
Poets of the Last Age exceeded those of this?" and the Apollo,
besides a versification of the identical query and answer which
Blount had quoted, contains a long descant on the Origin of
Poetry, and a remarkably shrewd answer to the question,
“ Which is the best poet-Boileau, Molière, or La Fontaine ?"
But the time of literary periodicals in England was not yet,
though this was the very eve of it: and they must therefore be
postponed.2
i The Athenian Mercury (1690-97) Its contents are real reviews, and
ran to twenty volumes. The Oracle, though the books reviewed are of no
from which the late Mr Underhill great interest, the summaries of their
made his interesting selection (London, contents are generally good, and the
n. d.), was issued in four. I have views advanced are fairly argued.
one (London, 1703), which calls itself (Texts, complete or extracted, of most,
an “Entire Collection," as well as of the critics discussed in the latter
Athenian Sport (London, 1707), and The part of this chapter will be found in
British Apollo (3rd ed., London, 1718). Spingarn, op. cit. sup. The same
? Excepting perhaps J. [Cornand] de author's also cited chapter in Camb.
La Croze's Works of the Learned, which, Hist. Eng. Lit., vol. vii. (1911), may be
translated mainly from the French, consulted again as to the earlier part
began to appear monthly in August of this.)
1691, and was collected before long.
147
INTERCHAPTER II.
-
In the present Interchapter we come to a sort of Omphalos of
the whole of critical history. Here and here only, up to the
present day, do we find a Catholic Faith? of criticism, not merely
at last constituted, but practically accepted over the whole
literary world. In ancient times, though it is not diffieult to
discern a creed of a not wholly dissimilar character, yet that
creed was arrived at in roundabout fashion, and was never
applied universally to poetry and prose as literature. In the
Middle Ages there was no such creed at all. In the eighteenth
century, which—or rather a certain aspect of it-continues the
seventeenth in England as' elsewhere with little break, the
catholic faith still maintains, and even, as is the wont of such
things, rather tightens, its hold as received orthodoxy; but
there are grumblings, and threatenings, and upheavals on the
one hand, and on the other the tendency to a dangerous
latitudinarianism. In the Dissidents of the Eighteenth, and in
the whole Nineteenth, with so much of the Twentieth as can be
seen or foreseen, there is no parallel consensus even of a prevail-
ing party. Take a dozen critics of any distinction, at different
times and in different countries of the seventeenth century in
Europe, and ask them to enunciate some general laws and
principles of literary criticism. The results, if not slavishly
identical, would be practically the same, putting aside particular
and half unreal squabbles of Ancient and Modern and the like.
Do the same at any time for the last hundred-certainly for
the last eighty or ninety-years, and the result would be a
Babel. If any two of the utterances did not betray direct
1 For a draft “Confession” of it, v. sup., Interchapter I., pp. 94, 95.
148
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
contradiction, it would probably be because the speakers began
at entirely different facets of the subject.
We have seen in the last Interchapter how something like
this orthodoxy had been achieved—not without a good deal of
opposition, and hardly, in any case, with the result of author-
itative and complete statement—in Italy, and to some extent
borrowed thence, in other countries, before the end of the
sixteenth century itself. The seventeenth did little more than
crystallise it, lay stress on particular points, fill up some gaps,
arrange, codify, illustrate. The absence of dissidence, except
on the minor points, is most remarkable. In regard to Aristotle,
in particular, there are no Patrizzis and hardly any Castel-
vetros. Men tack on a considerable body of Apocrypha to the
canonical books of the Stagirite, and misinterpret not a little
that he actually said. But they never take his general authority
in question, seldom the authority of any ancient, and that of
Horace least of all. The two great artificial conceptions of the
elaborate “ Unities” drama, with Acts and Scenes taking the
place of the choric divisions, and of the still more artificial
“Heroic Poem,” with its Fable, its Epic Unity, its Machines,
and so forth, acquire in theory – though, luckily, as far as
England goes, by no means in practice-greater and greater
dignity. It becomes a sort of truism that the drama is the
most beautiful and ingenious, the heroic poem the noblest,
thing on which the human mind can exercise itself. But they
are difficult things, sir! very difficult things. Each is sharply
isolated as a Kind: and the other Kinds are ranged around and
below them. You never criticise any thing first in itself, but
with immediate reference to its Kind. If it does not fulfil the
specifications of that Kind, it is either cast out at once or
regarded with the deepest suspicion.
Further, all the Kinds in particular, as well as poetry itself
in general, possess, and are distinguished by, Qualities which
are, in the same way, rigidly demanded and inquired into.
It is generally, if not quite universally, admitted that a poem
must please : though critics are not quite agreed whether you
are bound to please only so as to instruct. But you must
please in the Kind, by the Quality, according to the Rule.
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
149
There is no room for nondescripts; or, if they are admitted at
all, they must cease to be nondescripts, and become Heroi.
comic, Heroi-satiric, "Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,” 1 or
what not.
This general view may seem unorthodox to those who put
faith in the notion—to be found in some books of worth, as
well as of worship-that there was a “Romantic revolt" in
the beginning of the seventeenth century--that there was even
a kind of irruption or recrudescence of mediæval barbarism, and
that the pronounced and hardened classicism of the later
century was a fresh reaction-a case of Boileau à la rescousse !
The texts, and the facts, and the dates, do not, to my thinking,
justify this view of history, in so far, at least, as criticism is
concerned. The crystallising of the classical creed goes on
regardless of Euphuism, earlier and later, in England, of
Marinism in Italy, of Culteranism and Conceptism in Spain, of
the irregular outburst of similar tastes in France, which marks
the reign of Louis XIII. In England, Sidney, at the beginning
of the great Elizabethan period, holds out hands to Jonson at
the end.
At the same time, this accepted faith of Criticism, when we
come to examine it, is a very peculiar Catholicity. Uncom-
promisingly Aristotelian in profession, its Aristotelianism, as
has been recognised by an increasing number of experts from
the time of Lessing downwards, is hopelessly adulterated.
Many of the insertions and accretions are purely arbitrary;
others come from a combination of inability to forget, and
obstinate refusal frankly to recognise, the fact that the case
is quite a different case from that which Aristotle was dia-
gnosing. But, by the time at least when the creed became
triumphant, à new Pope, a new Court of Appeal, has been
foisted in, styling itself Good Sense, Reason, or even (though
quite Antiphysic) Nature. That this anti-Pope, this Antiphysis,
was partly created by the excesses of the Euphuist-Gongorist
1 It may be doubted whether there
is anything more wonderful in Shake-
speare than the way in which this
Polonian speech, atone slight side-blow,
impales sixteenth-serenteenth-century
criticism, with the due pin, on the due
piece of cork, for ever.
150
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
movements, need not be denied; but this is comparatively
irrelevant. The most interesting by-product of the processes
going on is the curious, and sometimes very ludicrous, attempt
to conciliate that furor poeticus which the ancients had never
denied, with those dictates of good sense which the ancients
were presumed to have accepted and embodied.
By degrees critical supremacy passed from Italy to France.1
This passing is an accepted truth, and like most, though not all,
accepted truths, this has so much of the real quality that it
is idle to cavil at it. That it has been abused there can be
little doubt-or could be little if people would take the small
trouble necessary to ascertain the facts. I do not know who
those Röntgen rays which the reader of examination-papers
can apply, has sunk deep into the youthful mind of this
country. It is a bad word. I have taken leave to call it
“ question-begging, clumsy, and incomplete," before now; and
I repeat those epithets with a fresh emphasis here. It begs
the question whether “Italo.- Classic” would not, in its own
kind, be the properer term: it is clumsy because the two parts
of it are not used in the same sense; and it is incomplete
because it does not intimate that much beside French in-
fluence, and that a very peculiar and sophisticated kind of
Classical influence, went to the making of the thing. But
there was French influence: and for some three-quarters of
a century France was the head manufactory in which Italian,
Classical, and other ideas were torn up and remade into a
sort of critical shoddy with which (as with other French
shoddy in that and other times) Europe was rather too eager
to clothe itself.
The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns—Italian in origin
and English by borrowing from France, but in the main
French-might look like revolt against Neo-Classicism, and
N
1 The attitude of Milton and Dryden
respectively illustrates this well. There
was scarcely more than twenty years
between the two poets. But Milton
looks to the Italians first, if not also
last, among the moderns, for criticism.
Dryden, though he knows and cites
them, does not.
2 “Neo-classic” itself is not a very
"blessed” word; but it has been long
recognised, and the objections to it are
mainly formal.
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
151
it undoubtedly spread seeds of the more successful revolution
which followed; but the more one studies it, the more one
sees that the revolt was in the main unconscious. The
Moderns were, as a rule, just as “classical ” in their ideas
as the Ancients. They were as incapable of catholic judg-
ment; they were even more ignorant of literature as a
whole ; they were at least as apt to introduce non-
literary criteria ; they were as much under the obsession of
the Kind, the Rule (cast - iron, not leaden), the sweeping
generalisation. Too commonly the thing comes to this-
that the man who can conjugate tupto will not hear of any.
thing which lessens the importance of that gift, and that
the man who cannot conjugate tupto will not hear of any
virtue attaching to it.
But though France may usurp and apparently possess the
hegemony, England is of almost the greatest importance,
though this importance belongs entirely to one man. This
one man in his time played many parts: and as the main
aim of literature is to give pleasure, and to produce original
sources thereof, we cannot perhaps say that his critical part
was the greatest. But we may almost say that it was the
most important. We can imagine English literature without
the poetry of Dryden: it would be wofully impoverished, but
somebody would take up the burden, probably before Pope.
Certainly Pope would take it up, though with much more to
do. But English criticism, and, what is more, European
criticism of the best and most fruitful kind, would have had,
if Dryden had been absent, to seek some totally new source:
and it is impossible to tell where that source would have
been found. There is no precedent anywhere for Dryden's
peculiar way of shaking different literatures and different
examples of literature together, of indicating the things that
please him in all, and of at least attempting to find out why
they please him. It is this, not his parade f Rules, and his
gleanings from the books, that makes his critical glory: and
it is this in which, among critics up to his own time, he is
alone. .
Yet even he does parade "rules”; even he does belaud
152
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
Rapin, and Le Bossu, and even Rymer; even he would have
been, no doubt, quite as ready to take the oath to Boileau as
he was nobly determined not to take it to William. His
genius is recalcitrant to the orthodoxy of the time; but some-
thing else in him accepts it. It is not for nothing that he
never published that word of power which'dissolves all the
spells of Duessa -“Had Aristotle seen our plays, he might
have changed his mind."
As one result of the establishment of Neo-Classicism, there
was evolved, towards the end of the seventeenth century, a
sort of false Florimel or Duessa, who was called Taste. She
was rather a Protean Goddess, and reflected the knowledge or
the want of it, the real taste or the want of it, possessed by
her priests and worshippers. The Taste of Dryden and the
Taste of Rymer are totally different things. But in all save the
very happiest minds, Taste, as far as Poetry is concerned almost
wholly, and to a great extent as regards prose, is vitiated by
all manner of mistaken assumptions, polluted by all manner of
foolish and hurtful idolatries. There is the Idol of the Kind
which has been noticed ; the Idol of the Quality; the Idol of
Good Sense, the most devouring of all." It is agreed, and agreed
very pardonably, that it is not well to write
“ And periwig with snow the baldpate woods."
But the baser folk go on from this — and all but the very
noblest have some difficulty in preventing themselves from
going on--to think that a man should not write
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine."
There is a sense, and a very proper sense, that, in a certain
general way, style must suit subjects: that you ought not to
write to a Child of Quality, aged five, as you would do to Queen
Anne, aged fifty. But this topples over into the most absurd
i Perhaps there is not a more un- “their sense ought to be a little dis-
happy gibe in literature (which has coloured.” There is much virtue in
many such) than that in The Rehearsal this “discolour.”
on Bayes, who is made to say that ? It may be said that this was later.
“Spirits must not be confined to talk But Prior was a man of thirty-six in
sense.” They certainly must not; 1700.
even Addison (Sp., 419) admits that
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
153
limitations, so that, a little later than our actual time, we shall
find Pope taking modest credit to himself with Spence for that,
though Virgil in his Pastorals “has sometimes six or eight lines
together that are epic," he had been so scrupulous as “scarce
ever to have two together, even in the Messiah.” Indeed it is
hardly possible to find a better reductio ad absurdum of Neo-
Classicism than this. You lay down (as in late classic times
Servius did lay it down), from a general induction of the
practice of a particular poet, such and such a rule about
Virgil's styles in his various works. Then you turn this
individual observation into a general rule. And then you go
near to find fault with the very poet from whom you have
derived it because he does not always observe it—as if his
unquestionable exceptions had not as much authority as his
supposed rules. Nor is there any doubt that this fallacy
derives colour and support from the false Good Sense, the
Pseudo-Reason. The induction from practice is hitched on to
Reason so as to become a deduction and a demonstration, and
once established as that, you deduce from it anything you like.
Meanwhile Good Sense, as complaisant to the critic as stern
to the victim of his criticism, will approve or disapprove any-
thing that you choose to approve or disapprove, will set her
seal to any arbitrary decision, any unjust or purblind whim,
and can only be trusted with certainty to set her face in-
variably against the highest poetry, and often against certain
kinds not so high.1
The result of all this is that, with the exception of Dryden,
no critic of the time achieves, with any success, the highest
function of the true critic of literature, the discovery and
celebration of beautiful literary things. It is not their
business, or their wish, to set free the “lovely prisoned soul
of Eucharis.” If Eucharis will get a ticket from the patron-
esses of the contemporary Almack's, and dress herself in the
prescribed uniform, and come up for judgment with the
1 Yet it is not for the twentieth
century to throw stones at the seven-
teenth, till we leave off laying down
rules of our own manufacture for still
earlier ages, and reproving Marlowe
and the youthful Shakespeare for being
“too lyrical” in tragedy.
154
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
proper courtesy, they will do her such justice as Minerva
has enabled them to do; but if not, not. Sometimes (as in
the case of the immortal Person of Quality who took the
trouble to get Spenser into order ?) they will good-naturedly
endeavour to give her a better chance, poor thing! But they
will never kiss the daughter of Hippocrates on the mouth,
and receive the reward thereto appropriated.
That, on the other hand, there is observable, throughout the
century, a certain interpenetration of the older and more
Romantic spirit—in the creative work chiefly, but even there
dying down, in the critical overmastered from the first, and
less and less perceptible, — this opinion will meet with no
contradiction here, but, on the contrary, with the strongest
support. All the eccentric phenomena, as they may be called,
which have been noticed from Euphuism to Gongorism, are
symptoms of this. Yet even this was, as has been said,
steadily dying down; and by the end of the century the
old Phønix was nearly in ashes, though the new bird was
to take slow rebirth from them. I am myself inclined to
think that the signs of Romantic leaning in Dryden belong
to the new, not to the old, chapter of symptoms; and that
in this way England, the last, save perhaps Spain, to give
up, was the first to feel again for, the standard of Romanticism.
But in this Dryden was in advance, not merely of all his
countrymen, but of all Europe; and he did not himself
definitely raise any flag of revolt. On the contrary, he always
supposed himself to be, and sometimes was, arguing for a
reasonable and liberal Classicism.
The Italian poet, satirist, and critic, Tassoni,2 once wrote an
interesting paradox on the admitted lovesomeness, body and
soul, of le donne brutte, and on the tricks which bruttezza and
bellezza play to each other. If that ingenious poet and polemic
had but pushed his inquiries a little further, and extended
i See Spenser Redivivus. London, This is "what Spenser ought to have
1686-87. The Person of Quality "de- been, instead of what is to be found
livers” Spenser “in Heroick numbers," in himself.”
as per sample-
2 Hist. Crit., ii. 326.
" Then to the lady gallant Arthur said,
All grief repeated is niore grievous made."
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
155
them in purview as well as lineally, he might bave come to
great things in criticism. It might, for instance, have struck
him whether the accepted notions of literary beauty were not
peculiarly like those of physical beauty, which were also those
of his century. These laws laid it down that “from the chin to
the pit betwixt the collar-bones there must be two lengths of
the nose," that the whole figure must be " ten faces high," and
that “the inside of the arm, from the place where the muscle
disappears to the middle, is four noses”; while the careful
calculators noted all the while with dismay that both the
Apollo Belvidere and the Medicean Venus set these proportions
at the most god-like defiance. He would (or he might) have
observed that, just as when you have settled exactly what a
bella donna must not have, there is apt to sail, or slip, into the
room somebody with that particular characteristic to whom
you become a hopeless slave, so, when you have settled the
qualifications of the drama and those of the epic with all the
infallible finality of Stome's stop-watch critic, there comes you
out some impudent production which is an admirable poem,
while the obedient begettings of your rules are worthless
rubbish. Tassoni, I say, might have done this; he seems to
have had quite the temper to do it; but he did it not. It was
doubtless with him, as with others, a case of Di terrent et
Jupiter hostis--the gods of their world and their time forbade
them.
A summary of the whole merits and defects of Neo-Classi-
cism must again be postponed; while as for the special defects
of this special period we have said enough. Its special
merits are partly of a negative kind, but they certainly exist.
In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, there was no code of
criticism at all; in the sixteenth century only a growing
approach to one, though the approach had become very near at
the last. Some outbreaks of heterodoxy—the last stand of
Romance for the time-had, as usually happens, drawn the
orthodox together, had made them sign a definite, or almost
definite, instrument or confession. Just or unjust, adequate or
See the whole absurd scheme in Translation of Du Fresnoy (ed. cit.
the appendix - matter to Dryden's sup., xvii. 429).
156
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
inadequate, even consistent or inconsistent, as it may be, from
the point of view of a very searching and all-inspecting logic,
the Neo-Classicism of the late seventeenth century was a thing
about which there could be no mistake. It knew its own mind
about everything which it chose to consider, and valiantly shut
its eyes to everything which it chose to ignore. For a time-
a short time only, of course, for the triumph of a religion is
always the signal for the appearance of a heresy—the majority
of people had not much more doubt about what was the proper
thing to believe in and admire in literature, than they had
about the multiplication table. It became possible to write
real literary histories: it became still more easily possible to
criticise new books on a definite basis of accepted postulates.
And it is by no means certain that this provisional orthodoxy
was not a necessary condition of the growth of the new study
of Æsthetic, which, though it has done criticism harm as well
as good, has certainly done it good as well as harm.
Nor is it possible to deny that there was something to admire
in the creed itself. It was weakest-it was in fact exceedingly
weak-on the poetical side; but the world happened to have
accumulated a remarkably good stock of poetry in the last two
centuries or so, and a fallow, or a cessation of manufacture, was
not undesirable. Prose, on the other hand, had never been
got into proper order in the vernaculars; and it was urgently
desirable that it should be so got. The very precepts of the
classical creed which were most mischievous in poetry were
sovereign for prose. Here also they might hinder the develop-
ment of eccentric excellence; but it was not eccentric excel.
lence that was wanted. Unjust things have been said about the
poetry of the Augustan ages; just things may be said against
the criticism which mainly controlled that poetry. But it is
hardly excessive to say that every precept-not purely metrical
-contained in the Arts of Boileau and of Pope, is just and true
for Prose. You may fly in the face of almost every one of these
precepts and be all the better poet; fly in the face of almost
any one of them in prose, and you must have extraordinary
genius if you do not rue it.
Even as to poetry itself some defence may be made. This
THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.
157
poetry needed these rules; or rather, to speak more critically,
these rules expressed the spirit of this poetry. The later and
weaker metaphysicals in England, and fantasts in France, the
Marinists and Gongorists in Spain and Italy, had shown what
happens when Furor [vere] Poeticus ceases to ply the oars, and
Good Sense has not come to take the helm. It is pretty certain
that if this criticism had not ruled, its absence would not
have brought about good or great Romantic poetry; we should
at best have had a few more Dyers and Lady Winchelseas. But
if it had not ruled we should have had a less perfect Pope and
less presentable minorities of this kind, and have been by no
means consoled by a supply of eighteenth-century Clevelands.
Once more, the period has the criticism that it wants, the
criticism that will enable it to give us its own good things
at their own best, and to keep off things which must almost
certainly have been bad.
158
CHAPTER IV.
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
CRITICISM AT DRYDEN'S DEATH-BYSSHE'S 'ART OF ENGLISH POETRY'-GILDON
- WELSTED-DENNIS-ON RYMER-ON SHAKESPEARE-ON “MACHINES”
-HIS GENERAL THEORY OF POETRY-ADDISON--THE 'ACCOUNT OF THE
BEST KNOWN ENGLISH POETS'-THE 'SPECTATOR' CRITICISMS-ON TRUE
AND FALSE WIT-ON TRAGEDY-ON MILTON—THE "PLEASURES OF THE
IMAGINATION”-HIS GENERAL CRITICAL VALUE-STEELE-ATTERBURY
-SWIFT—'THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS'—THE TALE OF A TUB'-MINOR
WORKS-POPE—THE 'LETTERS'-THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE-SPENCE'S
'ANECDOTES ---THE ' ESSAY ON CRITICISM '-THE ' EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS'
-REMARKS ON POPE AS A CRITIC, AND THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF HIS
GROUP--PHILOSOPHICAL AND PROFESSIONAL CRITICS-TRAPP-BLAIR-
THE 'LECTURES ON RHETORIC - THE 'DISSERTATION ON OSSIAN'—KAMES
-THE 'ELEMENTS OF CRITICISM'--CAMPBELL—THE PHILOSOPHY OF
RHETORIO'—HARRIS—THE PHILOLOGICAL ENQUIRIES '-" ESTIMATE”
BROWN : HIS ' HISTORY OF POETRY-JOHNSON: HIS PREPARATION FOR
CRITICISM—'THE RAMBLER' ON MILTON-ON SPENSER-ON HISTORY AND
LETTER-WRITING —ON TRAGI-COMEDY — “ DICK MINIM" 'RASSELAS'
-THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE — THE 'LIVES OF THE POETS' — THEIR
GENERAL MERITS—THE 'COWLEY'-THE 'MILTON-THE 'DRYDEN' AND
POPE'-THE COLLINS' AND GRAY'—THE CRITICAL GREATNESS OF
THE 'LIVES' AND OF JOHNSON-MINOR CRITICISM : PERIODICAL AND
OTHER-GOLDSMITH-VICESIMUS KNOX-SCOTT OF AMWELL.
THE death of Dryden punctuates, with an exactness not often
attainable in literary history, the division between seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century literature in England. In general letters
1 An interesting monograph on our that in Dennis), and as to reducing
subject, before and after 1700, is Herr the importance of French influence in
Paul Hamelius's Die Kritik in der England. To the collections of texts
Engl. Literatur des 17 und 18 Jahr- previously mentioned should be added
hunderts (Leipsic, 1897). Herr Ham- Mr Nichol Smith's most useful 18th
elius agrees with me on the romantic Century Essays on Shakespeare (Glas-
element in Dryden (though not as to gow, 1903).
BYSSHE.
159
it is succeeded—not at all immediately—by the great school of
Criticism Queen Anne men. In criticism one of the greatest
at Dryden's of these, a special pupil of Dryden, takes up the
no running at this interval, and others a little later;
but the succession is steadily maintained. Dennis, an un-
happily belated person, continues his exercitations; but has
very much the worse fortune, critical as well as pecuniary, in
his later days. And in the very year of the death there appears
an egregious work-extremely popular, maleficently powerful
beyond all doubt throughout the eighteenth century, and now
chiefly known to non-experts in our days by the humorous
contradiction which gave its author's name to Shelley, and
by the chance which made a literary connection, towards the
very end of its period of influence, between three such extra-
ordinarily assorted persons as Afra Behn, Bysshe himself, and
William Blake.
Edward Bysshe's Art of English Poetry 3 puts the eighteenth-
century theory of this art with a rigour and completeness which
can only be attributed either to something like genius,
Bysshe's
Art of or to a wonderful and complete absence of it. His
English Rules for Making English Verse are the first part
mye of the book in order, but much the least in bulk.
Then follow, first a collection of “the most natural and sublinie
thoughts of the best English poets," or, in other words, an
anthology, reasoned under headings, from poets of the seven-
Poetry.
1 The excessively rare Parliament of
Critics (London, 1702), a copy of which
has been kindly lent me by Mr Gregory
Smith, is more of what it calls itself,
a “banter," than of a serious com-
position. But it connects itself not
obscurely with the Collier quarrel.
2 See Mr Swinburne's William Blake,
p. 130 note, for the sortes Bysshiance of
Blake and his wife.
3 My copy is the Third Edition,
“ with large improvements, London,
1708. Some put the first at 1702, not
1700. Before Bysshe, Joshua Poole, a
schoolmaster, had given posthumously
(1657: I have ed. 2, London, 1677),
with a short dedication and a curious
verse proem of his own, and an Insti-
tution signed J. D.,- The English Par.
nassus. This contains a double gradus
of epithets and passages, an “Alphabet
of [Rhyming] Monosyllables," and some
“Forms of Compliment," &c. The
Institution stoutly defends "Rhythm"
[i.e., rhyme), notices Sidney, Daniel,
Puttenham, &c., shortly defines Kinds,
objects to excessive enjambment (note
the time, 1657) and to polysyllables,
but is sensible. (See, for more on it,
the present writer's History of English
Prosody (London, 1906-10), ii. 345-8.)
160
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
teenth century, extending to about four hundred and fifty pages;
and last a Dictionary of Rhymes. The “best English poets”
may be useful to give in a note. The Dictionary is preceded
by a few prefatory remarks, including one important historic-
ally, “Rhyme is by all allowed to be the chief ornament of
versification in the modern languages.". The killing frost which
had fallen on the flowers of Elizabethan poetry had killed one
weed at any rate—the craze against rhyme.
The Rules are preceded by a partly apologetic Preface, which
disclaims any wish to furnish tools to poetasters, and puts the
work “under the awful guard of the immortal Shakespeare,
Milton [note that this was before Addison's critique], Dryden,
&c.” The keynote is struck, in the very first sentence of the
text, with that uncompromisingness which makes one rather
admire Bysshe. “The Structure of our verses, whether blank
or in rhyme, consists in a certain number of syllables; not in
feet composed of long and short syllables, as the verse of the
Greeks and Romans." And he adds that, though some ingenious
persons formerly puzzled themselves in prescribing rules for
the quantity of English syllables, and composed verses by the
measure of dactyls and spondees, yet that design is now wholly
exploded. In other words, he cannot conceive classical feet
without classical arrangement of feet.
“Our poetry admits, for the most part, of but three sorts of
verses, those of 10, 8, and 7 syllables. Those of 4, 6, 9, 11, 12,
and 14 are generally employed in masks and operas.” But 12
and 14 may be used in Heroic verse with grace. Accent must
be observed ; and the Pause must be at or near the middle,
though in Heroics it may be at the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th
syllable, determined by the seat of the accent. Still, pauses at
the 3rd and 7th must be used sparingly. The 2nd and 8th
“can produce no true harmony"; and he seems to have refused
1 Addison, Atterbury, Beaumont and
Fletcher, Afra Behn, Blackmore, Tom
Brown, Buckingham, Cleveland, Con-
greve, Cowley, Creech, Davenant (2),
Denham, Dennis, Dorset, Dryden,
Duke, Garth, Halifax, Harvey, Sir
R. Howard, Hudibras, Jonson, Lee,
Milton, Mulgrave, Oldham, Otway,
Prior, Ratcliff, Rochester, Roscommon,
Rowe, Sedley, Shakespeare, Southern,
Sprat, Stafford, Stepney, Suckling,
Tate, Walsh, Waller, Wycherley, and
Yalden. Observe that no non-dramatic
poet earlier than Cowley is admitted.
BYSSHE.
161
to contemplate anything so awful as a pause at the 1st or 9th.
After decasyllables, octosyllables are commonest. As for lines
of 9 and 11 syllables, “ with the accent on the last [i.e., ana-
pæstic measures], the disagreeableness of their measure has
wholly excluded them from serious subjects.” The refining
effected since the days of Chaucer, Spenser, and other ancient
poets consists especially in the avoidance of the concourse of
vowels and in the rigid elision of the article, the contraction of
preterperfect tenses (“ amaz'd,” not“ amazed”), the rejection of
alliteration (an instance in Dryden is apologised for), of split-
ting words closely connected at the end of a verse, and of
polysyllables.
And a very large number of minute rules follow, the one
guiding principle of which is to reduce every line to its
syllabic minimum, never allowing trisyllabic substitution.
The book, base and mechanical as it may seem, is of the
first historical importance. It will be seen, even from these
few extracts, that the excellent Bysshe has no doubts, no half-
lights. The idea, which we have seen crystallising for a
century and a half, that English poetry is as strictly and
inexorably syllabic as French, and much more so than Greek
or Latin, is here put in its baldest crudity. Bysshe will have
no feet at all: and no other division within the line but at the
pause, which is to be as centripetal as possible, like the French
cæsura. It follows from this that, except the feminine or double
ending, which is allowed ostensibly as a grace to rhymes, though
also in blank verse, nothing extra to the ten, the eight, or
whatever the line-norm may be, is permitted on any account.
Articles, prepositions that will stand it, pronouns, are to be
rigidly elided; weak or short syllables in the interior of words
must be slurred out. There is (only that Bysshe will not have
even the name of foot) no room for a trisyllabic foot anywhere,
in what he equally refuses to call iambic or trochaic verse.
But what is more startling still is that trisyllabic feet dis-
appear, not merely from the octosyllable and the heroic, but
from English prosody, or are admitted only to “Compositions
for Musick and the lowest sort of burlesque.” Dryden might
have written, “After the pangs of a desperate lover”; Prior
L
:
162
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
(D
:
might be writing “ Dear Chloe, how blubbered is that pretty
face”: but Bysshe sternly averts his face from them.
Now, if this astonishing impoverishment of English poetry
had been the isolated crotchet of a pedant or a poetaster, it
would at most deserve notice in a note. But it was nothing
of the kind. “He,” this insignificant person, “said it”: they
went and did it. It expressed the actual poetic practice of
serious poets from Pope to Goldsmith: and it expressed the
deliberate theoretic creed of such a critic as Johnson. The
.contrary practice of the great old poets was at best a “licence,"
at worst a “fault.” What had actually happened to French-
that it had been reduced to the iamb—what Gascoigne had
lamented and protested against, long before, was here threatened
—or rather, with bland ignoring, even of threat, laid down-as
the unquestioned and unquestionable law of. English. The
whole eighteenth century did not, indeed, go the entire length
of Bysshe. Prior—it is his everlasting glory in English poeti-
cal history--took care of that, and not only saved anapæstic
cadence for us, but made it more popular than ever. But
the eighteenth century continued, charmingly as it wrote them,
to be a little ashamed of its anapæsts, to write them affectedly
as a relaxation, if not even a derogation to indulge in them
(just as it might indulge in leap - frog with wig and long-
skirted coat laid aside) avowedly for a frolic. And about the
decasyllable — not quite so rigidly about the octosyllable-
it accepted Bysshe almost without a protest. All the infinite
variety of true English prosody, all the gliding or melting
trochees, all the passion and throb which trisyllabic feet give
to iambic verse, were sacrificed, all freedom of pause was re-
linquished, and the decasyllable tramped, the octosyllable
tripped, as regularly and as monotonously as a High Dutch
grenadier or a Low Dutch clock.
Bysshe had been frankly formal; it is not a small merit in
him that he knew what he had to do and did it: but persons
.. who were little if at all above him in taste or in
Gildon.
e intellect affected to despise him for this, and Mr
Charles Gildon in his Complete Art of Poetry, published. a few
London, 1718.
WELSTED.
163
years later, is very high and mighty with Bysshe. As for
himself he does not think that Poetry consists even in “colour-
ing," but in Design: and he hashes up his French originals
into some would - be modish dialogues, in which ladies of
fashion attack and defend poetry on the old lines, before he
comes to minuter recommendations. These differ chiefly from
Bysshe's in that they are wordier, less peremptory, and given
to substitute the vagueness of the journalist for the precision of
the schoolmaster. Nor was this by any means Gildon's only
contribution to criticism. Among the others perhaps the most
interesting is an anonymous and undated, but apparently not
doubtful, rifacimento of Langbaine, which is curious as an
example of peine du talion. Gildon (who has employed his
own or some other * careful hand” to give himself an ingeni-
ously, because not extravagantly, complimentary notice in the
Appendix) serves Langbaine in Langbaine's own fashion; and,
not contented with reversing his judgments, indulges freely in
such phrases as “Mr Langbain mistakes,” “those scurrilous
and digressory remarks with which Mr Langbain has be-
spattered him [Dryden],” &c. The book is in the main biblio-
graphic and biographic rather than critical.
A name which has something to do with criticism, and
which associates itself naturally with those of Dennis and
, Gildon in the regiment of Pope's victims, is that
Welsted.
de of Leonard Welsted, who in 1712 published a
translation of Longinus, “ with some remarks on the English
Poets." Welsted's translation, whether made directly from the
Greek or not,2 is readable enough, and his alternative title,
“A treatise on the Sovereign Perfection of Writing," is not
unhappy. Neither are his Preface and his appended “Remarks"
contemptible. He can appreciate not merely Milton but
Spenser; is (how unlike Rymer !) transported with Othello, and

i Lives ... improved and continued
down to this time by a Careful Hand.
(No date in my copy, but the Dict.
Nat. Biog. gives 1699.) Since this
was written Gildon has found some
defenders or apologists. He needs
them.
? I hope the passing suspicion is not
illiberal. But why should he call the
Palmyrene" Zenobie" in English ? Cela
sent furieusement son Français. (For the
critical work of yet another who felt
the lash of Pope-James Ralph--see
Hist. Crit., ii. 554. .
164
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
Dennis.
especially with its conclusion; and if he is not superior to
others in scorning “Latin rhymes," at least has sufficient
independence to be very irreverent to Buchanan. .
· But there was a contemporary of Bysshe’s, more famous
than either Gildon or Welsted, whose soul was equally above
mere prosodic precept, and to whom, as it happens, Gildon
himself pays a compliment, as to a denizen of Grub Street, of
whom Grub Street could not but feel that he did it some
honour by herding with its more native and genuine population.
Of him we must say something — not, as we might almost
have said it, in juxtaposition with the great poet and critic
whom he had earlier admired, but before dealing with the lesser,
but still great, successors of Dryden, with whom he came into
collision in his evil days..
If John Dennis had been acquainted with the poetry of
Tennyson (at which he would probably have railed in his best
manner, in which he would certainly have detected
*** plagiarisms from the classics), he too might have ap-
plied to himself the words of Ulysses, “I am become a name."
Everybody who has the very slightest knowledge of English
literature knows, if only in connection with Dryden, Addison,
and Pope, the surly, narrow, but not quite ignorant or incom-
petent critic, who in his younger and more genial days admired
the first, and in his soured old age attacked the second and
third. But it may be doubted whether very many persons have
an acquaintance, at all extensive, with his works. They were
never collected; the Select Works of John Dennisl mainly con-
sist of his utterly worthless verse. Much of the criticism is hidden
away in prefaces which were seldom reprinted, and the original
editions of which have become very rare. Even good libraries
frequently contain only two or three out of more than a dozen
or a score of separate documents: and though the British
Museum itself is well furnished, it is necessary to range through
a large number of publications to obtain a complete view of
Dennis as a critic.
That view, when obtained, máy perhaps differ not a little
from those which have, in a certain general way, succeeded each
1 2 vols., London, 1718.
DENNIS.
165
other in current literary judgment. During the reign of Pope
and Addison, the scurrilous assailant of the first, and the more
courteous but in part severe censor of the second, was naturally
regarded as at best a grumbling pedant, at worst a worthless
Zoilus. The critics of the Romantic school were not likely to
be much attracted by Dennis. More recently, something of a
reaction has taken place in his favour; and it has become not
unusual to discover in him, if not exactly a Longinus or a
Coleridge, yet a serious and well-equipped critic, who actually
anticipated not a little that after-criticism has had to say.1
That this more charitable view is not entirely without founda-
tion may be at once admitted. As compared with Rymer, in
On Rymer.
whose company he too often finds himself in modern
el appreciation, Dennis shows, indeed, pretty well. He
very seldom-perhaps nowhere-exhibits that crass insensibility
to poetry which distinguishes “the worst critic who ever
lived.” One of his earliest and not his worst pieces, The Im-
partial Critic of 1693, an answer to Rymer himself, points
out with acuteness and vigour that “Tom the Second " would
ruin the English stage if he had his way, and even approaches
the sole causeway of criticism across the deep by advancing the
argument that the circumstances of the Greek drama were per-
fectly different from those of the English.2 Yet already there
are danger-signals. That the piece (which includes a Letter to
a Friend and some dialogues) contains a great deal of clumsy
jocularity, does not much matter. But when we find Dennis
devoting some of this jocularity to Antigone's lamentation over
her death unwedded, we feel sadly that the man who can write
thus is scarcely to be trusted on the spirit of poetry. And the
admission that Rymer's censures of Shakespeare are “in most
of the particulars very sensible and just” is practically ruinous.3
ILU.
i See, among others, Herr Hamelius,
op. cit. Yet it is interesting to find
that the passage of Dennis to which
his panegyrist gives the single and
signal honour of extract in an appen
dix is purely ethical : it is all on "the
previous question.”
2 Had Dryden let his Cambridge
admirer see the Heads ? (v. supra,
pp. 113, 137 notes.)
3 Although Dennis's fun is heavy
enough, there are some interesting
touches, as this : "Port (then a novelty
in England, remember] is not so well
tasted as Claret: and intoxicates
sooner." (See note at end of chapter.)
166
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
Dennis's answer to Collier is a little later, but still earlier
than most of his better known work; and it is very characteristic
of his manner, which has not often, I think, been exactly
described. As elsewhere, so in this tract, which is entitled
The Usefulness of the Stage to the Happiness of Mankind, to
Government and to Religion, Dennis is uncompromisingly
ethical; but he had here the excuse that Collier, to whom
he was replying, had taken the same line. There is less excuse
here or elsewhere for his method. This is to make a loud
clatter of assertions, arranged in a kind of pseudological order,
which seems to have really deceived the author, and may
possibly have deceived some of his readers, into believing it
syllogistic and conclusive. Dennis is very great at the word
“must." "As Poetry is an Art it must be an imitation of
nature” 2 and so forth; seldom shall you find so many“musts”
anywhere as in Dennis, save perhaps in some of his modern
analogues. Like all who argue in this fashion, he becomes
unable to distinguish fact and his own opinion. Collier, for
instance, had quoted (quite correctly) Seneca's denunciation of
the Stage. To which Dennis replies, “It is not likely that
Seneca should condemn the drama, . . since . . . he wrote
plays himself.” That the identity of the philosopher and the
dramatist is not certain does not matter: the characteristic
thing is the setting of probability against fact. But with
Dennis hectoring assertion is everything. “It cannot possibly
be conceived that so reasonable a diversion as the drama can
encourage or incline men to so unreasonable a one as gaming or
so brutal a one as drunkenness.” With a man who thinks this
an argument, argument is impossible.
The fact is that, though he has, as has been admitted, a cer-
tain advantage over Rymer, Lord Derby's observation that “He
1 It appeared in the very year of
the Short View (1698). I have a reprint
of it, issued many years later (1725),
but long before Dennis's death, to-
gether with The Advancement and Re-
formation of Modern Poetry and the
tragedy of Rinaldo and Armida, all
separately titled, but continuously
paged.
2 This is from the Advancement and
Reformation, which contains its author's
full definition of Poetry itself—not the
worst of such definitions. “Poetry is
an Imitation of Nature by a pathetio
and numerous speech." :
DENNIS.
167
never knew whether it was John or Thomas who answered
On Shake- the bell” will too often apply here. Rymer himself
speare. was not ignorant; Dennis, especially in regard to
ancient criticism, was still better instructed: and though both
were bad dramatists, with, in consequence, a conscious or un-
conscious bias on dramatic matters, Dennis was not so bad as
Rymer. His devotion to Dryden does him credit, though we
may suspect that it was not the best part of Dryden that he
liked: and, amid the almost frantic spite and scurrility of his
later attacks on Pope, he not unfrequently hits a weak place in
the “young squab short gentleman's ” bright but not invulner-
able armour. Yet Dennis displays, as no really good critic
could do, the weaknesses of his time and school both in generals
and particulars. It is perfectly fair to compare him (giving
weight for genius of course) with Johnson, a critic whose general
views (except on port and claret) did not materially differ from
his own. And, if we do so, we shall find that while Johnson is
generally, if not invariably, "too good for such a breed,” Dennis
almost as constantly shows its worst features. He altered The
Merry Wives of Windsor into The Comical Gallant 1—a most
illaúdable action certainly, yet great Dryden's self had done
such things before. But he aggravated the crime by a preface,
in which he finds fault with the original as having “no less than
three actions” (would there were thirty-three !] by remarking
that, in the second part of Henry the Fourth, Falstaff "does
nothing but talk” (would he had talked so for five hundred
acts instead of five !] and by laying down ex cathedra such
generalities as that “Humour, not wit, is the business of
comedy," a statement as false as would be its converse. In his
Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare? he is not so very far
from Rymer himself in the drivelling arbitrariness of his
criticism. Shakespeare has actually made Aufidius, the general
of the Volscians, a base and profligate villain! Even Coriolanus
himself is allowed to be called a traitor by Aufidius, and no-
body contradicts! The rabble in Julius Cæsar and other such
things “show want of Art," and there is a painful disregard of
Poetical Justice. The same hopeless wrong-headedness and (if
i London, 1702.
2 London, 1712.
168
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
I may so say) wrong-mindedness appear in a very different
work, the Remarks on the Rape of the Lock. I do not refer to
Dennis's mere scurrilities about “AP_E” and the like. But
On part of the piece is quite serious criticism. Few of
“ Machines.” us in modern times care much for the “ machinery”
of this brilliantly artificial poem; but fewer would think of
objecting to it on Dennis's grounds. Machines, it seems,
must bem
i. Taken from the religion of the Poet's country.
ii. Allegorical in their application.
iii. Corresponding though opposed to each other.
iv. Justly subordinated and proportioned.
And Pope's machines, we are told, fail in all these respects.
Now, putting the fourth ground aside as being a mere matter
of opinion (and some who are not fervent Papists think the
machines of the Rape very prettily and cleverly arranged in
their puppet-show way), one may ask Dennis “Who on earth
told you so ?” in respect of all the others. And if he alleged
(as he might) this or that sixteenth or seventeenth century
authority, " And who on earth told him so ? and what authority
had the authority? Why should machines be taken only from
the religion of the country? Why should they be allegorical ?
Why should Machine Dick on the one side invariably nod to
Machine Harry on the other ?” And even if some sort of
answer be forthcoming, “Why should the poet not do as he
please if he succeeds thereby in giving the poetic pleasure ?”
To which last query of course neither Dennis nor any of his
school could return any answer, except of the kind that requires
bell, book, and candle.
Nor would he have hesitated to use this, for he is a rule-
critic of the very straitest kind, a “Tantivy” of poetic Divine
His general Right. In his three chief books of abstract criticism 2
theory of he endeavours to elaborate, with Longinus in part
Poetry. for code, and with Milton for example, a noble,
indeed, and creditable, but utterly arbitrary and hopelessly
.
i London, 1728.
2 The Advancement and Reformation
of Poetry, 1701 ; A Large Account of
the Taste in Poetry, next year; and
Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704.
DENNIS.
169
narrow theory of poetry as necessarily religious, and as having
for its sole real end the reformation of the mind, by a sort of
enlarged Aristotelian katharsis as to spirit, and by attention
to the strict laws of the art in form. Poetical Justice was a
kind of mediate divinity to Dennis: as we have seen, he up-
braided Shakespeare for the want of it; he remonstrated, in
the Spectator, No. 548, and elsewhere, with Addison for taking
too little account of it; part at least of his enthusiasm for
Milton comes from Milton's avowed intention to make his
poem a theodicy.
A noble error! let it be repeated, with no hint or shadow of
sarcasm or of irreverence; but a fatal error as well. That
Poetry, like all things human, lives and moves and has its
being in God, the present writer believes as fervently and
unhesitatingly as any Platonic philosopher or any Patristic
theologian; and he would cheerfully incur the wrath of
Savonarola by applying the epithet “divine,” in its fullest
meaning, not merely to tragedy and epic and hymn, but to
song of wine and of love. But this is not what Dennis meant
at all. He meant that Poetry is to have a definitely religious,
definitely moral purpose—not that it is and tends of itself
necessarily ad majorem Dei gloriam, but that we are to shape
it according to what our theological and ethical ideas of the
glory of God are. This way easily comes bad poetry, not at all
easily good; and it excludes poetic varieties which may be as
good as the best written in obedience to it, and better. More-
over, putting Dennis's notion of the end of Poetry together with
his notion of its method or art (which latter is to be adjusted
to some at least of the straitest classical precepts), we can easily
comprehend, and could easily have anticipated, the narrow in-
tolerance and the hectoring pedantry which he shows towards
all who follow not him. In a new sense--not so very different
from the old mediæval one, though put with no mediæval
glamour, and by an exponent full of eighteenth-century pro-
saism, yet destitute of eighteenth-century neatness and con-
cinnity-Poetry becomes a part of theology; and the mere
irritableness of the man of letters is aggravated into the odium
theologicum. Bad poets (that is to say, bad according to
170
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
Dennis) are not merely faulty artists but wicked men ; of this
Dennis is sure. “And when a man is sure," as he himself
somewhere naïvely observes, “'tis his duty to speak with a
modest assurance.” We know, from examples more recent
than poor Dennis, that, when a man is thus minded, his assur-
ance is very apt to eat up his modesty, taking his charity,
his good manners, and some other things, as condiments to the
meal.
Dennis and Addison, though the latter did not escape the
absolute impartiality of the former's carping, were on terms of
mutual respect which, considering all things, were
Addison.
are creditable to both. During the latter part of his
rather short lifetime Addison, it is hardly necessary to say,
enjoyed a sort of mild dictatorship in Criticism as in other
departments of literature; and his right to it was scarcely
disputed till near the close of the century, though Johnson
knew that he was not deep, and tells us that, in his own last
days, it was almost a fashion to look down on Addisonian
criticism. If, like others, he was displaced by the Romantic
revival, he received more lenient treatment than some, in virtue
partly of his own general moderation, partly of his championship
of Milton. Yet while his original literary gifts recovered high
place during the nineteenth century, his criticism has often
been considered to possess scarcely more than historic interest,
and has sometimes been rather roughly handled—for instance,
by Mr Matthew Arnold. But a recent writer,1 by arguing that
Addison's treatment of the Imagination, as a separate faculty,
introduced a new principle into criticism, has at any rate
claimed for him a position which, if it could be granted,
would seat him among the very greatest masters of the art,
with Aristotle and Longinus among his own forerunners. As
usual let us, before discussing these various estimates, see what
Addison actually did as a critic.
His debut as such was not fortunate. He was, it is true, only
1 Mr W. Basil Worsfold in his Prin a very interesting and valuable essay.
ciples of Criticism (London, 1897). I 2 The most convenient edition of
hope that nothing which, in a politely Addison's Works is that of Bohn, with
controversial tone, I may have to say Hurd's editorial matter and a good deali
here, will be taken as disparagement of more (London, 6 vols., 1862).
ADDISON.
171
.
.:
three-and-twenty when at “dearest Harry's” request (that is to
say Mr Harry Sacheverell's) he undertook an Account
The Account Way
of the Best of the greatest English Poets. In 1694 nobody, ex-
known Eng- cept Dryden, could be expected to write very good
lish Poets.
* verse, so that the poetical qualities of this verse-
essay need not be hardly dwelt upon, or indeed considered
at all. We may take it, as if it were prose, for the matter
only. And thus considered, it must surely be thought one of
the worst examples of the pert and tasteless ignorance of its
school. Before Cowley nobody but Chaucer and Spenser is
mentioned at all, and the mentions of these are simply grotesque.
The lines convict Addison, almost beyond appeal, of being at the
time utterly ignorant of English literary history up to 1600, and
of having read Chaucer and Spenser themselves, if he had read
them at all, with his eyes shut. The Chaucer section reads as
if it were describing A C. Merry Tales or the Jests of George
Peele. Where Dryden, if he did not understand Chaucer's
versification, and missed some of his poetry, could see much even
of that, and almost all the humour, the grace, the sweetness, the
“God's plenty” of life and character that Chaucer has, Addison
sees nothing but a merry-andrew of the day before yesterday.”
So, too, the consummate art of Spenser, his exquisite versifica-
tion, his great ethical purpose, and yet his voluptuous beauty,
are quite hidden from Addison. He sees nothing but a tedious
allegory of improbable adventures, and objects to the “ dull
moral” which “lies too plain below,” much as Temple had
done before him. Cowley, Milton, and Waller are mentioned
next, in at least asserted chronological order. Cowley is “a
mighty genius” full of beauties and faults,
“Who more had pleased us had he pleased us less,"
? It is fair to say that he never ? “In vain he jests in his unpolished
published this, and that, as Pope told
strain,
Spence, he used himself to call it "a And tries to make his readers laugh in
poor thing," and admitted that he
vain."
spoke of some of the poets only sou: 3 "His moral lay so bare that it lost
hearsay." Now when Pope speaks to the effect” (Ess. on Po., iii. 420, ed. cit.
Addison's credit it is not as "what the sup.). Indeed it has been suggested
soldier said.” It is evidence, and of that Addison's debt to Temple here is
the strongest.
not confined to this.
172
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
but who is a perfect “milky way" of brilliancy, and has made
Pindar himself “take a nobler flight.” Milton alternately strikes
Addison with awe, rapture, and shock at his politics. He
“Betrays a bottom odious to the sight.”
So we turn to Waller, who is not only “courtly" but" moves
our passion," (what a pity that he died too soon to “rehearse
Maria's charms”!) to Roscommon, who "makes even Rules a
noble poetry," and Denham, whose Cooper's Hill “we must,"
of course, not “forget.” “Great Dryden” is then, not un-
happily, though not quite adequately, celebrated, and the line
on his Muse
“She wears all dresses, and she charms in all,"
is not only neat, but very largely true. When Dryden shall
decay, luckily there is harmonious Congreve: and, if Addison
were not tired with rhyming, he would praise (he does so at
some length) noble Montague, who directs his artful muse to
Dorset,
“In numbers such as Dorset's self might use," —
as to which all that can be said is that, if so, either the verses
of Montague or the verses of Dorset referred to are not those
that have come down to us under the names of the respective
authors.
To dwell at all severely on this luckless production of a
young University wit would be not only unkind but uncritical.
It shows that at this time Addison knew next to nothing i
about the English literature not of his own day, and judged
very badly of what he pretended to know.
The prose works of his middle period, the Discourse on
Medals and the Remarks on Italy, are very fully illustrated
from the Latin poets—the division of literature that Addison
knew best-but indulge hardly at all in literary criticism. It
was not till the launching of the Tatler, by Steele and Swift,
provided him with his natural medium of utterance, that
He proposes to give an account of
"all the Muse possessed” between
Chaucer and Dryden ; and, as a matter
of fact, mentions nobody but Spenser
between Chaucer and Cowley.
ADDISON.
173
Addison became critical. This periodical itself, and the less
known ones that followed the Spectator, all contain exercises in
this character: but it is to the Spectator that men look, and
look rightly, for Addison's credentials in the character of a
critic. The Tatler Essays, such as the rather well known papers
on Tom Folio and Ned Softly, those in the Guardian, the good-
The natured puff of Tom D'Urfey, &c., are not so much
Spectator serious and deliberate literary criticisms, as applica-
criticisms. tions, to subjects more or less literary, of the
peculiar method of gently malicious censorship, of laughing
castigation in manners and morals, which Addison carried to
such perfection in all the middle relations of life. Not only
are the Spectator articles far more numerous and far more
weighty, but we have his own authority for regarding them as,
in some measure at least, written on a deliberate system, and
divisible into three groups. The first of these groups consists
of the early papers on True and False Wit, and of essays on
the stage. The second contains the famous and elaborate criti-
cism of Milton with other things; and the third, the still later,
still more serious, and still more ambitious, series on the
Pleasures of the Imagination. Addison is looking back from
the beginning of this last when he gives the general descrip-
tion, and it is quite possible that the complete trilogy was
not in his mind when he began the first group. But there is
regular development in it, and whether we agree or not with
Mr Worsfold's extremely high estimate of the third division,
it is quite certain that the whole collection-of some thirty
or forty essays—does clearly exhibit that increasing sense of
what criticism means, which is to be observed in almost all
good critics. For criticism is, on the one hand, an art in
which there are so few manuals or trustworthy short summaries
-it is one which depends so much more on reading and know-
ledge than any creative art—and, above all, it is necessary to
make so many mistakes in it before one comes right, that,
1 In the last paragraph of Sp. 409.
The whole paper has been occupied by
thoughts on Taste and Criticism: it
contains the excellent comparison of *
critic to a tea-taster, and it ends with
this retrospect, and the promise of the
“Imagination" Essays (v. ed. cit.,
iii. 393).
174
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
probably, not one single example can be found of a critic of
importance who was not a much better critic when he left off
than when he began.
In Group One1 Addison is still animated by the slightly
desultory spirit of moral satire, which has been referred to
On True and above; and, though fifteen or sixteen years have
False Wit. passed since the Account, he does not seem to be
so entirely free as we might wish from the crude sciolism,
if not the sheer ignorance, of the earliest period. He is
often admirable : his own humour, his taste, almost perfect
within its own narrow limits, and his good sense, made that
certain beforehand. But he has somewhat overloaded it with
unduly artificial allegory, the ethical temper rather over-
powers the literary, and there is not a little of that arbitrary
“blackmarking” of certain literary things which is one of the
worst faults of neo-classic criticism. The Temple of Dulness
is built (of course) “after the Gothic manner,” and the image of
the god is dressed “after the habit of a monk.” Among the
idolatrous rites and implements are not merely rebuses, ana-
grams, verses arranged in artificial forms, and other things a
little childish, though perfectly harmless, but acrostics-trifles,
perhaps, yet trifles which can be made exquisitely graceful,
and satisfying that desire for mixing passion with playful-
ness which is not the worst affection of the human heart.
He had led up to this batch, a few weeks earlier, by some
cursory remarks on Comedy, which form the tail of a more
elaborate examination of Tragedy, filling four or five
On Tragedy.
coge numbers. Readers who have already. mastered the
general drift of the criticism of the time before him, will
scarcely need any long précis of his views, which, moreover, are
in everybody's reach, and could not possibly be put more
readably. Modern tragedies, he thinks, excel those of Greece
and Rome in the intricacy and disposition of the fable, but
fall short in the moral. He objects to rhyme (except an end-
couplet or two), and, though he thinks the style of our tragedies
superior to the sentiment, finds the former, especially in
Shakespeare, defaced by “sounding phrases, hard metaphors,
1 Sp. 58-63.
2 Sp. 39, 40, 42, 44, 45.
ADDISON.
175
and forced expressions.” This is still more the case in Lee.
Otway is very “tender": but it is a sad thing that the
characters in Venice Preserved should be traitors and rebels.
Poetic justice (this was what shocked Dennis), as generally
understood, is rather absurd, and quite unnecessary. And the
tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theatre, is
“one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a
poet's thought.” You "might as well weave the adventures of
Æneas and Hudibras into one poem” [and, indeed, one might
find some relief in this, as far as the adventures of Æneas are:
concerned]. Tragedies are not even to have a double plot.
Rants, and especially impious rants, are bad. Darkened stages,
elaborate scenery and dresses, troops of supers, &c., are as bad :
bells, ghosts, thunder, and lightning still worse. “Of all our
methods of moving pity and terror, there is none so absurd and
barbarous as the dreadful butchering of one another,” though
all deaths on the stage are not to be forbidden.
Now, it is not difficult to characterise the criticism which
appears in this first group, strengthened, if anybody cares, by a
few isolated examples. It contains a great deal of common
sense and good ordinary taste; many of the things that it
reprehends are really wrong, and most of what it praises is
good in a way. But the critic has as yet no guiding theory,
except what he thinks he has gathered from Aristotle, and has
certainly gathered from Horace, plus Common Sense itself,
with, as is the case with all English critics of this age, a good
deal from his French predecessors, especially Le Bossu and
Bouhours. Which borrowing, while it leads him into numerous
minor errors, leads him into two great ones—his denunciations
of tragi-comedy, and of the double plot. He is, moreover,
essentially arbitrary : his criticism will seldom stand the ap-
plication of the "Wlıy?” the “Après ?” and a harsh judge might,
in' some places, say that it is not more arbitrary than ignorant.
The Second Group, or Miltonic batch, with which may be
I These began in Sp. 267, and were
the regular Saturday feature of the
paper for many weeks. References to
Milton outside of them will be found
in the excellent index of the ed. cit. or
in that of Mr Gregory Smith's exact
and elegant reproduction of the Spec-
tator (8 vols., London, 1897).
176
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
taken its "moon," the partly playful but more largely serious
On Milton
examen of Chevy Chase, is much the best known, and
has been generally ranked as the most important
exhibition of Addison's critical powers. It is not, however, out
of paradox or desire to be singular that it will be somewhat
briefly discussed here. By the student of Addison it cannot be
too carefully studied; for the historian of criticism it has indeed
high importance, but importance which can be very briefly
summed up, and which requires no extensive analysis of the
eighteen distinct essays that compose the Miltonic group, or
the two on Chevy Chase. The critic here takes for granted-
and knows or assumes that his readers will grant-two general
positions :-
1. The Aristotelian-Horatian view of poetry, with a few of
the more commonplace utterances of Longinus, supplies the
orthodox theory of Poetics.
2. The ancients, especially Homer and Virgil, supply the most
perfect examples of the orthodox practice of poetry.
These things posed, he proceeds to examine Chevy Chase at
some, Paradise Lost at great, length by their aid ; and dis-
covers in the ballad not a few, and in the epic very great and
very numerous, excellences. As Homer does this, so Milton
does that: such a passage in Virgil is a more or less exact
analogue to such another in Paradise Lost. Aristotle says this,
Horace that, Longinus the third thing; and you will find the
dicta capitally exemplified in such and such a place of Milton's
works. To men who accepted the principle-as most, if not all;
men did the demonstration was no doubt both interesting and
satisfactory; and though it certainly did not start general ad-
miration of Milton, it stamped that admiration with a comfort-
able seal of official orthodoxy. But it is actually more anti-
quated than Dryden, in assuming that the question whether
Milton wrote according to Aristotle is coextensive with the
question whether he wrote good poetry.
The next batch is far more important.
What are the Pleasures of the Imagination ? It is of the
first moment to observe Addison's exact definition, Sight is
Sp. 411, ed. cit., iii. 394.
ADDISON.
177
the “sense which furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so
that by the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination or
The
" Pleasures Fancy, which I shall use promiscuously, I here
of the
,,mean such as arise from visible objects, either when
Imagination."
more we have them actually in our view, or when we call
up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues, descriptions,
or any the like occasion.” We can have no images not thus
furnished, though they may be altered and compounded by
imagination itself. To make this quite sure, he repeats that he
means only such pleasures as thus arise. He then proceeds, at
some length, to argue for the innocence and refinement of such
pleasures, their usefulness, and so on; and further, to discuss
the causes or origins of pleasure in sight, which he finds to be
three-greatness, uncommonness, and beauty. The pleasant-
ness of these is assigned to such and such wise and good
purposes of the Creator, with a reference to the great modern
discoveries of Mr Locke's Essay.
Addison then goes on to consider the sources of entertain-
ment to the imagination, and decides that, for the purpose, art
is very inferior to nature, though both rise in value as each
borrows from the other. He adduces, in illustration, an odd
rococo mixture of scene-painting and reflection of actual objects
which he once saw (p. 404). Italian and French gardens are
next praised, in opposition to the old formal English style, and
naturally trained trees to the productions of the ars topiaria ;
while a very long digression is made to greatness in Architec-
ture, illustrated by this remark (p. 409), “Let any one reflect on
the disposition of mind in which he finds himself at his first
entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, ... and consider how
little in proportion he is affected with the inside of a Gothic
cathedral, though it be five times larger than the other," the
reason being““ the greatness of the manner in the one, and the
meanness in the other.”
So the “ secondary” pleasures of the imagination-i.e., those
compounded and manufactured by memory—are illustrated by
the arts of sculpture and painting, with a good passage on
description generally, whence he turns to the Cartesian doctrine
of the association of ideas, and shows very ingeniously how the
M
178
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
poet may avail hiniself of this. Next comes a curious and often
just analysis of the reasons of pleasure in description-how, for
instance, he likes Milton's Paradise better than his Hell, be-
cause brimstone and sulphur are not so refreshing to the
imagination as beds of flowers and wildernesses of sweets.
Or we may like things because they “raise a secret ferment
in the mind," either directly, or so as to arouse a feeling of relief
by comparison, as when we read of tortures, wounds, and deaths.
Moreover, the poet may improve Naturę. Let oranges grow
wild, and roses, woodbines, and jessamines flower at the same
time. As for “the fairy way of writing”1__that is to say, the
supernatural-it requires a very odd turn of mind. We do it
better than most other nations, because of our gloominess and
melancholy of temper. Shakespeare excels everybody else in
touching “this weak superstitious part” of his reader's imagina-
tion. The glorifying of the imagination, however, is by no means
confined to the poet. In good historians we “see" everything.
None more gratify the imagination than the authors of the
new philosophy, astronomers, microscopists. This (No. 420) is
one of Addison's most ambitious passages of writing, and the
whole ends (421) with a peroration excellently hit off.
It is upon these papers mainly that Mr Worsfold 2 bases
his high eulogium of Addison as “the first genuine critic,” the
first “who added something to the last word of Hellenism,"
the bringer of criticism “into line with modern thought,” the
establisher of "a new principle of poetic appeal.” Let us, as
uncontroversially as possible, and without laying any undue
stress on the fact that Mr Worsfold practically omits Longinus
altogether, stick, in our hundrum way, to the facts.
In the first place, supposing for the moment that Addison
uses “imagination ” in our full modern sense, and supposing,
secondly, for the moment also, that he assigns the appeal to the
imagination as the special engine of the poet, is this an original
discovery of his? By no means: there are many loci of former
1 This phrase is originally Dryden's pp. 55-93.
(dedication to King Arthur, viii. 136, 3 Students of the Stagirite may be
ed. cit.), who, however, has “kind" almost equally surprised to find Aris-
for “way.”
totle regarded as mainly, if not wholly,
? Op. cit., pp. 93-107, and more largely a critic of Form as opposed to Thought.
LO
ADDISON.
179
writers to negative this there is one that is fatal. And this
is no more recondite a thing than the famous Shakespearian
description of
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,"
as
“Of imagination all compact,"
with what follows. But this is a mere question of property,
plagiarism, suggestion; and such questions are at best the exer-
cises of literary holiday-makers, at the worst the business of
pedants and of fools.
A more important as well as a more dangerous question is
this. Does Addison make " the appeal to the imagination” the
test of poetry? It can only be answered that, by his own
explicit words, he does nothing of the kind. If he advances
anything, it is that the appeal to the imagination is the appeal
of art generally—of prose (even of scientific) literary art as well
as of poetry, of painting, sculpture, architecture, as well as of
literature. In doing this he does a good thing: he does some-
thing notable in the history of general æsthetics; but in so far
as literature, and especially poetry, is concerned, he scarcely
goes as far as Longinus in the well-known passage, though he
works out his doctrine at much greater length, and with assist-
ance from Descartes and Locke.
But the most important and the most damaging question of
all is this, “Are not Addison and his panegyrist using words in
equivocal senses? Does Imagination in Addison's mouth bear
the meaning which we, chiefly since Coleridge's day, attach to
the word ? Does it even mean what it meant to Longinus,
much more what it meant to Shakespeare ?”
I have no hesitation in answering the two latter questions
with an absolute and unhesitating “No!”
It seems indeed extraordinary that, in face of Addison's
most careful and explicit limitations, any one should delude
himself into thinking that even the Shakespearian and Addi-
sonian Imaginations are identical-much more that Addison's
Imagination is the supreme faculty, creative, transcending
i De Sublimitate, cap. xv.
180
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
Fancy, superior to fact, not merely compounding and refining
upon, but altogether superseding and almost scorning, ideas of
sensation, which we mean by the word, and which Philostratus
or Apollonius 2 partly glimpsed. Addison tells us—tells us over
and over again-that all the ideas and pleasures of the imagin-
ation are pleasures of sense, and, what is more, that they are all
pleasures of one sense-Sight. Why he should have limited
himself in this singular manner it is hard to say; except that,
he was evidently full of Locke when he wrote, and, indeed,
almost entirely under the influence of the Essay. That he had
a contempt for music is elsewhere pretty evident; and this
probably explains his otherwise inexplicable omission of the
supplies and assistance given to Imagination by Hearing. His
morality, as well as old convention, excluded Touch, Taste, and
Smell as low and gross, though no candid philosophy could help
acknowledging the immense influence exercised upon Imagina-
tion by at least the first and the last-Taste, because the most
definite, being perhaps the least imaginative of all. But the
fact that he does exclude even these senses, and still more
rigidly excludes everything but Sense, is insuperable, irremov-
able, ruthless. Addison may have been the first modern critic
to work out the appeal of art to the pleasures and ideas furnished
by the sense of sight. He is certainly nothing more.
But is he therefore to be ignored, or treated lightly, because
of this strange overvaluation of him ? Certainly not. Though
His general by no means a very great critic, he is a useful, an
critical interesting, and a representative one. He represents :
the classical attitude tempered, not merely by good
sense almost in quintessence, but by a large share of tolerance
and positive good taste, by freedom from the more utterly
ridiculous pseudo-Aristotelianisms, and by a wish to extend a
concordat to everything good even if it be not“ faultless.” In
his Account he is evidently too crude to be very censurable: in
his first group of essays much of his censure is just. The
elaborate vindication of Milton, though now and for a long
i It would be unfair to lay too much
stress on his identification of Imagina-
tion and Fancy ; but there is some
thing tell-tale in it.
2 See Hist. Crit., i. 118 sq., and the
present volume, p. 9, note 2.
STEELE.
181
time past merely a curiosity, is again full of good sense, dis-
plays (if not altogether according to knowledge) a real liking
for real poetic goodness, and had an inestimable effect in keep-
ing at least one poet of the better time privileged and popular
with readers throughout the Eighteenth Century. As for the
essay on the pleasures of the Imagination, the fact that it has
been wrongly praised need not in the least interfere with a
cordial estimate of its real merits. It is not an epoch-making
contribution to literary criticism; it is rather one-sided, and
strangely limited in range. But it is about the first attempt
at a general theory of æsthetics in English; it is a most in-
teresting, and a very early, example of that application of
common - sense philosophy to abstract subjects which Locke
taught to the English eighteenth century; and many of its
remarks are valuable and correct. Moreover, it did actually
serve, for those who could not, or who did not, read Longinus,
as a corrective to pure form-criticism, to Bysshe with his rigid
ten syllables, to bare good sense and conventional rule. Its
Imagination was still only that which supplies Images, and was
strangely cramped besides ; but it was better than mere cor-
rectness, mere decency, mere stop-watch.
Between Addison and Pope, Steele, Atterbury, and Swift
call for notice. Steele has little for us. There are few things
more curious than the almost entire abstinence from
Steele.
use any expression, in the slightest degree really critical,
to be found in the eulogy of Spenser, which he generously enough
inserted in Sp. 540 to express “his passion for that charming
author.” The numerous friends whom he has so justly won for
himself may perhaps insist that there is criticism of the best in
this very phrase; and that the rather rash encomium on the
poet's “old words” as being “all truly English ” is balanced by
the justice of the reference to his “exquisite numbers.” But the
fact is that Steele had neither the knowledge, nor the patience,
nor the coolness for critical work.
1 Herr Hamelius, op. cit. sup., p. 103,
and elsewhere, thinks much more
highly of Steele than I do, and even
makes him a "Romantic before Ro-
manticism." Steele's temperament
was undoubtedly Romantic, and both
in essays and plays he displayed it ;
but he was not really critical.
182
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
Atterbury gives rather more. He was himself a man of
great intellectual power, a scholar, an eloquent and delicate
Atterbury.
writer, and possessed independent taste enough to
19. admire Milton fervently at a time when Addison
had not yet made it wholly orthodox to admire that poet at all,
and when most Tories detested him. But his observations on
Waller 1 are the very quintessence of pseudodoxy, as to that re-
spectable person; and, by a curious combination, though Waller
is a rhymer confirmed and complete, Atterbury joins with his
admiration for him an antipathy to rhyme — “this jingling
kind of poetry,” “this troublesome bondage, as Mr Milton well
calls it.” As for this we need say little ;' the danger lay not
there. But it lay in the direction of such remarks as that
“English came into Waller's hands like a rough diamond ; he
polished it first," that, "for aught I know, he stands last as well
as first in the list of refiners” [imagine the excellent Waller as
be-all and end-all of English !], that“ verse before Waller was
“ downright prose tagged with rhyme," &c., &c. Once more let
our impatience of this talk not be ignorant-as is the impatience
of those who nowadays cannot see music in Dryden, poetry
in Pope, “cry” and clangour now and then even in persons
like Langhorne and Mickle. He expressed an opinion; but in
expressing it he showed this same ignorance from which we
should abstain. Instead of pointing out that Waller intro-
duced a different kind of music, he insisted that Waller substi-
tuted music for discord: instead of saying that he introduced a
new fashion of cutting the diamond, he would have it that the
diamond was merely rough before. This was the culpa, the
maxima culpa of eighteenth-century criticism, and Atterbury
illustrates and shares it.2
The critical work of Swift 3 is much more important, and
1 In his Preface to the Second Part
of the Poems (1690).
? Of course he might, to some ex-
tent, have sheltered himself under
Dryden's own authority for all this.
3 I have thought it useless to give
references to particular editions of the
better known writings of Swift and
Pope, as they are so numerous. As to
Works, Scott's Swift is much inferior
to his Dryden; but in Pope's case the
edition of the late Mr Elwin and Mr
Courthope is not likely soon to be
superseded. The very useful “Bobn"
ed. of Swift's Prose in 12 vols. was
completed in 1908.
.
SWIFT:
183
por
Books
though a good deal of it is inextricably mixed up with the
writings of Pope and of Arbuthnot, the lion's claw is
generally perceptible enough. The famous Tatler
of September 28, 1710, on the corruptions of English style and
writing, ought to hold place in every history and course of
lectures on the subject, next to Sprat's passage in the History
of the Royal Society forty years before, as the manifesto of
a fresh stage in English style-criticism; and it practically
precedes everything that Addison, Steele, and Pope published
on, or in connection with, the subject. But long before this,
in the wonderful volume which first (1704) revealed his genius
to the world, Swift had shown how critical the Gods had made
him.
The Battle of the Books is one of the most eccentric docu-
ments in the whole History of our subject. Directly, and on
he Battle its face, it may be said to be of the first critical im-
of the portance; because it shows how very little subject,
So intention, accuracy of fact, verisimilitude, and half-
a-dozen other indispensables according to certain theories, have
to do with the goodness of a book. The general characteristics
of The Battle of the Books, in all these named respects and some
of the unnamed ones, are deplorable. In a tedious and idle
quarrel which, at least as it was actually debated, need never
have been debated at all, Swift takes the side which, if not the
intrinsically wrong one, is the wrong one as he takes it. To
represent Bentley, or even Wotton, as enemies of the Ancients
might seem preposterous, if it were not outdone by the prepos-
terousness of selecting Temple as their champion. The de-
tails are often absurd—from that ranking of “Despréaux" side
by side with Cowley as a Modern brigadier (which is probably
a slip, perhaps for “Desportes," of pen or press)—to the spiteful
injustices on Dryden. The idea of the piece was probably taken
from Callières.? Its composition, from the rigid "Ancient”
point of view, is sadly lax; and the two most brilliant episodes
-the “Sweetness and Light” quarrel of the Spider and the Bee,
and the "machine” of the Goddess of Criticism-have little or
nothing to do with the action. But yet it is and one knows
it is—a masterpiece ; and it is pretty certain from it that in
1 A French writer a little earlier. See Hist. Chrit., ii. 553 note.
0
184
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
certain kinds of destructive criticism, and even in certain kinds
of what may be called destructive-constructive, the author will
be able to accomplish almost anything that he is likely to try.
Though the Tale of a Tub is less ostensibly bookish, it shows
even greater purely critical power : for the power of the Battle
The Tale is mainly that of a consummate craftsman, who can
of a Tub. accomplish by sheer craftsmanship whatsoever his
hand findeth to do. In the Tale the crusade against bad
writing and bad writers, which Swift carried on more or less for
the whole of his middle and later years, and in which he enlisted
Addison and Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay, is all but formally pro-
claimed, and is most vigorously waged with or without pro-
clamation. In the “Dedication to Somers” the sword is being
something more than loosened in the sheath; it flashes out in
“The Bookseller to the Reader"; it is doing sanguinary work in
the great “ Epistle to Prince Posterity”; and it has only momen-
tary rests in the “ Preface" and the “Induction": while there
is hardly a section of the main text in which the quarters of
Grub Street are not beaten up, and the Conclusion is even as
the preludes and the main body.
A shrewd judge could hardly fail to perceive, from these
famous twin-books, that a new genius of thoroughly critical
Minor works.
character had arisen: but such a judge might well
*** have doubted how far its exercise could be anything
but negative. His doubts, as we have already hinted, were
to be justified. Indirectly, indeed, not merely in the Tatler
paper above referred to and elsewhere, but by that almost un-
canny influence which he seems to have exerted in so many
ways on men only less than himself, Swift had very much to
do with the rescuing of Style, by the hands of Addison and the
rest, from the vulgarisation which it was undergoing at the
close of the seventeenth century, not merely in common writers,
not merely in the hands of an eccentric like L'Estrange, but in
those of scholars like Collier and Bentley. But even this was
a task of destruction rather than of positive construction, and
he was always most at home in such tasks. The Meditation on
a Broomstick and the Tritical Essay, though every good re-
viewer should know them by heart, and will have but too many
opportunities of using his knowledge, are delivered with the
1
POPE.
185
backward, not the forward, speech of the critic; the Proposal
for correcting the English Tongue, which falls in with the Tatler
paper, aims at a sort of stationary state of language and litera-
ture alike, at proscriptions and ostracisings; the Letter to a
Young Clergyman and the Essay on Modern Education, though
both touch on literature, are exceedingly general in their
precepts; and though all persons with a true English apprecia-
tion of shameless puns and utter nonsense must delight in
The Antiquity of the English Tongue, it cannot be called serious
criticism. There is more in the Advice to a Young Poet: but
even here Swift is rather “running humours" on his subject
than discussing it in the grave and chaste manner.
We shall therefore hardly be wrong if, after excepting the
literary directions of the universal satiric douche in the Tale of
a Tub, and the useful but somewhat rudimentary warnings of
the Tatler paper, we see the most characteristic critical work of
Swift in Martinus Scriblerus and the Peri Bathous, especially
in the latter, which, though it be principally attributed to
Arbuthnot and Pope, is as surely Swiftian in suggestion as if
the Dean had written and published it alone. Often as it has
been imitated, and largely as its methods have been drawn
upon, it has never been surpassed as an Art of General and
Particular“ Slating": and the sections on the Figures, with the
immortal receipt for making an epic poem (the full beauty of
which is lost on those who do not know how appallingly close
it is to the approved prescriptions of the best neo-classic critics),
cannot be too highly praised. But, once more, the critic is here
at hangman's work only: he allows himself neither to admire
nor to love.
These principles, put in various ways by writers of more or
less genius for half a century, found what seemed to more than
Pope.
two generations (always with a few dissidents) some-
* thing like consummate expression in certain well-
known utterances of Pope. As expression these utterances
may still receive a very high degree of admiration : as anything
else it is difficult to believe that any turn of fashion, unless it
brings with it oblivion for large districts of noble literature, can
restore them to much authority. Pope, though better read than
186
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
he seems in his poems, was by no means a learned man; and it
is now pretty generally admitted that his intellect was acute
rather than powerful. The obstinate superficiality—the re-
duction of everything, even the most recondite problems of
philosophy, even the most far-ranging questions of erudition,
to a jury of " common-sense” persons, decorated with a little of
the fashion of the town which had set in, found in him an
exponent as competent to give it exquisite expression as he was
indisposed, and probably incompetent, to deepen or extend its
scope. He attained early to nearly his full powers, and it does
not much matter whether the Essay on Criticism was written at
the age of twenty or at that of twenty-two. He could have
improved it a little in form, but would hardly have altered it at
all in matter, if he had written it thirty years later. The
Imitation of the Epistle of Horace to Augustus, which was
actually written about that time, is, though superior as verse,
almost inferior as criticism, and more "out" in fact. The two
together give a sufficient view of Pope as he wished to be taken
critically. But to be perfectly fair we must add the
The Letters.
e critical utterances in his Letters,1 his Preface to
Shakespeare, and (with caution of course) the remarks attributed
to him by Spence. The Preface has received much praise; and
has deserved some even from those who follow not Pope gener-
ally. It would be unfair to blame him for adopting the mixed
“beauty and fault” system which had the patronage of great
names in antiquity, and found hardly even questioners in his
own time. And it is something that he recognises Shake-
speare's power over the passions, the individuality of his
characters, his intuitive knowledge of the world and of nature.
He is moderate and sensible on the relations of Shakespeare
and Jonson; he has practically said all that is to be said, in an
1 The most important of these is the
sentence on Crashaw (with whom Pope
has some points of sympathy), that he
is wanting in " design, form, fable,
which is the soul of poetry," and
“exactness or consent of parts, which
is the body," while he grants him
"pretty conceptions, fine metaphors,
glittering expressions, and something
of a neat cast of verse, which are pro-
perly the dress, gems, or loose orna-
ments” of it. See my friend Mr
Courthope (in his Life, ed. cit. of the
Works, v. 63), with whom, for once, I
am in irreconcilable disagreement.
POPE.
187
The
endless and tiresome controversy, by writing, “To judge Shake-
speare by Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by
Shakespeare the laws of one country who acted under those of
ce another.” And for such utterances we may excuse,
or at least pass over with little or no comment, the remarks that
Shakespeare kept bad company, that he wrote to please the
populace, that he resembles “an ancient majestic piece of Gothic
architecture (so far, so good), where many of the details are
childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur.” The little-
ness of this patchy, yea-nay criticism beside the great and ever-
lasting appreciation of his master Dryden speaks for itself; it
is only fair to remember that the very existence of Dryden's for
once really marmoreal inscription almost inevitably belittled and
hampered Pope. He was obliged to be different; and internal
as well as external influences made it certain that if he were
different he would be less.
The Popiana of Spencel add more to our idea of Pope's
critical faculty, or at least of its exercises ; in fact, it is possible
Spence's to take a much better estimate of Pope's “litera-
Anecdotes. ture” from the Anecdotes than from the Works.
Although the Boswellian spirit was, fortunately enough for
posterity, very strong in the eighteenth century, there was no
particular reason why Spence should toady Pope--especially
as he published nothing to obtain pence or popularity from
the toadying. That rather remarkable collection, or re-collec-
tion, of Italian-Latin poetry of the Renaissance, of which not
1 Spence (whose Anecdotes were
printed partly by Malone, and com-
pletely by Singer in 1820, reprinted
from the latter edition in 1858, and re-
selected by Mr Underhill (London,
n. d.) in the last decade of the nine.
teenth century, has sometimes received
praise as a critic himself. His Poly-
metis usefully brought together classical
art and letters, and the Anecdotes them-
selves are not without taste. But his
elaborate criticism of Pope's Odyssey,
published in 1726, is of little value,
neither praising nor blaming its subject
for the right things, and characterised
as a whole by a pottering and peddling
kind of censorship.
2 Selecta Poemata Italorum qui Latine
Scripscrunt. Cura cujusdam Anonymi
anno 1684 congesta, iterum in lucem data,
una cum aliorum Italorum operibus.
Accurante A. Pope. 2 vols., London,
1740. The title - page contains abso-
lutely all the ostensible editorial matter,
and, as I have not got hold of the work
of the Anonymus, I do not know how
much Pope added. But his collection,
as I can testify from some little know.
ledge of the subject, is good.
188
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
.
much notice has been taken by Pope's biographers, would, of
itself, show critical interest in a part, and no unnoteworthy
part, of literature: and a few of the Spencean salvages bear
directly upon this. He need not have been ashamed of his
special liking for Politian's Ambra: and he was right in think-
ing Bembo “stiff and unpoetical,” though hardly in joining
Sadolet with him in this condemnation. We know perfectly
well why he did not like Rabelais, for which Swift very
properly scolded him: indeed, he tells us himself, twice over,
that “there were so many things” in Master Francis, “in
which he could not see any manner of meaning driven at,"
that he could not read him with any patience. This is really
more tale-telling than the constantly quoted passage about
Walsh and correctness. For, after all, everybody aspires to be
correct: only everybody has his own notions of what is correct-
ness. It is not everybody-and, as we see, it was not the
great Mr Pope—who could, or can, appreciate nonsense, and
see how much more sensible than sense the best of it is. It
would skill but little to go through his isolated judgments: but
there are one or two which are eloquent. -
Still, it is to the Essay and the Epistle that we must turn for
his deliberate theory of criticism, announced in youth, indorsed
The Essay and emphasised in age. And we meet at once with
on Criticism. a difficulty. The possessor of such a theory ought,
at least, to have something like a connected knowledge, at least
a connected view, of literature as a whole, and to be able to
square the two. All Pope seems to have done is to take the
Arts of Horace, Vida, and Boileau, to adopt as many of their
principles as he understood, and as would go into his sharp
antithetic couplet, to drag their historical illustrations head and
shoulders into his scheme without caring for the facts, and to
fill in and embroider with criticisms, observations, and precepts,
sometimes very shrewd, almost always perfectly expressed, but
far too often arbitrary, conventional, and limited. He is
most unfortunate of all in the historical part, where Boileau
had been sufficiently unfortunate before him. The French-
man's observations on Villon and Ronsard had been ignorant
enough, and forced enough: but Pope managed to go a little
POPE.
189
beyond them in the Essay, and a great distance further still in.
the Epistle. The history of the famous passage,
“We conquered France, but felt our captive's charms,” 1
is like nothing on earth but the history-poetry of the despised
monkish ages, in which Alexander has twelve peers, and
Arthur, early in the sixth century, overruns Europe with a
British force, and fights with a Roman Emperor named Lucius.
And the sketch of European literature in the Essay, if it
contains no single statement so glaringly absurd, is as much a
“tissue of gaps” as the Irishman's coat.
Attempts have been made (including some by persons de-
serving all respect, and thoroughly acquainted with the subject)
to give Pope a high place, on the score of his charges to
“ follow nature.”. Unfortunately this is mere translation of
Boileau, of Vida, and of Horace, in the first place: and, still
more unfortunately, the poet's own arguments on his doctrine
show that what he meant by “following nature," and what we
mean by it, are two quite different things. He, usually at
least, means "stick to the usual, the ordinary, the commonplace.”
Just so the legendary King of Siam, had he written an Art of
Poetry, would have said “Follow nature, and do not talk about
such unnatural things as ice and snow.”
Regarded merely as a manual of the art of Pope's owu
poetry, without prejudice to any other, and as a satire on the
faults of other kinds, without prejudice to the weaknesses of
his own, the Essay is not merely an interesting document, but.
a really valuable one. Its cautions against desertion of nature
in the directions of excess, of the unduly fantastic, are sound
to this day: and its eulogies of ancient writers, though perhaps
neither based on very extensive and accurate first-hand know-
ledge, nor specially appropriate to the matter in hand, contain
much that is just in itself. One of the weakest parts, as might:
have been expected, is the treatment of rules, licences, and
faults. The poet-critic practically confesses the otiosity of the
whole system by admitting that a lucky licence is a rule, and
1 Ep. to Aug., l. 263.
190
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
that it is possible, as one of his own most famous and happiest
lines says,
“To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art."
And when he paraphrases Quintilian to the effect that you
must criticise
“With the same spirit that the author writ,"
and judge the whole, not the parts, he again goes perilously
near to jettison his whole system.
In the same way consistency is the last thing that can be
claimed for his chapters, as they may be called, on conceit, on
language, “numbers” (the most famous and the most ingenious
passage of the Essay), extremes, “turns,” the Ancient and
Modern quarrel, &c. The passage on Critics is among the
best-for here sheer good sense (even in the temporary, much
more in the universal, meaning) tells—and the historical sketch
of them, though not too accurate, is vigorous.
The much later Epistle is far more desultory, and inevitably
tinged by those personal feelings which many years of literary
The Epistle squabble had helped ill-health and natural disposi-
to Augustus. tion to arouse in Pope. But its general critical
attitude is not different. He is angry with the revival of old
literature which Watson and Allan Ramsay in Scotland, Oldys
and others in England, were beginning, hints sneers even at
Milton and the “weeds on Avon's bank,” is at least as hackneyed
as he is neat in his individual criticisms on poets nearer his own
day, and defends poetry and literature generally in a patronis-
ing and half-apologetic strain. In fact, what he has really at
heart is to be politely rude to George II. ; not to give any
critical account of English literature.
But the Essay on Criticism is too important a thing not to
require a little more notice here. It is extremely desultory;
ibe but so is the Epistola ad Pisones, and it is by no
on Pope as means certain that Pope was not wise in falling
a critic, back upon the Roman method, instead of emulating
the appearance of system in the Art Poétique. This latter
emphasises faults; Pope's causerie veils promiscuousness in the
Re
POPE.
191
elegant chit-chat of conversation. A bad critic is a more
dangerous person than a bad poet; and true taste is as un-
common as true genius. Bad education is responsible for bad
taste, and we must be very careful about our own. Nature is
the guide; the "rules” are but methodised nature. We derive
them, however, not from nature but from the ancient poets,
whom we must study. Even in licences we must follow them.
Bad critics are made by various causes, from ignorance and
party spirit to personal animus. A good critic is candid,
modest, well-bred, and sincere. The sort of history of criticism
which concludes the piece makes it specially surprising that
Johnson should have been so much kinder to Pope's learning
than he was to Dryden's; but the author of the actual Essay
on Criticism, and the author of the unhappily but projected
History of it, were too thoroughly in agreement about poetry,
and even about criticism itself, to make the latter quite an
impartial judge of the former.
When we pass from generals to particulars Pope's cleverness
at least appears more than ever. The sharply separated, neatly
flying, and neatly ringing couplets deliver “one, two” in the
most fascinating cut-and-thrust style, not without a brilliant
parry now and then to presumed (and never very formidable)
objections. The man's perfect skill in the execution of his own
special style of poetry raises, and in this case not delusively,
the expectation that he will know his theory as well as his
practice. The “good sense,” the “reason," are really and not
merely nominally present. A great deal of what is said is quite
undoubtedly true and very useful, not merely for reproof and
correction in point of critical and poetical sin, but actually for
instruction in critical and poetical righteousness.
But on further examination there is too often something
wanting; nay, there is too often no real root of the matter
present. The preliminary flourishes are well enough. And
certainly no school will quarrel—though each school may take
the privilege of understanding the words in its own way--with
the doctrine “Follow Nature." But
“One science only will one genius fit”
192
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
is notoriously false to nature, and if intended as a hint to the
critic, can only result in too common mistakes and injustices.
So, too, when we pass from the glowing eulogy of Nature,
and of her union with Art, to the Rules, there is a most de-
plorable gap. Those Rules, “discovered not devised,” are
“nature methodised.” Very good. This means, if it means
anything, a very true thing—that the Rules are extracted
from observed works of genius. But how, a most fervent
admirer of the Greeks may ask, did it happen that the Greeks
discovered all these rules? How, especially, did it happen that
they did so, when some kinds of literature itself were notoriously
neither discovered nor devised? And when we get a little
further, and are bidden to
“Know well each Ancient's proper character,"
we may, or rather must, reply, “It is most necessary; but you
will neglect the Moderns at your peril.”
In short, here as elsewhere, Pope's dazzling elocution, winged
with a distinct if narrow conception of his general purpose, flies
right enough in the inane, but makes painfully little progress
when it lights on the prosaic ground. The picture of “young -
Maro," with a sort of ciphering book before him, “totting up”
Homer, Nature, and the Stagirite, and finding them all exactly
equivalent, is really far more ludicrous than those flights of
metaphysical fancy at which critics of Pope's school delight to
gird; while the very climax of another kind of absurdity is
reached by the accordance to the Ancients, not merely of the
prerogative of laying down the rule always to be followed, but
of the privilege of making the not-to-be-imitated exception. So
again, fine as is the Alps passage, the famous doctrine of a “little
learning” is an ingenious fallacy. It is not the little learning
acquired, but the vast amount of ignorance left, that is dangerous.
The admirable couplet,
“True Wit is nature to advantage drest;
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed,"
though in itself the best thing in the whole poem, is unluckily
placed, because this sensation of familiarity beneath novelty is
POPE.
193
constantly given by those very “conceits” which Pope is de-
nouncing. On “ Language” and “Numbers" he is too notoriously
speaking to a particular brief. And as for his more general
cautions throughout, they are excellent sense for the most part,
but have very little more to do with criticism than with any
other function of life. A banker or a fishmonger, an architect,
artist, or plain man, will no doubt be the better for avoiding
extremes, partisanship, singularity, fashion, mere jealousy
(personal or other), ignorance, pedantry, vice. And if he turns
critic he will find these avoidances still useful to him, but not
more specially useful than in his former profession.
What then was the critical attitude which was expressed sol
brilliantly, and which gave Pope a prerogative influence over
and the all the orthodox criticism of his own century in
critical England and even elsewhere? It can be sketched
attitude
of his very fairly as being a sort of compromise between
group. a supposed following of the ancients, and a real
application, to literature in general and to poetry in par-
ticular, of the general taste and cast of thought of the time.
The following of the Ancients—it has been often pointed out
already—was, as the Articles of the Church of England have it,
a “corrupt following”: those who said Aristotle meant now
nobody more ancient than Boileau, now no one more ancient
than Vida, scarcely ever any one more ancient than Horace.
The classics as a whole were very little studied, at least by
those who busied themselves most with modern literature; and
it had entered into the heads of few that, after all, the standards
of one literature might, or rather must, require very consider-
able alteration before they could apply to another. But Greek
and Roman literature presented a body of poetry and of most
other kinds, considerable, admittedly excellent, and mostly com-
posed under the influence of distinct and identical critical
principles. Very few men had a complete knowledge of even a
single modern literature; hardly a man in France knew Old
French as a whole, hardly a man in England, except mere
antiquaries, knew Old English even as a part. There was
* Pope, v. supra, p. 187, actually ad-
mitted this as regards' Aristotle and
Shakespeare ; yet the admission practi-
cally revokes most of the Essay.
N
194
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
probably not a man in Europe till Gray (and Gray was still
young at Pope's death) who had any wide reading at once in
classical literature and in the mediæval and modern literatures
of different countries. Accordingly the principles of ancient
criticism, not even in their purity fully adequate to modern
works, and usually presented, not in their purity but in garbled
and bastardised form, were all that they had to stand by.
This classical, or pseudo-classical, doctrine was further af-
fected, in the case of literature generally, by the ethos of the
time, and, in the case of poetry, by the curious delusion as to
hard and fast syllabic prosody which has been noticed in con-
nection with Bysshe. Classicism, in any pure sense, was cer-
tainly not to blame for this, for everybody with the slightest
tinge of education knew that the chief Latin metre admitted
the substitution of trisyllabic for dissyllabic feet in every place
but one, and most knew that this substitution was almost as
widely permitted by Greek in a standard metre, approaching
the English still nearer. But it had, as we have seen, been a
gradually growing delusion, for a hundred and fifty years, in
almost every kind of non-dramatic poetry.
As for the general tendency, the lines of that are clear-
though the arbitrary extension and stiffening of them remain
a little incomprehensible. Nature was to be the test; but an
artificialised Nature, arranged according to the fashion of a town-
haunting society—a Nature which submitted herself to a system
of convention and generalisation. In so far as there was any
real general principle it was that you were to be like everybody
else—that singularity, except in doing the usual thing best,
was to be carefully avoided. Pope, being a man of genius,
could not help transcending this general conception constantly
by his execution, not seldom by his thought, and sometimes in
his critical precepts. But it remains the conception of his time
and of himself.
The writers whom we have been discussing, since we parted
coz with Dennis, have all been considerable men of letters,
and Profes- who in more or less degree busied themselves with
sional Critics. criticism. We must now pass to those who, with-
out exactly deserving the former description, undertook the sub-
BLAIR,
195
Trapp.
ject either as part of those “philosophical” inquiries which, how.
ever loosely understood, were so eagerly and usefully pursued
by the eighteenth century, or as direct matter of professional
duty. The first division supplies Lord Kames in Scotland
and “Hermes” Harris in England. Whether we are right
in reserving Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith, &c., from it, so
as to deal with them from the Æsthetic side in another chapter,
may be niatter of opinion.
To the second belong Trapp, Blair, and Campbell. Trapp
need not detain us very long; but as first occupant of the first
literary chair in England, and so the author of a
Pe volume of Proelections respectable in themselves, and
starting a line of similar work which, to the present day, has
contributed admirable critical documents, he cannot be omitted.
He was the author of one of the wittiest epigrams1 on record,
but he did not allow himself much sparkle in his lectures.2
Perhaps, indeed, he was right not to do so.
Hugh Blair, half a century later than Trapp, in 1759, started,
like him, the teaching of modern literature in his own country.
He had the advantage, as far as securing a popular
audience goes, of lecturing in English, and he was un-
doubtedly a man of talent. The Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles
Lettres, which were delivered with great éclat for nearly a quarter
of a century from the Chair of their subject, are very far, indeed,
from being devoid of merit. They provide a very solid, if a
somewhat mannered and artificial instruction, both by precept
and example, in what may be called the “full-dress plain
style” which was popular in the eighteenth century. They are
1 Individual preference, in the case This it is which gives the superior wing
of the famous pair of epigrams on the and sting to Trapp's javelin.
books and the troop of horse sent by ? Prælectiones Poeticce, London, 3rd
George I. to Cambridge and to Oxford ed., 1736. The first of the first batch
rrespectively, may be biassed by aca was printed as early as 1711, and an
demical and by political partisanship. English translation (not by the author)
But while it is matter of opinion was published in 1742. See Appendix
whether “Tories own no argument for a complete account, detailed in all
but force," and whether, in certain important instances, of Trapp and his
circumstances, a University may not successors in the Oxford Chair.
justifiably “want loyalty," no one can 3 The first ed. is that of Edinburgh,
ever maintain that it is not disgrace- 1783 : mine is that of London, 1823.
ful to a university to "want learning."
Blair.
2
196
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
as original as could be expected. The critical examination of
Addison's style, if somewhat meticulous, is mostly sound, and
has, like Johnson's criticisms of Dryden and Pope, the advan.
tage of thorough sympathy, of freedom from the drawback-so
common in such examinations that author and critic are stand-
ing on different platforms, looking in different directions, speak-
ing, one may almost say, in mutually incomprehensible tongues.
The survey of Belles Lettres is, on its own scheme, ingenious
and correct: there are everywhere evidences of love of Litera-
ture (as the lover understands her), of good education and read-
ing, of sound sense. Blair is to be very particularly commended
for accepting to the full the important truth that “Rhetoric."
in modern times really means “Criticism"; and for doing all he
can to destroy the notion, authorised too far by ancient critics,
and encouraged by those of the Renaissance, that Tropes and
Figures are not possibly useful classifications and names, but fill
a real arsenal of weapons, a real cabinet of reagents, by the
employment of which the practitioner can refute, or convince, or
delight, as the case may be.
But with this, and with the further praise due to judicious
borrowings from the ancients, the encomium must cease.
The Lectures In Blair's general critical view of literature the
on Rhetoric. eighteenth-century blinkers are drawn as close as
possible. From no writer, even in French, can more “awful
examples " be extracted, not merely of perverse critical assump-
tion, but of positive historical ignorance. Quite early in the.
second Lecture, and after some remarks (a little arbitrary, but
not valueless) on delicacy and correctness in taste, we find,
within a short distance of each other, the statements that “in
the reign of Charles II: such writers as Suckling and Etheridge
were held in esteem for dramatic composition," and later, “If
a man shall assert that Homer has no beauties whatever, that
he holds him to be a dull and spiritless writer, and that he
would as soon peruse any legend of old knight-errantry as the
Niad, then I exclaim that my antagonist is either void of all
taste,” &c. Here, on the one hand, the lumping of Suckling
and Etherege together, and the implied assumption that not
merely Suckling, but Etherege, is a worthless dramatist, gives
12
BLAIR.
197
us one “light,” just as the similar implication that "an old
legend of knight-errantry” is necessarily an example of dul-
ness, spiritlessness, and absence of beauty, gives us another.
That Blair lays down, even more peremptorily than Johnson,
and as peremptorily as Bysshe, that the pause in an English
line may fall after the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, and no
other, is not surprising; and his observations on Shakespeare
are too much in the usual “faults-saved-by-beauties” style to
need quotation. But that he cites, with approval, a classification
of the great literary periods of the world which excludes the
Elizabethan Age altogether, is not to be omitted. It stamps
the attitude.
These same qualities appear in the once famous but now little
read Dissertation on Ossian. That, in the sense of the word on
The
which least stress is laid in these volumes, this
Dissertation “ Critical Dissertation ” is absolutely uncritical does
on Ossian. not much matter. Blair does not even attempt to
examine the evidence for and against the genuineness of the
work he is discussing. He does not himself know Gaelic;
friends (like Hector MʻIntyre) have told him that they heard
Gaelic songs very like Ossian sung in their youth; there are
said to be manuscripts; that is enough for him. Even when
he cites and compares parallel passages—the ghost-passage and
that from the book of Job, Fingal's “I have no son." and Othello
--which derive their whole beauty from exact coincidence with
the Bible or Shakespeare, he will allow no kind of suspicion to
cross his mind. But this we might let pass. It is in the manner
in which he seeks to explain the “ amazing degree of regularity
and art,” which he amazingly ascribes to Macpherson's redac-
tion, the “rapid and animated style,” the “strong colouring of
imagination,” the “ glowing sensibility of heart,” that the most
surprising thing appears. His citations are as copious as his
praises of them are hard to indorse. But his critical argument
rests almost (not quite) wholly on showing that Fingal and
Temora are worked out quite properly on Aristotelian prin-
ciples by way of central action and episode, and that there are
1 I have it with The Poems of Ossian, Macpherson under his wing as early as
2 vols., London, 1796. Blair had taken 1760.
198
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON..
.
constant parallels to Homer, the only poet whom he will allow
to be Ossian's superior. In short, he simply applies to Ossian
Addison's procedure with Paradise Lost. The critical piquancy
of this is double. For we know that Ossian was powerful-
almost incredibly powerful—all over Europe in a sense quite
opposite to Blair's; and we suspect, if we do not know, that Mr
James Macpherson was quite clever enough purposely to give it
something of the turn which Blair discovers.
The charge which may justly be brought against Blair-that
he is both too exclusively and too purblindly " belletristic”—
cannot be extended to Henry Home, Lord Kames.
Kames.
* Johnson, whom Kames disliked violently, and who
returned the dislike with rather good-natured if slightly con-
temptuous patronage, dismissed the Elements of Criticism, 1761,1
as" a pretty Essay, which deserves to be held in some estima-
tion, though much of it is chimerical.” 2 The sting of this lies,
as usual, in the fact that it is substantially true, though by no
means all the truth. The Elements of Criticism is a pretty
book, and an estimable one, and, what is more, one of very
considerable originality. Its subtlety and ingenuity are often
beyond Johnson's own reach; it shows a really wide knowledge
of literature, modern as well as ancient; and it is surprisingly,
though not uniformly, free from the special “classical” pur-
blindness of which Johnson and Blair are opposed, but in their
different ways equal, examples. Yet a very great deal of it is :
“chimerical,” and, what is worse, å very great deal more is,
whether chimerical or not in itself, irrelevant. It presents a
philosophical treatise, vaguely and tentatively æsthetic rather
than critical, yoked in the loosest possible manner to a bundle of
quasi-professorial exercises in Lower and Higher Rhetoric. The
second part might not improperly be termed “ Critical Illustra-
tions of Rhetoric.” The first could only be properly entitled
“ Literary Illustrations of Morals."
Of course this excellent Scots lawyer and ingenious
* It had reached its eighth edition in My reason for not postponing is the
1807, the date of my copy. Perhaps large amount of positive literary criti-
some may think that Kawes, as being cism in his book.
mainly an ästhetician, ought to be ? Boswell, Globe ed., p. 132. He
postponed with Shaftesbury, Hume, &c. was elsewhere more, and less, kind.
KAMES.
199
-
“Scotch metaphysician” had strong precedents to urge for
The making a muddle of Moral Philosophy and Literary
Elements of Criticism. It has been pointed out that Aristotle
Criticism. himself is not a little exposed to the same imputa-
tion. But Kames embroils matters to an extent never sur-
passed, except by those, to be found in every day, who are in.
capable of taking the literary point of view at all, and who simply
treat literature as something expressing agreement or disagree-
ment with their moral, political, religious, or other views. He
seems himself to have had, at least once, a slight qualm. “A
treatise of ethics is not my province: I carry my view no
farther than to the elements of criticism, in order to show that
the fine arts are a subject of reasoning as well as of taste.”1 If
this was his rule. he certainly gives himself the most liberal
indulgence in applying it. His First Chapter is devoted to
“Perceptions and Ideas in a Train ”; the second (an immensely
long one, containing a good third of the first volume) to “ Emo-
tions and Passions”; while the whole of the rest till the end
of the seventeenth chapter is really occupied by the same class of
subject. Kames excels in that constantly ingenious, and often
acute, dissection of human nature which was the pride and
pleasure of his century and his country, but which is a little
apt to pay itself with clever generalisations as if they were
verde cause. In one place we find a distribution of all the
pleasures of the senses into pain of want, desire, and satis-
faction. In another 2 the philosopher solemnly informs us, “I
love my daughter less after she is married, and my mother less
after a second marriage; the marriage of my son or my father
diminishes not my affection so remarkably.” An almost bur-
lesque illustration of the procedure of the school is given in the
dictum,3 « Where the course of nature is joined with Elevation
the effect must be delightful; and hence the singular beauty of
smoke ascending in a calm morning.” When one remembers
this, and comes later 4 to the admirable remark, “Thus, to
i Vol. i. chap. iii., on“ Beauty”; i. in his chapter on “Motion and Force"
195 ed. cit.
(i. 250-255), referred complacently to
? i. 77.
his own indulgence in this foible, and
- 3 i. 26.
had accumulated others of the same
* j. 288, note. Kames had just before, kind.
200
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
1
account for an effect of which there is no doubt, any cause,
however foolish, is made welcome,” it is impossible not to say
“Thou sayest it"; as also in another case, where he lays it
down that “ Were corporeal pleasures dignified over and above
[i.e., beside the natural propensity which incites us to them]
with a place in a high class, they would infallibly disturb the
balance of the mind by outweighing the social affections. This
is a satisfactory final cause for refusing to these pleasures any
degree of dignity.”i I am tempted to quote Kames's philosophy
of the use of tobacco 2 also, but the stuff and method of his first
volume must be sufficiently intelligible already.
The second, much more to the purpose, is considerably less
interesting. A very long chapter deals with Beauty of Language
with respect to Sound, Signification, Resemblance between Sound
and Signification, and Metre. It is abundantly stocked with
well-chosen examples from a wide range of literature, and full
of remarks, generally ingenious and sometimes both new and
bold, as where at the outset Kames has the audacity to contra-
dict Aristotle, by implication at least, and lay it down that “of
all the fine arts, painting and sculpture only are in their nature
imitative.” 3 But it is not free from the influence of the idols
of its time. Of such, in one kind, may be cited the attribution
to Milton of "many careless lines”; 4 for if there is one thing
certain in the risky and speculative range of literary dog-
matism, it is that Milton never wrote a “careless” line in his
life. If his lines are ever bad (and perhaps they are some- .
times), they are bad deliberately and of malice. In another
and more serious kind may be ranged the predominating deter-
mination to confuse the sensual with the intellectual side of
poetry. This, of course, is Kames's root-idea; but that it is a
root of evil may be shown sufficiently by the following passage
in his discussion of the pause-in relation to which subject he
is as wrong as nearly all his contemporaries. He is talking of
a pause between adjective and substantive. What occurs to
him is that "a quality cannot exist independent of a subject,
nor are they separable even in imagination, because they make
1 1. 359.
2 i. 405, 410, 411, 416, 417.
3 ü. 3.
4.ii. 163.
5 ü. 129.
:
KAMES.
201
part of the same idea, and for that reason, with respect to melody
as well as to sense, it must be disagreeable to bestow upon the
adjective a sort of independent existence by interjecting a pause
between it and its substantive.” His examples are no doubt
vitiated by the obsession of the obligatory “middle” pause,
which makes him imagine one between adjective and substan-
tive in
“The rest, his many-coloured robe concealed,"
where the only real pause, poetic as well as grammatical, is at
“rest.” But his principle is clear, and it is as clearly a wrong
principle. It ignores the great fact glanced at above, that the
pleasure of poetry is double-intellectual and sensual—and that
the two parts are in a manner independent of each other. And
in the second place, even on its own theory, it credits the mere
intellect with too sluggish faculties. In the first line which
Kames suggests as “harsh and unpleasant" for this reason,
“Of thousand bright inhabitants of air,"
the pause at “bright” is so slight a one that some might deny
its existence. But if it be held necessary, can we refuse to the
subtilitas intellectus the power of halting, for the second of
a second, to conceive the joint idea of number and bright-
ness, before it moves further to enrich this by the notion of
“ inhabitants of air”? The mere and literal Lockist may
do so; but no other will. The Figures enjoy a space which,
without being surprised at it, one grudges; and the Unities are
handled rather oddly, while a digression of some fifty pages on
Gardening and Architecture speaks for itself. The conclusion
on the Standard of Taste is singularly inconclusive ; and an
interesting appendix on “terms defined and explained” presents
the singularity that not, I think, one of the terms so dealt with
has anything specially to do with literature or art at all.
Nevertheless, though it is easy to be smart upon Kames, and
not very difficult to expose serious inadequacies and errors both
in the general scheme and the particular execution, the Ele-
ments of Criticism is a book of very great interest and import-
ance, and worthy of much more attention than it has for a long
202
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
time past received. To begin with, his presentation, at the .
very outset of his book, of Criticism as “the most agreeable
of all amusements ”1 was one of those apparently new and
pleasant shocks to the general which are, in reality, only the
expression of an idea for some time germinating and maturing
in the public mind. Even Addison, even Pope, while praising
and preaching Criticism, had half-flouted and half-apologised for
it. Swift, a great critic on his own day, had flouted it almost
or altogether in others. The general idea of the critic had
been at worst of a malignant, at best of a harmless, pedant.
Kames presented him as something quite different,—as a man
no doubt of learning, but also of position and of the world,
"amusing," as well as exercising himself, and bringing the fash-
ionable philosophy to the support of his amusement.
But he did more than this. His appreciation of Shakespeare
is, taking it together (and his references to the subject are
numerous and important), the best of his age. His citations
show a remarkable relish for the Shakespearian humour, and
though he cannot clear his mind entirely from the “blemish-
and-beauty” cant, which is ingrained in the Classical theory,
and which, as we saw, infected even such a critic as Longinus, he
is far freer from it than either Johnson or Blair. In his chapter
on the Unities he comes very near to Hurd 2 (to whom, as the
Elements of Criticism preceded the Letters on Chivalry in time,
he may liave given a hint) in recognising the true Romantic
Unity of Action which admits plurality so far as the different.
interests work together, or contrast advantageously. He has a
most lucid and sensible exposure of the difference between the
conditions of the Greek theatre and ours. In short, he would
stand very high if he were not possessed with the pseudo-
logical mania which makes him calmly and gravely write 3
“Though a cube is more agreeable in itself than a parallelopipe-
don, yet a large parallelopipedon set on its smaller base is by
its elevation more agreeable, and hence the beauty of a Gothic
ii. 33.
indeed so universal that any other
2 Hurd is reserved for the next may seem pedantic. Yet it is need-
chapter.
less to say that the word so spelt is a.
3 ii. 457.
vox nihili, and should be “parallele
• Kames has this spelling, which is pipedon."
CAMPBELL.
203 :
tower.” But this amabilis insania is in itself more amiable
than insane. He wants to admit the Gothic tower, and that is
the principal thing. Magdalen, and Merton, and Mechlin may
well, in consideration of his slighting in their favour the more
intrinsic charms of a cube, afford to let a smile flicker round
their venerable skylines at his methodical insistence on justi-
fying admiration of them by calling them large parallelopipeda
set on their smaller ends. And the cube can console herself
with his admission of her superior intrinsic loveliness.
The faults of Blair and of Kames are both, for the most part,
absent, while much more than the merit of either, in method
, and closeness to the aim, is present, in the very re-
Campbell.
*** markable Philosophy of Rhetorici which Dr George
Campbell began, and, to some extent, composed, as early as
1750; though he did not finish and publish it till nearly thirty
years later (1777). It may indeed be admitted that this piece-
ineal composition is not without its effect on the book, which
contains some digressions (especially one on Wit, Humour, and
Ridicule, and another on the cause of the pleasure received from
the exhibition of painful objects) more excrescent than properly
episodic. s It is, moreover, somewhat weighted by the author's
strictly professional and educational design, in retaining as
much of the mere business part of the ancient Rhetoric as
would or might be useful to future preachers, advocates, or
members of Parliament. Campbell, too, is a less “elegant"
writer than Blair; and his acuteness has a less vivacious play
than that of Kames. But here concessions are exhausted; and
the book, however much we may disagree with occasional ex-
pressions in it, remains the most important treatise on the New
Rhetoric that the eighteenth century produced. Indeed, strange
as it may seem, Whately's, its principal formal successor in the
nineteenth, is distinctly retrograde in comparison.
The New Rhetoric—the Art of Criticism,this is what Camp-
The
bell really attempts. He is rather chary of acknow-
Philosophy ledging his own position, and, in fact, save in his
of Khetoric. title, seldom employs the term Rhetoric, no doubt
partly from that unlucky contempt of scholastic appellations
I use the Tegg edition, London, 1850.
204
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
which shows itself in his well-known attack on Logic. But his
definition of “Eloquence”-the term which he employs as a
preferred synonym of Rhetoric itself—is very important, and
practically novel. The word “Eloquence, in its greatest lati-
tude, denotes that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted
to its end.” Now this, though he modestly shelters it under
Quintilian's scientia bene dicendi and dicere secundum virtutem
orationis, asserting also its exact correspondence with Cicero's
description of the best orator as he who dicendo animos de-
lectat audientium et docet et permovet, is manifestly far more
extensive than the latter of these, and much less vague than the
former. In fact Rhetoric, new dubbed as Eloquence, becomes
the Art of Literature, or in other words Criticism.
It has been allowed that this bold and admirable challenge of
the whole province—for “ discourse” is soon seen to include
“writing”-is not always so well supported. After an interest-
ing introduction (vindicating the challenge, and noting Kames
more especially as one who, though in a different way, had
made it before him), Campbell for a time, either because he is
rather afraid of his own boldness, or to conciliate received
opinions on the matter (or, it has been suggested, because the
book was written at different times, and with perhaps slightly
different ends), proceeds to discuss various matters which have
very little to do with his general subject. Sometimes, as in
the Chapter, before referred to, on “ The Nature and Use of the
Scholastic Art of Syllogising," he wrecks himself in a galley
which he had not the slightest need to enter. The longer dis-
course on Evidence which precedes this is, of course, fully justi-
fied on the old conception of Rhetoric, but digressory, or at
least excursory, on his own. The above-mentioned sections on
Ridicule, and on the æsthetic pleasure derivable from painful
subjects, are excursions into the debatable kinds between
literature and Ethics, though much less extravagant than those
of Kames, and perhaps, as excursions, not absolutely to be
barred or banned; while chapters vii.-x., which deal with the
“ Consideration of Hearers," &c., &c., are once more Aristotelian
relapses, pardonable if not strictly necessary. But not quite a
third part of the whole treatise is occupied by this First Book of
-
CAMPBELL.
205
the three into which it is divided; and not a little of this third
is, strictly or by a little allowance, to the point. The remaining
two-thirds are to that point without exception or digression
of any kind, so that the Aristotelian distribution is exactly
reversed.
The titles of the two Books, " The Foundations and Essential
Properties of Elocution,” and “The Discriminating Properties
of Elocution," must be taken with due regard to Campbell's use
of the last word.1 But they require hardly any other proviso
or allowance. He first, with that mixture of boldness and
straight-hitting which is his great merit, attacks the general
principles of the use of Language, and proceeds to lay down
nine Canons of Verbal Criticism, which are in the main so sound
and so acute that they are not obsolete to the present day.
There is more that is arbitrary elsewhere, and Campbell seems
sometimes to retrograde over the line which separates Rhetoric
and Composition. But it must be remembered that this line
has never been very exactly drawn, and has, both in Scotland and
in America, if not also in England, been often treated as almost
non-existent up to the present day. In his subsequent distinc-
tion of five rhetorical Qualities of Style-Perspicuity, Vivacity,
Elegance, Animation, and Music-Campbell may be thought
to be not wholly happy. For the three middle qualities are
practically one, and it is even questionable whether Music would
not be best included with them in some general term, designat-
ing whatever is added by style proper to Perspicuity, or the
sufficient but unadorned conveyance of meaning. As, however,
is very common, if not universal, with him, his treatment is in
advance of his nomenclature, for the rest of the book-nearly a
full half of it—is in fact devoted to the two heads of Perspicuity
and Vivacity, the latter tacitly subsuming all the three minor
qualities. And there is new and good method in the treatment
of Vivacity, as shown first by the choice of words, secondly by
their number, and thirdly by their arrangement, while a section
1 He had, of course, good authority teresting and little-known person to
for it, including that of Dryden ; but whom we shall recur in the next
it is obviously better to limit it in the chapter) had already seen this, and
modern sense than to use it equivocally. expressly referred to it.
Mason (not Gray's friend, but an in-
206
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
under the first head ou “words considered as sounds" comes
very near to the truth. That there should be a considerable
section on Tropes was to be expected, and, as Campbell treats
it, it is in no way objectionable. His iconoclasm as to logical
Forms becomes much more in place, and much more effective, in
regard to rhetorical Figures.
One, however, of the best features of the work has hardly yet
been noticed ; and that is the abundance of examples, and the
thorough way in which they are discussed. To a reader turning
the book over without much care it may seem inferior as a
thesaurus to Kames, because the passages quoted are as a rule
embedded in the text, and not given separately, in the fashion
which makes of large parts of the Elements of Criticism a sort
of anthology, a collection of beauties or deformities, as the
case may be. But this is in accordance with the singularly
businesslike character of Campbell's work throughout. And if
it also seem that he does not launch out enough in appreciation
of books or authors as wholes, let it be remembered that English
criticism was still in a rather rudimentary condition, and that the
state of taste in academic circles was not very satisfactory. It
would not, of course, be impossible to produce from him examples
of those obsessions of the time which we have noticed in his two
compatriots, as we shall notice them in the far greater Johnson.
But he could not well escape these obsessions, and he suffers
from them in a very mild form.
James Harris, author of Hermes (and of the house of Malmes-
bury, which was ennobled in the next generation), is perhaps
.
Harris.
the chief writer whom England, in the narrower sense,
**** has to set against Blair, Kames, and Campbell in
mid-eighteenth century. But he is disappointing. It would
not be reasonable to quarrel with the Hermes itself for not
being literary, because it does not pretend to be anything but
grammatical; and the Philosophical Arrangements, though they
do sometimes approach literature, may plead benefit of title for
not doing so oftener. But the Discourse on Music, Painting, and
Poetry, and the Philological Enquiries--in which Philology is
expressly intimated to mean "love of letters” in the higher
i Works, Oxford, 1841.
HARRIS.
207
sense-hold out some prospects. The performance is but little.
Readers of Boswell will remember that Johnson, though the
author of Hermes was very polite to him, both personally and
with the pen, used, to his henchman's surprise and grief, to
speak very roughly of Harris, applying to him on one occasion
the famous and damning phrase, “a prig, and a bad prig," and
elsewhere hinting doubts as to his competency in Greek. That
the reproach of priggishness was deserved (whether with the
aggravation or not) nobody can read half-a-dozen pages of
Harris without allowing,—his would be complimentary observa-
tion on Fielding 1 would determine by itself. But the principal
note of Harris, as a critic, is not so much priggishness as con-
fused superficiality. These qualities are less visible in the
Dialogue (which is an extremely short, not contemptible, but
also not unimportant, exercitation in the direction of Æsthetic
proper) than in the Enquiries, which were written late in life, and
which, no doubt, owe something of their extraordinary garrulity
to “the irreparable outrage."
This book begins, with almost the highest possible promise for
us, in a Discussion of the Rise of Criticism, its various species,
The Philosophical, Historical, and Corrective, &c. It goes
Philological on hardly less promisingly, if the mere chapter-head-
uiries. ings are taken, with discourses on Numbers, Com-
position, Quantity, Alliteration, &c.; the Drama, its Fable and
its Manners, Diction, and, at the end of the second part, an im-
passioned defence of Rules. But the Third, which promises a
discussion of “the taste and literature of the Middle Age," raises
the expectation almost to agony-point. Here is what we have
been waiting for so long: here is the great gap going to be
filled. At last a critic not merely takes a philosophic-historic
view of criticism, but actually proposes to supplement it with
an inquiry into those regions of literature on which his pre-
decessors have turned an obstinately blind eye. As is the
exaltation of the promise, so is the aggravation of the dis-
appointment. Harris's first part, though by no means ill-
planned, is very insufficiently carried out, and the hope of
goodness in the third is cruelly dashed beforehand by the
i Note to Pt. II. chap. vii. of the Enquiries, p. 433, ed. cit.
208
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
sentence, “At length, after a long and barbarous period, when
the shades of monkery began to retire,” &c. The writer's mere
enumeration of Renaissance critics is very haphazard, and his
remarks, both on them and their successors, perfunctory in the
extreme. He hardly dilates on anybody or anything except-
following the tradition from Pope and Swift-on Bentley and
his mania for correction and conjecture.
In the second part he gives himself more room, and is better
worth reading, but the sense of disappointment continues. In
fact, Harris is positively irritating. He lays it down, for in-
stance, that "nothing excellent in a literary way happens
merely by chance," a thesis from the discussion of which much
might come. But he simply goes off into a loose discussion of
the effects and causes of literary pleasure, with a good many
examples in which the excellence of his precept, "seek the
cause,” is more apparent than the success of his own researches.
The rest is extremely discursive, and seldom very satisfactory,
being occupied in great part with such tenth-rate stuff as Lillo's
Fatal Curiosity. As for Harris's defence of the Rules, he does
not, in fact, defend them at all ; but, as is so common with con-
troversialists, frames an indictment, which no sensible antagonist
would ever bring, in order to refute it. He says that “he never
knew any genius cramped by rules, and had known great
geniuses miserably err by neglecting them.” A single example
of this last would have been worth the whole treatise. But
Harris does not give it. Finally, “the Taste and Literature of
the Middle Age” seem to him to be satisfactorily discussed by
ridiculing the Judgment of God, talking at some length about
Byzantine writers, giving a rather long account of Greek phil-
osophy in its ancient stages, quoting freely from travellers to
Athens and Constantinople, introducing " the Arabians," with
anecdotes of divers caliphs, saying something of the School-
men, a little about the Provençal poets, something (to do
him justice) of the rise of accentual prosody, and a very, very
little about Chaucer, Petrarch, Mandeville, Marco Polo, Sir John
Fortescue, and—Sannazar! “And now having done with the
1 Harris deserves a good word for his prosodic studies, which may entitle him
to reappear.
BROWN.
209
Coto
Middle Age,” he concludes/having, that is to say, shown that,
except a pot-pourri of mainly historical anecdote, he knew
nothing whatever about it; or, if this seem harsh, that his
knowledge was not of any kind that could possibly condition
his judgment of literature favourably. In fact, no one shows
that curious eighteenth-century confusion of mind, which may
be noticed frequently in other countries, better than Harris.
He is, as we have seen, a fervent devotee of the Rules-he
believes 1 that, before any examples of poetry, there was an.
abstract schedule of Epic, Tragedy, and everything else down to
Epigram, which you cannot follow but to your good, and cannot
neglect but to your peril. Yet, on the one hand, he feels the
philosophic impulse, and on the other, the literary and historical
curiosity, before which these rules were bound to vanish.
A few allusions,2 in contemporaries of abiding fame, have kept
half alive the name-though very few, save specialists, are likely
who to be otherwise than accidentally acquainted with
Brown: his the work—of John Brown of Newcastle, author of
History of the once famous Estimate of the Manners and Prin-
Poetry.
. ciples of the Times, and afterwards, when he
had gained reputation by this, of a Dissertation on the Rise
of Poetry and Music,4 later still slightly altered, and re-
christened History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry. The
Estimate itself is one of those possibly half - unconscious
pieces of quackery which from time to time put (in a manner
which somehow or other tickles the longer ears among their
contemporaries) the old cry that everything is rotten in
the state of Denmark. There is not much in it that is
directly literary; the chief point of 'the kind is an attack
on the Universities : it may be noted that quacks generally do
attack Universities. The Dissertation-History is a much less
1 "There never was a time when See also Chesterfield, to the Bishop of
rules did not exist ; they always made Waterford, April 14, 1758. Chester-
a part of that immutable truth," &c. field was no Bottom, but, being melan.
-P. 450.
choly at the time, he was tickled.
2 The best known is Cowper's, in 8 London, 1757, 8vo.
Table Talk, 11. 384, 385–
4 London, 1763, 4to.
Newcastle, 1764, Svo,
Rose like a paper - kite and charmed the
“The inestimable Estimate of Brown
town."
210
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
claptrap piece, but far more amusing to read. Brown is one
as criticism ; and those who will may hear how
“ Peace on Nature's lap reposes (why not vice versa?]
and so forth. The difference of the two forms is not important.
In the second, Brown simply left out Music, so far as he could,
· as appealing to a special public only. He believes in Ossianz
then quite new. He thinks it contains “Pictures which no
civilised modern could ever imbibe in their strength, nor con-
sequently could ever throw out” — an image so excessively
Georgian (putting aside the difficulty of imbibing a picture)
that one has to abbreviate comment on it. For the rest, Brown
rejoices, and wallows, in the naturalistic generalisation of his
century. He begins, of course, with the Savage State, lays it
down that, at religious and other festivals, men danced and sang,
that then organised professional effort supplemented unorgan-
ised, and so poets arose. Then comes about a sort of Estab-
lished Choir, whence the various kinds are developed. And we
have the Chinese-the inevitable Chinese-Fow-hi, and Chao-
hao, and all their trumpery. Negligible as an authority, Brown
perhaps deserves to rank as a symptom.
But we must leave minorities, and come to him who is here
ó péryas.
There is no reason to doubt that Johnson's critical opinions
were formed quite early in life, and by that mixture of natural
Themen. Bis bent and influence of environment which, as a rule,
preparation forms all such opinions. There has been a tendency
Jor criticism. to regard, as the highest mental attitude, that of con-
sidering everything as an open question, of being ready to
reverse any opinion at a moment's notice. As a matter of fact,
we have record of not many men who have proceeded in this
way; and it may be doubted whether among them is a single
person of first-rate genius, or even talent. Generally speaking,
the men whose genius or talent has a “stalk of carle hemp” in
it find, in certain of the great primeval creeds of the world,
political, ecclesiastical, literary, or other, something which suits
JOHNSON.
211
their bent. The bent of their time may assist them in fasten-
ing on to this by attraction or repulsion-it really does not
much matter which it is. In either case they will insensibly,
from an early period, choose their line and shape their course
accordingly. They will give a certain independence to it; they
will rarely be found merely “swallowing formulas." It is the
other class which does this, with leave reserved to get rid of
the said formulas by a mental emetic and swallow another set,
which will very likely be subjected to the same fate. But the
hero will be in the main Qualis ab incepto.
Johnson was in most things a Tory by nature, his Toryism
being conditioned, first by that very strong bent towards a sort
of transcendental scepticism which many great Tories have
shown; secondly, by the usual peculiarities of social circum-
stance and mental constitution; and lastly, by the state of
England in his time—a state to discuss which were here im-
pertinent, but which, it may be humbly suggested, will not be
quite appreciated by accepting any, or all, of the more ordinary
views of the eighteenth century. .
His view of literature was in part determined by these
general influences, in part-perhaps chiefly-by special imping-
ing currents. His mere birth-time had not very much to do
with it-Thomson, Dyer, Lady Winchelsea, who consciously or
unconsciously worked against it, were older, in the lady's case
much older, than he was; Gray and Shenstone, who consciously
worked against it in different degrees, were not much younger.
The view was determined in his case, mainly no doubt by that
natural bent which is quite inexplicable, but also by other
things explicable enough. Johnson, partly though probably not
| wholly in consequence of his near sight, was entirely insen-
sible to the beauties of nature; he made fun of “prospects”;
he held that “one blade of grass is like another” (which it most
certainly is not, even in itself, let alone its surroundings);
he liked human society in its most artificial form-that provided
by towns, clubs, parties. In the second place, his ear was only
1
. His birth-year was 1709; Thom.
son's 1700; Dyer's perhaps the
same; Shenstone's 1714; Gray's
1716. Lady Winchelsea had been borp
as far back as 1660.
212
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
less deficient than his eye. That he did not care for music, in
the scientific sense, is not of much importance; but it is quite
clear that, in poetry, only an extremely regular and almost math-
ematical beat of verse had any chance with him. Thirdly, he
was widely read in the Latin Classics, less widely in Greek,
still more widely in the artificial revived Latin of the Renais-
sance and the seventeenth century Fourthly, he was, for a
man so much given to reading—for one who ranged from Mac-
robius in youth to Parismus and Parismenus in age, and from
Travels in Abyssinia to Prince Titi—not very widely read either
in mediæval Latin or in the earlier divisions of the modern lan-
guages; indeed, of these last he probably knew little or nothing.
Fifthly, the greatest poet in English immediately before his
time, and the greatest poet in English during his youth and
early manhood, had been exponents, the one mainly, the other
wholly, of a certain limited theory of English verse. Sixthly,
the critical school in which he had been brought up was strictly
neo-classic. Seventhly, and to conclude, such rebels to con-
vention as appeared in his time were chiefly men whom he
regarded with unfriendly dislike, or with friendly contempt.
Nor can it be said that any one of the contemporary partisans of
“the Gothick” was likely to convince a sturdy adversary. Wal-
pole was a spiteful fribble with a thin vein of genius;2 Gray a.
sort of Mr Facing-Both-Ways in literature, who had “classical”
mannerisms worse than any of Johnson's own, and whose
dilettante shyness and scanty production invited ridicule.
Both were Cambridge men (and Johnson did not love Cam-
bridge men, nor they him), and both were Whigs. Percy and
Warton were certainly not very strong as originals, and had
foibles enough even as scholars. But whether these reasons
go far enough, or do not so go, Johnson's general critical atti-
tude never varies in the least. It was, as has been said, prob-
1 He was perhaps the last man of
very great power who entertained the
Renaissance superstition of Latin. He
was horrified at the notion of an Eng,
lish epitaph; and in the first agony of
his stroke in 1783 he rallied and
racked his half - paralysed brains to
make Latin verses as the best test
of his sanity.
2 This judgment is a little severe
perhaps : but not wholly unjust.
3 However, in Johnson, as in most
strong men, there were certain leanings
to the other side. His sepse of mys-
JOHNSON.
213
ably formed quite early; it no doubt appeared in those but
dimly known contributions to periodical literature which
defrayed so ill the expense of his still more dimly known first
twenty years in London. We have from him no single treatise,
as in the cases of Dante and Longinus, no pair of treatises, as in
the case of Aristotle, to go upon. But in the four great docu-
| ments of The Rambler, Rasselas, the Shakespeare Preface, and
the Lives, we see it in the two first rigid, péremptory, in the
Preface, curiously and representatively uncertain, in the last
conditioned by differences which allow it somewhat freer play,
and at some times making a few concessions, but at others more
pugnacious and arbitrary than before.
The critical element in The Rambler is necessarily large; but
a great deal of it is general and out of our way.' Directly con-
The Rambler cerning us are the papers on the aspects (chiefly
on Milton. formal) of Milton's poetry-especially versification
--on which Addison had not spoken, with some smaller papers
on lesser subjects. The Miltonic examen begins at No. 86.
Johnson is as uncompromising as the great Bysshe himself on
the nature of English prosody. “The heroick measures of the
English language may be properly considered as pure or mixed.”
They are pure when“ the accent rests on every second syllable
through the whole line." In other words, “purity” is refused
to anything but the strict iambic decasyllable. Nay, he goes
further; this is not only “purity” and “the completest harmony
possible," but it ought to be “exactly kept in distichs” and in
the last line of a (verse) paragraph.
Nevertheless, for variety's sake, the “mixed” measure is
allowed; “though it always injures the harmony of the line
considered by itself," it makes us appreciate the “harmonious"
lines better. And we soon perceive that even this exceedingly
ZULU
tery, his religiosity, his strong passions,
his tendency to violence in taste and
opinions -- were all rather Romantic
than Classical.
i The Allegory on Criticism (daughter
of Labour and Truth, who gives up her
task to Time, but is temporarily person-
ated by Flattery and Malevolence) in
No. 3 almost speaks itself in the paren-
thetical description just given. Cf. also
4, on Ancient and Modern Romances ;
22, another Allegory on Wit and Learn-
ing; 23, on the Contrariety of Criti.
cism; and 36, 37, on “Pastoral
Poetry.”
214
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
grudging, and in strictness illogical, licence is limited merely to
substitution of other dissyllabic feet for the pure iamb. In :
“Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood,
Both turned,"
the rigid Johnson insists on the spondaic character, “ the accent
is on two syllables together and both strong”; while he would
seem to regard “And when," in the line
“And when we seek as now the gift of sleep,"
as a pyrrhic (“ both syllables are weak”). A trochee (“ deviation,
or inversion of accent”) is allowed as a “mixture” in the first
place, but elsewhere is "remarkably inharmonious," as, for
instance, in Cowley's beautiful line,
“And the soft wings of peace cover him round."
The next paper (88) passes, after touching other matters, to
“elision,” by which he means (evidently not even taking tri-
syllabic possibility into consideration such a case as
“Wisdom to folly as nourishment to wind."
This licence, he says, is now disused in English poetry; and adds
some severe remarks on those who would revive or commend it.
He even objects to the redundant ending in heroic poetry.
In the third paper (90) he comes to Pauses; and once more
plays the rigour of the game. The English poet, in connecting
one line with another, is never to make a full pause at less than
three syllables from the beginning or end of a verse; and in all
lines pause at the fourth or sixth syllable is best. He gives a
whole paper to Milton's accommodation of the sound to the
sense, and winds up his Miltonic exercitations, after a very
considerable interval, with a set critique (139) of Samson
Agonistes, partly on its general character as an Aristotelian
tragedy (he decides that it has a beginning and end, but no
middle, poor thing!) and partly on details. These papers
show no animus against Milton. There are even expressions
of admiration for him, which may be called enthusiastic.
- But they do show that the critic was not in range with his
JOHNSON.
215
author. Almost every one of his axioms and postulates is
questionable.
Of the remaining critical papers in the Rambler it is very
important to notice No. 121, “On the Dangers of Imitation, and
On Spenser.
the Impropriety of imitating Spenser.” Johnson's
“ acuteness was not at fault in distrusting, from his
point of view, the consequences of such things as the Castle of
Indolence or even the Schoolmistress ; and he addresses a direct
rebuke to "the men of learning and genius” who have intro-
duced the fashion. In so far as his condemnation of “echoes”
goes he is undoubtedly not wrong, and he speaks of the idol of
Neo-Classicism, Virgil, with an irreverent parrhesia? which, like
many other things in him, shows his true critical power. But
on Spenser himself the other idols—the idola specus rather than
fori-blind him. In following his namesake in the condemna-
tion of Spenser's language he is, we may think, wrong; yet this
at least is an arguable point. But in regard to the Spenserian
istanza things are different. Johnson calls it “at once difficult
and unpleasing; tiresome to the ear from its uniformity, and to
the attention by its length,” while he subsequently goes off into
the usual error about imitating the Italians. No truce is here
possible. That the Spenserian is not easy may be granted at
once, but Johnson was certainly scholar enough to anticipate
the riposte that, not here only, it is “hard to be good.” As
for “unpleasing," so much the worse for the ear which is not
pleased by the most exquisite harmonic symphony in the long
and glorious list of stanza-combinations. As for monotony, it is
just as monotonous as flowing water. While as for the Italian
parallel, nothing can probably be more to the glory of Spenser
than this; just as nothing can be more different than the pretty,
but cloying, rhyme even of Tasso, nay, sometimes even of Ariosto,
and the endless unlaboured beauty of Spenser's rhyme-sound.
1
1 He was no doubt thinking also of
Gilbert West, in his Life of whom he in-
troduces a caveat against West's Imita-
tions of Spenser as “successful” indeed
and “amusing,” but “only pretty."
2 “The warmest admirers of the
great Mantuan poet can extol him for
little more than the skill with which
he has ... upited the beauties of the
riad and Odyssey," and he adds a
longish exposure of the way in which
Virgil, determined to imitate at all
costs, has put in his borrowed matter
without regard to keeping.
216
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
It is no valid retort that this is simply a difference of taste. If
a man, as some men have done, says that Spenser is pleasing
and Dryden and Pope are not, then the retort is valid. When
the position is taken that both rhythms are pleasing, both really
poetical, but poetical in a different way, the defender of it may
laugh at all assailants.
The criticism of the English historians which immediately
follows has an interest chiefly of curiosity, because it was written
On History just at the opening of the great age of the department
and Letter- with which it deals. Prejudices of different kinds
muing would always have prevented Johnson from doing
full justice to Robertson, to Hume, and, most of all, to Gibbon;
but, as it is, he deals with nobody later than Clarendon, and
merely throws back to Raleigh and Knolles. Very much the
same drawback attends the criticism on Epistolary writing: for
here also it was the lot of Johnson's own contemporaries, in
work mostly not written, and hardly in a single case published,
at the date of the Rambler, to remove the reproach of England.
But the paper on Tragi-Comedy (156) is much more important.
For here, as in other places, we see that Johnson, but for the
combination of influences above referred to, might have taken
On Tragi- high, if not the highest, degrees in a very different
comedy. school of criticism. He puts the great rule Nec
quarta loqui into the dustbin, with a nonchalance exhibiting
some slight shortness of sight; for the very argument he uses
will sweep with this a good many other rules to which he still
adheres. “We violate it,” he says coolly," without scruple and
without inconvenience.” He is equally iconoclastic about the
Five Acts, about the Unity of Time, while he blows rather hot
and cold about tragi-comedy in the sense of the mixing of
tragic and comic scenes. But the close of the paper is the most
remarkable, for it is in effect the death-knell of the neo-classic
system, sounded by its last really great prophet. “It ought to
be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from
custom, or that which is established because it is right from that
which is right only because it is established ; that he may neither
violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself
from the attainment of beauties within his view by a needless fear
JOHNSON.
217
11
of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to
enact.”
"Oh! the lands of Milnwood, the bonny lands of Milnwood,
that have been in the name of Morton twa hundred years; they
are barking and fleeing, infield and outfield, haugh and holme!”
With this utterance, this single utterance, all the ruling doctrines
of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century criticism re-
ceive notice to quit.1
The well-known “Dick Minim” papers in the Idler (60, 61)
are excellent fun, and perhaps Johnson's chief accomplishment
“ Dick in the direction of humour. The growth of criticism
Minim.” in Dick, his gradual proficiency in all the critical
commonplaces of his day (it is to be observed that Johnson, like
all true humourists, does not spare himself, and makes one of
Minim's secrets de Polichinelle a censure of Spenser's stanza), his
addiction to Johnson's pet aversion, “suiting the sound to
( the sense,” and his idolatry of Milton, are all capitally done.
Indeed, like all good caricatures, the piece is a standing piece
to consult for the fashions and creeds which it caricatures. But
it neither contains nor suggests any points of critical doctrine
that we cannot find elsewhere, and it is only indirectly serious.2
The Dissertation upon Poetry of Imlac in Rasselas (chap. x.)
may be less amusing; but it is of course much more serious.
There can be no reasonable doubt that Imlac gives
Rasselas.
case as much of Johnson's self as he chose to put, and could
put, in character: while it is at least possible that his senti-
ments are determined in some degree by the menacing appear-
ances of Romanticism. Imlac finds “with wonder that in almost
all countries the most ancient poets are reputed the best”; that
"early writers are in possession of nature and their successors
of art”; that "no man was ever great by imitation”; that he
must observe everything and observe for himself, but that he
i The chief remaining critical loci in
the Rambler are the unlucky strictures
in No. 168 on “dun," "knife," and
“blanket" in Macbeth as “low”; and
the remarks on unfriendly criticism in
176.
2 There are, of course, other passages
in the Idler touching on Criticism,
59 on the Causes of Neglect of Books,
68, 69 on Translation, 77 on “Essay
Writing,'' 85 on Compilations. But
they contain nothing of exceptional
importance.
218
.
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
must do it on the principle of examining,“ not the individual,
but the species." He is to remark “general properties and
large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the
tulip or describe the different shapes in the verdure of the
forest,” but must “exhibit prominent and striking features,”
neglecting “minuter discriminations.” In the same way his
criticism of life must be abstracted and generalised; he must be
f" a being superior to time and place”; must know many
languages and sciences; must by incessant practice of style
'“ familiarise to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of
harmony."
Surely a high calling and election ! yet with some question-
able points in it. If the poet must not count the streaks of the
tulip, if he must merely generalise and sweep; if he must con-
sult the laziness and dulness of his readers by merely portraying
prominent and striking features, characteristics alike obvious to
vigilance and carelessness—then even Dryden will not do, for
he is too recondite and conceited. Pope alone must bear the
bell. Lady Winchelsea's horse in twilight, the best part of a
century earlier; Tennyson's ashbuds in the front of March, the
best part of a century later, are equally “streaks of the tulip,”
superfluous if not even bad. Habington's picture of the pitiless
northern sunshine on the ice-bound pilot, and Keats's of the
perilous seas through the magic casements, must be rejected,
as too unfamiliar and individual. The poetic strangeness and
height are barred en bloc. Convention, familiarity, generalisa-
I tion-these are the keys to the poetical kingdom of heaven.
The tenant of Milnwood has a fresh enfeoffment!
The Shakespeare Preface is a specially interesting document,
because of its illustration, not merely of Johnson's native
The critical vigour, not merely of his imbibed eighteenth-
Shakespeare century prejudices, but of that peculiar position of
Preface. compromise and reservation which, as we have said
and shall say, is at once the condemnation and the salvation
of the English critical position at this time. Of the first there
are many instances, though perhaps none in the Preface itself
quite equal to the famous note on the character of Polonius,
which has been generally and justly taken as showing what
JOHNSON. .
219
a triumph this failure of an edition might have been. Yet.
even here there is not a little which follows in the wake of
Dryden's great eulogy, and some scattered observations of
the highest acuteness, more particularly two famous sentences
which, though Johnson's quotation is directed to a minor
matter--Shakespeare's learning-settle beforehand, with the
prophetic tendency of genius, the whole monstrous absurdity
of the Bacon-Shakespeare theory." The rest, however, is, if not
exactly a zigzag of contradiction, at least the contrasted utter-
| ance of two distinct voices. Shakespeare has this and that
merit of nature, of passion; but“ his set speeches are commonly
cold and weak.” “What he does best he soon ceases to do."
Johnson, here also, has no superstitious reverence for the
Unities, and even speaks slightly of dramatic rules; nay, he
suggests “the recall of the principles of the drama to a new
examination,” the very examination whịch Lessing was to give
it. But he apologises for the period when “ The Death of
Arthur was the favourite volume," and hints a doubt whether
much of our and his own praise of Shakespeare is not "given
by custom and veneration." "He has corrupted language by
every mode of depravation," yet Johnson echoes Dryden “when
he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too."
A singular triumph of “ depraved language.” In short, through-
out the piece it is now Johnson himself who is speaking, now
some one with a certain bundle of principles or prejudices
which Johnson chooses to adopt for the time.
It was with these opinions on the formal and substantial
nature of poetry and of criticism that Johnson, late in life, sat
The Lives of down to the Lives of the Poets, one of the most
the Poets. fortunate books in English literature. In very few
cases have task and artist been so happily associated. For
LU
1"Jonson, ... who besides that
he had no imaginable temptation to
falsehood, wrote at a time when the
character and acquisitions of Shake-
speare were known to multitudes. His
evidence ought therefore to decide the
controversy, unless some testimony of
equal force could be opposed.”
2 With Johnson, as with others, I do
not specify editions. I must, however,
mention Mr J. H. Millar's issue of the
Lives (London, 1896) for the sake of
the excellent Introduction. Loci Critici
contains a selection of remarkable passe
ages from the other works.
220
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
almost all his authors, he had biographical knowledge such as
no other living man had, and the access to which has long been
closed. If, now and then, his criticism was not in touch with
his subjects, this was rare: and the fact gave a certain value
even to the assertions that result-for we, do what we will,
cannot see Milton quite as Johnson saw him, and so his view is
valuable as a corrective. By far the greater part of these
subjects belonged to one school and system of English poetry, a
school and system with which the critic was at once thoroughly
familiar and thoroughly in sympathy. And, lastly, the form of
the work, with its subdivision into a large number of practically
independent and not individually burdensome sections, was well
suited to coax a man who suffered from constitutional indolence,
and who for many years had been relieved from that pressure
of necessity which had conquered his indolence occasionally,
and only occasionally, earlier. No other man, it is true, has
had quite such a chance: but he must indeed have a sublime
confidence, both in the strength of his principles and in the
competence of his talents, who thinks that, if he had the chance,
he could do the task better than Johnson did his.
The work, of course, is by no means equal throughout: and it
could not be expected to be. Some was merely old stuff,
Their gen- dating from a much less mature period of the writer's
eral merits. genius, and made to serve again. Some was on
subjects so trivial that good nature, or simple indolence, or, if any
one pleases, an artistic reluctance to break butterflies on so huge
a wheel, made the criticisms almost as insignificant as the
criticised. Here and there extra-literary prejudice--political-
ecclesiastical, as in the case of Milton; partly moral, partly
religious, and, it is to be feared, a little personal, as in that of
Swiftdistorted the presentation. And it is quite possible that
a similar distortion, due to the same causes or others, was in the
case of Gray intensified by a half-unconscious conviction that
Gray's aims and spirit, if not his actual poetical accomplish-
ments, were fatal to the school of poetry to which the critic
himself held.
But make allowance for all this, and with how great a thing
do the Lives still provide us! In that combination of biography
1
JOHNSON
221
VA
and criticism, which is so natural that it is wonderful it should
be soʻlate, they are all but the originals, and are still almost the .:-
standard. They are full of anecdote, agreeably and crisply
told, yet they never descend to mere gossip: their criticism of
life is almost always just and sound, grave without being
precise, animated by the same melancholy as that of the
Vanity of Human Wishes, but in milder mood and with touches
of brightness. Their criticism of literature is all the more
valuable for being the criticism of their time. When we read
Johnson's remarks on Milton's minor poems it is foolish to rave,
and it is ignoble to sneer. The wise will rejoice in the oppor-
tunity to understand. So when Johnson bestows what seems to
us extraordinary and unintelligible praise on John Pomfret's
Choice, he is really praising a moral tract couched in verse not
unpleasing in itself, and specially pleasing to his ear. When he
speaks less favourably of Grongar Hill, he is speaking of a piece
of nature-poetry, not arranged on his principle of neglecting
the streak of the tulip, and availing itself of those Miltonic
licences of prosody which he disapproved. But we shall never
find that, when the poetry is of the stamp which he recognises,
he makes any mistake about its relative excellence : -and we
shall find that, in not a few cases, he is able to recognise excel-
lence which belongs to classes and schools not exactly such as
he approves. And, lastly, it has to be added that for diffused
brilliancy of critical expression, subject to the allowances and
conditions just given, the Lives are hardly to be excelled in any
language. It is not safe to neglect one of them, though no
doubt there are some six or seven which, for this reason or that,
take precedence of the rest.
The “ Cowley” has especial interest, because it is Johnson's
1. There are blind attempts at it even
in antiquity ; but Dryden's Lives of
Lucian and Plutarch are, like other
things of his elsewhere, the real
originals here.
2 Let me draw special attention to
“ John.” I once, unwittingly, or care-
lessly, called him "Thomas," and I am
afraid that I even neglected to correct
the error in a second edition of the
guilty book. A man who writes-
“ Thomas” for “John," in the case of
a minor poet, can, I am aware, possess
no virtues, and must expect no pardon.
But I shall always henceforth remember
to call him "Pomfret, Mr John."
“Let this expiate," as was remarked in
another case of perhaps not less mortal
sin.
222
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
The
only considerable attempt at that very important part of
criticism, the historical summary of the character-
% istics of a poetical period or school. And, though far
from faultless, it is so important and so interesting in its kind
that it ranks with his greatest Essays. Only that singular
impatience of literary history, as such, which characterised the
late Mr Matthew Arnold, and which not infrequently marred
his own critical work, can have prevented him from including,
in his Johnsonian points de repère, the Essay which launched,
and endeavoured to make watertight, the famous definition
of the “Metaphysical” School of the school represented
earlier by Donne, and later by Cowley himself.
The phrase itself has been both too readily adopted and too
indiscriminately attacked. Taken with the ordinary meaning
of “metaphysical,” it may indeed seem partly meaningless and
partly misleading. Taken as Johnson meant it, it has a mean-
ing defensible at least from the point of view of the framer, and
very important in critical history. Johnson (it is too often
forgotten) was a scholar; and he used “ metaphysical” in its
(proper sense of that which “comes after” the physical or
natural. Now, it was, as we have seen, the whole cardinal
principle of his school of criticism that they were “ following
(nature" by imitating it. The main objection to the poetry of
what Dryden calls the “last Age"--what we call, loosely but
conveniently, “Elizabethan" poetry—was that its ideas, and still
more its expressions, went beyond and behind nature, substi-
tuted afterthoughts and unreal refinements for fact. It would
be delightful to the present writer to defend the Metaphysicals
here—but it would not be to the question.
Political and religious prejudice accounts, as has been said,
for much in the Milton. But it will not fully account for the
The Milton
facts. The at first sight astonishing, and already
gften referred to, criticisms on the minor poems show
a perfectly honest and genuine dislike to the form as well as
to the matter, to the manner as well as to the man. If Johnson

1 It was of course probably suggested
by Dryden (Essuy on Satire, “ Donne
, , affects the metaphysics”), but in
Johnson's hands is much altered and
extended.
JOHNSON.
223
calls Lycidas “ harsh,” it is because he simply does not hear its
music; he can even call the songs in Comus “not very musical
in their numbers.” When of the, no doubt unequal but often
splendid, sonnets he can write,“ of the best it can only be said
that they are not bad,” he gives us the real value of his criticism
immediately afterwards by laying it down that“ the fabric of a
sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never suc-
ceeded in ours.” And when he has earlier stated that “all that
short compositions can commonly attain is sweetness and ele-
gance,” we see in this the whole thing. Milton is condemned
under statute (though the statute is hopelessly unconstitutional
and unjust) on certain counts; on others his judge, though cap-
able and perfectly honest, does not know the part of the code
which justifies the accused. Johnson is listening for couplet-
music, or for stanzas with regular recurrence of rhyme, for lines
constituted entirely on a dissyllabic, or entirely on a trisyllabic,
basis. He does not find these things: and he has no organ
to judge what he does find.
With the lives of Dryden and Pope we are clear of all diffi-
culties, and the critic is in his element. The poets whom he is
The Dryden criticising occupy the same platform as he does; they
and Pope. have in fact been themselves the architects of that
platform. There is no fear of the initial incompatibilities which,
when aggravated by accident, lead to the apparent enormities of
the Milton Essay, and which, even when not so aggravated, con-
dition the usefulness, though they may positively increase the
interest, of the Cowley. But there is more than this. In no
instance, perhaps, was Johnson so well in case to apply his
biographical and critical treatment as in regard to Dryden
and Pope. With the latter he had himself been contempor-
ary; and when he first came to London the traditions even
of the former were still fresh, while there were many still living
(Southerne the chief of them) who had known glorious John well.
Further, Johnson's peculiar habits of living, his delight in con-
versation and society, his excellent memory, and his propensity
to the study of human nature, as well as of letters, furnished
him abundantly with opportunities. Yet, again, his sympathy
with both, on general literary sides, was not unhappily mixed
224
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
and tempered by a slight, but not uncharitable or Puritanic,
disapproval of their moral characters, by regret at Dryden's
desertion of the Anglican Church, and at the half-Romanist,
half-freethinking, attitude of Pope to religion.
The result of all this is a pair of the best critical Essays in
the English language. Individual expressions will of course
renew for us the sense of difference in the point of view. We
shall not agree that Dryden “ found English poetry brick and
left it marble,” and we shall be only too apt to take up the
challenge, “ If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found ?”
even if we think the implied denial, to which the challenge was
a reply, an absurdity. And we may find special interest as well
as special difference in the condemnation even of these masters
for attempting Pindarics, because Pindarics “ want the essential
constituent of metrical compositions, the stated recurrence of
settled numbers,” seeing in it a fresh instance of that Pro-
crustean tyranny of suiting the form to the bed, not the bed to
the form, which distinguishes all neo-classic criticism. But
these points occur rarely. The criticism, as a whole, is not
merely perfectly just on its own scheme, but requires very little
allowance on others; nor, in the difficult and dangerous art of
comparative censorship, will any example be found much sur-
passing Johnson's parallel of the two poets.
In the Milton and the Cowley we find Johnson dealing with
schools of poetry which he regards as out of date and imper-
The Collins fect; in the Dryden and the Pope, with subjects
and Gray. which are not to him subjects of any general con-
troversy, but which he can afford to treat almost entirely on
their merits. In the Collins and the Gray we find a new re-
lation between poet and critic—the relation of decided, though
not yet wholly declared, innovation on the part of the poets,
and of conscious, though not yet quite wide-eyed and irrecon-
cilable, hostility on the part of the critic. The expression of
this is further differentiated by the fact that Johnson regarded
Collins with the affection of a personal friend, and the gener-
ous sympathy of one who, with all his roughness, had a mind
as nearly touched by mortal sorrows as that of any senti.
mentalist; while it is pretty clear, though we have no positive
JOHNSON.
225
evidence for it, that he reciprocated the personal and political
dislike which Gray certainly felt for him.
The result was, in the case of Collins, a criticism rather in-
adequate than unjust, and not seldom acute in its indication of
faults, if somewhat blind to merits; in that of Gray, one which
cannot be quite so favourably spoken of, though the censure
which has been heaped upon it-notably by Lord Macaulay
and Mr Arnold-seems to me very far to surpass its own in-
justice. Johnson's general summing up—that Gray's "mind had
a large grasp; his curiosity i was unlimited, and his judgment
cultivated; he was likely to love much where he loved at all,
but fastidious and hard to please "—is acute, just, and far from
lungenerous. That on the Elegy—“The four stanzas beginning,
Yet even these bones,' are to me original; I have never seen
the notions in any other place. Yet he that reads them here
persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray
written often thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to
praise him”—is a magnificent and monumental compliment, said
as simply as “Good morning.” He is absolutely right when he
says that in all Gray's Odes “there is a kind of cumbrous splen-
dour that we wish away,” for there never was such an abuser of
“poetic diction” (to be a poet) as Gray was. Yet undoubtedly
the Essay is not satisfactory; it has not merely, as the Collins
has, blindness, but, what the Collins has not, that obvious deni-
gration, that determination to pick holes, which always vitiates
a critique, no matter what learning and genius be bestowed on it.
And the probable reasons of this are interesting. It has been
said that they were possibly personal in part. We know that
Gray spoke rudely of Johnson; and there were many reasons
why Johnson might rather despise Gray, though he certainly
should not have called him “dull.”
On the whole, however, I have little doubt-and it is this
which gives the essay its real interest for me--that one main
reason of Johnson's antipathy to Gray's poetry was the same as
ļ that for which we like it. He suspected, if he did not fully
perceive, the romantic snake in Gray's classically waving grass.
i It must be remembered that this with Johnson. It meant intelligent
word had no unfavourable connotation and scholarly interest.
226
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
And he had on his own grounds good reason for suspecting it.
| Gray might use Greek and Latin tags almost extravagantly.
But he sedulously eschewed the couplet; and, while preferring
lyric, he chose lyrical forms which, though Johnson was too
much of a scholar to dare to call them irregular, violated his
own theories of the prompt and orderly recurrence of rhyme;
and the duty of maintaining a length of line as even as possible,
The sense of nature, the love of the despised “prospect," was
everywhere; even the forbidden “streak of the tulip” might be
detected. And, lastly, Gray had too obvious leanings to classes
of subject and literature which lay outside of the consecrated
range-early English and French, Welsh, Norse, and the like.
It is no real evidence of critical incapacity, but of something
quite the reverse, that Johnson should have disliked Gray. He
spied the great Romantic beard under the Pindaric and Horatian
muffler--and he did not like it.
On the whole, it may be safely said that, however widely a
man may differ from Johnson's critical theory, he will, provided
The critical that he possesses some real tincture of the critical
greatness of spirit himself, think more and more highly of the
the Lives
Lives of the Poets the more he reads them, and the
Johnson. more he compares them with the greater classics of
critical literature. As a book, they have not missed their due
meed of praise; as a critical book, one may think that they have.
The peculiarity of their position as a body of direct critical
appraisement of the poetical work of England for a long period
should escape no one. But the discussion of them, which
possesses, and is long likely to possess, prerogative authority as
coming from one who was both himself a master of the craft
and a master of English, admirable and delightful as it is and
always will be, is not, critically speaking, quite satisfactory.
Mr Arnold speaks of the Six Lives which he selected in very
high terms: but he rather pooh-poohs the others, and, even in
regard to the chosen Six, he puts upon himself—and in his
amiable, but for all that exceedingly peremptory, way, insists
in putting on his readers—a huge pair of blinkers. We are to
regard the late seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth
century as an Age of Prose: and we are to regard Johason,
U
JOHNSON.
227
whether he was speaking of the poets of this age or of others, as
the spokesman of an age of prose. Far be it from me to deny
that there is an element of truth in this : but it is not the whole
truth, and the critic must strive, though he may not boast, to
“find the whole."
The whole truth, as it seems to me, about Johnson is that he
was very much more than the critic of an age of prose, though
he was not (who has been ? even Longinus ? even Coleridge ?)
. “The King who ruled, as he thought fit,
The universal monarchy of wit"
pas regards poetic criticism. He saw far beyond prose,, as in
those few words of the concluding and reconciling eulogy of
Gray which have been quoted above. It is poetry and not prose
which has the gift of putting new things so that the man who
reads them ingenuously thinks that they are merely a neat state-
ment of what he has always thought. And Johnson was far
more than merely a critic of the eighteenth-century Neo-Classic
theory, though he was this. A most noteworthy passage in the
Rambler (No. 156), which I have purposely kept for comment
in this place, though it is delivered on the wrong side, shows us,
as the great critics always do show us, what a range of sight
the writer had. In this he expresses a doubt whether we ought
“to judge genius merely by the event," and, applying this to
Shakespeare, takes the odd, but for an eighteenth-century critic
most tell-tale and interesting, line that if genius succeeds by
means which are wrong according to rule, we may think higher
of the genius but less highly of the work. It is hardly neces-
sary to point out that this is, though in no way a discreditable,
a transparent evasion of the difficulty which is pressing on the
defenders of the Rules. "Show me,” one may without irrever-
ence retort, “thy genius without thy works; and I will show
thee my genius by my works.” If Shakespeare shows genius in
neglecting the Rules, the inexorable voice of Logic, greater than
Fortune, greater than all other things save Fate, will point out
that the Rules are evidently not necessary, and, with something
like the Lucretian Te sequar, will add, “ Then for what are they
necessary ?" But Johnson's power is only a little soured and
228
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
not at all quenched by this. He has seen what others refused
-perhaps were unable to see, and what some flatly denied -
that a process of literary judgment " by the event” is pos-
sible, and that its verdicts, in some respects at any rate, cannot
be challenged or reversed. These great critical aperçus, though
sometimes delivered half unwillingly or on the wrong side,
establish Johnson's claim to a place not often to be given to
critics; but they do not establish it more certainly than his
surveys of his actual subjects. It was an unfortunate con-
sequence of Mr Arnold's generous impatience of all but “the
chief and principal things," and of his curious dislike to literary
history as such, that he should have swept away the minor
Lives. One may not care for Stepney or Yalden, Duke or
King, much more, or at all more, than he did. But with a
really great member of the craft his admissions and omis-
sions, his paradoxes, his extravagances, his very mistakes
pure and simple, are all critically edifying. How does he
apply his own critical theory? is what we must ask: and,
with Johnson, I think we shall never ask it in vain.
His idea of English poetry was the application to certain
classes of subjects, not rigidly limited to, but mainly arranged
by, the canons of the classical writers of what seemed to him
and his generation the supreme form of English language and
metre, brought in by Mr Waller and perfected by Mr Pope, yet
not so as to exclude from admiration the Allegro of
Milton and the Elegy of Gray. We may trace his applica-
tions of this, if we have a real love of literature and
a real sense of criticism, nearly as profitably and pleas-
antly in relation to John Pomfret as in relation to Alex-
ander Pope. We may trace his failures (as we are pleased,
quite rightly in a way, to call them), the failures arising from
the inadequacy, not of his genius, but of his scheme, not less
agreeably in relation to Dyer than in relation to Dryden. We
are not less informed by his passing the Castle of Indolence
almost sub silentio than we are by that at first sight astounding
criticism of Lycidas. This Cæsar never does wrong but with
just cause — to use the phrase which was too much for the
equanimity or the intelligence of his great namesake Ben,
CD
JOHNSON.
229
in the work of one whom both admired yet could not quite
stomach.
Now, this it is which makes the greatness of a critic. That
Johnson might have been greater still at other times need not
necessarily be denied; though it is at least open to doubt
whether any other time would have suited his whole disposition
better. But, as he is, he is great. The critics who deserve that
name are not those who, like, for instance, Christopher North
and Mr Ruskin, are at the mercy of different kinds of caprice-
with whom you must be always on the qui vive to be certain
what particular watchword they have adopted, what special
side they are taking. It may even be doubted whether such a
critic as Lamb, though infinitely delightful, is exactly “great"
because of the singular gaps and arbitrariness of his likes and
dislikes. Nay, Hazlitt, one of the greatest critics of the world
on the whole, goes' near to forfeit his right to the title by the
occasional outbursts of almost insane prejudice that cloud his
vision. Johnson is quite as prejudiced; but his prejudice is
not in the least insane. His critical calculus is perfectly sound
on its own postulates and axioms; and you have only to apply
checks and correctives (which are easily ascertained, and kept
ready) to adjust it to absolute critical truth. And, what is
more, he has not merely flourished and vapoured critical abstrac-
tions, but has left us a solid reasoned body of critical judgment;
he has not judged literature in the exhausted receiver of mere
art, and yet has never neglected the artistic criterion; he has
kept in constant touch with life, and yet has never descended
ſto mere gossip. We may freely disagree with his judgments,
but we can never justly disable his judgment; and this is the
real criterion of a great critic.
Johnson is so much the eighteenth-century orthodox critic in
quintessence (though, as I have tried to show, in transcendence
also) that he will dispense us from saying very much
Criticism: more about the rank and file, the ordinary or inferior
Periodical examples, of the kind. If we were able to devote
and other.
the whole space of this volume to the subject of the
present chapter, there would be no lack of material. Critical
exercitations of a kind formed now, of course, a regular part of
Minor
also) that he
230
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
the work of literature, and a very large part of its hack-work.
The Gentleman's Magazine devoted much attention to the sub-
ject; and for a great part of the century two regular Reviews,
the Critical and the Monthly,' were recognised organs of literary
censorship, and employed some really eminent hands, notably
Smollett and Goldsmith. The periodicals which, now in single
spies, now (about the middle of the century) in battalions, en-
deavoured to renew the success of the Tatler and Spectator, were
critical by kind; and dozens, scores, hundreds probably, of sepa-
rate critical publications, large and small, issued from the press.2
But, with the rarest exceptions, they must take the non-benefit
of the old warning—they must merely “be heard by their fore-
man.". Something we must say of Goldsmith; then we may
take two contrasted examples, Knox and Scott of Amwell, of
the critic in Johnson's last days who inclined undoubtingly to
the classical, and of the critic of the same time who had qualms
and stirrings of Romanticism, but was hardly yet a heretic.
And then, reserving summary, we may close the record.
i Johnson's relative estimates of the
two (Boswell, Globe ed., pp. 186, 364)
are well known; as is his apology for
the Critical Reviewers' habit ſhe had
been one himself] of not reading the
books through, as the “duller" Monthly
fellows were glad to do. Later genera-
tions have perhaps contrived to be dull
and not to read.
2 For instance, here is one which I
have hunted for years—Essay on the
New Species of Writing founded by
Fielding, with a word or two on Modern
Criticism (London ? 1751). The better
known Canons of Criticism of Thomas
Edwards (4th ed., London, 1750) may
serve as a specimen of another kind.
It is an attack on Warburton's Shake-
speare, uncommonly shrewd in all senses
of the word, but, as Johnson (Boswell,
Globe ed., p. 87 note) justly enough
said, of the gad-fly kind mainly. A
curious little book, which I do not
remember to have seen cited anywhere,
is the Essay upon Poetry and Painting
of Charles Lamotte (Dudlin (sic), 1742).
La Motte, who was an F.S.A., a D.D.,
and chaplain to the Duke of Montagu,
but who has the rare misfortune of
not appearing in the Dict. Nat. Biog.,
never refers to his French namesake,
but quotes Voltaire and Du Bos fre-
quently. He is very anxious for "pro-
priety” in all senses, and seems a little
more interested in Painting than in
Poetry. As to the latter, he is a good
example of the devouring appetite for
sense and fact which had seized on the
critics of this time (save a few rebels)
throughout Europe. The improbabil-
ities of Tasso and of “Camoenus, the
Homer and Virgil of the Portuguese,"
aflict him more, because they amuse
him less, than they do in Voltaire's own
case, and to any liberty with real or
supposed history he is simply Rhada-
manthine. “That which jars with
probability--that which shocks Sense
and Reason-can never be excused in
Poetry.” Mrs Barbauld and The An-
cient Mariner sixty years before date :
Dennis after Dennis's death!
GOLDSMITH.
231
Of Goldsmith as a critic little need be said, though his pen
was not much less prolific in this than in other departments.
But the angel is too often absent, and Poor Poll dis-
Goldsmith.
* tressingly in evidence. The Inquiry into the Present
State of Polite Learning in Europe is simply " prodigious.” It is
admirably written-Macaulay owes something to its style, which
he only hardened and brazened. The author apes the fashion-
able philosophastering of the time, and throws in cheap sciolism
like the prince of journalists that he was. It is almost always
interesting; it is, where it touches life, not literature, sometimes
excellently acute; but there is scarcely a critical dictum in it
which is other than ridiculous. So in the Citizen of the World
the Author's Club is of course delightful; but why should a
sneer at Drayton have been put in the mouth of Lien Chi
Altangi? And the miscellaneous Essays, including the Bee,
which contain so much of Goldsmith's best work, are perhaps
the best evidences of his nullity here. When one thinks how
little it would cost anybody of Goldsmith's genius (to find such
an one I confess would cost more) to write a literary parallel to
the magnificent Reverie, which would be even finer, it is enough
to draw iron tears down the critic's cheek. Goldsmith on Taste,
Poetry, Metaphor, &c., is still the Goldsmith of the Inquiry.
His “ Account of the Augustan Age,” 2 though much better, and
(unless I mistake) resorted to by some recent critics as a source
of criticism different from that mostly prevalent in the nine-
teenth century, has all the limitations of its own period. And
the Essay on Versification, though it contains expressions
which, taken by themselves, might seem to show that Gold-
smith had actually emancipated himself from the tyranny of
the fixed number of syllables, contains others totally irreconcil-
able with these, supports English hexameters and sapphics,4 and
as a whole forces on us once more the reluctant belief that
he simply had no clear ideas, no accurate knowledge, on the
subject.
1 Essays, xii.-xvii.
and others, was a blind motion for
2 The Bee, viii.
freedom. Yet Goldsmith commits him-
8 Essay xviii.
self to the hemistich theory of deca-
4 It is perhaps only fair to hope syllables.
that this fancy, as later with Southey
232
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
1.1
Vicesimus Knox 1 is a useful figure in this critical Transition
Period. A scholar and a schoolmaster, he had some of the
Vicesimus advantages of the first state and some of the defects
Knox. of the less gracious second, accentuated in both cases
by the dying influences of a “classical” tradition which had
not the slightest idea that it was moribund. He carries his
admiration for Pope to such a point as to assure us somewhere
that Pope was a man of exemplary piety and goodness, while
Gay was “uncontaminated with the vices of the world,” which
is really more than somewhat blind, and more than a little
kind, even if we admit that it is wrong to call Pope a bad man,
and that Gay had only tolerable vices. He thinks, in his Four-
teenth Essay on the "Fluctuations of Taste," that the Augustans.
arrived at that standard of perfection which,” &c.; that the
imitators of Ariosto, Spenser, and the smaller poems of Milton
are "pleasingly uncouth” [compare Scott, infra, on the metrical
renaissance of Dyer], depreciates Gray, and dismisses the Elegy
as “a confused heap of splendid ideas ”; is certain that Milton's
sonnets“ bear no mark of his genius," and in discussing the
versions of “the sensible ? Sappho” decides that Catullus is
much inferior to — Philips ! “The Old English Poets [Essay
Thirty-Nine] are deservedly forgotten.” Chaucer, Gower, Lyd-
gate, and Occleve “seem to have thought that rhyme was
poetry, and even this constituent they applied with extreme
negligence ” — the one charge which is unfair against even
Occleve, and which, in reference to Chaucer, is proof of utter
ignorance. Patriotism probably made him more favourable to
Dunbar, Douglas, and Lyndsay, though he groans over the
necessity of a glossary in their case also. In fact, Knox is but
a Johnson without the genius. Let it, however, be counted to
him for righteousness that he defended classical education, in-
cluding verse - writing, against its enemies, who even then
imagined vain things..
John Scott of Amwell, once praised by good wits, now much
forgotten, was a very respectable critic and a poet of “glimmer-
i Essays, Moral and Literary, 2nd
ed., London, 1774, 8vo.
2 This is perhaps the most delightful
instance in (English) existence of the
change which has come over the wean.
ing of the word.
-
-
SCOTT OF AMWELL.
233
ings.” In fact, I am not at all sure that he does not deserve
Scott oj to be promoted and postponed to the next chapter,
Amwell. as a representative of the rising, not the falling, tide.
His Essays on poetry i exhibit in a most interesting way the
“know-not-what-to-think-of-it” state of public opinion about
the later years of Johnson. He defends Lycidas against the
Dictator; yet he finds fault with the “daystar” for acting both
as a person and an orb of radiance, and admits the “incorrect-
ness” of the poem, without giving us a hint of the nature or
authority of “correctness.” He boldly attacks the consecrated
Cooper's Hill, and sets the rival eminence of Grongar against
it, pronouncing Dyer" a sublime but strangely neglected poet,"
yet picking very niggling holes in this poet himself. He often
anticipates, and oftener seems to be going to anticipate, Words-
worth, who no doubt owed him a good deal; yet he thinks
Pope's famous epigram on Wit “the most concise and just
definition of Poetry.” In Grongar Hill itself he thinks the
“ admixture of metre [its second, certainly, if not its first great
charm] rather displeasing to a nice ear”; and though he de-
fends Gray against Knox, he is altogether yea-nay about Wind-
sor Forest, and attacks Thomson's personifications, without re-
membering that Gray is at least an equal sinner, and without
giving the author of the Seasons, and still more of the Castle of
Indolence, any just compensation for his enthusiasm of nature.
In fact, Scott is a man walking in twilight, who actually sees
the line of dawn, but dares not step out into it.2
Critical Essays, London, 1785, 8vo.
? I should like to return to Dennis,
in order to notice briefly his com-
paratively early Remarics on Prince
Arthur and Virgil (title abbreviated),
London, 1696. It is, as it stands, of
some elaboration ; but its author tells
us that he "meant" to do things
which would have made it an almost
complete Poetic from his point of
view. It is pervaded with that refraiu
of “this ought to be" and "that must
have been” to which I have referred
in the text; and bristles with purely
arbitrary preceptist statements, such
as that Criticism cannot be ill-natured
because Good Nature in man cannot
be contrary to Justice and Reason ;
that a man must not like what he
ought not to like--a doctrine under-
lying, of course, the whole Neo-classic
teaching, and not that only; alniost
literally cropping up in Wordsworth;
and the very formulation, in categorical-
imperative, of La Harpe’s “monstrous
beauty." The book (in which poet
and critic are very comfortably and
equally yoked together) is full of
agreeable things; and may possibly
have suggested one of Swift's most
exquisite pieces of irony in its con-
tention that Mr Blackmore's Celestial
Machines are directly contrary to the
Doctrine of the Church of England.
235
Mn
INTERCHAPTER III.
ENGLISH Eighteenth - Century criticism has a very notable
advantage over Seventeenth and Sixteenth. In the earliest
of the three, as we saw, criticism exists almost without a critic.
Its authorities are either men of something less (to speak kindly)
than the first rank as men of letters, or else they devote only a
slight and passing attention to the subject. In the Seventeenth
this is not quite so, for Dryden is a host in himself. But he is
also a host almost by himself : a general without an army.
In the Eighteenth the case is far more altered, in regard:
both to persons and to methods and opportunities of treat-
ment. Addison, Johnson, Pope, are all dictators of literature,
whose fame and authority, in the case at least of the first and
last, go far beyond their own country-and they are all critics.
Moreover, criticism has enormously multiplied its appearances
and opportunities of appearance : it has, in a manner, become
popular. The critical Review – the periodical by means of
which it is possible, and becomes easy, to give critical account
of the literature, not merely of the past but of the present-
becomes common. The critic as such is no longer regarded as
a mere pedant; he at least attempts to take his place as a
literary man of the world.
But while this alteration and extension applies to almost all
Europe, the contribution of England is specially interesting as
working towards a reconstruction as well as a continuation of
criticism. In consequence, very mainly, of Dryden's own
magnificent championship of Shakespeare and Milton, it was,
by the beginning of the eighteenth century, felt in England
that these two older writers at any rate had to be reckoned
d.
236
THE NEMESIS OF CORRECTNESS.
with; while Chaucer also had the same powerful recommenda-
tion, and Spenser had never lost the affection of the fit, though
for a time they might be few. With these four to be some-
how or otherby hook or by crook-taken into consideration,
it was impossible for the worst harm to be done; and the
peculiarities of the English character, combined with the more
vigorous condition of English creative literature, helped the
compromise to work. It might have been dangerous if
Johnson had written the Lives at the age which was Pope's
when he wrote the Essay on Criticism ; but this danger also the
Fortune of England-kindest of Goddesses, and most abused in
her kindness, yet justified of Fate !-averted.
Still, as we saw, Neo-Classicism is undoubtedly the accepted
orthodoxy of the time. If that draft confession of Faith, which
has been sketched in a former page, had been laid before an
assembly of the leading men of letters, not many Englishmen
would have refused to accept it. At the same time until,
towards the later years of the century, the “alarums and
excursions” of the Romantic rising recalled the orthodox to
strictness—a more searching examination would have revealed
serious defections and latitudinarianisms. Pope was perhaps
the most orthodox neo-classic, in criticism as in creation, of
the greater men of letters of the time; but Pope was fond of
Spenser. Addison had never thoroughly cleared his mind up
about criticism; but many things in him point the Romantic
way, and we know that some of the more orthodox thought
him weak and doubtful. And we have seen how the great Dr
Samuel Johnson, though he resisted and recovered himself, was
at least once within appreciable distance of that precipice of
“judging by the event," over which, when a Classic once lets
himself slip, he falls for ever and for ever through the Romantic
void.
But all these things were as the liberalities of a securely
established orthodoxy, estated and endowed, dreading no dis-
turbance, and able to be generous to others—even to indulge
itself a little in licence and peccadillo. Everywhere but
in England the vast majority of men, and even in England
all but a very small minority, had no doubt about the general
THE NEMESIS OF CORRECTNESS.
237
principles of the Neo-classic Creed. They still judged by
Rules and Kinds; they still had the notion that you must
generalise, always generalise ; they still believed that, in some
way or other, Homer and Virgil -- especially Virgil — had
exhausted the secrets of Epic, and almost of poetry; and, above
all, they were entirely unprepared to extend patient and
unbiassed judgment to something acknowledged, and acknow-
ledging itself, to be new. On the contrary, they must still be
vindicating even things which they liked, but which appeared
to them to be novel, on the score of their being so very like the -
old—as we saw in the case of Blair and Ossian.
The Nemesis of this their Correctness, as far as creation is
concerned, in prose to some extent, but still more in verse, has
been described over and over again by a thousand critics and
literary historians. The highest and most poetical poetry they
could not write at all-except when they had, like Collins,
Smart, Cowper, and Blake, a little not merely of furor poeticus,
but of actual insanity in their constitution. In their own
chosen way they could at best achieve the really poetical
rhetoric, but at the same time the strictly rhetorical poetry,
of Pope, and, in a lower range, of Akenside. For prose they
had the luck to discover, in the Novel, a Kind wbich, never
having been to any great extent practised before, was a Kind
practically without rules, and so could make or neglect its-
rules for itself. In another, not quite so new, their perform-
ance gave striking instance of their limitations. The Periodical
Essay was a thing of almost infinite possibilities: but because
it had happened at first to be written in a certain form by
persons of genius, they turned practice into Kind and Rule
once more, and for nearly the whole century went on imitating
the Spectator.
In Criticism itself the effects were pot wholly different, though
of course to some extent apparently dissimilar. We have seen
how, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the neces-
sary and ineluctable set of the critical current towards full
and free "judging of authors" seems to have been resisted by
a sort of unconscious recalcitrance on the part of critics ; yet
how they are drawn nearer and nearer to it, and, in Dryden's.
C
238
THE NEMESIS OF CORRECTNESS.
case at any rate, achieve admirable results. By the eighteenth,
in all countries, the tendency becomes irresistible. The interest
in literature, the bent and occupations of men of letters great
and small, the new institution of periodicals—all combine to
strengthen it: and every kind of critical estimate, from the
elaborate literary history to the brief review, begins to be
written, and is written, ever more copiously.
This was what criticism wanted; and it could not but do
good. Yet the results illustrated, as mere abstract treatises
never could have done, the deficiencies of the common critical
theory. The writers save themselves, as a rule, from the worst
mistakes by simply ignoring that of which they are ignorant.
But in regard to the things with which they do deal the
inadequacy and the hamper of their theory are sufficiently
apparent.
Of course the deficiencies of Eighteenth-century criticism are
to be easily matched with other, and sometimes opposite, de-
ficiencies in other times. It takes considerably more pains to
get at something like a real appreciation of its subject, some-
thing more than a bare reference to schedule, than had been the
case, either in ancient times or in the two centuries imme-
diately preceding. It is very much better furnished with a
critical theory (whether good or bad does not at the moment
matter) than has usually been the case with Criticism from
the early years of the nineteenth century to the early years of
the twentieth. It is not even intentionally ignorant-its ignor-
ance only proceeds from a mistaken estimate of things as worth
or not worth knowing; and there is rarely to be found in it
the bland assumption which has been not entirely unknown
later, that “I like this,” or perhaps rather, “I choose to say I
like this,” will settle everything. But it combines, in a fashion
already perhaps sufficiently illustrated, the awkwardness of
dogmatism and of compromise ; and it is certainly more ex-
posed to those two terrible questions, “ Why?” and “Why
Not?” which are the Monkir and Nakir of all critics and all
criticism, than the criticism of any other period. It is difficult
to see how a critic such as Dennis could give any reasons for
admiring Shakespeare at all, save ethical ones; and it is quite
THE BALANCE-SHEET OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
239
certain that a persistent Te sequar with the “Why Not?” will
dispose of almost all the stock eighteenth-century objections
both to Shakespeare and to all other suspected persons. The
anti-Shakespearians had the advantage over their own adver-
saries of being at least consistent.
The theory not merely of the authades kallos, the “head-
strong beauty," but of the "monstrous beauty”-the beauty
which is beautiful but has no business to be so, the miracle-
working power which does work miracles, but is to be forbidden
as Black Magic, because it does not work them according to the
rules—may seem itself so monstrous as to be a patent reduc-
tion to the absurd. In fact it acted as such. Yet the logic
of it is undeniable. It had all along been the unspoken
word, but the word that ought to have been spoken, and had
to be spoken some day. Nor need we grudge the admission
that it was in a certain sense better than the practice (which
had been often resorted to before, and which has not seldom
been resorted to since) of denying the beauty altogether, with
the possible result of being, after a time, honestly unable to
see it.
At the same time, the merits of Neo-Classicism deserve
another word or two. The chief perhaps is, that it provided
an orthodoxy—and that is never a wholly bad thing. Even if it
is not as really orthodox, as really right as its opponents, it has
merits which they can rarely claim. It has no temptations
for the clever fool, who is perhaps on the whole the most pesti-
lent, intellectually, of human beings. It demands a certain
amount of self-abnegation, which is always a good thing. It
does not perhaps really offer any greater temptation to the
merely stupid than does the cheap heterodoxy of other times.
Above all, it directly tends to a certain intellectual calmness-
to an absence of fuss, and worry, and pother, which is certainly
not one of the least characteristics of the Judge. At all times
the wise man would rather be orthodox than not; and at most
times, though not quite at all, the wisest men have been
orthodox, if only because they have recognised that every
opinion has some amount of truth in it, and that this truth,
240
THE BALANCE-SHEET OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
plus the advantages of orthodoxy just mentioned, is greatest,
and should prevail.
This will be recognised by all fair-minded persons as a
handsome allowance in any case; it is surely a particularly
handsome allowance when the arbiter happens not to be a
partisan of the orthodoxy in question. And it is quite sincere.
The present writer has emerged from the serious and consecu-
tive examination of “classical ” critics, necessary for the writ-
ing of this History, with a distinctly higher opinion of them
generally, with a higher opinion in most cases in particular,
than he held previously on piecemeal and imperfect acquaint-
ance. Yet if we take the true reading of illud Syrianum,
“Judex damnatur [capitis] cum [in]nocens [culpatur vel
minime]," then the case of the criticism with which we have
been dealing becomes somewhat parlous. It is all the worse
because its worsening is gradual and continuous. The sins of
the earliest Renaissance criticism are sins chiefly of neglect,
and are not as a rule aggravated by commission; while its
merits are very great. We could have done nothing without
it: at best we should have had to do for ourselves all that it
has done for us. But the bad side of the matter betrays itself
in the code-making of the seventeenth century ; it is but im-
perfectly and unsatisfactorily disguised in the compromises of
the earlier eighteenth; and it appears in all its deformity in
its late eighteenth-century recrudescence, the worst faults of
which were seen rather in France than in England, but which
were not absent in such men as Knox or Gifford, or even in
Johnson sometimes.
And these faults came from the absence of a wide enough
collection of instances from the past, and of an elastic and toler-
ant system of trial and admission for the present and future.
The compiling, in however piecemeal and haphazard a way,
of such a collection, and the construction, under whatever
similar limitations, of such a system, were the necessary
conditions precedent to what is sometimes called “Modern,"
sometimes “Romantic,” Criticism. Both these terms may be
much controverted: but the controversies are rather too
THE BALANCE-SHEET OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
241
general for the present volume. We have already seen what
its predecessor was, in general, and that in the usual general,
gradual, incalculable way, opposition to it, conscious or uncon-
scious, began to grow up at different times and in different
places. This opposition was a plant of early though slow and
fitful growth in England, but it does not follow that we can
put the finger on this and that person as having“ begun the
new movement. Such an opinion is always tempting to not
too judicious inquirers, and there has been no lack of books on
“Romanticism in the Classics," and the like. The fact, of
course, simply is that everything human exists essentially or
potentially in the men of every time; and that you may not
only find books in the running brooks but (what appears at
first more contradictory) dry stones in them: while, on the
other hand, founts of water' habitually gush from the midst of
the driest rock. Indagation of the kind is always treacherous,
and has to be conducted with a great deal of circumspection.
It would be difficult to find an author who illustrates this
danger and treachery better than the case of Butler (who for
that reason has been postponed for treatment here) on Dryden,
Rymer, Denham, and the cavalier poet Benlowes. Thế author
of Hudibras was born not long after Milton, and nearly twenty
years before Dryden, who outlived him by the same space. His
great poem did not give much room for critical utterances in
literature; but the Genuine Remains 1 are full of it in separate
places, both verse and prose. Take these singly, and you may
make Butler out to be, not merely a critic, but half a dozen
critics. In perhaps the best known of his minor pieces, the
Repartees between Cat and Puss, he satirises “Heroic” Plays, and
is therefore clearly for “the last age," as also in the savage and
admirable “ On Critics who Judge Modern Plays precisely by
the Rules of the Ancients," which has been reasonably, or
1 Published, not entirely, by Thyer
of Manchester in 1759 (2 vols.) A
handsome reprint of 1827 gives only
a few of the prose “Characters”;
more of these, but not the whole,
were given by Mr H. Morley in his
Character - Writing of the Seventeenth
Century (London, 1891). The verse
remains may be found in Chalmers or
in the Aldine (vol. ii., London, 1893),
and the whole is now (1910) in the
Cambridge edition (1908) of the Char-
acters and Note-Bools.
242
THE BALANCE-SHEET OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
certainly, thought to be directed against Rymer's blasphemy of
Beaumont and Fletcher, published two years before Butler's
death. The satirist's references and illustrations (as in that to
“the laws of good King Howel's days”) are sometimes too
Caroline to be quotable; but the force and sweep of his pro-
test is simply glorious. The Panegyric on Sir John Denham
is chiefly personal; but if Butler had been convinced that
Cooper's Hill was the ne plus ultra of English poetry he could
hardly have written it: and though the main victim of “To a
Bad Poet” has not been identified the lines-
“For so the rhyme be at the verse's end,
No matter whither all the rest does tend”-
could scarcely have been written except against the new poetry.
The “Pindaric Ode on Modern Critics” is chiefly directed
against the general critical vice of snarling, and the passages
on critics and poets in the Miscellaneous Thoughts follow suit.
But if we had only the verse Remains we should be to some
extent justified in taking Butler, if not for a precursor of the
new Romanticism, at any rate for a rather strenuous defender
of the old.
But turn to the Characters. Most of these that deal with
literature are in the general vein which the average seven-
teenth-century character - writer took from Theophrastus,
though few put so much salt of personal wit into this as Butler.
In“ A Small Poet” the earlier pages might be aimed at almost
anybody from Dryden himself (whom Butler, it is said, did not
love) down to Flecknoe. But there is only one name men-
tioned in the piece; and that name, which is made the object
of a furious and direct attack, lightened by some of the bright-
est flashes of Butler's audacious and acrid humour, is the
name of Edward Benlowes. Now, that Benlowes is a person
1 A blank rhyme indicates "Howard” didly decorated by Hollar, and others;
- whether Edward or Robert does not and the consequence is that copies of it
matter. But another blank requires a are very rare, and generally mutilated
trisyllable to fill it.
when found. (The present writer in.
? Benlowes is a warning to “illus cluded it in the first volume of Minor
trated poets.” It pleased him to have Poets of the Caroline Period (Oxiord,
his main book (Theophila, or Love's 1905).)
Sacrifice : London, 1652, folio) spleu-
THE BALANCE-SHEET OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
243
taillable et corvéable à merci et à miséricorde by any critical
oppressor, nobody who has read him can deny. He is as
extravagant as Crashaw without so much poetry, and as Cleve-
land without so much cleverness. But he is a poet, and a
“metaphysical” poet (as Butler was himself in another way),
and an example, though a rather awful example, of that “poetic
fury” which makes Elizabethan poetry. Yet Butler is more
savage with him than with Denham.
The fact is that Butler's criticism is merely the occasional
determination of a man of active genius and satiric tem per to
matters literary. Absurdities strike him from whatever school
they come; and he lashes them unmercifully whensoever and
whencesoever they present themselves. But he has no general
creed: he speaks merely to his brief as public prosecutor of
the ridiculous, and also as a staunch John Bull. If he had
been writing at the time when his Remains were first actually
published, it is exceedingly probable that he would have
“ horsed” Gray as pitilessly as he horses Benlowes; if he
had been writing sixty years later still, that he would have
been as “savage and Tartarly” to Keats and Shelley, or
seventy years later, to Tennyson, as the Quarterly itself.
This is not criticism: and we must look later and more
carefully before we discern any real revolution in literary
taste.
It is even very unsafe to attempt to discover much definite
and intentional precursorship in Addison, who was born two
full generations later than Butler. There is no need to repeat
what has been said of what seems to me misconception as to
his use of the word Imagination: nor is this the point which is
principally aimed at here. But the more we examine Addison's
critical utterances, whether we agree with Hurd or not that
they are “shallow," we shall, I think, be forced to conclude that
any depth they may have has nothing to do with Romanticism,
Addison likes Milton, no doubt, because he is a sensible man
and a good critic, as a general reason. But when we come to
investigate special ones we shall find that he likes him rather
because he himself is a Whig, a pupil of Dryden, and a religious
man-nay, perhaps even because he really does think that
244
TAE BALANCE-SHEET OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
Milton carries out the classical idea of Epic-than because of
Milton's mystery, his "romantic vague," his splendour of
diction and verse and imagery. So, too, the admiration of
Chevy Chase is partly a whim or a joke, partly determined
by the fact that at that time the Whigs were the “Jingoes,"
and that Chevy Chase is very pugnacious and very patriotic.
Nowhere, from the articles on True and False Wit to the
Imagination papers, do we find any real sense of unrest or
dissatisfaction with the accepted theory of poetry. There is
actually more in Prior, with all his profanation of the Nut-
browne Maid and his distortions of the Spenserian stanza.
And Dryden himself, Dryden whose method led straight to
the Promised Land, and whose utterances show that he oc-
casionally saw it afar off, came too early to feel any very
conscious desire of setting out on the pilgrimage of discovery.
But in critical as in other history, readers will rarely find
sharp and decided turns, assignable to definite hours and particu-
lar men. It is a part of the Neo-Classic error itself to assume some
definite goal of critical perfection towards which all things tend,
and which, when you have attained it, permits you to take no
further trouble except of imitation and repetition. Just as you
never know what new literary form the human genius may
take, and can therefore never lay down any absolute and final
schedule of literary kinds, and of literary perfection within
these kinds, so you can never shape the set of the prevalent
taste, and you can never do much more than give the boat the
full benefit of the current by dexterous rowing and steering.
Indeed, as we have seen, the taste in criticism and the taste in
creation unite, or diverge, or set dead against each other in a
manner quite incalculable, and only interpretable as making
somehow for the greater glory of Literature. Somewhere about
the time to which we have harked back-the meeting of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or a little later, or much
later, as the genius of different countries and persons would
have it - a veering of the wind, an eddy of the current, did
take place. And it is of this and of its consequences we have
now to give an account.
245
CHAPTER V.
THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS OF ROMANTICISM.
THE FIRST GROUP-MEDIÆVAL REACTION-GRAY-PECULIARITY OF HIS
CRITICAL POSITION-THE LETTERS-THE OBSERVATIONS' ON ARISTO-
PHANES AND PLATO-THE' METRUM'-THE LYDGATE NOTES-SHENSTONE
-PERCY-THE WARTONS-JOSEPH'S 'ESSAY ON POPE'-THE 'ADVEN-
TURER' ESSAYS - THOMAS WARTON ON SPENSER — HIS HISTORY OF
ENGLISH POETRY' — HURD: ÉIS COMMENTARY ON ADDISON — THE
HORACE — THE DISSERTATIONS — OTHER WORKS —THE LETTERS ON
CHIVALRY AND ROMANCE'—THEIR DOCTRINE-HIS REAL IMPORTANCE
-ALLEGED IMPERFECTIONS OF THE GROUP-STUDIES IN PROSODY-
JOHN MASON: HIS POWER OF NUMBERS' IN PROSE AND POETRY-
MITFORD: HIS 'HARMONY OF LANGUAGE - IMPORTANCE OF PROSODIC
INQUIRY — STERNE AND THE STOP-WATCH -- ÆSTHETICS AND THEIR
INFLUENCE - SHAFTESBURY - HUME — EXAMPLES OF HIS CRITICAL
OPINIONS—HIS INCONSISTENCY-BURKE ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTI-
FUL—THE SCOTTISH ÆSTHETIC - EMPIRICS : ALISON — THE ESSAY ON
TASTE'-ITS CONFUSIONS AND ARBITRARY ABSURDITIES --AN INTERIM
CONCLUSION ON THE ÆSTHETIC MATTER—THE STUDY OF LITERATURE
-THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE-SPENSER-CHAUCER -- ELIZABETHAN
MINORS-NOTE: T. HAYWARD-MIDDLE AND OLD ENGLISH-INFLUENCE
OF ENGLISH ABROAD.
We have already, in the last chapter, said that in England, about
the middle of the eighteenth century, the tables of criticism
turned, and that a company of critics, not large, not as a rule
very great men of letters, began slowly, tentatively, with a
great deal of rawness, and blindness, and even backsliding, to
grope for a catholic and free theory of literature, and especially
of poetry. We are now to examine this group 1 more narrowly.
With the not quite certainly to be allowed exception of Gray
i One celebrated person, much as
sociated with it in some ways, and
referred to in passing above, will not
appear here. Horace Walpole did, for
such a carpet knight, real service in
the general movement; but he was a
literary critic pour rire only. His
admiration of Mme. de Sévigné is not
really much more to his credit than his
sapient dictum (to Bentley, Feb. 23,
246
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
110 one of them could pretend to the first rank in the literature
of the time; and most of them (Hurd and Percy were the
chief exceptions) did not live to see, even at the extreme verge of
life, the advent of the champions who were to carry their prin-
ciples into practice. But they were the harbingers of the dawn,
little as in some cases (perhaps in all) they comprehended the
light that faintly and fitfully illuminated them beforehand.
Three of the writers of this class whom it is necessary to
name here have been alluded to already; the others were
Shenstone and the Wartons. As so often happens
SE in similar cases, it is exceedingly difficult to
group.
assign exact priority, for mere dates of publica-
tion are always misleading; and in this case, from their
close juxtaposition, they almost of themselves give the warn-
ing that they are not to be trusted. How early, in his
indolent industry at Cambridge, Gray had come to a Pisgah-
sight of the true course of English poetry; Shenstone, in
pottering and maundering at the Leasowes, to glimpses of
the same; Percy and Shenstone again to their design, after-
wards executed by Percy alone, of publishing the Reliques; the
Wartons to their revolutionary views of Pope on the one side
and Spenser on the other; Hurd to his curious mixture of
true and false aperçus,-it is really impossible to say. The last-
named, judging all his work together, may seem the least likely,
early as some of that work is, to have struck out a distinctly
original way for himself; but all, no doubt, were really driven,
nolentes volentes, conscious or unconscious, by the Time-Spirit.
The process which the Spirit employed for effecting this
great change was a simple one; indeed, we have almost summed
up his inspiration in the oracular admonition,
Antiquam exquirite matrem. For more than two
reaction.
hundred years literary criticism had been insolently
or ignorantly neglecting this mother, the Middle Age—now
with a tacit assumption that this period ought to be neglected,
now with an open and expressed scorn of it. But, as usually
1755) that A Midsummer Night's interested him in a manner which he
Dream is “forty times more nonsen- could understand : Shakespeare was
sical than the worst translation of an neither “Gothic” por modern. So he
Italian opera-book.” “Notre Dame liked the one and despised the other-
des Rochers” talked of subjects that - uncritically in both cases.
Medicevi
GRAY.
247
happens, a return had begun to be made just when the
opposite progress seemed to have reached its highest point.
Dryden himself had “translated ” and warmly praised.
Chaucer; Addison had patronised Chevy Chase. But before
the death of Pope much larger and more audacious explorations
had been attempted. In Scotland—whether consciously stung
or not by the disgrace of a century almost barren of literature
-Watson the printer 1 and Allan Ramsay 2 had, in 1706-11
and 1724-40, unearthed a good deal of old poetry. In England
the anonymous compiler 3 of the Ballads of 1723 had done
something, and Oldys the antiquary, under the shelter of “Mrs
Cooper's" petticoat, had done more with the Muses' Library of
1737. These examples 4 were followed out, not without a little
cheap contempt from those who would be in the fashion, and
knew not that this fashion had received warning. But they
were followed, and their most remarkable result, in criticism
and creation combined, is the work of Gray.
We have not so very many fairer figures in our “fair” herd
than Gray, though the fairness may be somewhat like that of
Gray.
Crispa, visible chiefly to a lover of criticism itself.
His actual critical performance is, in proportion,
scantier even than his poetical; and the scantiness may at
first sight seem even stranger, since a man can but poetise
when he can, but may, if he has the critical faculty,
criticise almost when he will and has the opportunity. That
opportunity (again at first sight) Gray may seem to have
had, as scarcely another man in our whole long history
has had it. He had nothing else to do, and was not
inclined to do anything else. He had sufficient means,
no professional avocations, the knowledge, the circumstances,
the locale, the wits, the taste, even the velleity-everything
but, in the full sense, the will. This indeed he might, in all
i Choice Collection of Scots Poems. In Pamby's" best work by far. There is a
three Parts. Reprinted in 1 vol. (Glas- reprint, without date (3 vols.), among
gow, 1869).
the very valuable series of such things
2 The Evergreen, The Tea-Table Mis- which were published by Pearson C.
cellany. Reprinted in 4 vols. (Glasgow, · 1870.
1876).
* For more of them, see the latter
3 Said to be Ambrose Philips. If so, part of this chapter.
the book, despite its uncritical and Ausonius, Ep. 77.
heterogeneous character, is “Namby.
248
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
vishly
circumstances and at all times, have lacked, for Mr Arnold
showed himself no philosophic student of humanity when he
said that at the date of Milton, or at the date of Keats, Gray
would have been a different man. His work would doubtless
have been a different work; but that is another matter. At
all times, probably, Gray would have had the same fastidious-
ness, the same liability to be "put off”; and if his preliminary
difficulties had been lightened by the provision, in times nearer
our own, of the necessary rough-hewing and first research by
others, yet this very provision would probably have prevented
him from pursuing what he would have disdainfully regarded
as a second-hand business. We may—we must-regret that
he never finished that History of English Poetry which he
hardly began, that he never attempted the half-dozen other
things of the kind, which he was better equipped for doing
than any man then living, and than all but three or four men
who have lived since. But the regret must be tempered by a
secret consciousness that on the whole he probably would not
have done them, let time and chance and circumstance have
favoured him never so lavishly.
Yet this very idiosyncrasy of limitation and hamper in him
made, in a sense, for criticism; inasmuch as there are two
. kinds of critical temperament, neither of which
of his
could be spared. There is the eager, strenuous,
critical almost headlong critical disposition of a Dryden,
which races like a conflagration 1 over all the field
it can cover; and there is the hesitating, ephectic, intermittent
temperament of a Gray, which directs an intense and all-dis-
solving, but ill-maintained heat at this and that special part of
the subject. In what is called, and sometimes is, “ originality,"
this latter temperament is perhaps the more fertile of the two,
and Gray has it in an almost astounding measure. Great as
was his own reading, a man might, I think, be as well read as
himself without discovering any real indebtedness of his, ex-
cept to a certain general influence of literary study in many
times and tongues. He knew indeed, directly or indirectly,
most of the other agents in the quiet and gradual revolution
which was coming on English poetic and literary taste; but he
With acknowledgments to Longinus.
position.
GRAY.
249
was much in advance of all of them in time. Well as he was
read in Italian, he nowhere, I think, cites Gravina, in whom
there was something to put him on new tracks; and though
he was at least equally well read in French, and does cite Fon-
tenelle, it is not for any of the critical germs which may be
discovered in that elusive oracle. The one modern language
to which he seems to have paid little or no attention was
German," where the half-blind strugglings of the Zürich
school might have had some stimulus for him. Whatever he
did, alone he did it; and though the volume of his strictly
critical observations (not directed to mere common tutorial
scholarship) would, if printed consecutively, perhaps not fill
twenty-—-certainly not fifty—pages of this book, its virtue,
intrinsic and suggestive, surpasses that of libraries full not
merely of Rymers but of (critical) Popes.
From the very first these observations have, to us, no un-
certain sound. In a letter to West, when the writer was
about six-and-twenty, we find it stated with equal
The Letters. a
** dogmatism, truth, and independence of authority
that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry
except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or
image does not support it, differs nothing from prose,” with a
long and valuable citation, illustrating this defence of “poetic
diction,” and no doubt thereby arousing the wrath of
Wordsworth. Less developed, but equally important and
equally original, is the subsequent description of our language
as not being "a settled thing” like the French. Gray, indeed,
makes this with explicit reference only to the revival of
archaisms, which he defends; but, as we see from other places
as well as by natural deduction, it extends to reasonable
neologisms also. In this respect Gray is with all the best
original writers, from Chaucer and Langland downwards, but
against a respectably mistaken body of critics who would fain
not merely introduce the caste system into English, but, like
1 Mr Gosse, I find, agrees with me in the inid-eighteenth century.
on this point. It is well known that 2 Gray's Works (ed. Gosse, 4 vols.,
ignorance of German was almost (Ches- London, 1884), ii. p. 106, Letter xliv.,
terfield, I think, in encouraging his dated April. without the year; but the
son to the study, says roundly that it next gives it: 1742.
was quite) universal among Englishmen
250
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
Sir Boyle Roche, make it hereditary in this caste not to have
any children.
This same letter contains some of Gray's best-known
criticisms, in his faint praise of Joseph Andrews and his
warm appreciation of Marivaux and Crébillon. I am not
quite certain that, in this last, Gray intended any uncom-
plimentary comparison, or that he meant anything more than
a defence of the novel generally—a defence which itself de-
serves whatever crown is appropriated to critical merit, inasmuch
as the novel had succeeded to the place of Cinderella of
Literature. However, both Fielding and Smollett were pro-
bably too boisterous for Gray, who could appreciate Sterne
better, though he disliked “Tristram's” faults.
But the fact is that it is not in criticisms of his contem-
poraries, or indeed in definite critical appreciation at all, that.
Gray's strength lies. For any defects in the former he has, of
course, the excuse that his was a day of rather small things
in poetry; but, once more, it is not quite certain that cir-
cumstances would have much altered the case. We must
remember that Mr Arnold also does not come very well out
of this test; and indeed, that second variety of the critical
temperament which we have defined above is not conducivo
to enthusiasm. It is, of course, unlucky that Gray's personal
affection for Mason directed his most elaborate praises to a
tenth-rate object; but it is fair to remember that he does
reprehend in Mason faults—such as excessive personification
which were not merely those of his friend, the husband of
“ dead Maria," but his own. It is a thousand pities that,
thanks to Mason himself, we have the similar criticisms of
Beattie only in a garbled condition ; but they too are sound
and sensible, if very merciful. The mercy, however, which
Gray showed perhaps too plentifully to friends and relations
he did not extend to others. That the “frozen grace” of
Akenside appealed little to him is less remarkable than liis
famous pair of judgments on “ Joe” Warton and Collins.
i Gray has been upbraided with his summarised the whole of Boswell's
description (in part at least) of Boswell's work, had he lived to see it, as that of
Paoli-book as “a dialogue between a il green goose (a thing like him more
green goose and a hero." It does him admirable dead than alive) with
no discredit; in fact, he might have semi-heroic love for heroes.
.
GRAY.
251
The coupling itself, moreover, and even the prophecy that
“neither will last,” are less extraordinary (for the very keenest
eyes, when unassisted by “the firm perspective of the past,"
will err in this way, and Joseph's Odes are, as his friend, Dr
Johnson, said of the rumps and kidneys, “very pretty little
things”) than the ascription of “a bad ear” to Collins. This
is certainly “a term inexplicable to the Muse." It was
written in 1746. Five years later an undated but clearly
datable letter to Walpole contains (lxxxiv., ed. cit.) in a notice
of Dodsley's Miscellany, quite a sheaf of criticisms. That of
Tickell—"a poor short-winded imitator of Addison, who had
himself not above three or four notes in poetry, sweet enough
indeed, like those of a German flute, but such as soon tire and
satiate the ear with their frequent return”-is very notable for
this glance backward on the great Mr Addison, though it
would have been unjust to Tickell if (which does not quite
appear) it bad been intended to include his fine elegy on
Addison himself, and the still finer one on Cadogan. Gray
is quite amiable to The Spleen and The Schoolmistress, and
London ; justly assigns to Dyer (the Dyer of Grongar Hill, not
of The Fleece) “ more of poetry in his imagination than almost
any of our number," but unjustly calls him “rough and in-
judicious," and brushes most of the rest away, not too super-
ciliously. A year later (December 1752, to Wharton) he
grants to Hall's Satires "fulness of spirit and poetry; as much
of the first as Dr Donne, and far more of the latter." In
the elaborate “ buckwashing” of Mason's Caractacus ode, which
occupies great part of the very long letter of December 19,
1756, there is a passage of great importance on Epic and Lyric
style, which exhibits as well perhaps as anything else the
independence, and at the same time the transitional consistency,
of Gray's criticism.
He says first (which is true, and which no rigidly orthodox
Neo-Classic would or could have admitted): “ The true. lyric
style, with all its flights of fancy ornaments, heightening of
expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to
every other style.” Then he says that this is just the cause
why it could not be borne in a work of great length; then
1 I am well aware that the " parallel-passagers” have tried their jaws on these.
252
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
that the epic “therefore assumed graver colours,” and only
stuck on a diamond borrowed from her sister here and there;
then that it is “natural and delightful” to pass from the
graver stuff to the diamond, and then that to pass from lyric
to epic is to drop from verse to mere prose. All of which
seems to argue a curious inequality in clearing the mind from
cant. It is true, as has been said, that Lyric is the highest
style. But surely the reason why this height cannot be kept
is the weakness, not of human receptivity but of human pro-
ductiveness. Give us an Iliad at the pitch of the best chorus
of the Agamemnon, and we will gladly see whether we can
bear it or not. Again, if you can pass from the dress to the
diamond, why not pass from the diamond to the dress ? It is
true that in Mason's case the diamonds were paste, and bad
paste; but that does not affect the argument. When, in still
a later. letter (clxii.) to the same “Skroddles” i he lays it down
that “extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous,
and musical is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry," we
must accentuate one of the. But there is a bombshell for
Neo-Classicism in cvii., still to “Skroddles.” “I insist that
sense is nothing in poetry, but according to the dress she wears
and the scene she appears in." .
Gray's attitude to Ossian is interesting, but very much what
we should have expected. He was bribed by its difference
from the styles of which he was weary; but he seems from
the very first to have had qualms (to which he did some
violence, without quite succeeding, in order to stifle them) as to
its genuineness.
No intelligent lover of the classics, whose love is not limited
to them, can fail to regret that by very far the larger bulk of
Gray's critical Observations is directed to Aristo-
The Obser-
vations on phanes and Plato. The annotator is not incom-
Aristophanes petent, and the annotated are supremely worthy of
and Plato.
see his labours; but the work was not specially in need
of doing, and there have been very large numbers of men as
i After all, he may be forgiven much the Monologues and the Odes, and
apparent over-valuation of Mason for all but those lines of the epitaph on
this name. Whatever its meaning his wife which Gray wrote for him.
between the friends, it “speaks” the “To skroddle" should have been natu-
author of Elfrida and Caractacus, and ralised for “to write minor poetry.”
GRAY.
253
well or better qualified to do it. Such things as this— Aves,
1114: “ These were plates of brass with which they shaded the
heads of statues to guard them from the weather and the
birds ”—are things which we do not want from a Gray at all.
They are the business of that harmless drudge, the lexico-
grapher, in general, of a competent fifth-form master editing
the play, in particular. But there was probably at that time
not a single man in Europe equally qualified by natural gifts
and by study to deliver really critical and comparative opinions
on literature, to discuss the history and changes of English,
and the like. Nor has there probably at any date been any
man better qualified for this, having regard to the conditions
of his own time and country. One cannot, then, but feel it
annoying that a life, not long but by no means very short, and
devoted exclusively to literary leisure, should have resulted, as
far as this special vocation of the author is concerned, in nothing
more than some eighty small pages of Dissertation devoted to
English metres and to the Poems of Lydgate.
Let us, however, rather be thankful for what we have got,
and examine it, such as it is, with care.
· In the very first words of the Metrum it is curious and de-
lightful to see a man, at this early period, cutting right and
The Metrum. Sed
- left at the error of the older editors, who calmly
setuntshoved in, or left out, words and syllables to make
what they thought correct versification for Chaucer, and at the
other error committed by the majority of philologists to-day in
holding that Chaucer's syntax, accidence, and orthography were as
precise as those of a writer in the school of the French Academy.
Even more refreshing are, on the one hand, his knowledge and
heed of Puttenham, and, on the other, his correction of Putten-
ham's doctrine of the fixed Cæsura, his admissions of this in
the case of the Alexandrine, and his quiet demonstration that
the admission of it in the decasyllable and octosyllable would
make hayoc of our best poetry. The contrast of this reason-
able method and just conclusion, not merely with the ignorant
or overbearing dogmatism of Bysshe half a century earlier, but
with the perversity, in the face of light and knowledge, of
Guest a century later, is as remarkable as anything in the
history of English criticism.
Letry
254
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
Gray, of course, was fallible. He entangles himself rather
on the subject of “Riding Rhyme”; and though he, first (I
think) of all English writers, notices the equivalenced dimeter
iambics of Spenser's Oak and Briar, and compares Milton's
octosyllables with thein, he goes wrong by saying that this is
the only English metre in which such a liberty of choice is
allowed, and more wrong still in bringing Donne's well-known
ruggedness under this head. And he does not allow himself
to do more than glance at the Classical-metre craze, his remarks
on which would have been very interesting.. .
His subsequent analysis of “measures,” with the chief books
or poems in which they are used, is of very great interest, but
as it is a mere table it hardly lends itself to comment, though
it fills nearly twenty pages. The conclusion, however, is im.
portant, and, without undue guessing, gives us fair warrant for
inferring that Gray would have had much (and not a favour-
able much) to say on the contemporary practice he describes
if the table had been expanded into a dissertation. And the
table itself, with its notes, shows that though his knowledge of
Middle English before Chaucer was necessarily limited, yet he
knew and had drawn right conclusions from Robert of Glou-
cester and Robert of Brunne, The Owl and the Nightingale,
the early English Life of St Margaret, and the Poema Morale.1
His observations on “the pseudo-Rhythmus” (which odd
and misleading term simply nieans Rhyme), with the shorter
appendices on the same subject, present a learned and judic-
ious summary of the facts as then known.
The criticism on John Lydgate which closes Gray's critical
dossier might have been devoted to a more interesting subject,
The
but they enable us to see what the average quality
Lydgate of the History would have been. And they cer-
tainly go, in scheme and quality, very far beyond
any previous literary history of any country with which I am
acquainted. The article (as we may call it) is made up of a
otes.
1 As printed in Mr Gosse's edition
he is made to say that the Moral Ode
was written "alınost two hundred years
after Chaucer's time.” The sense, how
ever, as well as the use of the word
“Semi-Saxon," shows that he meant
"before," so that "after" must be a
slip, either of his own pen or of the
later press.
GRAY.
255
Po
judicious mixture of biography, account of books (in both cases,
of course, as far as known to the writer only), citation, exposi-
tion of points of interest in subject, history, manners, &c.,
criticisms of poetical characteristics in the individual, and now
and then critical excursus of a more general kind suggested by
the subject. In one place, indeed, Gray does introduce Homer
in justification of Lydgate : but no one will hesitate to do this
now and then; and it is quite clear that he does not do it from
any delusion as to a cut-and-dried pattern, or set of patterns,
to which every poem, new or old, was bound to conform.
And to this we have to add certain facts which, if not
critical utterances, speak as few such utterances have done-
the novelty of Gray's original English poetry, and his selection
of Welsh and Scandinavian originals for translation and imita-
tion. These things were themselves unspoken criticism of the
most important kind on the literary habits and tastes of his
country, and of Europe at large. The, to us, almost unintel-
ligible puzzlement of his contemporaries—the "hard as Greek"
of the excellent Garrick, and the bewilderment of the three
lords at York races, establish the first point; as for the
second, it establishes itself. To these outlying languages and
literatures nobody had paid any attention whatever previously;2
they were now not merely admitted to literary attention, but
actually allowed and invited to exercise the most momentous
influence on the costume, the manners, the standards of those
literatures which had previously alone enjoyed the citizenship
of Parnassus.
Small, therefore, as is the extent of deliberate critical work
which Gray has left us, we may perceive in it nearly all the
notes of reformed, revived, we might almost say reborn, criti-
cism. The two dominants of these have been already dwelt
upon—to wit, the constant appeal to history, and the readiness
to take new matter, whether actually new in time, or new
in the sense of having been hitherto neglected, on its own
See Letter to Wharton, October 7, Percy's "Five Pieces," and on the sub-
1757 (cxxxvi., ii., 340, ed. cit.).
ject generally, an interesting treatise,
2 I mean, of course, nobody except Mr F. E. Finlay's Scandinavian In-
specialists. On the vexed question of fluences on the English Romantic Move-
Gray's direct knowledge of Norse, on ment (Boston, U.S.A., 1903), has ap-
the priority or contemporaneousness of peared since the text was written.
256
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
merits; not indeed with any neglect of the ancients—for Gray
was saturated with “classical” poetry in every possible sense
of the word, with Homer and Virgil, as with Dante and Milton
and Dryden—but purely from the acknowledgment at last of
the plain and obvious truth,“ other times, other ways." As a
deduction from these two we note, as hardly anywhere earlier,
a willingness to take literature as it is, and not to prescribe to
it what it should be-in short, a mixture of catholicity with
tolerance, which simply does not exist anywhere before. Lastly,
we may note a special and very particular attention to prosody.
This is a matter of so much importance that we must our-
selves bestow presently some special attention upon it, and
may advantageously note some other exercitations of the kind
at the time or shortly afterwards.
Of the rest of the group mentioned above, Shenstone 2 is
the earliest, the most isolated, and the least directly affected
by the mediæval influence. Yet he, too, must have
Shenstone.
l. felt it to have engaged, as we know he did, with
f
Percy in that enterprise of the Reliques which his early death
cut him off from sharing fully. From his pretty generally
known poems no one need have inferred much tendency of
the kind in him : for his Spenserian imitation, The School-
mistress, has as much of burlesque as of discipleship in it.
Nor are indications of the kind extremely plentiful in his
prose works. But the remarkable Essays on Men and Man-
ners, which give a much higher notion of Shenstone's power
than his excursions into the rococo, whether versified or hortu-
lary, are full of the new germs. Even here, however, he is,
after the prevailing manner of his century, much more'ethical
than literary, and shows deference, if not reverence, to not a
few of its literary idols. The mixed character of his remarks
i Despite the curious infuriation edition, in 2 vols., of the Poems and
which such attention seems to excite Essays (London, 1768), with the second
in some minds by no means devoid of edition of the additional volume con-
celestial quality. Gradually it will be taining the Letters (London, 1769).
seen that current views of prosody are These latter are described by Gray in
a sort of " tell-tale ” or index of the the less agreeable Graian manner, as
state of poetic criticism generally. They “about nothing but " the Leasowes
concern us here, however, only at cer- "and his own writings, with two or
tain moments.
three neighbouring clergymun who
3 My copy of him is Dodsley's third wrote verses also.”
PERCY.
257
on Pope? (which are, however, on the whole very just) may be
set down by the Devil's Advocate to the kind of jealousy com-
monly entertained by the "younger generations who are knock-
ing at the door”; and his objection to the plan of Spenser is
000-classically purblind. But his remarks on Prosody 2 breathe
a new spirit, which, a little later, we shall be able to trace in
development. His preference for rhymes that are " long” in
pronunciation over snip-snaps like “cat” and “not"; his dis-
covery—herald of the great Coleridgean reaction--that "there
is a vast beauty in emphasising in the eighth and ninth place
a word that is virtually a dactyl”; the way in which he lays
stress on harmony of period and music of style as sources of
literary pleasure; and above all the fact, that when examining
the “dactylic" idea just given, he urges the absurdity of bar-
ring trisyllabic feet in any place, and declares that a person
ignorant of Latin can discern Virgil's harmony, show us the
new principles at work. Perhaps his acutest critical passage
is the maxim, “Every good poet includes a critic: the reverse
will not hold”; his most Romantic, “ The words 'no more'
have a singular patbos, reminding us at once of past pleasure
and the future exclusion of it.” 3
Shenstone's colleague in the intended, his executor in the
actual, scheme of the Reliques was allowed by Fate to go very
Percy.
much further in the same path. At no time, per-
haps, has Bishop Percy had quite fair play. In his
own day his friend Johnson laughed at him, and his enemy
1
1 Ed. cit., ii. 10-13, 158-161, and
elsewhere.
? Most of the quotations following
are found in two Essays on " Books
and Writers," ii. 157-180, 228-239.
3 ii. 172; ii. 167. The first of these
has been echoed, perhaps unconsciously,
by more than one great Romantic
writer. For the second, compare Reg.
nier's regret pensif et confus, D'avoir été
et n'être plus. Shenstone's Letters (as
is implied in the very terms of Gray's
sneer) deal with literary subjects freely
enough ; but their criticism is rarely
important, though I have noted a
good many places. Some of the most
interesting (p. 58 sq., ed. cit.) concern
Spenser, and Shenstone's gradual con-
version “from trifling and laughing to
being really in love with him.” From
another (lxii. p. 175) we learn that at
any rate when writing, S. was still in
the dark about “the distance of the
rhymes" in Lycidas. There is seen in
Letter xc., viii. sq., on “Fables,” an
intimation (c. iii. p. 321) of the ballad
plan with Percy; praise of The
Rambler'; a defence of light poetry as
being still poetry, &c. &c. It is almost
all interesting as an example of Critica)
Education.
258
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
Ritson attacked him with his usual savagery. In ours the
publication at last of his famous Folio Manuscript has resulted
in a good deal of not exactly violent, but strong language as
to his timorous and eclectic use of the precious material he
had obtained, and his scarcely pardonable tamperings with such
things as he did extract. Nobody indeed less one-sided and
fanatical than Ritson himself, or less prejudiced than the great
lexicographer, could ignore the vastness of the benefit which
the Reliques actually conferred upon English literature, or the
enormous influence which it has directly and indirectly exer-
cised; but there has been a slight tendency to confine Percy's
merits to the corners of this acknowledgment.
Yet there is much more, by no means always in the way of
mere allowance, to be said for Percy than this. His poetic
taste was not perfect: it could not be so. It was unlucky
that he had a certain not wholly contemptible faculty for pro-
ducing as well as for relishing verse, and an itch for exercising
this; while he suffered, as everybody did till at least the close
of his own life, from failing entirely to comprehend the late
and rather decadent principle that you must let ruins alone
that you must not "improve " your original. But a man must
either be strangely favoured by the gods, or else have a real
genius for the matter, who succeeds, at such a time and in
such circumstances, in getting together and publishing such a
collection as the Reliques. Nor are Percy's dissertations destitute
of critical as well as of instinctive merit. Modern scholarship
—which has the advantage rather of knowing more than Percy
could know than of making a better use of what it does know,
and which is much too apt to forget that the scholars of all
ages are
“Priests that slay the slayer
And shall themselves be slain" -
can find, of course, plenty of errors and shortcomings in the
essays on the Minstrels and the Ancient Drama, the metre of
Piers Plowman, and the Romances; and they are all unneces-
sarily adulterated with theories and fancies about origin, &c.
But this last adulteration has scarcely ceased to be a favourite
i By Messrs Hales & Furnivall. 3 68.) As for Percy's Scandinavian in.
vols. and Supplement. (London, 1867- quiries, see note above.
THE WARTONS.
259
The
Waritons.
* form of competition ” among critics; while I am bound to say
that the literary sense which is so active and pervading in
Percy seems to have deserted our modern philologists only too
frequently.
At any rate, whatever may be his errors and whatever his
shortcomings, the enormous, the incalculable stimulus and
l'eagency of the Reliques is not now matter of dispute; while
it is equally undeniable that the poetical material supplied was
reinforced by a.method of historical and critical inquiry which,
again with all faults, could not fail to have effects almost equally
momentous on criticism if not quite so momentous on creation.
The two Wartons and Hurd gave still more powerful assist-
ance in this latter department, while Thomas Warton at least
supplied a great deal of fresh actual material in his
me History. To none of the three has full justice, as
it seems to me, been recently done; while to one
of them it seems to me that there has been done very great
injustice. The main documents which we have to consider in
the case of the two brothers are for Joseph, bis Essay on Pope
(1756–71), and the numerous critical papers in The Adventurer ;
for Thomas, the Observations on The Faerie Queene (1754), and
of course The History of English Poetry (1774–81).
Warton's Essay on Pope?- vaguely famous as a daring act of
iconoclasm, and really important as a document in the Romantic
Revolt--almost literally anticipates the jest of a
Joseph's hundred years later on another document, about
Essay on
Pope.
“chalking up ‘No Popery!' and then running
away.” It also shows the uncertainty of stand-
point which is quite pardonable and indeed inevitable in these
early reformers. To us it is exceedingly unlucky that Warton
should at page ii. of his Preface ask, “What traces has
Donne of pure poetry ?" Yet when we come immediately
afterwards to the (for the time) bold and very nearly true
statement that Boileau is no more poetical than La Bruyère,
we see that Warton was thinking only of the satirist, not of
the author of The Anniversaries and the “Bracelet” poems.
1 Vol. i. appeared in 1756, vol. ü.
not till 1782—which gap of a quarter
of a century is not imperceptible in the
work itself, and must be remembered
in reading the text.
260
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
1
Further, Warton lays down, sans phrase and with no Addi-
sonian limitations, that “a poet must have imagination." He
is sure (we may feel a little more doubtful) that Young, his
dedicatee, would not insist on being called a poet on the
strength of his own Satires. And he works himself up to the
position that in Pope there is nothing transcendently sublime
or pathetic, supporting this by a very curious and for its time
instructive division of English poets into four classes. The
first contains poets of the first rank on the sublime-pathetic-
imaginative standard, and is limited to three — Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Milton. The second company-headed by
Dryden, but including, not a little to our surprise, Fenton-has
less of this poetic intensity, but some, and excels in rhetorical
and didactic vigour. The third is reserved for those--Butler,
Swift, Donne, Dorset, &c.--who, with little poetry, have
abundant wit; and the fourth “gulfs” the mere versifiers,
among whom we grieve to find Sandys and even Fairfax
herded with Pitt and Broome.
There is evidently, both in its rightgoings and its short-
comings, considerable matter in this for discussion, were such
discussion in place. But the main heads of it, which alone
would be important, must be obvious to every one. In the body.
of the Essay, Warton, as was hinted above, rather "hedges." He
maintains his position that Pope was not transcendently a poet;
and indulges in much detailed and sometimes rather niggling
criticism of his work; but readmits him after a fashion to a
sort of place in Parnassus, not quite “utmost, last, provincial,"
but, as far as we can make out, on the fence between Class Two
and Class Three. The book, as has also been said, is a real
document, showing drift, but also drifting. The Time-Spirit
is carrying the man along, but he is carried half-unconsciously.
Warton's Adventurer essays are specially interesting. They
were written early in 1753–54, some years before the critical
period of 1760-65, and two or three before his
The Ad. Pope essay; and they were produced at the recom-
venturer
Essays.
mendation, if not under the direct editorship, of
Johnson. Further, in the peroratorical remarks
which were usual with these artificial periodicals, Warton
explains that they were planned with a definite intention
THE WARTONS.
261
not merely to reintroduce Criticism among polite society,
but to reinvest her with something more of exactness and
scholarship than had been usual since Addison followed the
French critics in talking politely about critical subjects.
Warton's own exercitations are distinguished by a touch which
may be best called “gingerly.” He opens (No. 49) with a
“Parallel between Ancient and Modern Learning,” which is
in effect an almost violent attack on French critics, with ex-
ceptions for Fénelon, Le Bossu, and Brumoy. Then, taking
the hint of Longinus's reference to “the legislator of the Jews,"
he feigns a fresh discovery of criticisms of the Bible by the
author of the IIepi "Yyous. He anticipates his examination
of Pope by some remarks (No. 63) on that poet from the
plagiarism-and-parallel-passage standpoint; upholds the Odyssey
(Nos. 75, 80, 83) as of equal value with the Tiad, and of
perhaps greater for youthful students; insinuates some objec-
tions to Milton (No. 101); studies The Tempest (Nos. 93, 97)
and Lear (Nos. 113, 116, 122) more or less elaborately.
Throughout he appears to be conditioned not merely by the
facts glanced at above, by the ethical tendency of these
periodicals generally, and by his own profession of school-
master, but also by a general transition feeling, a know-not-
what-to-think-of-it. Yet his inclination is evidently towards
something new—perhaps he does not quite know what-and
away from something old, which we at least can perceive with-
out much difficulty to be the Neo-Classic creed. He would pro-
bably by no means abjure that creed if it were presented to him
as a test, but he would take it with no small qualifications.
For a combination of earliness, extension, and character
no book noticed in this chapter exceeds in interest Thomas
Thomas
Warton's Observations on Spenser. To an ordinary
Warton on reader, who has heard that Warton was one of the
Spenser.
great ushers of Romanticism in England, and that
Spenser was one of the greatest influences which these ushers
1 On this, as on other points in this
chapter and the preceding more par-
ticularly, as well as elsewhere, a most
valuable companion has been supplied,
as was noted above, by Mr D. Nichol
Smith's excellent edition of Eighteenth
Century Essays on Shakespeare. (Glas-
gow, 1903.)
2 The full title is Observations on
the Faëric Qucene of Spenser (ed. 1,
262
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
applied, the opening of the piece, and not a very few passages
later, may seem curiously half-hearted and unsympathetic.
Such a reader, from another though closely connected point
of view, may be disappointed by the fragmentary and annota-
tory character of the book, its deficiency in vues d'ensemble, its
apologies, and compromises, and hesitations. But those who
have taken a little trouble to inform themselves on the matter,
either by their own inquiries or by following the course which
has been indicated in this book, will be much better satisfied.
They will see that he says what he ought to have said in the
concatenation accordingly.
It is impossible to decide how much of yet not discarded
orthodoxy, and how much of characteristic eighteenth-century
compromise, there is in the opening about “depths of Gothic
ignorance and barbarity," " ridiculous and incoherent excur-
sions," "old Provençal vein," and the like. Probably there is
a good deal of both;? there is certainly a good deal which
requires both to excuse it. Yet before long Warton fastens
a sudden petard on the main gate of the Neo-Classic stronghold
by saying: “But it is absurd to think of judging either Ariosto
or Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to.” Absurd,
indeed! But what becomes of those antecedent laws of poetry,
those rules of the kind and so forth, which for more than two
hundred years had been accumulating authority ? It is no
good for him to go on: “We who live in the days of writing
by rule. . . . Critical taste is universally diffused ..." and
so on. The petard goes on fizzing and sparkling at the gate,
and will blow it in before long.
In the scattered annotations, which follow for a long time,
the attitude of compromise is fairly kept; and even Neo-
Classics, as we have seen, need not necessarily have objected
to Warton's demonstration ² pièces en main, that Scaliger “had
no notion of simple and genuine beauty”; while the whole of
*
5
London, 1754 ; ed. 2, 1762 (of which is
my copy). From Hughes's editions of
1715 to Upton's of 1758 (after Warton's
first edition) a good deal of attention
had been paid to Spenser, if not quite
according to knowledge. For a long
list of imitations in the eighteenth
century see Mr H. A. Beers (English
Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, London, 1899, pp. 854–55, note),
who copies it from Prof. Phelps.
i. 15, ed. cit.
? Ed. cit., i. 96.
THE WARTONS.
263
his section (iv.) on Spenser's stanza, &c., is full of lèse-poésie, and
that (vii.) on Spenser's inaccuracies is not much better. But
the very next section is an important attack on the plagiarism-
and-parallel-passage mania which almost invariably develops
itself in bad critics; and the defence of his author's Allegory
($ x.), nay, the plump avowal of him as a Romantic poet,
more than atones for some backslidings even here. Above all,
the whole book is distinguished by a genuine if not always
understanding love of the subject; secondly, by an obvious
refusal-sometimes vocal, always latent-to accept a priori
rules of criticism; thirdly, and most valuably of all, by recur-
rence to contemporary and preceding models as criteria instead
of to the ancients alone. Much of the last part of the book
is occupied with a sort of first draft in little of the author's
subsequent History; he is obviously full of knowledge (if some-
times flawed) and of study (if sometimes misdirected) of early
English literature. And this is what was wanted. “Nullum
numen abest si sit conscientia” (putting the verse aside) might
almost be the critic's sole motto if it were not that he certainly
cannot do without prudentia itself. But Prudentia without
her sister is almost useless: she can at best give inklings, and
murmur, “If you are not conscious of what has actually been
done in literature you can never decide what ought and ought
not to have been done."
This is what gives the immense, the almost unequalled
importance which Warton's History of English Poetry should
His History possess in the eyes of persons who can judge just
of English judgment. It has errors: there is no division of
etry. literature in which it is so unreasonable to expect
accuracy as in history, and no division of history to which
that good-natured Aristotelian dictum applies so strongly as
to literary history. Its method is most certainly defective, and
one of its greatest defects is the disproportion in the treatment
of authors and subjects. When the author expatiates into
i Originally issued in the years 1774-
78–81. The editions of 1824 and 1840,
with additional notes by Price and
others, are valuable for matter; and
that of Mr W. O. Hazlitt (4 vols.,
London, 1871), with the assistance of
Drs Furnival, Morris, Skeat, and
others, invaluable. But Warton's own
part is necessarily more and more ob-
scured in them.
264
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
Dissertation, he may often be justly accused of first getting
out of his depth as regards the subject, and then recovering
himself by making the treatment shallow. And I do not
know that his individual criticisms betray. any very frequent
or very extraordinary acuteness of appreciation. To say of the
lovely
“Lenten is come with love to town,"
that it “displays glimmerings of imagination, and exhibits
some faint ideas of poetical expression," is surely to be, as
Dryden said of Smith and Johnson in The Rehearsal, a “cool
and insignificant gentleman”; and though it is quite accurate
to recognise“ much humour and spirit” in Piers Plowman, it
is a little inadequate and banal.
But this is mere hole-picking at worst, at best the necessary
or desirable ballast or set-off to a generous appreciation of
Warton's achievement. If his erudition is not unflawed, its
bulk and mass are astonishing in a man of his time; if his
method and proportion are defective, this is almost inevitable
in the work of a pioneer; and we have seen enough since of
critics and historians who make all their geese swans, not to
be too hard on one who sometimes talked of peacocks or
humming-birds as if they were barndoor fowls or sparrows.
The good which the book, with its wealth of quotation as well
as of summary, must have done, is something difficult to realise
but almost impossible to exaggerate. Now at least, for Eng-
land and for English, the missing links were supplied, the
hidden origins revealed, the Forbidden Country thrown open
to exploration. · It is worth while (though in no unkind spirit)
once more to recall Addison's péché de jeunesse in his Account
of the English Poets, in order to contrast it with the picture
presented by Warton. Instead of a millennium of illiteracy
and barbarism, with nothing in it worth noticing at all but
Chaucer and Spenser—presented, the one as a vulgar and obso-
lete merryandrew, and the other as half old-wives’-fabulist and
half droning preacher—century after century, from at least the
thirteenth onward (Warton does not profess to handle Anglo-
Saxon) was presented in regular literary development, with
abundant examples of complicated literary kinds, and a crowded
i De quo fabula?
HURD.
265
bead-roll of poets, with specimens of their works. Men had
before them for the first time, except in cases of quite extra-
ordinary leisure, opportunities, taste, and energy—the actual
progress of English prosody and English poetic diction, to set
against the orthodox doctrine that one fine day not so very
early in the seventeenth century Mr Waller achieved a sort
of minor miracle of creation in respect of both. And all these
works and persons were accorded serious literary and critical
treatment, such as had been hitherto reserved for the classics of
old, for the masterpieces of what Callières. calls les trois nations
polies abroad, and for English writers since Mr Waller. That
Warton did not gush about them was no fault; it was exactly
what could have been desired. What was wanted was the
entrance of mediæval and Renaissance poetry into full recogni-
tion; the making of it hoffähig; the reconstitution of literary
history so as to place the work of the Middle Period on a
level basis, and in a continuous series, with work ancient and
modern. And this Warton, to the immortal glory of himself,
his University, and his Chair, effected.
The remaining member of the group requires handling with
some care. Not much notice has been taken of Bishop Hurd
for a long time past, and some authorities who have
Hurd.
His Com- given him notice have been far from kind. Their
mentary on unkindness, I think, comes very near injustice; but
Addison.
" Hurd has himself to blame for a good deal of it.
As a man he seems to have been, if fairly respectable, not in
the least attractive; an early but complete incarnation of the
disposition called “donnishness"; a toady in his younger man-
hood, and an exacter of toadying in his elder. He lived long
enough to endanger even his critical fair fame, by representing
his admiration for Shakespeare as an aberration, and declaring
that he returned to his first love Addison. And his work
upon Addison himself (by which, I suppose, he is most com-
monly known) is of a meticulous and peddling kind for the
most part, by no means likely to conciliate the majority of
i See Appendix.
? He is, however, exquisitely charac-
teristic in his description of Addison's
own critical work (see the Bohn ed., Ü.
383) as “discovering his own good
taste, and calculated to improve that
of the reader, but otherwise of no great
merit."
266
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
micalulons in Englisy early and til 8
recent critics. Most of Hurd's notes deal with mere grammar;
and while nearly all of them forget that writers like Addison
make grammar and are not made by it, some are choice ex-
amples of the sheer senseless arbitrariness which makes grammar
itself too often a mere Lordship of Misrule and Abbacy of Un-
reason. Yet even here there are good things; especially
some attempts very early and till recently with very few
companions in English-to bring out and analyse the rhyth-
mical quality of prose. But it may be frankly admitted that
if the long-lived Bishop had been a critic only in his
Addisonian commentary, he would hardly have deserved a
reference, and would certainly have deserved no long reference,
here.
His own Works * are of much higher importance. The
edition (with commentary, notes, and dissertations) of Horace's
Epistles to the Pisos and to Augustus is in part of the
oructe class of work to which, in this stage of our history,
we can devote but slight attention, but even that part shows
scholarship, acuteness, and—what is for our purpose almost more
important than eitherwide and comparative acquaintance
with critical authorities, from Aristotle and Longinus to Fon-
tenelle and Hume.5
The “ Critical Dissertations” which follow mark a higher
flight, indeed, as their titles may premonish, they rather dare
that critical inane to which we have more than once referred.
Hurd is here à classicist with tell-tale excursions and divaga-
tions. In his Idea of Universal Poetry he will not at first in-
1 e.g. iii. 171: "Men's minds. Men's,
for the genitive plwal of man, is not
allowable."
2 Vide ed. cit., ii. 417, and especially
iii. 389-91, a long note of very great
interest. I do not know whether Hurd
had condescended to take a hint from
the humble dissenting Mason (v. inf.)
3 He was born only twenty years
after the death of Dryden, and died
the year before Tennyson was born.
+ My copy in 10 vols. (London, 1777)
appears to be made up of different edi.
tions of the separate books the fifth of
the Horace and Dialogues, the third of
the Cowley.
5 These qualities are particularly
shown in a really admirable note, ii.
107–15, on the method and art of
criticism, with special reference to
Longinus, Bouhours, and Addison.
Hurd is, however, once more, and in
more detail, too severe on Addison.
It may be repeated that Lessing pays
very particular attention to Hurd in
the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, and
speaks of him with great respect.
HURD.
267
sse
clude verse in his definition, nor will be accept the commonplace
but irresistibly cogent argument of universal practice
* and expectation. Poetry is the only form of com-
tations.
position which has pleasure for its end; verse gives
pleasure ; therefore poetry must use verse. The fiction or
imitation is the soul of poetry; but style is its body (not
“ dress," mark). Hurd even takes the odd and not main-
tainable but rather original view that the new prose fiction is.
a clumsy thing, foolishly sacrificing its proper aids of verse.?
He is most neo-classically peremptory as to the laws of Kinds,
which are not arbitrary things by any means, nor “to be
varied at pleasure."2 But the long Second Dissertation on
the Provinces of the Drama, which avowedly starts from this
principle, shows, before long, something more than those ease-
ments and compromises by which, as we have already said,
eighteenth-century critics often temper the straitness of their
orthodoxy. “It is true,” says Hurd, "the laws of the drama,
as formed by Aristotle out of the Greek poets, can of them-
selves be no rule to us in this matter, because these poets had
given no examples of such intermediate species.” It is, in-
deed, most true ; but it will be a little difficult to reconcile it
with the prohibition of multiplying and varying Kinds. The
Third and Fourth Dissertations, filling a volume to themselves,
deal with Poetical Imitation and its Marks, the hard-worked
word“ imitation ” being used in its secondary or less honourable
sense.
The Discourses are, in short, of the “parallel passage " kind,
but written in a liberal spirit,showing not merely wide read-
ing but real acuteness, and possessing, in the second instance,
the additional interest of being addressed to “Skroddles"
Mason, who certainly “imitated ” in this sense pretty freely.
Even here that differentia which saves Hurd appears, as where
he says,5 The golden times of the English poetry were un-
doubtedly the reigns of our two queens," while, as we saw in
the last chapter, Blair was teaching, and for years was to teach,
1 ii. 153.
saying the plain truth that “but for
2 ii. 154.
the Argonautics, there had been no
3 ii. 220.
fourth book of the Æneis" (iii. 49).
4 Almost too liberal, as where he 5 iii. 153.
falls foul of Jeremias Holstenius for
6 P. 197.
268
.
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
his students at Edinburgh, a scheme of literary golden ages in
which that of Elizabeth was simply left out.
· Still, these three volumes, though they would put Hurd
much higher than the Addison Commentary, are not those
which give him the position sought to be vindicated for him
here.
Neither will his titles be sought by any one in his Lectures
on the Prophecies : while even that edition of Cowley's Selected
Works the principle of which Johnson at one time
Whenne attacked, while at another be admitted it to more
favour, can only be drawn on as a proof that Hurd
was superior to mere “correctness" in harking back to this
poet. Nay, the Moral and Political Dialogues (which drew
from the same redoubtable judge the remark, “I fear he is
a Whig still in his heart"), though very well written and in-
teresting in their probable effect on Landor, are not in the
main literary. Literary characters Waller, Cowley, and others
—often figure in them, but only the third, “On the Age of
Queen Elizabeth,” has something of a literary bent, and this
itself would scarcely be noteworthy but for its practically in-
dependent appendix, the Letters on Chivalry and Romance.
Here-not exactly in a nutshell, but in less than one hundred
and fifty small pages—lie all Hurd's " proofs,” his claims, his
titles: and they seem, to me at least, to be very considerable.
It is true that even here we must make some deductions.
The passages about Chivalry and about the Crusades not
merely suffer from necessarily: insufficient information, but are
exposed to the diabolical arrows of that great advo-
The Letters
on Chivalry catus diaboli Johnson when he said : that Hurd was
and “one of a set of men who account for everything
Romance.
ce systematically. For instance, it has been a fashion
to wear scarlet breeches; these men would tell you that accord-
ing to causes and effects no other wear could at the time have
been chosen." This is a most destructive shrapnel to the
whole eighteenth century, and by no means to the eighteenth
century only ; but it is fair to remember that Hurd's Romance
was almost as distasteful to Johnson as his Whiggery. And
1 Boswell, Globe ed., pp. 363, 441. 3 Works, ed. cit., vol. vi., p. 196.*
2 Ibid., p 598.
HURD.
269
The
now there is no need for any further application of the refiner's
fire and the fuller's soap; while on the other hand what remains
of the Letters (and it is much) is of altogether astonishing
quality. I know nothing like it outside England, even in
Germany, at its own time; I know nothing like it in England
for more than thirty years after its date; I should be puzzled
to pick out anything superior to the best of it (with the proper
time allowance) since.
At the very opening of the Letters, Hurd meets the current
chatter about “ monkish barbarism," "old wives' tales," and the
rest, full tilt. “The greatest geniuses,” he says,
OC- "of our own and foreign countries, such as Ariosto
trine.
and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in
England, were seduced by these barbarities of their fore-
fathers; were even charmed by the Gothic Romances. Was
this caprice and absurdity in them? Or may there not be some-
thing in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a
genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic
moderns have gone too far in their perpetual contempt and
ridicule of it?” There is no mistake possible about this; and
if the author afterwards digresses not a little in his “ Chivalry”
discussions—if he even falls into the Addisonian track, which he
elsewhere condemns, of comparing classical and romantic methods,
as a kind of apology for the latter, one ought, perhaps, to admit
that it was desirable, perhaps necessary, in his day to do so.
But when he returns to his real subject, the uncompromising-
ness and the originality of his views are equally evident, and they
gain not a little by being compared with Warton, whose Obser-
vations on the Faërie Queene had already appeared. After argu-
ing, not without much truth, that both Shakespeare and Milton
are greater when they “use Gothic manners” than when they
employ classical, he comes 1 to Spenser himself, and undertakes
to "criticise the Faërie Queene under the idea not of a classical,
but of a Gothic composition.” He shows that he knows what
he is about by subjoining that, “if you judge Gothic archi-
tecture by Grecian rules, you find nothing but deformity, but
when you examine it by its own the result is quite different.”
i In Letter VIII., ibid., p. 266 sq.
270
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
A few pages later1 he lays the axe even more directly to the
root of the tree. - The objection to Spenser's method arises
from your classic ideas of Unity, which have no place here."
There is unity in the Faërie Queene, but it is the unity not
of action, but of design. Hurd even reprobates the additional
unities which Spenser communicates by the ubiquity of Prince
Arthur, and by his allegory. (He may be thought wrong here,
but this does not matter.) Then he proceeds to compare Spenser
with Tasso, who tries to introduce classic unity, and gives the
Englishman much the higher place ; and then again he un-
masks the whole of his batteries on the French critics. He
points out, most cleverly, that they, after using Tasso to depre-
ciate Ariosto, turned on Tasso himself; and, having dealt
dexterous slaps in the face to Davenant, Rymer, and Shaftes-
bury, he has a very happy passage on Boileau's clinquant du
Tasse, and the way in which everybody, even Addison, duti-
fully proceeded to think that Tasso was clinquant, and nothing
else. Next he takes the offensive-defensive for "the golden
dreams of Ariosto, the celestial visions of Tasso” themselves,
champions “the fairy way," and convicts Voltaire out of the
mouth of Addison, to whom he had appealed. And then,
warming as he goes on, he pours his broadsides into the very
galère capitaine of the pirate fleet, the maxim“ of following
Nature.” “ The source of bad criticism, as universally of bad
philosophy, is the abuse of terms."4 A poet, no doubt, must
follow “Nature”; but it is the nature of the poetical world,
not of that of science and experience. Further, there is not
only confusion general, but confusion particular. You must
follow the ordinary nature in satire, in epigram, in didactics,
not in other kinds. Incredulus odi has been absurdly mis-
understood. The “divine dream" is among the noblest of
the poet's prerogatives. “The Henriade," for want of it, “will
in a short time be no more read than Gondibert.”? And he
winds up a very intelligent account of Chaucer's satire on
Romance in Sir Thopas by a still more intelligent argument,
that it was only the abuse of Romance that Chaucer satirised,
1 P. 271.
5 P. 306.
2 P. 273.
6 P. 309.
8 P. 290.
7 P. 313.
4 P. 299.
HURD.
271
H2S
and by an at least plausible criticism of the advent of Good
Sense, “Stooping with disenchanted wings to earth.”
“What," he concludes, “ we have gotten is, you will say, a
great deal of good sense; what we have lost is a world of fine
fabling, the illusion of which is so grateful to the charmed
spirit that, in spite of philosophy and fashion, Fairy' Spenser
still ranks highest among the poets ; I mean, with all those
who are either come of that house, or bave any kindness for it.”
And now I should like to ask whether it is just or fair to
say that the work of the man who wrote this thirty-three
years before Lyrical Ballads is “vapid and perverted,” that it is
“empirical, dull, and preposterous," and, at the best, “not very
useful as criticism”?
On the contrary, I should say that it was not only useful as
criticism, but that it was at the moment, and for the men, the
unum necessarium therein. Why the Time-Spirit
m- chose Hurd for his mouthpiece in this instance I
portance.
know no more than those who have used this harsh
language of him; this Spirit, like others, has a singular fashion
of blowing where he lists. But, at any rate, he does not blow
hot and cold here. Scraps and orts of Hurd's doctrine may of
course be found earlier-in Dryden, in Fontenelle, in Addison,
even in Pope ; but, though somebody else may know an
original for the whole or the bulk of it, I, at least, do not.
The three propositions—that Goths and Greeks are to be
judged by their own laws and not by each other's; that there
are several unities, and that “unity of Action” is not the only
one that affects and justifies even the fable; and that “follow
Nature” is meaningless if not limited, and pestilent heresy as
limited by the prevailing criticism of the day—these three
abide. They may be more necessary and sovereign at one time
than at another, but in themselves they are for all time, and
they were for Hurd's more than for almost any other of which
Time itself leaves record.
Literary currishness and literary cubbishness (an ignoble
1 Hurd knew Gray (who, character in Mr Gosse's Index). He may have
istically in both ways, described him as caught some heat from one who had
" the last man who wore stiff-topped plenty, though he concealed it. (Loci
gloves") pretty well (see the references Critici contains extracts from Hurd.)
272
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
but hardy and vivacious pair of brethren) have not failed
almost from the first to growl and gambol over the
Alleged im- mistakes which—in most cases save that of Gray-
perfections
of the group. were made by these pioneers. Some of these mis-
takes they might no doubt have avoided, as he did,
by the exercise of a more scholarly care. But it may be
doubted whether even Gray was not saved to a great extent
from committing himself by the timidity which restrained him
from launching out into extensive hypotheses, and the in-
dolence or bashfulness which held him back from extensive
publication, or even writing. It was indeed impossible that
any man, without almost superhuman energy aud industry, and
without a quite extraordinary share of learning, means, health,
leisure, and long life, should have at that time informed him-
self with any thoroughness of the contents and chronological
disposition of mediæval literature. The documents were, to all
but an infinitesimal extent, unpublished ; in very few cases
had even the slightest critical editing been bestowed on those
that were in print; and the others lay in places far distant,
and accessible with the utmost difficulty, from each other; for
the most part catalogued very insufficiently, or not at all, and
necessitating a huge expense of time and personal labour even
to ascertain their existence. At the beginning of the twentieth
century any one who in these islands cannot find what he
wants in a published form could in forty-eight hours obtain
from the librarians at the British Museum, the Bodleian, the
Cambridge Library, that of Trinity College, Dublin, and that
of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, information on the
point whether what he wants is at any of them, and by exert-
ing himself a little beyond the ordinary could visit all the five
in less than a week. When the British Museum was first
opened, in the middle of the last century, and Gray went to
read in it “ through the jaws of a whale,” it would have taken
a week or so to communicate with the librarians; they would
probably have had to make tedious researches before they
could, if they chose to do so, reply, and when the replies were
received, the inquirer would have had to spend the best part
of a month or more in exhausting, costly, and not always safe,
journeys, before he could have got at the books.
HURD.
273
There was, therefore, much direct excuse for the incom-
pleteness and inaccuracy of the facts given by Percy, and
Warton, and even Hurd; and not a little indirect excuse for the
wildness and baselessness of their conjectures on such points
as the Origin of Romance and the like. It is scarcely more
than thirty or forty years—it is certainly not more than fifty
or sixty-since it began to be possible for the student to
acquaint himself with the texts, and inexcusable for the teacher
not to do so. It is a very much shorter time than the shortest
of these since theories, equally baseless and wild with those of
these three, have been confidently and even arrogantly put for-
ward about the origin of the Arthurian legends, and since
mere linguistic crotchets have been allowed to interfere with
the proper historical survey of European literature. The point
of importance, the point of value, was that Percy, and Warton,
and Hurd, not only to the huge impatience of Johnson, the
common friend of the first two, devoted their attention to
ballad, and romance, and saga, and mediæval treatise not only
recognised and allowed the principle that in dealing with new
literary forms we must use now literary measures-not only
in practice, if not in explicit theory, accepted the pleasure of the
reader, and the idiosyncrasy of the book, and the “leaden
rule” which adapts itself to Art and not Art to itself, as the
grounds of criticism, but laid the foundations of that wider
study of literary history which is not so much indispensable to
literary criticism as it is literary criticism itself.
To this remarkable group of general precursors may be
added, for a reason previously given, a couple of pioneers in
: a particular branch-one contemporary with and
Prosody.
indeed in most cases anticipating their general
work; the other coming level with its latest in-
stances. The fact of them is not contestable, and, as we have
seen already, the tyranny of the absolutely syllabic, middle-
1 The original History of Criticism
contained a passage promising a larger
treatment of the special subject of
Prosody, if possible, which promise the
writer has since been able to carry
out. The performances of Mason and
Mitford, however, are extremely char-
acteristic of the general trend of
"preceptive” criticism at this time,
and it seemed unnecessary to omit
the account of them. But from this
point onwards the handling of in-
finitely prosodic matters will be for
the most part eschewed.
274
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
• and
paused, end-stopped couplet coincides exactly with the “prose-
and-sense” dynasty in English poetry. We have seen also that
most of the precursors, explicitly or incidentally, by theory or
by practice, attacked or evaded this tyranny. But not one of
them—though Gray's Metrum shows what he might have done
if in this matter, as in others, he could only have persuaded
himself to “speak out”-had the inclination or the courage to
tackle the whole subject of the nature and laws of harmony in
English composition. The two whom we have mentioned were
bolder, and we must give them as much space as is allowable
without unduly invading the province of the other History.
In 1749 appeared two pamphlets, on The Power of Numbers
and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic Compositions, and on
The Power and Harmony of Prosaic Nurnbers. No
his Power
on : author's name is on either title-page, but they are
of Numbers known to be by a Dissenting minister named John
Poetry.
Mason. He seems to have given much attention to
the study and teaching of elocution, and he pub-
lished another pamphlet on that special subject, which attained
its fourth edition in 1757.2
In his poetical tractate Mason plunges into the subject
after a very promising fashion, by posing the question with
which he has to deal as “What is the cause and source of that
pleasure which, in reading either poetry or prose, we derive not
only from the sound and sense of the words, but the order in
which they are disposed ? ” or, as an alternative, “Why a
sentence conveying just the same thought, and containing the
very same words, should afford the ear a greater pleasure when
expressed one way than another, though the difference may
perhaps arise only from the transposition of a single word ?”
One feels, after reading only so far, that De Quincey's well-
known phrase, “ This is what you can recommend to a friend !”
is applicable—that whether the man gives the right answers
or not he has fixed at once on the right questions, and has
1 "Skroddles" was William.
2 My copy contains all three bound
together. It is interesting, though not
surprising, to find that there was no
demand for the two original and valu-
able constituents, and a brisk one for
the commonplace third.
JOHN MASON.
275
acknowledged the right ground of argument. Not “ How
ought sentences to be arranged ? " not “How did A. B. C.
arrange them or bid them be arranged ? ” but “How and why
do they give the greatest pleasure as the result of arrange-
ment?”
So also, in his prose tractate, Mason starts from the position
that "numerous” arrangement adds wonderfully to the pleasure
of the reader. To enter into the details of his working out of
the principle in the two respects would be, to commit that
“digression to another kind” from which we have warned
ourselves off. But it is not improper to say that, a hundred
and fifty years ago, he had already cleared his mind of all the
cant and confusion which to this day beset too many minds in
regard to the question of Accent v. Quantity, by adopting the
sufficient and final principle ? that “that which principally fixes
and determines the quantities in English numbers is the accent
and emphasis"; that though he is not quite so sharply happy
in his definition, he evidently uses "quantity” itself merely as
an equivalent for “unit of metrical value”; that he clears away
all the hideous and ruinous nonsense about “elision," observing ?
that in
“And many an amorous, many a humorous lay"
there are fourteen syllables instead of ten, and that “the ear
finds nothing in it redundant, defective, or disagreeable, but
is sensible of a sweetness not ordinarily found in the common
iambic verse.” Further, he had anticipated ? Hurd by giving
elaborate examples of quantified analysis of prose rhythm.
The minutiæ of all this, interesting as they are, are not for us ;
the point is that here is a man who has not the fear of Bysshe
before his eyes, or the fear of anybody; who will not be
“connoisseured out of his senses,” and whose brain, when his
ear tells it that a line is beautiful, proceeds calmly to analyse
if possible the cause of the beauty, without troubling itself to
ask whether anybody has said that it ought not to exist. 4
i Power of Numbers, p. 9.
leads him to something like the old
2 Ibid., p. 27.
blasphemy of rhyme (“one of the
3 Prosaic Numbers, passim.
lowest ornaments and greatest shackles
4 Mason's very errors are interesting of modern poesy" (Power of Numbers,
as where his delight in recovered p. 14).
rhythin-in full melody of variety-
276
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
These inquiries into prosody and rhythm formed no unim-
portant part of the English criticism of the mid-eighteenth
century. The two different ways in which they
Mitford-
his Har- were regarded by contemporaries may be easily
mony of
guessed, but we have documentary evidence of them
Language.
in an interesting passage of the dedication to John
Gilpina of the second edition of the book in which they
culminated, and to which we now come. Mitford's Inquiry
into the Principles of Harmony in Language represents himself
as having paid a visit to Pye, afterwards Laureate ; and, finding
him with books of the kind before him, as having expostulated
with “a votary of fancy and the Muses” for his “patience
with such dull and uninteresting controversy." Pye, it seems,
replied that “the interest in the subject so warmly and exten-
sively taken by English men of letters ” had excited his
curiosity, which had been gratified by Foster's elucidation of
the subject itself. And Mitford, borrowing the book, soon
found his own excited too.3
The volume of which this was the genesis, appeared first in
1774. The second edition, very carefully revised and ex-
1 Even at this early date Mason was
able to quote not a few writers—Pem-
berton, Manwaring, Malcolm, Gay,
who, as well as Geddes, Foster, Galley,
and others, had dealt with this subject.
In fact, the list of such authors in the
eighteenth century is quite long, though
few of them are very important. For
an excellent reasoned bibliography see
Mr T. S. Omond's English Metrists
(Tunbridge Wells, 1903). Henry Pem-
berton, Gresham Professor of Physic,
and a man of various ability, published
on the tous surprising subject of
Glover's Leonidas, in 1738, Observations
on Poetry, which I had hunted in the
catalogues for a long time, when Mr
Gregory Smith kindly gave me a copy.
It shows, as the election of its text
may indicate, and as its date would
further suggest, no very enthusiastic
or imaginative appreciation of the Muse,
but is remarkably learned, not merely
in the ancients and the modern French
men, but in Italians like Minturno and
Castelvetro. Pemberton deals with
Epic and Dramatic poetry—their rise,
dignity, fable, sentiment, character,
language, and difference; with Versi-
fication, where his standpoint may be
guessed, from his denouncing “the
mixture of iambic and trochaic” as a
blemish on L'Allegro and Il Penscroso;
with the Sublime. He is not an in-
spiring or inspired writer, but holds
some position, both as influential on
the Germans, who not seldom quote
him, and in the history of Prosody.
2 Not Cowper's hero, but a son of
"Picturesque" Gilpin. Mitford had
been a pupil of Gilpin the elder.
Foster's (John) Essay on the Differ-
ent Nature of Accent and Quantity
(second edition, Eton, 1763) is duly
before me also, but I must not touch
it here.
4 As An Essay on the Harmony of
Language. My friend, Mr T. S.
MITFORD.
277
tended, was not published till 1804. It may appear at first
sight unfortunate, but on reflection will probably be seen to
have been a distinct advantage, that even this second edition
preceded the appearance of any of the capital works of the new
school except the Lyrical Ballads. For had it been otherwise,
and had Mitford taken any notice of the new poetry, we should
in all probability have had either the kind of reactionary pro-
test which often comes from pioneers who have been overtaken
and passed, or at best an attempt at awkward adjustment of
two very different points of view. As it is, the book, besides
exhibiting much original talent, belongs to a distinct school
and platform that of the later but still eighteenth-century
Romantic beginners, while at the same time it represents a
much greater knowledge of old literature, helped by Ellis's
Specimens, by Ritson's work, and other products of the last
years of the century, than had been possible to Shenstone, to
Gray, or even to Warton,
Once more, its detailed tenets and pronouncements, with all
but the general methods by which they are arrived at, belong
to another story. But these general methods, and some special
exemplifications of them, belong to us. Rightly or wrongly,
Mitford sought his explanations of the articulate music of
poetry from the laws of inarticulate music itself. For this
reason, or for another, he was disposed to join the accentual
and not the quantitative school of prosodists, and to express
strong disapproval of the adoption of classical prosodic terms
in regard to English. He is sometimes arbitrary, as when he
lays down? “that in English every word has one syllable
always made eminent by accent”; and we have to remember
that he was writing after nearly a hundred years of couplet
verse on Bysshian principles before we can excuse--while we
can never endorsem-his statement that “ to all who have any
familiarity with English poetry a regularity in the disposition
of accents is its most striking characteristic." He is rather
Omond, in the quite invaluable biblio. Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge were
graphy referred to above, thinks this in their nurseries.
“clearer, shorter, more pointed” than 1 Harmony of Language, second
the second. It is at any rate well edition, p. 51.
to remember that when it appeared, 2 Ibid., p. 81.
Johnson had ten years to live, and
278
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
unsound on the Pause, but lays down the all-important rule
that “rhyme is a time-beater” without hesitation. He admits
trisyllabic feet even in what he calls “common time"; but (in
consequence of his accentual theories probably) troubles himself
with “aberration" of accent (i.e., substitution of trochee for
iamb), with redundant or extra-metrical syllables in the middle
of the line, and with other epicyclic and cumbrous superfluities.
But the most important thing in the whole book—the thing
which alone makes it really important to us is that he sup-
ports his theories by a regular examination of the whole of
English verse as far as he knows it, even back to Anglo-
Saxon times, and that in making the examination, he appeals
not to this supposed rule or to that accepted principle, but to
the actual practice of the actual poets as interpreted to him by
his own ear.
In his errors, therefore (or in what may seem to some his
errors), as well as in his felicities, Mitford exhibits himself to
the full as an adherent of that changed school of poetical
criticism which strives in the first place to master the actual
documents, in the second to ascertain, as far as possible and as
closely as possible, their chronological relation to each other,
and in the third to take them as they are and explain them as
well as it may, without any selection of a particular form of a
particular metre at a particular time as a norm which had been
painfully reached and must on no account be departed from.
Ho shows the same leaning by his constant reference to the
ear, not the rule, as the authority. The first draft of his book
was published not only when Johnson was still alive, but long
before the Lives of the Poets appeared; and it is most interesting
to see the different sides from which they attack the prosodic
character, say of Milton. Johnson—it is quite evident from his
earlier and more appreciative handling of the subject in the
Ramblerapproaching Milton with the orthodox decasyllabic
rules in hand, found lines which most undoubtedly do not
accord with those rules, and termed them harsh accordingly.
Mitford approaches the lines with nothing but a listening ear,
finds them “not harsh and crabbed, but musical as Apollo's
lute," and then proceeds to construct, rightly or wrongly, such
A rule as will allow and register their music.
STERNE.
279
The truth is, that these inquirers both builded and pulled
down better than they knew. Many persons besides Mitford
ames have begun by thinking controversies about prosody
of prosodic dull and uninteresting, while only too few have
inquiry allowed themselves to be converted as he did ; nor
is it common to the present day to find a really intelligent
comprehension of the importance of the subject. On the con-
trary, a kind of petulant indignation is apt to be excited by
any criticism of poetry which pursues these “mechanical”
lines, as they are called, and the critic has sometimes even
to endure the last indignity of being styled a "philologist” for
his pains.
Yet nothing is more certain than that these inquiries into
prosody were among the chief agencies in the revolution which
came over English poetry at the end of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the next. A sort of superstition of the
decasyllable, hardened into a fanaticism of fixed pause, rigidly
dissyllabic feet and the rest, had grown upon our verse-
writers. A large part of the infinite metrical wealth of
English was hidden away and locked up under taboo. In-
quiries into prosody broke this taboo inevitably; and
something much more than mere metrical wealth was sure
to be found, and was found, in the treasure-houses thus
thrown open.
One expected figure of a different kind may perhaps have been
hitherto missed in this part of our gallery. Sterne's well-known
termes and outburst as to criticism, in the twelfth chapter of
the stop the third book of Tristram Shandy is far too famous
a thing to be passed over with the mere allusion
given to it in the last chapter, or with another in this. Nay,
it may be said at once, from its fame and from its forcible
expression, to have had, and even in a sense still to have, no
small place among the Dissolvents of Judgment by Rule.
“ Looking only at the stop-watch " is one of those admirable
and consummate phrases which settle themselves once for all
in the human memory, and not merely possess—as precisians
complain, illegitimately—the force of an argument, but have a
property of self-preservation and recurrence at the proper
N02
wa
280
.
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
moment in which arguments proper are too often sadly lack-
ing.
Further, it must be admitted that there are few better instances
of the combined sprightliness and ingenuity of Sterne's humour.
“Befetiched with the bobs and trinkets of criticism” is in
reality even happier than the “stop-watch," and of an extra-
ordinary propriety. Though he did “fetch it from the coast
of Guinea,” nothing was ever less far-fetched or more home-
driven. The " nothing of the colouring of Titian ” is equally
happy in its rebuke of the singular negativeness—the attention
to what is not there, not to what is--of Neo-Classicism; while
the outburst, again world-known, as to the “ tormenting cant
of criticism," and the ingenious and thoroughly English appli-
cation of this cant itself to the eulogy of the curse of Ernulphus,
are all too delightful, and have been too effective for good, not
to deserve the heartiest acknowledgment.
At the same time the Devil's Advocate—who is always a
critic, if a critic is not always an officer of the devil-may,
nay must, point out that Sterne's main object in the passage
is not strictly literary. It is assuredly from the sentimental
point of view that he attacks the Neo-Classic“ fetichism”; the
“generous heart” is to “give up the reins of its imagination
into the author's hands," to " be pleased he knows not why,
and cares not wherefore." To which Criticism, not merely of
the Neo-Classic persuasion, can only cry, “Softly! Before the
most generous of hearts gives up the reins of imagination
(which, by the way, are not entirely under the heart's control)
to an author, he must show that he can manage them, he
must take them, in short. And it is by no means superfluous
-it is highly desirable, if not absolutely necessary-to know
and care for the wherefore of your pleasing." Nor, wide as
was Sterne's reading, and ingenious as are the uses which he
makes of it, does it appear that he had any very great inte-
rest in literature as such as being good, and not merely odd,
or naughty, or out-of-the-way, or conducive to outpourings
of heart. He might even, by a very ungenerous person, be
described as by no means disinterested in his protests. For
certainly his own style of writing had very little chance of
SHAFTESBURY.
281
being adjudged to keep time according to the classical stop-
watch, of satisfying, with its angles and its dimensions, the
requirements of the classical scale. So he is rather a “Hal o'
the Wynd” in the War of Critical Independence—he fights
for his own hand, though he does yeoman's service to the
general cause.
From these we may turn-and in fact return to a group of
English writers whose criticism is more directly interconnected.
Esthetics In these we may perceive the working of some-
and their thing like a general conception of the philosophical
Influence. or Æsthetic kind of theories of Beauty not limited
to one kind of Art. This, first distinctly apparent in Descartes,
had been more specially cultivated (though there is something
of it in Addison) on the Continent than in England—by Baum-
garten and Sulzer in Germany, by André in France, and above
all by Vico in Italy.1 But it is as a derivation from Locke,
apparent in English, very specially in a contemporary of Addi-
son's who was widely read, and in others later,—Hume, Burke,
Adam Smith,” Alison, and Gibbon.
There are few writers of whom more different opinions have
been held, in regard to their philosophical and literary value,
than is the case with Shaftesbury. His criticism
Shaftesbury.
* has been less discussed, except from the purely
philosophical or the more purely technical æsthetic side; but
difference is scarcely less certain here when discussion does
take place. It is difficult to put the dependence of that
1 For all these and others see Hist.
Crit., ü. 141 sq.
2 On Adam Smith and Gibbon a note
must suffice. The former has actually
left us nothing important in print
concerning the subject, though he is
known to have lectured on it, and
though to the partisans of “psycho
logical” criticism the Moral Senti-
ments may seem pertinent. His line
seems to have been close to those of
Hume and Blair, the latter of whom
knew and used Smith's Lectures in
preparing his own. As for Gibbon, his
great work did not give very much
opportunity for touching our subject,
and he availed himself little of what
it did give : though on Byzantine liter-
ature generally, and on some indi.
viduals—Photius, Sidonius, and others
-he acquits himself well enough. His
early Essay on the Study of Literature
is extremely general and quite unim-
portant.
282
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
difference in an uncontentious and non- question - begging.
manner, because it concerns a fundamental antinomy of the
fashion in which this curious author strikes opposite tempera-
ments. To some, every utterance of his seems to carry with
it in an undertone something .of this sort: “I am not merely
a Person of Quality, and a very fine gentleman, but also, look
you, a philosopher of the greatest depth, though of the most
elegant exterior, and a writer of consummate originality and
agudeza. If you are sensible people you will pay me the
utmost respect; but alas! there are so many vulgar and in-
sensible people about, that very likely you will not." Now
this kind of “air” abundantly fascinates some readers, and
intrigues others; while, to yet others again, it seems the
affectation, most probably of a charlatan, certainly of an
intellectual coxcomb, and they are offended accordingly. It
is probably unjust (though there is weighty authority for it) to
regard Shaftesbury as a charlatan; but he will hardly, except
by the fascination aforesaid or by some illegitimate partisanship
of religious or philosophical view, escape the charge of being
a coxcomb; and his coxcombry appears nowhere more than in
his dealings with criticism.1 From the strictest point of view
of our own definition of the art, he would have very little
right to entrance here at all, and would have to be pretty
unceremoniously treated if he were allowed to take his trial.
His concrete critical utterances—his actual appreciations-are
almost Rymerical; with a modish superciliousness substituted
for pedantic scurrility. .“ The British Muses," quoth my lord,
in his Advice to an Author,2 “ may well lie abject and obscure,
especially being as yet in their mere infant state. They have
scarce hitherto arrived to anything of stateliness or person,"
and he continues in the usual style with “wretched pun and
quibble,” “ false sublime,” “Gothick mode of poetry," “horrid
discord of jingling rhyme," &c. He speaks of “that noble
satirist Boileau” as “raised from the plain model of the
1 These are to be found almost
påssim in the Characteristics (my copy
of which is the small 3 vol. ed., s.l.,
1749), but chiefly in his Advice to an
Author (vol. i., ed. cit., p. 105-end) and
in the Third Miscellany (üi. 92-129).
2 i. 147.
SHAFTESBURY-HUME.
283
ancients.” Neither family affection, nor even family pride,
could have induced him to speak as he speaks of Dryden, if
he had had any real literary taste. His sneers at Universities,
at “pedantick learning," at "the mean fellowship of bearded
boys," deprive him of the one saving grace which Neo-
classicism could generally claim. “Had I been a Spanish
Cervantes, and with success equal to that comick author had
destroyed the reigning taste of Gothick or Moorish Chivalry,
I could afterwards contentedly have seen my burlesque itself
despised and set aside.” 3 Perhaps there is not a more un-
happily selected single epithet in the whole range of criticism
than “the cold Lucretius." 4
On the other hand, both in the more speciously literary parts
of his desultory discourses de quodam Ashleio, and outside of
them, he has frequent remarks on the Kinds; 5 he is quite
copious on Correctness ; 6 and there can be no doubt that he
deserves his place in this chapter by the fashion in which he
endeavours to utilise his favourite pulchrum and honestum in ref-
erence to Criticism, of which he is a declared and (as far as his
inveterate affectation and mannerism will let him) an ingeni-
ous defender. The main locus for this is the Third Miscel-
lany, and its central, or rather culminating, passage occurs in
the second chapter thereof. The Beautiful is the principle of
Literature as well as of Virtue; the sense whereby it is appre-
hended is Good Tastë; the manner of attaining this taste is by a
gradual rejection of the excessive, the extravagant, the vulgar.
A vague enough gospel, and not over well justified by the fruits
of actual appreciation quoted above; 9 but not perhaps much
vaguer, or possessing less justification, than most "metacritic."
The position of Hume in regard to literary criticism has
an interest which would be almost peculiar if it were not
for something of a parallel in Voltaire. If the
a literary opinions of the author of the Enquiry into
Human Nature stood alone they would be almost negligible;
1 iii. 187 sq.
2 i. 224, &c. George Campbell in his Philosophy of
3 ü. 173.
4 i. 35.
Rhetoric (v. sup., p. 203) beats up his
5 i. 147 sq.
i. 157 sq. lordship's quarters, on the score of
? iii. 125.
8 i. 163 sq. precious and rococo style, is too much
• The lively fashion in which Dr forgotten nowadays.
Hume.
284
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
and if he had worked them into an elaborate treatise, like
that of his clansman Kames, this would probably, if remembered
at all, be remembered as a kind of “awful example." In
their context and from their author, however, we cannot
quite “regard and pass” Hume's critical observations as their
intrinsic merit may seem to suggest that we should do: nay,
in that context and from that author, they constitute a really
valuable document in more than one relation.
It cannot be said that Hume does not invite notice as a
critic; on the contrary, his title of “ Essays. Moral, Political,
Examples of and Literary” seems positively to challenge it. Yet.
his critical his actual literary utterances are rather few, and
opinions. would be almost unimportant but for the considera-
tions just put. He tells us that criticism is difficult;a he
applies 2 (as Johnson did, though differently) Fontenelle's remark
about “telling the hours”; he illustrates from Holland the
difference of excellence in commerce and in literature. He con-
demns--beforehand, and with the vigour and acuteness which
we should expect from him—the idea of Taine, the attempt
to account for the existence of a particular poet at a particular
time and in a particular place. He is shocked at the vanity,
at the rudeness, and at the loose language of the ancients.5
He approaches, as Tassoni 6 and Perrault? had approached,
one of the grand cruces of the whole matter by making his
Sceptic urge that “beauty and worth are merely of a relative
nature, and consist of an agreeable sentiment produced by
an object on a particular mind”; 8 but he makes no detailed
use or application whatever of this as regards, literature.
His Essay on Simplicity and Refinement in Writingº is psy-
chology rather than criticism, and he uses his terms in a
rather curious manner. At least, I myself find it difficult
i The literary essays occur almost
wholly in the First part (published in
1742: my copy is the “new edition"
of the Essays and Treatises, 2 vols. :
London and Edinburgh, 1764).
? Essay on Delicacy of Taste, pp. 5,
7, ed. cit.
.8 On the Rise and Progress of the
Arts and Sciences, ibid., p. 125.
. Ibid., p. 126.
5.P. 141 sq.
6 V. Hist. Crit., ii. 327, 417.
7 V. Hist. Chit., ii. 418.
8 The Sceptic, p. 186.
9 Pp. 217-222.
HUME.
285
to draw up any definitions of these qualities which will
make Pope the ne plus ultra of justifiable Refinement, and
Lucretius that of Simplicity; Virgil and Racine the examples
of the happy mean in both ; Corneille and Congreve excessive
in Refinement, and Sophocles and Terence excessive in
Simplicity. The whole is, however, a good rationalising of
the “classical” principle; and is especially interesting as
noticing, with slight reproof, a tendency to too great “affecta-
tion and conceit” both in France and England — faults for
which we certainly should not indict the mid-eighteenth
century. The Essay On Tragedy is more purely psychological
still. And though On the Standard of Taste is less open to
this objection, one cannot but see that it is Human Nature,
and not Humane Letters, in which Hume is really interest-
ing himself. The vulgar censure on the reference to Bunyan 2
is probably excessive ; for it is at least not improbable that
Hume had never read a line of The Pilgrim's Progress, and
was merely using the tinker's name as a kind of type-counter.
But this very acceptance of a conventional judgment - ac-
ceptance constantly repeated throughout the Essay—is almost
startling in context with the alleszermalmend tendency of some
of its principles. A critic who says 3 that “It is evident that
none of the rules of composition are fixed by reasonings a
priori,” is in fact saying “Take away that bauble !” in regard
to Neo-classicism altogether; and though in the very same
page Hume repeats the orthodox cavils at Ariosto, while
admitting his charm on the next, having thus set up the idol
again, he proceeds once more to lop it of hands and feet and
tumble it off its throne by saying that "if things are found
to please, they cannot be faults; let the pleasure which they
produce be ever so unexpected and unaccountable.” The
most dishevelled of Romantics, in the reddest of waistcoats,
could say no more.
1 “Refinement" seems here to mean
“conceit," “elaborate diction.” But
the "simplicity” of Lucretius, in any
sense in which the quality can be said
to be pushed to excess by Sophocles, is
very hard to grasp.
2 P. 257: “Whoever would assert.
an equality of genius and elegance
between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan
and Addison, would be thought to
defend no less an extravagance," &c.
3 P. 258.
286
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
1
In his remarks upon the qualifications and functions of
the critic, Hume's anthropological and psychological mastery
is evident enough : but it is at least equally evident that his
actual taste in literature was in no sense spontaneous, original,
or energetic. In comparing him, say, with Johnson, it is
not a little amusing to find his much greater acquiescence
in the conventional and traditional judgments. Indeed, towards
the end of his Essay? Hume anticipates a later expression 2
of a perennial attitude of mind by declaring, “However I may
excuse the poet on account of the manners of his age, I never
can relish the composition,” and by complaining of the want
of “humanity and decency so conspicuous" even sometimes
in Homer and the Greek tragedies. That David, of all
persons, should fail to realise—he did not fail to perceive-
that the humanity of Homer was human and the decency
of Sophocles was decent, is indeed surprising.
Such things might at first sight not quite dispose one to
regret that, as he himself remarks,3 “ the critics who have
His incon- had some tincture of philosophy” have been “few,"
sistency. for certainly those who have had more tincture
of philosophy than Hüme himself have been far fewer. But,
as is usually the case, 4 it is not the fault of philosophy at
all. For some reason, natural disposition, or want of disposi-
tion, or even that necessity of clinging to some convention
which has been remarked in Voltaire himself, evidently made
Hume a mere “church-going bell”—pulled by the established
vergers, and summoning the faithful to orthodox worship-
in most of his literary utterances. Yet, as we have seen, he
could not help turning quite a different tune at times, though
he himself hardly knew it.
At the close of Burke's Essays he expressly declines “to
1 P. 274.
of the subject, a "Parabasis on Philo-
2 “I must take pleasure in the thing sophical Criticism" generally.
represented before I can take pleasure 5 A Philosophical Inquiry into the
in the representation," v. infra on Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Peacock himself.
Beautiful, with an Introductory Dis-
3 Essay on Tragedy, p. 243.
course concerning Taste : 1756. I use
4 In the larger History will be found, the Bohn edition of the Works, vol. i.
preceding the discussion of this part pp. 49-181.
BURKE.
287
consider poetry as it regards the Sublime and Beautiful more
Burbe on the at large”; but this "more” refers to the fact that
Sublime and his Fifth Part had been given to the Power of
utajul Words in exciting ideas of the kind. Most of
what he says on this head is Lockian discussion of simple
and compound, abstract and concrete, &c., and of the connection
of words with images, as illustrated by the cases—so interest-
ing in one instance to the English, and in the other to the
whole, eighteenth century-of Blacklock the blind poet, and
Saunderson the blind mathematician. There is, however, a
not unacute contention 1 (against the sinall critics of that and
other times) that the exact analytical composition necessary
in a picture is not necessary in a poetic image. But one
may doubt whether this notion was not connected in his own
mind with the heresy of the “streaks of the tulip.” 2 It serves
him, however, as a safeguard against the mere “imitation "
theory: and it brings (or helps to bring) him very near to a
just appreciation of the marvellous power of words as words.
His remarks on the grandeur of the phrase "the Angel of
the Lord” are as the shadow of a great rock in the weary
glare of the Aufklärung, and so are those which follow on
Milton's "universe of Death.” Nor is it a trifling thing that
he should have discovered the fact that “very polished
languages are generally deficient in Strength."
In the earlier part there are interesting touches, such as
that of “degrading” the style of the Æneid into that of The
Pilgrim's Progress, which, curiously enough, occurs actually in a
defence of a taste for romances of chivalry 3 and of the sea-
.coast of Bohemia. Part I. sect. xv., on the effects of tragedy,
is almost purely ethical. In the parts—the best of the book-
which deal directly with the title subjects (Parts II. and III.),
an excellent demonstration 4 is made of the utter absurdity
of that scheme of physical proportion which we formerly
laughed at:5 but the application, which might seem so
i Op. cit., p. 175 sq. But Burke 3 of this in turn Blair was perhaps
does not seem to have reached the thinking when he wrote the unlucky
larger and deeper views of Lessing on passage quoted above.
this subject.
4 Part III. § iv.
2 See above on Johnson.
5 . Hist. Crit., ii. 417 sq.
288
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
tempting, to similar arbitrariness in judging of literature,
is not made. Still more remarkable is the scantiness of the
section on “ The Beautiful in Sounds”i which should have
brought the writer to our proper subject. Yet we can hardly
regret that he says so little of it when we read that astonish-
ing passage 2 in which the great Mr Burke has “observed”
the affections of the body by Love, and has come to the
conclusion that “the head reclines something on one side;
the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently
with an inclination towards the object; the mouth is a little
opened and the breath drawn slowly with now and then a
low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands fall
idly to the sides”-a sketch which I have always wished
to have seen carried into line by the ingenious pencil of
Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.3 A companion portrait of the
human frame under the influence of poetic afflatus, in writer
or in reader, would indeed have been funny, but scarcely
profitable. In fact, the most that can be said for Burke, as
for the generality of these æsthetic writers, is that the specu-
lations recommended and encouraged could not but break
up the mere ice of Neo-classic rule-judgment. They almost
always go directly to the effect, the result, the event, the
pleasure, the trouble, the thrill. That way perhaps lies the
possibility of new error: but that way certainly lies also
the escape from old.
The trinitarian succession of Scottish æsthetic-empirics-
... Gerard, Alison, Jeffrey-could not with propriety
The Scottish
cesthetic- be omitted here, but the same propriety would be
empirics : violated if great space were given to them. They
Alison.
connect with, or at least touch, Burke and Smith
on the one hand, Kames on the other: but they are, if rather
1 III. $ xxv.
? IV. & xix. i. 160, ed. cit.
3 In the mood in which he did that
eccentric frontispiece to the Maitland
Club Sir Bevis of Hampton (Edinburgh,
1838) at the abgeschmackt - Dess
of which the late excellent Prof.
Kölbing shuddered when he edited
Arthur and Merlin (Leipzig, 1890,
p. ix.) A picture of La Belle Dame
sans Merci in the Royal Academy for
1902 seems to have been actually con-
structed on Mr Burke's suggestions.
For a very witty and crushing jest of
Schlegel's on The Sublime and Beauti-
ful, see Hist. Crit., iii. 400.
ALISON.
289
more literary than the first two, very much less so than the
third. All, in degrees modified perhaps chiefly by the natural
tendency to "improve upon” predecessors, are associationists:
and all display (though in somewhat decreasing measure as a
result of the Time-spirit) that, sometimes amusing but in the
end rather tedious, tendency to substitute for actual reasoning
long chains of only plausibly connected propositions, varied by
more or less ingenious substitutions of definition and equiva-
lence, which is characteristic of the eighteenth century,
Gerard, the earliest, is the least important:1 and such notice
of Jeffrey as is necessary will come best in connection with
his other critical work. Alison, as the central and most im-
portant of the three, and as representing a prevailing party
for a considerable time, may have some substantive notice
here.
The Essay on Taste, which was originally published in 1790,
and which was sped on its way by Jeffrey's Review (the original
The Essay form of the reviewer's own essay) in 1811, had
on Taste. reached its sixth edition in 1825, and was still an
authority, though it must by that time have begun to seem not
a little old-fashioned, to readers of Coleridge and Hazlitt. It
is rather unfortunately “dated” by its style, which—even at
1 This was not the opinion of some fully imitated in painting ;” “Where
person who has annotated the copy of refinement is wanting, taste must be
the Essay on Taste (3rd ed.,. Edin- coarse and vulgar”. (p. 115). “Perfect
burgh, 1780: the first appeared in criticism requires therefore” (p. 174)
1758) which belongs to the Uni. "the greatest philosophical acuteness
versity of Edinburgh, as "wonderfully united with the most exquisite per-
profound.” Other annotators, how- fection of taste.” “The different works
ever, both of this and the Essay on of men of genius sometimes differ very
Genius (1774)—for the University au- much in the degree of their perfec-
thorities of the past appear to have tion” (Genius, p. 236). “Both in
been somewhat indifferent to the genius for the arts and in genius for
fashion in which students used books science Imagination is assisted by
-do not agree with him. In plain Memory." Certainly "here be truths,"
truth both pieces are rather trying but a continued course of reading
examples of that “saying an infinite things like them begins before long
deal of nothing" which is so common to inspire a considerable longing for
in philosophical inquiries. “Facility falsehoods. Gerard, however, though
in the conception of an object, if it habitually dull, is less absurd than
be moderate, gives us pleasure” (Taste, Alison, whom he undoubtedly sup-
p. 29); “The rudest rocks and moun- plied with his principle of Associa-
tains . . . acquire beauty when skil. tion.
290
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
its original date something of a survival—is of the old “ele-
gant” but distinctly artificial type of Blair: and, as has been
hinted already, it abuses the eighteenth-century weakness for
substituting a “combined and permuted” paraphrase of the
proposition for an argument in favour of the fact. There is
a very fair amount of force in its associationist considerations,
though, as with all the devotees of the Association principle
down to Mill, the turning round of the key is too often taken
as equivalent to the opening of the lock. But its main faults,
in more special connection with our subject, are two. The
first is a constant confusion of Beauty or Sublimity
Its confusions
with Interest. Alison exhausts himself in proving
nnn
ULI
the object-a truth no doubt too often neglected by the Neo-
classic tribe, but accepted and expressed by men of intelligence,
from the Lucretian usus concinnat down to Maginn's excellent
“Don't let any fool tell you that you will get tired of your
wife; you are much more likely to get quite unreasonably
fond of her.” But love and admiration, though closely con-
nected, are not the same thing, and love and interest are still
farther apart. Another confusion of Alison's, very germane
indeed to our subject, is that he constantly mixes up the
beauty of a thing with the beauty of the description of it.
The most interesting point, however, about Alison is his
halting between two opinions as to certain Neo-classic idols.
His individual criticisms of literature are constantly vitiated
by faults of the old arbitrariness, especially as to what is
“low.” There is an astonishing lack of critical imagination
“Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem
Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces.”—
as “cold," "prosaic,” “tame," "vulgar,” and “spiritless.” As
if the image of the busy town after the country beauty were
not the most poetic of contrasts in the first: and as if the City
of the Seven Hills did not justly fire every Roman mind !1
1 Ed. cit. See a little farther for a trahuntque siccas machince carinas of
similarly uncritical criticism on the Horace.
ALISON.
291
anc
These, however, might be due to “ the act of God,"—to sheer
want of the quality on which the essay is written. A large
part of the second volume exhibits the perils of that
arbitrary Castle Dangerous, the "half-way house," unmistak-
bsurditres. ably and inexcusably. Alison is dealing with the in-
teresting but ticklish subject of human beauty, and, like Burke, is
justly sarcastic on the “four noses from chin to breast," "arm and
a half from this to that” style of measurement. But he is him-
self still an abject victim of the type-theory. Beauty must suit
the type; and its characteristics must have a fixed qualitative
value-blue eyes being expressive of softness, dark complexions
of melancholy, and so on. But here he is comparatively sober.
Later he indulges in the following: “The form of the Grecian
nose is said to be originally beautiful, ., . and in many cases
it is undoubtedly so. Apply, however, this beautiful form to
the countenance of the Warrior, the Bandit, the Martyr, or to
any which is meant to express deep or powerful passion, and
the most vulgar spectator would be sensible of dissatisfaction,
if not of disgust." Let us at least be thankful that Alison has
freed us from being “the most vulgar spectator." Why the
Warrior, why the Martyr, why the deep and powerful man,
should not have a Grecian nose I fail to conceive: but the in-
compatibility of a Bandit and a straight profile lands me in pro-
founder abysses of perplexity. The artillery and the blue horse
must yield their pride of place : the reason in that instance is,
if not exquisite, instantly discernible. But nothing in all Neo-
classic arbitrariness from Scaliger to La Harpe seems to me to
excel or equal the Censure of the Bandit with the Grecian
Nose as a monstrous Bandit, a disgustful object, hateful not
merely to the elect but to the very vulgar.2
Let us hear the conclusion of this whole æsthetic matter.
Any man of rather more than ordinary intelligence-perhaps
any man of ordinary intelligence merely--who has been pro-
perly educated from his youth up (as all men who show even
1 Ibid.
tory? The only possible answer of
2 The mother of Gwendolen Harleth course caps the absurdity. The con-
was wiser. “Oh! my dear, any nose," ventional Bandit is an Italian ; the
said she, “will do to be miserable conventional Italian has an aquiline
with !" and if so, why not to be preda- nose : therefore, &c.
292
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
a promise of ordinary intelligence should have been) in ancient
and modern philosophy, who knows his Plato, his .
conclusion on Aristotle, and his neo-Platonists, his Scholastics, his
the westhetic moderns from Bacon and Hobbes and Descartes
matter.
downwards, can, if he has the will and the op-
portunity, compose a theory of æsthetics. That is to say, he
can, out of the natural appetite towards poetry and literary
delight which exists in all but the lowest and most unhappy
souls, and out of that knowledge of concrete examples thereof
which exists more or less in all, excogitate general principles
and hypotheses, and connect them with immediate and par-
ticular examples, to such an extent as the Upper Powers per-
mit or the Lower Powers prompt. If he has at the same
time a happy case of which the most eminent example up
to the present time is Coleridge—a concurrent impulse towards
actual "literary criticism," towards the actual judgment of the
actual concrete examples themselves, this theory may more
or less help him, need at any rate do him no great harm. Mais
cela n'est pas nécessaire, as was said of another matter; and
there are cases, many of them in fact, where the attention to
such things has done harm.
For after all, once more Beyle, as he not seldom did, reached
the flammantia monia mundi when he said, in the character
of his “Tourist” eidolon, “En fait de beau chaque homme a sa
demi-aune." Truth is not what each man troweth : but beauty
is to each man what to him seems beautiful. You may better
the seeming :--the fact is at the bottom of all that is valuable
in the endlessly not-valuable chatter about education generally,
and it excuses, to a certain extent, the regularity of Classi-
cism, the selfish “culture" of the Goethean ideal, the extrava-
gances of the ultra-Romantics. But yet
“A God, a God, the severance ruled,"
7
and you cannot bridge the gulfs that a God has set by any
philosophastering theory.
i Had all ästheticians approached
their subject in the spirit of our
English historian of it, much of what
I have said would be quite inappli-
cable. “The æsthetic theorist," says
Mr Bosanquet in his Preface (History
ÆSTHETICS AND THEIR INFLUENCE.
293
1
Yet although all this is, according to my opinion at least,
absolutely true; although literary criticism has not much
more to do with æsthetics than architecture has to do with
physics and geology—than the art of the wine-taster or the
tea-taster has to do with the study of the papillæ of the tongue
and the theory of the nervous system generally, or with the
botany of the vine and the geology of the vineyard; although,
finally, as we have seen and shall see, the most painful and
earnest attention to the science of the beautiful appears to be
compatible with an almost total indifference to concrete judg-
ment and enjoyment of the beautiful itself, and even with
egregious misjudgment and failure to enjoy,—yet we cannot
extrude this other scienza nuova altogether, if only because of
the almost inextricable entanglement of its results with those
of criticism proper. And it is more specially to be dealt with
in this particular place because, beyond all question, the di-
rection of study to these abstract inquiries did contribute to
the freeing of criticism from the shackles in which it had lain
so long. Any new way of attention to any subject is likely
to lead to the detection of errors in the old : and as the errors
of Neo-classicism were peculiarly arbitrary and irrational, the
“high priori way" did certainly give an opportunity of dis-
covering them from its superior height—the most superfluous
groping among preliminaries and foundations gave a chance of
unearthing the roots of falsehood. As in the old comparison
Saul found a kingdom when he sought for his father's asses,
of Æsthetic: London, 1892), “ desires
to understand the artist, not in order
to interfere with the latter, but in
order to satisfy an intellectual inter-
est of his own." With such an at-
titude I have no quarrel : nor, I should
think, need those who take it have
any quarrel with mine. I may add
that from this point onwards I shall
take the liberty of a perpetual silent
reference to Mr Bosanquet's treat-
ment of subjects and parts of subjects
which seem to me to lie outside of
my own plan. I purposely abstainéd
from reading his book until two-
thirds of my own were published,
and more than two-thirds more of
the remainder were written. And I
have been amused and pleased, though
not surprised, to find that if we had
planned the two books together from
the first, we could hardly have covered
the ground more completely and with
less confusion. I cannot, however, help
observing that Mr Bosanquet, like al-
most all æstheticians I know, except
Signor Croce, though he does not
neglect literature, at least devotes
most attention to the plastic arts.
This is perhaps a little significant.
294
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
so it was at least possible for a man, while he was consider-
ing æsthetic abstractions and theories, to have his eyes sud-
denly opened to the fact that Milton was not merely a fanatic
and fantastic, with a tendency to the disgusting, and that
Shakespeare was something more than an “abominable"
mountebank,
Notice has already been taken of the importance, as it seems
to the present writer, of the widened and catholicised study of
literature during the earlier eighteenth century. Almost all
the “English precursors” have in fact owed part of their
position here to their share in this literary “Voyage round
the World.” Some further exposition and criticism of the way
in which the exploration itself worked may be looked for in
Hist. Crit., ii., Interchapter vi. Here we may give a little space
to some such explorers who, though scarcely worthy of a place
among critics proper, did good work in this direction, and to
the main lines and subjects on and in regard to which the
explorations were conducted. For it cannot be too often
repeated that without Literary History, Literary Criticism in
the proper sense is impossible; that the defects of the latter
have, as a rule, been directly connected with ignorance or
imperfect knowledge of the former; and that the ocean of
literature almost automatically melts and whelms the icebergs
of critical error when they find their way into it.
The most interesting and directly important of the great
The study of literary countries in regard to this matter is un-
Literature. doubtedly England. Curiosity in Germany was
much more widespread and much more industrious;2 but in
1 The student who wishes to be
thorough on this subject should con-
sult not merely Mr Bosanquet and the
“Parabasis” of Hist. Crit. mentioned
above, but also the work of the Italian
critic noticed before, Signor Benedetto
Croce, which is now accessible in Eng.
lish. He thinks me “barren in phil-
osophy," and I think him rather super-
fluous in it; but he has been good
enough to compliment my literature,
and I think I may say that by aid of
that literature I had independently
attained some results not very differ-
ent from the best of his.
2 The Germans, I believe, have
definitely ticketed these explorers as
"The Antiquarians.”
THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE.
295
the first place the notable German explorers are not here our
direct concern, and in the second, the width too often with
them turned to indiscriminateness, and the industry to an in-
telligent hodman's work. France, by providing such pioneers
as Sainte-Palaye, and by starting the great Histoire Littéraire,
contributed immensely to the stimulation and equipment of
foreign students; but it was some time before this work reacted
directly on her own literature. There was less done in Spain,
where for a time the adherents of the older literature were,
like their ancestors in the Asturias, but a handful driven to
bay, instead of as in other countries an insurrectionary multi-
tude gaining more and more ground; and the traditional Dante-
and-Petrarch worship of Italy did at this time little real good.
Both directly and indirectly - at home and, chiefly in the
Shakespeare direction, abroad – England here occupies the
chief place.
· Her exercises on the subject may be advantageously con-
sidered under certain subject-headings: Shakespeare himself,
Spenser, Chaucer, minor writers between the Renaissance and
the Restoration, Middle English, and Anglo-Saxon. It is not
necessary here to bestow special attention on Milton-study,
despite its immense influence both at home and abroad, be-
cause it was continuous. From Dryden to the present day,
Milton has always been with the guests at any feast of English
literature, sometimes, it is true, as a sort of skeleton, but much
more often as one whom all delight more or less intelligently
to honour.
It is not mere fancy which has discerned a certain turning-
point of importance to literature, in the fact that between the
The study of Fourth Folio and the first critical or quasi-critical
Shakespeare. edition (Rowe's) there intervened (1685-1709) not
quite a full quarter of a century. The successive editions of
Rowe himself, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, and John-
son not merely have a certain critical interest in themselves,
not merely illustrate the progress of criticism in a useful
1 They and the other Continental
pioneers are fully dealt with in the
appropriate sections of the larger
History.
296
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
manner, but bring before us, as nothing else could do, the way
in which Shakespeare himself was kept before the minds of
the three generations of the eighteenth century.
Spenser's fortunes in this way coincided with Shakespeare's
to a degree which cannot be quite accidental. The third folio
Spenser.
of the Faerie Queene appeared in 1679, and the first
nocte critical edition—that of Hughes-in 1715. But
the study-stage-not the theatrical, considering a list of adap-.
ters which runs from Ravenscroft through Shadwell up to
Dryden—had spared Shakespeare the attentions of the Person
of Quality.2 Before Hughes, Spenser had received those of
Prior, a person of quality : much greater; but Prior had spoilt
the stanza, and had travestied the diction almost worse than he
did in the case of the Nut-Browne Maid. He would not really
count in this story at all if his real services in other respects
did not show that it was a case of " time and the hour,” and if
his remarks in the Preface to Solomon did not show, very
remarkably, a genuine admiration of Spenser himself, and a
strong dissatisfaction with the end-stopped couplet. And so of
Hughes' edition : yet perhaps the import of the saying may
escape careless readers. At first one wonders why a man like
Prior should have taken the trouble even to spoil the Spen-
serian stanza; why an editor like Hughes should have taken
the much greater troublé to edit a voluminous poet whose most
ordinary words he had to explain, whose stanza he also thought
" defective," and whose general composition he denounced as
“monstrous” and so forth; why all the imitators 4 should have
imitated what most of them at any rate seem to have re-
garded as chiefly parodiable. Yet one soon perceives that
? I may once more refer the reader
to Mr Nichol Smith's valuable edition
of the Prefaces to these. Mrs Mon-
tagu's famous Essay on the Writings
and Genius of Shakespeare (London,
1769, and often reprinted) may expect
a separate mention. It is well inten-
tioned but rather feeble, much of it
being' pure tu quoque to Voltaire, and
sometimes extremely unjust on Cor.
neille, and even on Æschylus. It is
not quite ignorant; but once more
non tali auxilio /
2 V. Hist. Crit., ii. 416.
3 See the Ode to the Queen, 1706.
Prior inserts a tenth line, and makes
the seamless coat an awkwardly
cobbled thing of quatrain, quatrain,
couplet.
4 See above, p. 214.
THE STUDY OF SPENSER, CHAUCER, ETC.
297
mens agitat molem, that the lump was leavened, that, as in
one case at any rate (Shenstone's), is known to be the fact,
“ those who came to scoff remained to pray.” They were
dying of thirst, though they did not know how near the
fountain was; and though they at first mistook that fountain
and even profaned it, the healing virtues conquered them at
last.
The same coincidence does not fail wholly even with Chau-
cer, of whom an edition, little altered from Speght's, appeared in
1687, while the very ill-inspired but still intention-
Chaucer.
we ally critical attempt of Urry came out in 1721,
Dryden's wonderful modernisings again coming between. But
Chaucer was to wait for Tyrwhitt, more than fifty years later
(1775) before he met any full scholarly recognition, and this
was natural enough. There had been no real change in
English prosody since Spenser, any more than since Shake-
speare: and the archaism of the former was after all an
archaism not less, deliberate, though much better guided by
genius, than that of any of his eighteenth-century imitators.
To the appreciation of Chaucer's prosody one simple but, till
turned, almost insuperable obstacle existed in the valued
final e, while his language, his subjects, and his thought were
:separated from modern readers by the great gulf of the
Renaissance,-a gulf indeed not difficult to bridge after a
fashion, but then unbridged.
Invaluable as the study of Shakespeare was in itself, its
value was not limited to this direct gain. Partly to illustrate
Elizabethan him and partly from a natural extension, his fellow-
minors. dramatists were resorted to,-indeed Ben Jonson
and Beaumont and Fletcher had never lost hold of the acting
stage. A few of the greatest, Marlowe especially, were somewhat
long in coming to their own; but with others it was different,
and the publication of Dodsley's Old Plays, at so early a date
as 1744, shows with what force the tide was setting in this
direction. Reference was made in the last chapter to the very
remarkable Muses' Library which Oldys began even earlier,
though he did not find encouragement enough to go on with
298
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
it,1 and the more famous adventure of the Reliques was followed
up in the latter part of the century by divers explorations
of the treasures of the past, notably that of the short-lived
Headley.?
Nay, about the close of the seventeenth century and the
beginning of the eighteenth it looked as if early Middle English
Middle and and Anglo-Saxon themselves might come in for a
Old English. share of attention, as a result of the labours of such
men as Hearne and Hickes. But the Jacobite antiquary was
interested mainly in the historical side of literature, and Hickes,
Wanley, and the rest were a little before their time, though
that time itself was sure to come. And before it came the
all but certain forgeries of Macpherson, the certain forgeries
of Chatterton, the sham ballads with which, after Percy's ex-
ample, Evans and others loaded their productions of the true,
1 To this context perhaps best be-
longs Thomas Hayward's British Muse,*
, an anthology on the lines of
T. Hayward
naguuru. Poole and Bysshe, published
in 1738 and dedicated to Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu. The book has a
preface of some length (which is said
to be, like the dedication, the work not
of the compiler but of Oldyst himself),
criticising its predecessors (including
Gildon) rather severely, and showing
knowledge of English criticism gener-
ally ; but the point of chief interest
about the book is its own interest in,
and extensive draughts from, Eliza-
bethan Drama. Not merely "the
divine and incomparable" Shakespeare,
not merely the still popular sock and
buskin of Ben Jonson and of Beaumont
and Fletcher, but almost all the others,
from Massinger and Middleton down to
Goffe and Gomersall, receive attention,
although, as he tells us, they were so
hard to get that you had to give be-
tween three or four pounds for a volume
containing some ten plays of Massinger.
This is noteworthy ; but that his zeal
was not according to full knowledge is
curiously shown by the contempt with
which he speaks, not merely of Boden-
ham's Belvedere, but of Allot's Eng.
land's Parnassus, allegiug “the little
merit of the obsolete poets from which
they were extracted.” Now it should
be unnecessary to say that Allot drew,
almost as largely as his early date per-
mitted him, on “the divine and incom-
parable" himself, on Spenser, and on
others only inferior to these. But
this carping at forerunners is too
common. If Oldys could write thus,
what must have been the ignorance
of others ?
? Even before, at, or about the date:
of the Reliques themselves, a good deal
was being done - e.g., Capell's well-
known Prolusions, which gave as early
as 1760 the real Nut - Browne Maid,
Sackville's Induction, Edward III., and
Davies' Nosce Teipsum, and the Mis-
cellaneous Pieces of 1764, supplying
Marston's Poems and The Troublesome:
Reign of King John.
* 3 vols., London.
† It thus connects the book with The
Muses' Library.
THE STUDY OF FOREIGN LITERATURE,
299
all worked (bad as some of the latter might be) for good in
the direction of exciting and whetting the literary appetite
for things not according to the Gospel of Neo-Classicism.
The study of older Foreign literature was not, till very late
in the century, of much importance in England, Gray being
once more the chief exception, and its effects on him being, as
usual, unproductive, except in the case of Prose. But: Cer-
vantes had a great and constant effect especially on and
through Fielding, — the theory and practice of the Comic
Prose Epic being fatal to Neo-Classic assumptions. Dante, if
not much relished, must have been and was sometimes read,
and Ariosto and Tasso were favourites with students of
“elegant" literature. All these and others could not but
work in one way and in ways leading to one goal-little as
that goal may have been definitely sought by those who were
making for it.
1 I have seen an ingenious attempt
recently made in America by a writer
whose work and name I have un.
fortunately mislaid, to disprove the
influence of Spenser - study. I am
afraid I cannot regard this as much
more than a fresh instance of the
temptation to more or less erudite
paradox which the system of theses
and monographs offers. The author
has read meritoriously : but his argu-
ments are of very little validity.
301
INTERCHAPTER IV.
The period or stage of English criticism reviewed in the last
chapter may seem at first sight extremely confused; composed
as it is of constituents separated from their countrymen, their
contemporaries, and in some cases even their fellow-workers, -
whom we have dealt with formerly. But these constituents
have in reality the greatest of all unities, a unity (whether
conscious or unconscious does not matter a jot) of purpose.
“One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose hold where'er they fare."
The port was the Fair Haven of Romanticism, and the purpose
was to distinguish “ that which is established because it is
right, from that which is right because it is established,” as
Johnson himself formulates it. And now, of course, the horse-
leeches of definition will ask me to define Romanticism, and
now, also, I shall do nothing of the sort, and borrow from the
unimpeachable authority of M. Brunetière ? my reason for
not doing it. What most of the personages of this book sought
or helped (sometimes without at all seeking, sometimes in
actual antipathy to it) to establish is Romanticism, and Roman-
ticism is what they sought or helped to establish.,
In negative and by contrast, as usual, there is, however, no
difficulty in arriving at a sort of jury-definition, which is per-
haps a good deal better to work to port with than the aspiring
Y
I Les définitions ne se posent pas à
priori, si ce n'est peut-être en mathé-
matique. En histoire, c'est de l'étude
patiente de la réalité qu'elles se dégagent
insensiblement. Here a "Classic"
states the very principle of the
opposite creed.
302
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
but rather untrustworthy mast-poles of “ Renascence of Wonder”
and the like. We have indeed seen, in the whole history of
Neo-Classicism, that the curse and the mischief of it lay in the
tyranny of the Definition itself. You had no sooner satisfied
yourself that Poetry was such and such a thing, that it con-
sisted of such and such narrowly delimited Kinds, that its
stamped instruments and sealed patterns were this and that,
than you proceeded to apply these propositions inquisitorially,
excommunicating or executing delinquents and nonconformists.
The principal uniformity, amid the wide diversities, of the new
critics was that, without any direct concert, without any formu-
lated anti-creed, they all laboured to remove the bolts and the
bars, to antiquate the stipulations, to make the great question
of criticism not “What Kind have you elected to try? and have
you followed the Rules of it? but “What is this that you have
done ? and is it good ?" Yet they never, in any instance, for-
mulated the abolition of restrictions, as, for instance, we find
Victor Hugo doing in the Preface to the Orientales. They had
almost invariably some special mediate or immediate object in
view, and so the whole tendency is rather to dissolve' what
exists than to put anything definite in its place.
The survey of their actual accomplishment, therefore, may
be best executed, for the purpose of corresponding with and
continuing those formerly given, by first considering more
generally the main new critical engines - Æsthetic inquiry
and the Study of Literature - which have formed in detail
the subjects of the latter part of the last chapter; then by
summarising the most significant performances, and indicat-
ing, as best may be done, the point to which the stage has
brought us.
The advantages and importance of the wider and more
abstract æsthetic inquiry in reconstituting or reorganising
criticism should be pretty obvious. The worst fault of the
later Neo-Classicism, in its corruption, was that it tended to
become wholly irrational—a mere reference to classification ;
that even its appeal to Nature, and to Reason herself, had got
utterly out of rapport with real nature, with true reasori.
Now the construction of a general theory of the Sublime and
SUMMARY.
303
Beautiful-however partial or however chimerical the inquiry
into the appeals of different arts and different divisions of the
same art might be—could not but tend-however indirectly,
however much even against the very will of the inquiry-to
unsettle, and sometimes to shatter, the conventional hypotheses
and theories. “Why?” and “Why not?” must force them-
selves constantly on such an inquirer; and, as has been said
more than once or twice, “Why ?” and “Why not?” are
battering-rams, predestined, automatic, irresistible, to conven-
tional judgments of all sorts. It was, indeed, not impossible
for a person sufficiently stupid, or sufficiently ingenious, to
construct an æsthetic which, somehow or other, should fit
in with the accepted ideas. But what stupid people do does
not count for inuch in the long-run, despite the proverbial
invincibility of stupidity for the time. And the ingenious
person, unless his perverseness were truly diabolical, must
sometimes hit upon truth which would explode all his
convention.
At the same time Æsthetics have proved, and might by
an observer of sufficient detachment have from the first
been seen to be likely to prove, a very dangerous auxiliary
to Criticism, if not even a Stork for a Log. In the first place,
there was the danger-present in fact from the first, impend-
ing from before the very first-of fresh arbitrary rules being
set up in the place of the old ones,—of the old infinitely mis-
chievous question, “Does the poet please as he ought to please ?"
being juggled into the place of the simple “Does he please ?”
No form of abstract inquiry can escape this danger: and that
is why, save in matter of the pure intellect, abstract inquiries
should always be suspected. Form your theory and conduct
your observations of the æsthetic sense, of “the Beautiful,” of
the mediate axioms of this or that literary kind, as carefully,
as impartially, with as wide a range and view, as you may-
these perilous generalisations and abstractions will always
bring you sooner or later into contact and conflict with the
royal irresponsibility, or (as some may hold it) the anarchic
individualism, of the human senses, and tastes, and artistic
1 Père André, in France, probably seemed, to himself or others, to do this.
304
THE DISSOLVENTS - OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
powers. You will hamper your feet with a network of
axioms and definitions ; you will burden your back with a
whole Italian-image-man's rack-full of types. It is somewhat
improbable that you will be a Lessing: yet even a Lessing
loses himself in inquiries as to what “a jealous woman’s ”
revenge will be, what "an ambitious woman's” revenge will
be. Shakespeare (for that Shakespeare had very much to
do with the whole portraiture of Margaret, from the first
gracious and playful scene with Suffolk to the sombre and
splendid triumph over Elizabeth Woodville, I at least have
no doubt) has shown us in Margaret of Anjou the revenge
and the other passions of a woman who is at once ambitious,
jealous, the victim perhaps not of actually adulterous but
certainly of rather extra-conjugal love, yet loyal to her hus-
band's position if not to himself, a tigress alike to her enemies
and to her young, a rival in varying circumstance, an almost
dispassionate sibyl reflecting and foretelling the woes of her
rivals. You can no more disentangle all these threads, and
get the passion of this type and the passion of that separate,
than Psyche could have done her task without the ants. . Yet,
early and crude as is the work, it is all right, it is all there.
And Æsthetics are not the ants.
A much more dangerous result of addiction to the æsthetic
side of criticism, mainly or exclusively, is that you get by
degrees away from the literary matter altogether, and resign
yourself to the separation with all the philosophy of Marryat's
captain, when he gave orders first that he should be called
when the last ship of his convoy was out of sight behind, and
then when the first hove in sight again. In the exclusive
attraction to the æsthetic, the moral, the dramaturgic side and
the like, an absolute break of contact with the literary may
come about. This is the case even with Lessing, and much
more with others. The “word,” the “expression," sinks out of
the plane of the critic's purview. His Æsthetics become
Anæsthetics, and benumb his literary senses and sensibilities.
The benefits, therefore, of the rise of Æsthetics. as a special
study were far from unmixed, though the influence of that
rise was very great. It is otherwise with the Study of Litera-
SUMMARY.
305
ture. Here it was all but impossible that extension of con-
sideration from modern and classical to mediæval, from certain
arbitrarily preferred modern languages to others—should fail
to do good. Prejudice, the bane of Criticism, received, in the
mere and necessary progress of this study, a notice to quit.
This notice took various forms and was exhibited and attended
to in various ways. But they can be reduced to a few heads
with very little difficulty.
The first of these is the attempt to judge the work presented,
not according to abstract rules, derived or supposed to be
derived from ancient critical authority, nor according to its
agreement or disagreement with the famous work of the past.
To some extent this revolutionary proceeding was forced upon
our students by the very nature of the case it was one of
the inevitable benefits of the extension of study, and especially
of the return to mediæval literature. To attempt to justify
that literature, as Addison, with more or less seriousness, had
done, by showing that its methods were after all not so very
different from those of Homer, or even Virgil, was in some
cases flatly impossible, in most extremely difficult; while in
almost all it carried with it a distinct suspicion of burlesque.
There was no need of any dislike of the classics ; but it must
have been and it was felt that mediæval and later literature
must be handled differently.) And sominsensibly no doubt
at first--there came into Criticism the sovereign and epoch-
making recognition of the “leaden rule" — of the fact that
literature comes first and criticism after that criticism must
adjust itself to literature, and not vice versa. Very likely not
one of the men we are here discussing would have accepted
this doctrine simpliciter : 2 indeed it is the rarest thing to find
it accepted even a century and a half after their time, except
in eccentric and extravagant forms. But it lay at the root
of all their practice.
Further, that practice, deprived of the crutches and go-carts
1 This is where Hurd is so valuable.
2 It is doubtful whether Hurd would
have acoepted it; it is pretty certain
that no other English writer, except
Hume, quite reached the point of view
at which it could have presented itself.
And Hume here was as reactionary as
Voltaire.
306
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
of rule and precedent, was perforce obliged to follow the natural
path and play of the feelings and faculties—to ask itself first,
"Do I like this?" then, “How do I like it ?" then, “What
qualities are there in it which make me like it?" Again,
these questions may not have formulated themselves quite
clearly to any of our group. Again, it would be hard to name
many critics since who have at once fearlessly and faithfully
kept them before their eyes. But, again also, these were the
questions which, however blindly and stumblingly, they fol-
lowed as their guiding stars, and these have been the real
questions of criticism ever since.
Postponing the discussion of the relationship of this new
criticism to the old, we may turn to another point of its
differentia. This is that students of medieval literature
especially were—again perforce and whether they would or
no-driven to make excursions into the region of Literary
History, and, what is more, of Comparative Literary History.
They found themselves face to face with forms—the ballad
and the romance being the chief of them—which were either
not represented at all or represented very scantily and ob-
scurely in classical literature, while they had been entirely
and almost pointedly neglected by classical criticism. They
could not but see that, both in mediæval literature proper
and in modern, there were other forms and subvarieties of
literature, in drama,1 in poetry, in prose, which differed extremely
from anything in ancient letters. In examining these, with
no help from Aristotle, or Longinus, or Horace, they could
not but pursue the natural method of tracing or endeavour-
ing to trace them to their origins, and in so doing they could
not but become conscious, not merely of the history—so long
interrupted by a mist like that of Mirza's vision of English
or French or whatsoever literature itself, but also more dimly
of the greater map of European literature, as it spread and
branched from the breaking up of the Roman Empire onwards.
i Lessing's attempt to confute the ignoring the fact that, though much
French out of Aristotle's mouth is in Shakespeare is justified by Aris-
thoroughly effective ad homines, and totle, much can only be justified with-
most valuable now and then intrinsi- out him, and some must be justified
cally. But it has the drawback of in the very teeth of the Poetics,
307
And this study of Literary History was in the main, this study
of Comparative Literary History was almost absolutely, again
a new thing.
Nor were the actual critical results which, either expressly
or incidentally, came from the exercitations of these critics, of
less importance. The turn of the tide may nowhere be seen
so strongly as in Joseph Warton's audacious question whether
Pope, the god of the idolatry of the earlier part of the century
in England, was a poet, or at least a great poet, at all. This
indeed was, like all revolutionary manifestos, an extrava-
gance, yet the extravagance was not only symptomatic but
to a great extent healthy. It was probably impossible as a
matter of tactics-it would certainly have been unnatural as
a matter of history and human nature-to refrain from carry-
ing the war into the enemies' country, from laying siege to
the enemies' stronghold. And this was invited by the ignorant
and insulting depreciation which had long been, and long
continued to be, thrown upon one of the most charming
and precious divisions of the literature and thought of the
world.
But there were more sober fruits of the revolt. Hurd might
indeed have developed further that doctrine of Romantic as
independent of Classical Unity, which is one of the most
important discoveries or at least pronouncements of any time,
which practically established a modus vivendi between all
rational Neo-classic and all rational Romantic criticism, and
which has never yet been worked out as it deserves. But
his mere enunciation or suggestion of it is all-important.
Percy's Essay on Alliterative Metre, despite the comparative
narrowness of its basis, is both acute and successful; and with
Gray's work, begins a more intelligent devotion to Prosody.
Thomas Warton, though often a fanciful and sometimes an
insufficiently equipped critic, was a critic both alert and sound.
And the bent of almost all of them turned, and turned most
beneficially, especially in the case of Warton, to History,
The performance of England here was not so fruitful of great
critical personalities, such as Lessing in Germany or as Diderot
in France—for her greatest, Johnson, was in intention, though
308
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.
by no means wholly in performance, on the other side. Nor,
though the English Æsthetics were influential abroad 1 as well
as at home, can they be ranked very high. In the other chief
branch, however, of that practical operation which has been
noticed, the rediscovery and revaluation of the capital of the
literature for critical purposes, England takes by far the most
important position of all. The French, except from the anti-
quarian side, were still neglecting, and even for the most part
despising, their own old treasures : and the Germans, though
not neglectful of what they had, had less, and dealt with it
in a less thoroughly literary spirit. But Gray, Percy, Hurd, .
the Wartons (especially Thomas), and all the painful and meri-
torious editors from Theobald to Tyrwhitt, were engaged not
merely in clearing away rubbish and bringing treasures to
light, but in combating the prejudices, and doing away with
the delusions and ignorances, which had led to the neglect
and contempt of those treasures themselves.
For once more, it is History which is at the root of the
critical—as of almost every other--matter. To judge you
must know,-must not merely know the so-called best that
has been thought and done and written (for how are you to ,
know the best till you know the rest ?), but take in all, or
something of all, that has been written, and done, and thought
by the undulating and diverse animal called Man. His un-
dulation and his diversity will play you tricks still, know
you never so widely; but the margin of error will be narrower
the more widely you know. The most perfect critical work
that we have -- that of Aristotle and that of Longinus — is
due in its goodness to the thoroughness of the writers' know-
ledge of what was open to them; in its occasional badness and
lack of perfection to the fact that everything was not open to
them to know.
? In fact, no period, oddly enough, is
50 free from foreign influence as this.
German had not begun to exercise
any: what French exercised was chiefly
old.
309
CHAPTER VI.
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS
AND ADVERSARIES.
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE
PREFACES — THAT TO
‘LYRICAL BALLADS,' 1800 — ITS HISTORY – THE ARGUMENT AGAINST
POETIC DICTION, AND EVEN AGAINST METRE—THE APPENDIX : POETIC
DICTION AGAIN — THE MINOR CRITICAL PAPERS - COLERIDGE'S EX-
AMINATION OF WORDSWORTH'S VIEWS_HIS CRITICAL QUALIFICATIONS
-UNUSUAL INTEGRITY OF HIS CRITIQUE — ANALYSIS OF IT — THE
"SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF" — ATTITUDE TO METRE - EXCURSUS ON
SHAKESPEARE'S 'POEMS' — CHALLENGES WORDSWORTH ON “REAL”
AND “RUSTIO” LIFE —"PROSE" DICTION AND METRE AGAIN — CON-
DEMNATION IN FORM OF WORDSWORTH'S THEORY—THE 'ARGUMENTUM
AD GULIELMUM'—THE STUDY OF HIS POETRYHIGH MERITS OF THE
EXAMINATION - WORDSWORTH A REBEL TO LONGINUS AND DANTE-
THE 'PREFACE' COMPARED MORE_SPECIALLY WITH THE 'DE VULGARI,'
AND DANTE'S PRACTICE WITH WORDSWORTH'S—THE COMPARISON FATAL
TO WORDSWORTH A8 A CRITIC — OTHER CRITICAL PLACES IN COLE-
RIDGE-THE REST OF THE 'BIOGRAPHIA - THE FRIEND'-AIDS TO
REFLECTION, ETC.—THE 'LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE, ETC.--THEIR
CHAOTIC CHARACTER AND PRECIOUSNESS-SOME NOTEWORTHY THINGS
IN THEM : GENERAL AND PARTICULAR--COLERIDGE ON OTHER DRA-
MATISTS—THE 'TABLE TALK'-THE ‘MISCELLANIES'—THE LECTURE ON
STYLE' — THE 'ANIMA POETÆ' — THE LETTERS '- THE COLERIDGEAN
POSITION AND QUALITY-HE INTRODUCES ONCE FOR ALL THE CRITERION
OF IMAGINATION, REALISING AND DISREALISING—THE “COMPANIONS”
-SOUTHEY-GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS CRITICISM-REVIEWS
—THE DOCTOR' - ALTOGETHER SOMEWHAT “IMPAR SIBI” — LAMB
—HIS "OCCULTISM" AND ALLEGED INCONSTANCY - THE EARLY
'LETTERS'—THE SPECIMENS '-THE GARRICK PLAY NOTES— MISCEL-
LANEOUS ESSAYS—'ELIA'— THE LATER 'LETTERS '— UNIQUENESS OF
LAMB'S CRITICAL STYLE AND THOUGHT-LEIGH HUNT : HIS SOME-
WHAT INFERIOR POSITION - REASONS FOR IT — HIS ATTITUDE TO
DANTE — EXAMPLES FROM 'IMAGINATION AND FANCY' - HAZLITT
310
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
METHOD OF DEALING WITH HIM—HIS SURFACE AND OCCASIONAL
FAULTS : IMPERFECT KNOWLEDGE AND METHOD – EXTRA-LITERARY
PREJUDICE-HIS RADICAL AND USUAL EXCELLENCE-THE ENGLISH
POETS'—THE COMIC WRITERS'-'THE AGE OF ELIZABETH '—'CHAR-
ACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE' — THE PLAIN SPEAKER' - THE ROUND
TABLE, ETC.- THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE'-'SKETCHES AND ESSAYS '--
'WINTERSLOW' - HAZLITT'S CRITICAL VIRTUE, IN SET PIECES, AND
UNIVERSALLY -- BLAKE — HIS CRITICAL POSITION AND DICTA — THE
"NOTES ON REYNOLDS” AND WORDSWORTH — COMMANDING POSITION
OF THESE-SIR WALTER SCOTT COMMONLY UNDERVALUED AS A CRITIC
-INJUSTICE OF THIS-CAMPBELL: HIS 'LECTURES ON POETRY —HIS
SPECIMENS'-SHELLEY: HIS DEFENCE OF POETRY'-LANDOR-HIS
LACK OF JUDICIAL QUALITY-IN REGULAR CRITICISM—THE CONVERSA-
TIONS —'LOCULUS AUREOLUS' — BUT AGAIN DISAPPOINTING — THE
REVIVAL OF THE POPE QUARRELS — BOWLES - BYRON — THE 'LETTER
TO MURRAY, ETC.—OTHERS : ISAAC DISRAELI-SIR EGERTON BRYDGES
~'THE RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW'-THE 'BAVIAD' AND 'ANTI-JACOBIN,
WITH WOLCOT AND MATHIAS—THE INFLUENCE OF THE NEW 'RE-
VIEWS, ETC. - JEFFREY — HIS LOSS OF PLACE AND ITS CAUSE - HIS
INCONSISTENCY--HIS CRITICISM ON MADAME DE STAËL—ITS LESSON-
HALLAM-HIS ACHIEVEMENT—ITS MERITS AND DEFECTS—IN GENERAL
DISTRIBUTION AND TREATMENT — IN SOME PARTICULAR INSTANCES
HIS CENTRAL WEAKNESS, AND THE VALUE LEFT BY IT.
THERE are many differences, real and imaginary, partial and
general, parallel and cross, between ancient, and medieval, and
Wordsworth modern poetry; but there is one, very striking, of
and a kind which specially differentiates ancient and
rage. mediæval (except Dante) from modern. In the
former class of poets the “critic whom every poet must
contain" was almost entirely silent, or conveyed his criticism
through his verse only. It would have been of the very
first interest to have an Essay from the hand of Euripides
justifying his decadent and sentimental fashion of drama, or
from that of Lucretius on the theory and practice of didactic
verse: but the lips of neither were unsealed in this direction."
Dante, on the other hand, as we have seen, was prepared and
ready to put the rationale of his own verse, his own beliefs
about poetry, into prose: so at the Renaissance were the
poets of Italy and France; so was Dryden, so was Pope.
In no instance, however, save perhaps that of the Pléiade
and Du Bellay's Défense et Illustration, did a protagonist of
WORDSWORTH.
311
the new poetry take the field in prose so early and so aggress-
ively as did Wordsworth in his Preface to the second edition
of Lyrical Ballads. In none, without exception, was such an
attack so searchingly criticised and so powerfully seconded,
with corrections of its mistakes, as in the case of the well-
known chapters of the Biographia Literaria in which Coleridge
examined Wordsworth’s examination. These, it is true, came
later in time, but when the campaign, whereof the first sword
had been drawn in the Lyrical Ballads, and the first horn
blown in the Preface of their second edition, though far gone
was not finished, when the final blows, by the hands of Keats
and Shelley, had still to be struck.
The Preface, with the little group of other prefaces and
observations which supplements it,1 provides a bundle of
The former's documents unequalled in interest except by the De
Prefaces. Vulgari Eloquio in the special class, while, as it
happens, it goes directly against the tenor of that precious
booklet. Wordsworth, there can be no doubt, had been deeply
annoyed by the neglect or the contemptuous reception of the
Lyrical Ballads, to which hardly any one had done justice
except the future Archdeacon Wrangham, while his own
poems in simple language had offended even more than The
Ancient Mariner had puzzled. To some extent I do not ques-
tion that his part of the scheme being to make the familiar
poetical, just as it was Coleridge's to make the unfamiliar
acceptable, the uncommon common-the refusal of “poetic
diction” which he here advances and defends was a vera causa,
a true actuating motive. But there is also, I think, no doubt
that, as so often happens, resentment, and a dogged deter-
mination to “spite the fools," made him here represent the
principle as much more deliberately carried out than it actually
*was. And the same doggedness was no doubt at the root of
his repetition of this principle in all his subsequent prose
1 It is wisely usual in editions of
Wordsworth to print these together
and consecutively. They are so short,
and accessible in so many different
shapes, that it seems superfluous to
give page-references to any particular
edition. The Letter to a friend of
Robert Burns (1816) (which Mr Rhys
has included in the Literary Pamphlets
noticed elsewhere) is less purely liter-
ary, but has important passages,
especially that on Tam o Shanter.
312
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
observations, though, as has been clear from the first to
almost all impartial observers," he never, from Tintern
Abbey onwards, achieves his highest poetry, and very rarely
achieves high poetry at all, without putting that principle
in his pocket.
That the actual preface begins with a declaration that he
was rather more than satisfied with the reception of his poems,
and that the appearance of a systematic defence is
That to
Lyrical set down to "request of friends," is of course not in
Ballads, the least surprising, and will only confirm any
1800.
student of human nature in the certainty that pique
was really at the bottom of the matter. As a matter of fact,
there is no more typical example of an aggressive-defensive
plaidoyer in the whole history of literature.
It begins with sufficient boldness and originality (indeed
“W. W.” was never deficient in either) admitting fully that
Its history.
"by writing in verse, an author is supposed to
*make a formal engagement that he will gratify
certain habits of association, and merely urging that these
habits have varied remarkably. The principle here is sound
enough; it is in effect the same which we have traced in
previous “romantic” criticism from Shenstone onwards ; but
the historical illustrations are unfortunate. They are “ the
age of Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius” contrasted with that
of Statius and Claudian, and “the age of Shakespeare and
Beaumont and Fletcher" with that of Donne and Cowley or
Dryden and Pope. The nisus of the school towards the
historic argument, and, at the same time, its imperfect
education in literary history, could hardly be better illus-
trated. For, not to quibble about the linking of Statius and
Claudian, the age of Catullus and Lucretius was most certainly
not the age of Terence; and the English pairs are still more
luckless. Donne and Cowley, Shakespeare and Beaumont and
1 Since this was originally written,
there has been a tendency to take up
the cudgels for "W. W.” I do not
think it necessary to add more in con-
sequence : for nothing that has been
said has weakened my own opinion in
the least, highly as I esteem Professors
Raleigh and Bradley, and perhaps
others of those who differ with me.
Indeed the best of them, I think, are
disposed to admit that W. W. said
more than he meant, and even to some
extent what he did not mean.
WORDSWORTH.
313
tron
*
.
.
Fletcher, are bad enough in themselves : but the postponement
of Donne to the twin dramatists, when he was the elder of
Fletcher probably by six or seven years, of Beaumont by
ten or twelve, is rather sad. However, it is not on history
that Wordsworth bases his attack.
His object, he tells us, was to choose incidents and illustra-
tions from common life; to relate and describe them, as far
The aron as was possible, in a selection of language really
ment against used by men; and at the same time to throw over
poetic dic-
them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby
even against ordinary things should be presented to the mind in
metre.
. an unusual aspect-a long but much less forcible
appendix examining why the life so chosen was not merely
“ordinary," but "rustic and humble.” The kernel of his next
paragraph is the famous statement that all good poetry is "the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and then, after a
little divagation, he sets to work to show how such a style
as he was using was adapted to be the channel of such an
overflow. He utterly refuses Personification : he “has taken
as much pains to avoid what is called Poetic Diction as is
ordinarily taken to produce it”; he “has at all times endeav-
oured to look steadily at the subject with little falsehood of
description"; and he has not only denied himself false poetic
diction, but many expressions in themselves proper and beauti-
ful, which have been foolishly repeated by bad poets till they
became disgusting. A selected sonnet from Gray 1 is then rather
captiously attacked for the sake of showing (what certainly
few will admit) that, in its only part of value, the language
differs in no respect from that of prose: whence the heretic
goes farther and, first asserting that there is no essential
difference between the language of Prose and that of Poetry,
proceeds in a note to object to the opposition of Poetry and
Prose at all, and to the regarding of the former as synonymous
with metrical composition. Then he asks what a poet is
and answers himself at great length, dwelling on the poet's
philosophical mission, but admitting that it is his business to
give pleasure. He anticipates the objection, "Why, then, do
i That on the death of West.
..
..
.
.
*
.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
*.

314
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
@
you not write in Prose?” with the rather weak retort, “ Why
should I not add the charm of metrical language to what I
have to say ?” A little later comes the other famous definition
of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” with a long
and exceedingly unsuccessful attempt to vindicate some work
of his own from the charge of being ludicrous. And the
Preface ends with two candid but singularly damaging ad-
missions, that there is a pleasure confessedly produced by met-
rical compositions very different from his own, and that, in
order entirely to enjoy the poetry which he is undertaking, it
would be necessary to give up much of what is ordinarily
enjoyed.
There is an appendix specially devoted to “Poetic Diction”
in which Wordsworth develops his objection to this. His
argument is curious, and from his own point of
The
appendix: view rather risky. Early poets wrote from passion,
Poetic Dic- yet naturally, and so used figurative language: later
tion again.
" ones, without feeling passion, imitated them in the
use of Figures, and so a purely artificial diction was formed.
So also metre was early added, and came to be regarded as a
symbol or promise of poetic diction itself. To which of course
it is only necessary to register the almost fatal demurrer,
“Why, if the early poets used figurative language different
from ordinary, may not later ones do so ? or do you mean
that Greek shoemakers of Homer's time said koruthaiolos and
dolichoskion?" Again, “How about this curious early 'super-
adding' of metre? Where is your evidence ? and supposing
you could produce any, what have you to say to the further
query, 'If the metre was superadded, what could have been
the reason, except that some superaddition was felt to be
wanted ?'”
It is proof of the rather prejudiced frame of mind in which
· Wordsworth wrote that, in some subsequent criticisms of par-
The Minor ticulars, he objects to Cowper's “church-going bell”
Critical as “a strange abuse ”—from which we must suppose
Papers that he himself never talked of a "dining-room," for
it is certain that the room no more dines than the bell goes
· to church. The later papers on “Poetry as a Study," and
· WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE.
315
“Poetry as Observation and Description,” are also full of in-
teresting matter, though here, as before, their literary history
leaves much to desire, and though they are full of examples
of the characteristic stubbornness with which Wordsworth
clings to his theory. The most remarkable example probably
of this stubbornness is the astonishing note to the letter on
the last-named subject (addressed to Sir George Beaumont), in
which, after attributing to the poet Observation, Sensibility,
Reflection, Information, Invention, and Judgment, he adds, with
a glance at his enemy, Metre—“As sensibility to harmony of
numbers and the power of producing it are invariably attend-
ants on the faculties above specified, nothing has been said
upon those requisites.” Perhaps there is no more colossal
petitio principii, and at the same time no more sublime ignoring
of facts, to be found in all literature, than that “invariably."
Interesting, however, as the Preface and its satellites are in
themselves, they are far more interesting as the occasion of
Coleridge's the much longer examination of the main document
examination which forms the centre, and as criticism the most
of Words-
worth's valuable part, of the Biographia Literaria 1 of Cole-
views. ridge, Wordsworth's fellow-worker in these same
Lyrical Ballads. That Wordsworth was himself not wholly
pleased with this criticism of his criticism, we know: and it
would have been strange if he had been-nay, if a much less
arrogant and egotistical spirit than his had taken it quite
kindly. But Coleridge was on this occasion entirely within
his right. The examination, though in some parts unsparing
enough, was conducted throughout in the most courteous, in-
(leed in the most eulogistic, tone; the critic, especially after
the lapse of so many years, could not be denied the right of
pointing out the limits of his agreement with a manifesto
which, referring as it did to joint work of his and another's,
might excusably be supposed to represent his conclusions as
well as those of his fellow-worker.
As to his competence for the task, there could even then
be little, and can now be no, dispute. Wordsworth himself,
i I have used, and refer to, the Bohnians, v. sup., prefer rather to belittle
edition of Coleridge's Prose Works. Coleridge.)
2 1800-1817. (Recent Wordsworth-
8
316
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
1.
cations.
though he has left some valuable critical dicta, had by no
means all, or even very many, of the qualifications of a critic.
His intellect, save at his rare moments of highest poetical
inspiration, was rather strong than fine or subtle; and it could
not, even at those moments, be described as in any degree
flexible or wide-ranging. He carried into literature the tem-
perament of the narrowest theological partisan; and would
rather that a man were not poetically saved at all, than that
he were saved while not following “W. W's” own way. His
reading, moreover, was far from wide, and his intense self-
centredness made him indifferent about extending it: while
he judged everything that he did read with reference to
himself and his own poetry.
In all these respects, except poetical intensity, Coleridge
was his exact opposite. But for a certain uncertainty, a sort
His critical of Will-o'-the-Wispishness which displays itself
qualifi- in some of his individual critical estimates--and for
the too well-known inability to carry out his de-
signs, which is not perhaps identical, or even closely con-
nected, with this uncertainty,—he might be called, he may
perhaps even in spite of them be called, one of the very
greatest critics of the world. He had read immensely, and
much of his reading had been in the philosophy of æsthetics,
more in pure literature itself. The play of his intellect—when
opium and natural tendency to digression did not drive it
devious and muddle it-was marvellously subtle, flexible, and
fine. He could take positions not his own with remarkable
alacrity; was nothing if not logical, and few things more than
historical-literary. Further, such egotisms as came into play
in this particular quarrel all made for righteousness in his
case, while they were snares to Wordsworth. It may be un-
gracious, but is not unfair, to say that Wordsworth's contempt
for poetic diction, and his belittling of metre, arose very mainly
from the fact that, in his case, intense meaning was absolutely
required to save his diction from stiffness, on the one hand
and triviality on the other, while he had no very special
metrical gifts. Coleridge, though he certainly had no lack-
of meaning, and could also write simply enough when he
1
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE.
317
chose, was a metrist 1 such as we have not more than five or
six even in English poetry, and could colour and harmonise
language in such a way. that, at his best, not Shakespeare
himself is his superior, and hardly any one else his equal.
The old, the true, sense of Cui bono? comes in here victoriously.
It was certainly to Wordsworth’s interest that diction and
metre should be relegated to a low place. Coleridge, though
he had personal reasons for taking their part, could do well
without them, and was not obliged to be their champion.
However all this may be, there is no doubt about the im-
portance of the discussion of Wordsworth's literary theories, in
Unusual in chaps. xiv. to xxii. of the Biographia. Some have
tegrity of held that Coleridge could not write a book; more
his critique. have laid it down that he never did write one.
Certainly the title is to be allowed to the Biographia as a
whole only by the most elastic allowance, while large parts
of it are at best episodes, and at worst sheer divagations. But,
if books were not sacred things, it would be possible, and of
no inconsiderable advantage, to sub-title this part of the
book A Critical Enquiry into the Principles which guided the
Lyrical Ballads, and Mr Wordsworth's Account of Them, to
print this alone as substantive text, and to arrange what
more is wanted as notes and appendices.
The examination begins with an interesting, and (whether
Epimethean or not) quite probable and very illuminative
Analysis account of the actual plan of the Ballads, and the
of it. principle on which the shares were allotted. He
and his friend, he tells us, had, during their neighbourly inter-
course in Somerset, often talked of the two cardinal points
of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader
by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power
of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of
imagination. And he illustrates this finely, by instancing
1 In practice, though not always in
theory: for his famous explanation of
his Christabel metre is admitted, even
by an authority who takes such dif-
ferent views of prosody from mine as
Mr Robert Bridges, to be quite wrong.
? I have, since this was written, en-
deavoured to do something of the
kind for a practical purpose (to which
nothing is sacred) in my Loci Critici
(London and Boston, Mass., 1903), pp.
303-365.
318
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
the sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, of moon-
shine or sunset, communicate to familiar objects. .
The Ballads were to illustrate both kinds: and the poets
were to divide the parts generally on the principle of Coleridge
The rosus. endeavouring to make the unfamiliar credible,1 and|
pension of Wordsworth the familiar charming., And with al
lief." charity which, I fear, the Preface will not bear, he
proceeds to represent its contentions as applying only to the
practical poetical attempt which Wordsworth, in accordance
with the plan, was on this occasion making. He admits how-
ever, that Wordsworth's expressions are at any rate some-
times equivocal, and indicates his own standpoint pretty early
and pretty decisively by calling the phrase “language of real
life” unfortunate. And then he proceeds to state his own
view with very frequent glances and more than glances-
at his companion's.
From the first, however, it is obvious that on one of the
two cardinal points—the necessity or non-necessity of metre
Attitude in poetry—he is, though hardly to be called in
to metre. two minds, for some reason or other reluctant to
speak out his one mind. The revival of this old heresy among
such men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, is the more to
be wondered at, in that their predecessors of the eighteenth
century had by no means pronounced on the other side in
theory, and that therefore they themselves had no excuse
of reaction. No one who, at however many removes, followed
or professed to follow the authority of Aristotle, could deny
that the subject, not the form, made poetry and poems. But
just as the tyranny of a certain poetic diction led Wordsworth
and others to strike at all poetic diction, so the tyranny of
certain metres seems to have induced them to question the
necessity of metre in general. At any rate Coleridge's language,
though not his real drift, is hesitating and sometimes almost
.self-contradictory. He will on the same page grant that “all
1 Or, as he puts it in one of the great
critical phrases of the world, “to pro-
duce that willing suspension of dis-
belief for the moment which constitutes
poetic faith.” It derives of course
from Aristotle, but the advance on
the original is immense.
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE.
319
compositions to which this charm of metre is superadded,
whatever their contents, may be called poems," and yet lay
down that a poem is “ that species of composition which is op-
posed to works of science by proposing for its immediate object
pleasure, not truth," and (after adding to this a limitation,
doubtless intended to take in metre, but nebulous enough to :
justify Peacock himself,') will once more clear off his own mist
by saying that if any one “ chooses to call every composition
a poem which is rhyme or measure or both, I must leave
his opinion uncontroverted.”
That he himself saw the muddle is beyond doubt, and the
opposite page contains a curious series of aporice which show
the difficulty of applying his own definition. The first (i.l.,
fourteenth) chapter ends with a soft shower of words, rhetoric-
ally pleasing rather than logically cogent, about the poet
“bringing the whole soul of man into activity”; “fusing the
faculties, each into each, by the synthetic and magical power
of imagination,” reconciling differences and opposites. “Finally,
good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery,
emotion its life, and imagination the soul.” In the fifteenth
and sixteenth the author turns with evident relief from
the definition of the perhaps indefinable to an illustration of
it by discussing Venus and Adonis. Here, though it would
be pleasant, it would be truancy to follow him.
This study, however, is by no means otiose. It leads him
to make a comparison between the poetry of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and that of “the present age," a
I“ And from all other species having
this object in common with it, it is
discriminated by proposing to itself
such delight from the whole as is
compatible with a distinct gratifica-
tion from each component part." This
is the dialect of “ Cimmerian Lodge”
with a vengeance ! An attempt to
expound it will be found in the
abstract of the Lectures of 1811 given
by J. P. Collier : but it sheds little
light. And simpler Estesian defini-
tions elsewhere—“Prose is words in
good order : poetry the best words in
the best order," &c.—labour likewise
under the common curse that Poetry
escapes them. What better words in
what better order than the Lord's
Prayer? Is that poetry?
2 The extraordinary critical genius
of Coleridge can hardly be better shown
than by his gloss here on the Petronian
enigma, Præcipitandus est liber spiritus,
to which we have referred so often.
The poet-the image is not Coleridge's,
but I think it very fairly illustrates
his view—_rides the reader's own genius,
and both together attain the goal.
320
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
on
comparison of which not the least notable point is a reference
us on to the De Vulgari Eloquio. Coleridge seems only.
Shakespeare's to have known it in the Italian translation ; but
ms. it is much that he should have known it at all:
and though he does not try to bring out its diametrical op-
position to Wordsworth, that opposition must have been, con-
sciously or unconsciously, in his mind. And then he comes
back to Wordsworth himself.
He now (chap. xvii.) strikes into a line less complimentary
and more corrective than his earlier remarks. It is true, he
Challenges says, that much of modern poetic style is false,
Wordsworth and that some of the pleasure given by it is false
on "real"
and spustic” likewise. It is true, further, that W. W. has
life. done good by his sticklings for simplicity. But
Coleridge cannot follow him in asserting that "the proper
diction for poetry in general consists altogether in language
taken from the mouths of men in real life.” And he proceeds
to show, by arguments so obvious and so convincing that it
is unnecessary to recapitulate them, that a doctrine of this
kind is neither adequate nor accurate—that Wordsworth's own
poems do not bear it out, and (pushing farther) that poetry
must be “disrealised” (he does not use the word) as much
as possible. He proceeds, cautiously and politely, but very
decidedly, to set the puerilities and anilities? of The Idiot Boy
and The Thorn in a clear light, which must have been extremely
disagreeable to the particular author; and goes on to pull
W. W.'s arguments, as well as his examples, to shreds and
thrums. If you eliminate, he says (and most truly), a rustic's
poverty of thought and his "provincialism and grossness,"
you get nothing different from “the language of any other
man of common-sense,” so that he will not help you in the
least; his speech does not in any degree represent the result
of special and direct communing with nature. Nay, “real”
in the phrase "real life" is itself a wholly treacherous and
This (chap. xvi., not long after the mother tongue. But it shows know-
beginning (p. 157, ed. Bohn)) is more ledge.
important indirectly than directly. It ? These terms are used with no
is, in itself, very slight, and merely offensive intention, but in strict refer-
concerns Dante's jealousy for his ence to the matter of the poems.
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE.
321
me
equivocal adjective. Nor will you do any good by adding “in
a state of excitement."
In the next chapter, the eighteenth, Coleridge carries the
fray farther still into the enemy's country, hitting the blot
c Prose" dice that though W. W.'s words may be quite ordinary,
tion and their arrangement is not. And after wheeling
letre again. about in this way, he comes at last to the main
attack, which he has so often feinted, on Wordsworth's astound-
ing dictum that “there neither is nor can be any essential
difference between the language of prose and metrical com-
position.” After clearing his friend (and patient) from an
insinuation of paradox, he becomes a little “metaphysical”.
perhaps because he cannot help it, perhaps to give himself
courage for the subsequent accusation of "sophistry” which
he ventures to bring. Of course, he says, there are phrases
which, beautiful in poetry, are quite inappropriate in prose.
The question is, “ Are there no others which, proper in prose,
would be out of place in metrical poetry and vice versa ?” And
he has no doubt about answering this question in the affirmative,
urging the origin of metre (for which, as we saw, Wordsworth
did not attempt to account), and its effects of use and pleasure.
He will not admit the appeal to nursery rhymes; and he
confesses (a confession which must have given W. W. dire
offence) that he should have liked Alice Fell and the others
much better in prose.
On the whole, Coleridge still shows too great timidity. He
is obviously and incomprehensibly afraid of acknowledging
pleasure in the metre itself. But in this differing more
signally from Wordsworth than from Wordsworth's uncom-
promising opponents-he says; “I write in metre, because I
am about to use a language different from that of prose.”
And, though on grounds lower than the highest, he finally
plucks up courage to declare that “Metre is the proper form
of poetry: and poetry [is] imperfect and defective without
metre." 'Twill serve, especially when he brings up in support,
triarian fashion, “the instinct of seeking unity by harmonious
adjustment,” and “the practice of the best poets of all
countries and of all ages."
322
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
It is perhaps an anti-climax, though a very. Coleridgean
one, when he proceeds to criticise (very justly) Wordsworth's
Condemna- criticism of Gray, and some passages both of his
tion in form own and others: but we can have no quarrel with
of Words-
worth's
him when he ends the chapter, too verbosely indeed,
theory. but unanswerably, with the following conclusion
of the whole matter: “When a poem, or part of a poem, shall
be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures and
contexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which
no reason can be assigned, except that it differs from the
style in which men actually converse,—then and not till then
can I hold this theory to be either plausible or practicable, or
capable of furnishing either such guidance, or precaution, that
might not, more easily and more safely, as well as more natur-
ally, have been deduced in the author's own mind from con-
siderations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of
things, confirmed by the authority of works whose fame is
not of one country and of one age.”
He has now (chaps. xix., xx.) argued himself into more
confidence than he had shown earlier, and seems disposed
Aron to retract his concession that W. W.'s limitations
mentum ad were not intended to apply to all poetry. He sees,
lielmum. indeed, from the criticism on Gray, and from Words-
worth's references to Milton, that this concession was excessive,
but still he thinks the general notion too monstrous for
Wordsworth to have beld. And he swerves, once more, to
point out the especial beauty of beautiful diction and beautiful
metre added to fine or just thought, and introduces interesting
but rather superfluous examples of this from all manner of
poets down to Wordsworth himself. These last lead him to
the very just conclusion, "Were there excluded from Mr
W's poetic compositions all that a literal adherence to the
theory of his Preface would exclude, two-thirds at least of the
marked beauties of his poetry must be erased.”I Which indeed
is once more a conclusion of the whole matter. .
After an odd, a distinctly amusing, but despite its title a, for
1 Chap. xx. sub fin., p. 201, ed. cit. Professors Raleigh, Herford, and Brad-
2 Except, once more, to my friends, ley, and some more negligible folk.
Gulielmum.
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE.
323
our purpose, somewhat irrelevant, excursus on “the present
T'he study of mode of conducting critical journals,"1 Coleridge
his poetry. concludes with a pretty long 2 and a very interesting
examination of Wordsworth's poetry. He brings out his,
defects, his extraordinary declension from the felicitous to the
undistinguished, his matter-of-factness of various kinds (thiş
part includes a merciless though most polite censure of The
Excursion), his undue preference for dramatic [perhaps we
should say dialogic] form, his prolixity, and his introduction
of thoughts and images too great as well as too low for the
subject. The excellences are high purity and appropriateness
of language; weight and sanity of thoughts and sentiments;
strength; originality and curiosa felicitas in single lines and
paragraphs; truth of nature in imagery; meditative pathos;
and, lastly, imagination in the highest and strictest sense of
the word
In fact this chapter, which forms in itself an essay of the
major scale, is one of the patterns, in English, of a critical study
High merits of poetry. None, I think, had previously exhibited
of the the new criticism so thoroughly, and very few, if
mination. any, have surpassed or equalled it since, although
it may be a little injured on the one hand by its limitation
to a particular text, and by the restrictions which the personal
relations of the critic with his author imposed on Coleridge;
on the other, by his own tendencies to digression, verbosity,
1 Chap. xxi. Personality, partisan- been copious and constant writers of
ship, haphazard, garbling, caricature criticism themselves. Always is the
in selection of instances, are the chief author teinpted, like Mr Baxter, to
faults that Coleridge finds with both cry, “Ah, but I was in the right, and
Edinburgh and Quarterly. The reply these men are dreadfully in the
is dignified in tone and not unjust; but, wrong"; always does he think, like
like other things of the same kind, it the Archbishop of Granada, that the
illustrates certain permanent weak- incriminated part of his sermon is ex-
nesses of human nature. All the actly the best part; always, when he
faults, I think, which Coleridge finds bewails the absence of the just and im-
with “Blue and Yellow" and "Buff” partial critics of other times, does he
reviewing might be found with his own forget the wise ejaculation of Mr Rig.
critique of Maturin's Bertram, printed marole, “Pretty much like our own, I
in this very volume. All these faults fancy !” (There is no mental reserva-
are certainly found by every genera tion in these remarks.)
tion of authors with their critics, even 2 Four - and - thirty closely printed
when these authors happen to have pages in the Bohn ed.
324
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
1
and intrusion of philosophical “heads of Charles I.” In
fact, there is no other critical document known to me which
attacks the chief and principal things of poetry proper--poetic
language and poetic numbers--in so satisfactory a manner,
despite the economy which Coleridge displays on the latter
head. Some of the ancient and most of the Renaissance dis-
cussions shoot too far and too high, and though the arrows
may catch fire and give a brilliant and striking illumination,
they hit no visible mark. The discussions of Lessing in the
Laocoon concern an interesting but after all quite subordinate
point of the relation of poetry to other arts ; nearly all of those
in the Dramaturgie deal with a part of literature only, and
with one which is not, in absolute necessity or theory, a part
of literature at all. But here we have the very differentia of
poetry, handled as in the Ilepi "Teous or the De Vulgari
itself, but handled in a more full, generally applicable, and
philosophically based manner than Dante's prose admitted of,
and in a wider range than is allowed by the special purpose
of Longinus.
With both these great lights of criticism Coleridge. agrees
almost as thoroughly as Wordsworth disagrees with them:
, and it is proper here to fulfil the promise which
a rebel to was made of a consideration of Wordsworth's
Longinus work in reference to Dante specially, but with
and Dante.
adde extension to Longinus as well.
The collision of Wordsworth with Longinus appears in the
very title of the famous little treatise. Fight as we may about
the exact meaning of úfos, it must be evident, to poets and
pedlars alike, that it never can apply to the “ordinary language
of real life”; struggle as Wordsworthians may, they never can
establish a concordat between the doctrine of the Preface and
the doctrine of the “ beautiful word.” But as Longinus was
not specifically writing of Poetry, and as in reference to Poetry
he was writing from his own point of view only, on a special
function or aspect of Poetry and Rhetoric alike, he does not
meet the Apostle of the Ordinary full tilt and weapon ta
weapon. I have said that I do not know whether, when
IV. sup., pp. 21, 22, also the reference to Prof. Herford's recent article.
ko
WORDSWORTH AND DANTE.
325
Wordsworth wrote the Preface, he knew the De Vulgari or not.
If Coleridge had known it at the time, he probably would have
imparted his knowledge in the celebrated Nether Stowey talks:
but his own reference, itself not suggestive of a very thorough
appreciation, is twenty years later. And as Wordsworth was
a perfectly fearless person, and had not a vestige of an idea
that any created thing had authority sufficient to overcrow
W. W., he would pretty certainly have rebuked this Flor-
entine, and withstood him to his face, if he had known his
utterances.
But, on the other hand, Dante himself might almost have
been writing with the Preface before him (except that had
The Pre- he done so Wordsworth would probably have
face com- been at least in Purgatory), considering the direct-
pared more noen
specially
ness, the almost rude lie - circumstantial of the
with the antidote. “Take the ordinary language, especially
Vulgari, of rustic men,” says Wordsworth. “Avoid rustic
["silvan"] language altogether," says Dante, “and even of
urban' words let only the noblest remain in your sieve.”
“If you have Invention, Judgment, and half a dozen other
things,” every one of which has been possessed in more or less
perfection by most of the great writers of the world whether
in prose or poetry, "metrical expertness will follow as a
matter of course," says Wordsworth. “You must, after pain-
fully selecting the noblest words and arranging them in the
noblest style, further arrange them in the best line that ex-
perience and genius combined can give you, and yet further
build these lines into the artfullest structure that art has
devised,” says Dante. “Poetry is spontaneous utterance,” says
he of Cockermouth. “Poetry, and the language proper for it,
is a regular panther - quest,' an elaborate and painful toil,”
says the Florentine.
And their practice is no less opposed than their theory; or
rather the relation of the two, to theory and practice taken
and Dante's together, is the most astonishing contrast to be
practice found in Poetry. Dante never falsifies his theory
for a moment. You cannot find a line, in Commedia or Vita
Nuova or anywhere else, where the “panther-quest” of word,
17
326
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
and phrase, and line-formation, and stanza-grouping is not
evident; you will be put to it to find one where this quest
is not consummately successful. And, in following word and
phrase and form, Dante never forgets or starves his meaning.
He may be sometimes obscure, but never because there is no
meaning to discern through the gloom. He may be sometimes
technical; but the technicality is never otherwise than the
separable garb of a “strange and high” thought and intention.
Matter and form with him admit no divorce: their marriage
is not the marriage of two independent entities, but the
marriage of soul and body. He has no need of the alterna-
tion of emotion and tranquillity, of the paroxysm succeeded by
the notebook (or interrupted by it and succeeded by the fair
copy), because his emotion and his tranquillity are identical,
because the tide of his poetry is the tide “ too full for sound
or foam," at least for splash or spoondrift. He is methodical
down to the counting of syllables in poetic words: and yet
who has more poetic madness than he ?
The difference in Wordsworth is almost startling; it looks
as if it had been “done on purpose.” He does obey his
with Words- theory, does accept the language of ordinary life.1
worth’s. But when he does so, as (almost) everybody admits,
he is tõo often not poetical at all-never in touch with the
highest poetry. And (which is extremely remarkable and has
not, I think, been remarked by Coleridge or by many other
critics) even in these poems he has not the full courage of
his opinions. In no single instance does he venture on the
experiment of discarding the merely “superadded charm” of
metre, of which he has such a low opinion. He never in one
single instance relies on the sheer power of “spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings” on the impetus of “emotion
i Yet there are curious lapses even
here. Take the extreme example, Alice
Pell, of whom even her author was half-
ashamed as mean and homely. How
about "fierce career,” and “smitten
with a startling sound,” and the inver-
sion of “Proud creature was she ” ?
2 My friend Prof. Raleigh, in his
brilliant and (for that word hath some-
thing derogated) really critical study
of Wordsworth (London, 1903), is of
a different opinion : but I hold my
own. And I do not enter into con-
troversy on the point, because I have
nothing to add to the text, written
before Prof. Raleigh's book appeared.
WORDSWORTH.
327
recollected in tranquillity," without metre. In the form of
poetry, which he affects to despise, he is even as these
publicans.
These are two sufficiently striking points; but they are not
so striking as the third. Wordsworth is a great poet; he has
moments of all but the sublimest—for this argument we need
certainly not grudge to say of the sublimest-poetry. He can
bathe us in the light of setting suns, and introduce us even
to that which never was on sea and land ;1 he can give us the
full contact, the full ecstasy, the very “kiss of the spouse."
But in no single instance, again, does he achieve these moments,
except—as Coleridge has pointed out to some extent, and as can
be pointed out without shirking or blenching at one "place"
of poetry—at the price of utterly forgetting his theory, of
flinging it to the tides and the winds, of plunging and exult-
ing in poetic diction and poetic arrangement.
So we can only save Wordsworth the poet — in which
salvage there is fortunately not the slightest difficulty-at
The com- the expense of Wordsworth the critic. Even in
on these curious documents of critical suicide there
fatal to
Wordsworth are excellent critical utterances obiter, and some
as a critic. even of the propositions in the very argument
itself are separately, if not in their context, justifiable. He
might, if he could have controlled himself, have made a very
valuable exposure, not merely of false poetic diction, but of
that extremely and monotonously mannerised poetic diction
which, though not always bad in its inception and to a cer-
tain extent, becomes so by misusage and overusage. He might
have developed his polemic against the personification of Gray
and others with real advantage. He might have arranged
a conspectus of the sins of eighteenth-century poetic diction,
which would have been a most valuable pendant to Johnson's
array of the extravagances of the Metaphysicals. He might-
if he had carried out and corrected that theory of his of the
necessity of antecedent "powerful feelings” in the poet-have
produced a “Paradox of the Poet” which would have been as
true as Diderot's on the Actor, and have had far greater value.
? I am well acquainted with the glosses on this famous phrase.
328
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
But he did none of these things; and what he did do is itself
not even a paradox-it is a paralogism.
How much better Coleridge comes out of this affair has
already been partly said. But these concluding chapters 1
Other criti- of the Biographia, though certainly his capital criti-
cal places in cal achievement, are very far from being his only
Leridge. one. Indeed, next to his poetical, his critical work
is Coleridge's greatest: and with all his everlasting faults of
incompleteness, digression, cumbrousness of style, and what
not, it gives him a position inferior to no critic, ancient or
modern, English or foreign. But it is scattered all over his
books, and it would not be ill done if some one would extract
it from the mass and set it together. In surveying such
examples of it as are here most important, we shall take the
convenient Bohn edition of Coleridge's Prose, following the
contents of its volumes, but supplementing them to no small ex-
tent with the very interesting and only recently printed notes
which Mr Ernest Coleridge published as Anima Poetce, and
with a glance at the Letters.
Coleridge himself, at the very beginning of the Biographia,
has indicated the discussion of the question of Poetic Diction
The rest as the main point which he had in view; but, with
of the all its gaps and all its lapses, the whole book is
Biographia. among the few which constitute the very Bible of
Criticism. The opening, with its famous description of the
author's education in the art under the merciless and yet so
merciful ferule of Boyer or Bowyer; the reference to Bowles-
so little important in himself and on Arnoldian principles, so
infinitely important to “them," and so to history and to us,
the “us” of every subsequent time; the personal digressions
on himself and on Wordsworth and on Southey-are among
1 “Concluding" in strictness they
are not; for Coleridge, in one of his
whims, chose to transfer Satyrane's
Letters from The Friend to be a sort
of coda to the Biographia, tipped it
with the rather brutish sting of the
Critique on Bertram, and attempted
Versöhnung with a mystical perora-
tion. But the thing really and logi-
cally ends with the words "Betty Foy,"
sub fin., chap. xxi.
? He somewhere sighs for Southey's
command of terse crisp sentences, and
compares his own to “Surinam toads
with young ones sprouting and hang.
ing about them as they go.”
COLERIDGE.
329
“the topmost towers of Ilion,” the best illustrations of that
“English fashion of criticism” of which, as has been said,
Dryden laid the foundations nearly a century and a half
earlier by uniting theory with elaborate, and plentiful, and
apparently indiscriminate, examples from practice.
One seldom feels inclined to be more angry 1 with Cole-
ridge's habit of “Prommy pas Payy” 2 than in reference to
that introduction to the Ancient Mariner-dealing with the
supernatural, and with the difference between Imagination and
Fancy-to which he coolly refers the reader as if it existed, 3
just before the actual examination of Wordsworth's theories in
the Biographia, and after the long digressions, Hartleian,
biographical proper, and what not, which fill the second
division of the book. But that one does well to be angry is
not quite so certain. The discussion would probably have
been the reverse of methodical, and it is very far from unlikely
that everything good in it is actually cast up here, or there,
on the “Rich Strand” of his actual work. To return to that
work,4 there is little criticism in the extraordinary mingle-
mangle of religion, politics, and philosophy, of “Bell and Ball:
.:, Ball and Bell,” Maria Schoening and Dr Price, called
The Friend."
de The Friend, whichever of its two forms 5 be taken.
At the beginning there are one or two remarks which seem
1 An agreeable American critic, Miss
Agnes Repplier, once remarked that
Coleridge must have been "a very
beatable child.” This beatability con.
tinued till his death: you can only
worship him in the spirit of the Portu-
guese sailor towards his saints.
2 Mrs General Baynes of the Hon-
ourable Mrs Boldero in The Adventures
of Philip, chap. xx.
3 Mr Dykes Campbell (whose thread.
ing of the maze and piecing of the
ends of Coleridgiana is a standing
marvel) thought, or seemed to think,
that the Introduction grew into the
Biographia itself.
4 Satyrane's Letters themselves con-
tain a good deal of criticism in and out
of the interview with Klopstock (p.
270 sq., ed. cit.), where the credit is
claimed by some for Wordsworth.
The Critique on Bertram opens well
on the “Don Juan" story, but the
rest of it is not muy hermosa cosa,
combining, as it does, that snarling
and carping tone, against which Cole-
ridge is always and justly protesting,
with more than a suspicion of personal
spite. For Bertram had been preferred
to Zapolya.
5 The usually known reprint of the
2nd ed. of 1818 is very different from
the original, published in the extra-
ordinary fashion described by Cole-
ridge himself in the Biographia, during
1809-10, and collected in volume form
thereafter. This latter is perhaps the
better worth reading. It is at any rate
330
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
to promise matter of our kind, and there is some good Shake-
speare comment at p. 299: but that is about all.
Neither should we expect (save on the principle that in
Coleridge the unexpected very generally happens) anything
Aids to Re- in the Aids to Reflection or the Confessions of an
flection, &c. Enquiring Spirit, though in the first there are some
of the usual girds at anonymous reviewing, and the second is.
important enough for that equivocal if not bastard variety
of our kind which has “Biblical" or "Higher" tacked before
it. But the three remaining volumes 1 are almost compact
of our matter, while there is not a little of it, and of the
very best quality, in the Anima Poetce.
The great storehouse next to the Biographia is, of course,
the Lectures on Shakespeare with their satellite fragments,
The Lectures unsatisfactory as are the conditions under which
on Shake- we have all these things. There is perhaps no
are, &c. more astounding example of the tricks of self-
deception than Coleridge's statement to Allsop that he had
“written” three volumes of five hundred pages each, con-
taining a complete critical history of the English drama, and
“ requiring neither addition, omission, nor correction—nothing
but mere arrangement.” What we actually have of his whole
critical work, outside the Biographia, consists of perhaps one-
third that amount of his own and other people's notes of
Lectures, very rarely consecutive at all, requiring constant.
omission because of repetition, and defying the art of the
most ingenious diaskeuast to get them into anything like
order, and of a smaller but still considerable mass of Margin-
alia, pocket-book entries, and fragments of the most nondescript
kinds. And we know from indisputable testimony by persons
a confirmation of the at first sight
immoral maxim that you should always
buy a book you want, whether you can
afford it or not. Thirty years ago it
was not common but comparatively
cheap; now, alas ! it is both uncommon
and very dear.
1 The editor of these, the late Mr
Thomas Ashe (author of a poem far too
little read— The Sorrows of Hypsipyle),
took much pains with them; and if he:
could have kept back a few flings,
would have deserved unqualified
thanks. “Never mind God's will”.
may be a noble counsel, or an unlucky
advice to run worse than your head:
against worse than a stone wall. But.
it is certainly out of place in very brief:
and rare notes on a classical author.
COLERIDGE.
331
who actually heard the Lectures which these notes represent,
that if we possessed reports in extenso by the most accurate
and intelligent of reporters, things would be not so very much
better, because of Coleridge's incurable habit of apology,
digression, anticipation, and repetition. That he found a
written lecture an intolerable trammel, and even notes irksome,
if he stuck close to them, we can readily believe. Many, if
not most, lecturers would agree with him. But it is given to
few people, and certainly was not given to him, to speak ex-
tempore on such subjects in a fashion which will bear printing.
And his lectures have, as we have said, only very rarely had
even the chance of standing this.
Nevertheless, we are perhaps not in reality so very much
worse off. Extreme method in criticism is something of a
Their superstition, and, as we have seen, the greatest
chaotic critical book of the world, that of Longinus, has,
character as we possess it, very little of this, and does not
appear ever to have had very much. The critic does his best -
work, not in elaborating theories which will constantly break
down or lead him wrong when they come into contact with
the myriad-sided elusiveness of Art and Humanity, but in
examining individual works or groups of work, and in letting
his critical steel strike the fire of mediate axioms and aperçus
from the flint of these. It does the recipient rather good than
harm to have to take the trouble of selecting, co-ordinating,
and adjusting such things for himself; at any rate, he escapes
entirely the danger of that deadly bondage to a cut-and-dried
scheme which was the curse of the Neo-classic system. And
there is no critic who provides these examinations and aperçus
and axiomata media more lavishly than Coleridge.?
1 The question-a puzzle like other
Qucestiones Estesiance about the exact
numbers and dates of Coleridge's
Shakespearian courses is not for us.
It is enough to say that our extant
materials (consisting, in regard to some
lectures, of notes and reports from
several different sources) chiefly, if not
wholly, concern two courses delivered in
London (1811-12 and 1818), and one at
Bristol, 1813-14. Of the Royal Institu-
tion Lectures of 1806-7, on which he
relied (throwing 'them even farther
back) to prove his priority to Schlegel,
nothing at all, unluckily, is preserved.
Indeed Mr Dykes Campbell insisted,
and seems to have almost prored, that
none at all were delivered till Jan. 1808.
And of these we have only Crabb
Robinson's brief references.
332
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
.
I remember still, with amusement after many years, the
words of, I suppose, a youthful reviewer who, admitting that
and pre- an author whom he was reviewing had applied the
ciousness. method of Coleridge as to Shakespeare, &c., with
some skill and even some originality, hinted that this method
was quite vieux jeu, and that modern criticism was taking
and to take an entirely different line. And I have been
grateful to that reviewer ever since for giving me a mental
smile whenever I think of him. That his new critical Evangel
-it was the “scientific” gospel of the late M. Hennequin,
if" amid the memories long outworn Of many-volumed eve and
morn” I do not mistake-has itself gone to the dustbin
meanwhile does not matter, and is not the cause of the smile.
The risibility is in the notion that any great criticism can
ever be obsolete. We may, we must, we ought sometimes
to differ with Aristotle and Longinus, with Quintilian and
Scaliger, with Patrizzi and Castelvetro, with Dryden and John-
son, with Sainte-Beuve and Arnold. But what is good in them
—and even what, though not so intrinsically good, is injured
only by system and point of view, by time and chance and
fatality-remains a possession for ever. “The eternal substance
of their greatness" is of the same kind (although it be less
generally recognised or relished) as the greatness of creation.
La Mort ny mord.
Of such matter Coleridge provides us with abundance every-
where, and perhaps most on Shakespeare. He acknowledges
his debts to Lessing, and was perhaps unduly anxious to
deny any to the Schlegels; but he has made everything
that he may have borrowed his own, and he has wealth un-
told that is not borrowed at all. He can go wrong like
other people. His favourite and constantly repeated denunci-
ation of Johnson's couplet-
“Let Observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru"-
as “bombast and tautology," as equivalent to “let observation
with extensive observation survey mankind extensively,” is
COLERIDGE.
333
not only unjust but actually unintelligent,1 and probably due
only to the horror of eighteenth-century personification, in-
tensified in Coleridge by the fact that in his own early poems
he had freely indulged therein.
But on the very opposite page 2—in the very corresponding
lines which shut up on this carping when the book is closed-
Some note- we read, " To the young I would remark that it is
worthy. always unwise to judge of anything by its defects:
things in
them: the first attempt ought to be to discover its excel-
general, lences.” I could find nothing better for the motto
of this book; I cannot imagine anything better as a corrective
of the faults of Neo-classic critics—as a “Take away that
bauble!” the stop-watch. Again, observe the admirable separa-
tion of poet and dramatist in Lecture vii. of the 1811 course ;3
the remarks (suggested perhaps by Lessing, but in no respect
an echo of him) on poetry and painting in the Ninth ;4 and
the altogether miraculous “character” of Ariel which follows."
The defences of Shakespeare's puns are always consummate 6.
in fact, “Love me, love my pun," should be one of the chief
articles of a Shakespearian Proverb-book. In the notes re-
ferring (or supposed to refer) to the course of 1818, variations
of the Biographia (published the year before) were sure to
occur and do; one of the most noteworthy being the expansion
and application of the idea of “suspension of disbelief.”? Note,
too, the acuteness in the censure 8 (with half-apologies) of
the absurd stage-directions which characterised German, and
have since characterised Scandinavian, drama.
1 This perhaps should, and can very “Peru," with the porcelain and the
shortly, be demonstrated:–Observation pigtails, the llamas and the gold associ-
may be either broad and sweeping, orated with mankind in these countries.
minute and concentrated; Johnson And in the name of Logic, and Rhetoric
specifies the former kind in the last and Poetry into the bargain, “Why
half of the first line. Observation may should be uot?”
be directed to men, to things, &c.; 2 P. 73, ed. cit. Goethe, of course,
it is to mankind that he wishes it was of the same opinion.
directed, and he says so in the first 3 P. 89.
* P. 138.
half of the second. Further, as this
5 P. 139 sq.
is too abstract, he gives the poetic 6 E.g., p. 152 89. ? P. 207.
and imaginative touch by filling in 8 P. 213.
the waste atlas, with “China” and
334
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
Of the separate notes on Shakespeare's Plays it is impossible
to say much here: and indeed it is not necessary. They are
and par. to be read—if possible in conjunction with the plays
ticular. themselves—by everybody: to digest them into a
formal treatise would be perhaps impossible, and, as hinted
above, would not be, a testimonial to their value if it were
possible. But their great merit, next to their individual felicity,
is the constant cropping up of those aperçus of a more general,
though not too general, cast which have been noticed.
Coleridge never admires Shakespeare too much; but the
Devil's Advocate may perhaps make something of a count
dove against him that he is often apt to depress others
on other by a comparison, which is not in the least neces-
utists. sary. On Ben Jonson he is rather inadequate than
unjust; but he is certainly unjust to Beaumont and Fletcher,
and I almost fear that his injustice, like his more than justice
to Massinger, may be set down to extra-literary causes. It is
extraordinary that such a critic should have used the language
that he uses of Florimel in The Maid of the Mill. Her devices
to preserve her honour are extravagant: this extravagance, as
compared with the perfect naturalness of Shakespeare, is the
constant note of “the twins”; and if Coleridge had confined
himself to bringing it out, there would have been no more to
be said. But his remarks are here not merely unjust, they
are silly. And yet here, too, we could find the priceless obiter
dicta, that on words that have made their way despite precisian
objection, those on metre 3 almost always, and others.
The motes fly thick for us in the Table Talk; and as they
are clearly headed and indexed in the edition referred to, there
The Table is the less need of additional specification, while
Talk. there is, here as everywhere, a good deal of repeti-
tion. But one must point in passing to the striking contrast
O
2 P. 412.
3 E.g., pp. 426, 427.
1 P. 441.
4 All men who write for the periodi-
.cal press must almost necessarily repeat
themselves, and Hazlitt (whose work
often comes to us directly from the
press itself) is not so very much less
peccant in this kind than Coleridge.
Coleridge's own method exposes the
peccadillo ruthlessly. The “Let Ob-
servation” criticism occurs several
times : the story about the Falls of
Lanark and the man who, beginning
with "majestic," spoilt it by “very
COLERIDGE.
335
11
of Schiller's “ material sublime ”i (and Coleridge was not in-
clined to undervalųe Schiller 2) with Shakespeare's economy of
means; the pertinent, though by no means final, question,
“If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you
leave him ?”3 the remarks on Spenser's “swan-like move-
ment”; 4 a remarkable cluster of literary dicta in the entry
for Midsummer-Day 1827 (when H. N. says that his uncle
talked “a volume"), to be supplemented by another sheaf on
July 12; the contrast of Milton and Shakespeare ;5 the re-
marks on Rabelais ; & the wonderfully pregnant one as to the
“ three silent revolutions in England”;? those on Latin Lit-
erature ;8 on the evolutionary quality of genius ; 9 another
great obiter dictum,10 that “Great minds are never in the wrong,
but in consequence of being in the right imperfectly," which
is truest of all in criticism itself; yet another, 11 « To please me,
a poem must be either music or sense: if it is neither, I con-
fess I cannot interest myself in it”; and, above all, that on
Tennyson 12—one of the loci classici of warning to the greatest
çritics to distrust themselves when they are judging the poetry
of the “younger generations.” And if we cannot help re-
proachfully ejaculating “ Æschylus !" when he denies 13 sub-
limity to the Greeks, let us again remember that Æschylus
was strangely occulted to the whole Neo-classic age, and that
it is very much Coleridge's own doing that we of the last
two or three generations have re-discovered him.
The few contributions, shortly supplemented from MS., to
Southey's Omniana give little, but the volume now entitled
The Mis- Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary, is very nearly
cellanies, all ours. Much of it, however, is repetition in ap-
parent title, and a good deal of the rest does not quite answer
expectations. The general Essays on the Fine Arts with which
pretty," over and over again. Nor is 6 P. 74.
6 P. 97.
this repetition merely due to the ? P. 158. These were, “When the
chaotic state of his publications : it professions fell off from the Church;
seems to have been a congenital bias, when literature fell off from the pro-
as testified to in his conversation quite fessions; and when the press fell off
early.
from literature."
1 P. 15, ed. cit.
8 P. 164 sq.
P. 177.
3 V. infra on Letters.
10 P. 183.
11 P. 201.
3 P. 38.
4 P. 45.
12 P. 214.
13 P. 174, v. inf.
336
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
it opens (and of which the author, who had lost them, enter-
tained that perhaps rather exaggerated idea which we usually
entertain of lost loves, books, fishes, &c.) possess in abundance
Coleridge's uniquely stimulating quality, but, perhaps in not
much less abundance, his extreme desultoriness and want of
definition, save of the most indefinite character. The essay on
the Prometheus which follows excites (though hardly in the
wary mind, Estesianly “alphabeted,” as he would himself say)
great expectations. But it is scarcely too much to say that
on this—the most purely poetical of all extant Greek dramas,
a miracle of sublimity and humanity mingled, and the twin
pillar, with the Agamemnon, of its author's claim to be one of
the greatest poets of the world—Coleridge has not a word to
say that even touches the poetry. He is philosophico-mytho-
logical from the egg to the apple ; and one is bound to add
that he here shows one of his gravest drawbacks as a critic.
The new fragments, however, of the 1818 lectures are full of
good matter, on Cervantes especially, perhaps a little less
specially on Dante, on Robinson Crusoe very particularly
indeed, on Rabelais and Sterne and Donne: while these are
taken up and multiplied in interest by the “Marginalia," with
which the literary part of the book concludes, and which con-
tain, on Daniel and Chapman and Selden, Browne and Fuller,
Fielding and Junius, some of the best known and nearly of
the best of their author's critical work. Here also, and here
only, do we find much on Milton, Coleridge's rather numerous
lectures on him having left surprisingly little trace. He is,
though a fervent admirer, not quite at his happiest.
But the most interesting piece that the book contains is the
Lecture on Style, with its satellite note (a small but sparkling
The Lecture star) on the “Wonderfulness of Prose."1 The
On Style. author's definition of his most elusive subject is
indeed not only not satisfying, but (unless you remember his
own dictum about being “right incompletely ") demonstrably
and almost astoundingly unsatisfactory. “Style is of couise
nothing but the art of conveying the meaning appropriately
and with perspicuity.” One .feels inclined in one's haste to
1 Miscellanies, pp. 175-187 ed. cit.
COLERIDGE.
: 337
say, “That is just what it is not"; one must cool down a
little before one can modify this to “Style, begins exactly
where” the art, &c., “leaves off,” and one can perhaps never
come nearer to an accommodation than “ The necessary prelim-
inary to Style, and one essential ingredient of it,” is “the art,"
and so forth. It was no doubt this side of the matter that
Coleridge was looking at, and at this he stopped, as far as his
general way of looking at the thing went. But the main in-
terest of the piece does not lie here. He bases his definition
on, and tries to adjust it to, a survey of English style, which
is probably one of the first of the kind ever attempted, after
the notion of the Queen Anne men being the crown and flower
of English had been given up. And though his history, as
was natural, is sometimes shaky, and his conclusions are often
to be disputed and even overthrown, the whole is of the
highest value, not merely as a point de repère historically, but
as an introduction to the consideration of Style itself.
But the book of Coleridge which, next to the Biographia,
is of most importance to the student of his criticism, is perhaps
The Anima the long - posthumous Anima Poetoe. Mr Ernest
Poetæ. Coleridge, in his preface to the Anima itself, says
that the Biographia is now little read. I hope he is wrong:
but if he is right it would explain many things.
This volume-a collection of extracts from Coleridge's pocket-
books—appeared a more than sixty years after the poet's death,
and the notice taken of it was comparatively small. That it
contains passages of ornate prose superior to anything in the
previously published writings is interesting, but for our pur-
pose almost irrelevant: it is not so that it gives the fullest
and clearest side-lights on Coleridge's criticism that we have.
The earliest years (and pages) are not very fertile, though I
subjoin some references which will assist the reader in look-
ing them up. But from p. 119 for some fifty pages onward
(it is significant that the time of writing, 1805-8, corresponds
1 It is odd, but useful, to remember
Coleridge's fancy for stating proposi-
tions algebraically. If his definition were
true, a=b or even (a+b)2=a² + 2ab +62
would be style at its very acme (cf.
Addison in Spec. 62 on Euclid and Wit).
? London, 1895.
8 Pp. 4, 5, 30, 35, 59, 82, 88.
338
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
with Coleridge's absence in Malta, &c., from which we have
little or no published work) the entries are " diamondiferous.”
On French poetry (mistaken but so informingly!);1 on
Cowper;2' on the absurdity of calling etymology (how much
more philology!) a "science";s on the attitude to poetry and
to books ;4 on Leibnitz's “profound sentence” that “men's
intellectual errors consist chiefly in denying”,5 on the “in-
stinctive passion in the mind for one word to express one
act of feeling” (Flaubert fifty years before date ); on pseudo-
originality,--Coleridge is at his very acme. The yeast of criti-
cism—the reagent which, itself created by the contact of the
critical with the creative, re-creates itself in all fit media--has
never been more remarkably represented than here.
And great as are these passages, there are many others
(though not so many in close context) to match them. See
the entry (which I venture to think has been wrongly side-
headed as “A plea for poetic license") at the foot of p. 165
as to the desire of carrying things to a greater height of
pleasure and admiration than they are susceptible of—the
old “wish to write better than you can,” the “loss of sight
between this and the other style." 6 See the astonishing antici-
pation of the best side of Ruskinism in the note on archi-
tecture and climate ;7 and that on poetry and prose and on the
“esenoplastic" power ;8 and that on somebody (Byron ?) who
was “splendid” everywhere, but nowhere poetical ;' and that
on scholastic terms; 10 and that on the slow comprehension of
certain in this case Dantean) poetry.11 They are all apices
criticismi—not easy reading, not for the running man, but
for him who reads them fitly, certain to bear fruit if he reads
them early, to coincide with his own painful and struggling
attainments if he reads them late.
1 P. 118 sq. 3 P. 121.
many into one"—the creative imagin-
3 P. 123.
4 Pp. 127-130. ation. This form is much better than
5 P. 147. Cf. sup., p. 223.
"esemplastic,” which Coleridge adopts
6 Coleridge quotes neither Quin- in the Biographia, for there one
tilian nor Dante, and was probably stumbles over the second syllable, and
not thinking of either. But we think supposes it to be the preposition èv.
of them.
9 P. 258. 10 Pp. 274, 275. .
7 P. 194.
11 P. 293.
8 I.e., “The faculty which makes
COLERIDGE.
339
Nor must the Letters 1 be omitted in any sufficient survey of
Coleridge's criticism. That at one early period 2 he apparently
thought Schiller more sublime than Milton is not
The Letters.
in the least to his discredit. He was twenty-two;
he was, I think, demonstrably in love with three ladies 3 at once,
and extremely uncertain which of two of them he should
marry-a state of mind neither impossible nor unnatural, but
likely to lead to considerable practical difficulties, and to upset
the judgment very decidedly. His minor critical remarks at
this very time on Southey's poems are excellent. That Bowles
should be “divine” and Burke “sad stuff" 4 does not matter-
we can explain both statements well enough. But how many
men of three- or four-and-twenty (or for that matter of three-
or four-and-seventy) were there, are there, have there ever
been, who could ask, “Why pass an Act of Uniformity against
poets ?” 5 one of the great critical questions of the world, and
never, so far as I remember, formulated so pertinently before.
It is odd that he should have forgotten (if he knew) Sidney, in
his singular and pedantic complaint that to give the name
Stella to a woman is “unsexing” it, and his supposition that
“Swift is the authority.” 6 But another astonishing critical
truth is that “Poetry ought not always to have its highest
relish "; 7 and yet another in the contrast 8 of himself with
Southey, “I think too much to be a poet; he too little to be
a great poet,” unjust as the application is in the first half; and
yet again on metre itself “implying a passion," 9 a passage
worth comparing with, and in some points better than, the
Biographia (with which compare also pp. 386, 387). Nor these
alone, but many others later—the criticism on Wordsworth's
1 Ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols.,
London, 1895.
two (89) earlier.
? i. 97, ed. cit.
3 Miss Mary Evans, Miss Sarah
Fricker, and an uncertainly Christian-
named Miss Brunton. More in excelsis
Coleridgeano he, being engaged to No.
2 and desiring to marry No 1, "hoped
that he might be cured” by the “ex.
quisite beauty and uncommon accom-
plishments" of No. 3. See a page or
4 P. 157.
5 P. 163.
6 P. 181,
7 P. 196.
8 P. 210. This was just after the
as yet hollow healing of the first great
quarrel in 1796.
9 P. 384. These passages are most
important as showing how early Cole.
ridge dissented from Wordsworth.
340
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
“Cintra” pamphlet;1 that on the inadequacy of one style
for all purposes;2 the remarks on stage illusion,_might be
cited.
When the present writer began his larger task an excel-
lent scholar said, “ How will you ever finish that book?
Why, Coleridge himself would take a volume !"
The
Coleridgean There is something to be said for the hyperbole.
position and in this and that critic, of the many ages which
quality.
. a historian has to survey, we may find critical
graces which are not in him; but in all, save two, we shall
find corresponding deficiencies. In all the ancient critics, save
these two, the limitation of the point of view, the hamper
of the scheme, are disastrously felt, nor is either Aristotle or
Longinus quite free from them. In the greatest of the six-
teenth-century Italians these limitations recur, and are re-
peated in most of those of the seventeenth and eighteenth.
Dante is of the greatest, but he touches the subject very briefly
and from a special side. Dryden is great, but he is not fully
informed, and comes too early for his own point of view.
Fontenelle is very nearly great, but he has the same drawbacks,
and adds to them those of an almost, perhaps a quite, wilful
eccentricity and capriciousness. Lessing is great, but he has
fixed his main attention on the least literary parts of literature;
while Goethe later is great but a great pedant.4 Hazlitt is
great; but Coleridge was Hazlitt's master, and beside the
master the pupil is insular and parochial in range and reading
if not in spirit. In Sainte-Beuve himself we want a little more
theory; some more enthusiasm; a higher and more inspiriting
choice of subjects. And in Mr Arnold the defects of Fontenelle
reappear without Fontenelle's excuse of chronology.
So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and
Coleridge. The defects of the modern, as contrasted with the
ancient, man of letters are prominent in Coleridge when we
compare him with these his fellows: and so we cannot quite
say that he is the greatest of the three. But his range is neces-
sarily wider: he takes in, as their date forbade them to take,
all literature in a way which must for centuries to come give
1 P. 549.
2 P. 557.
8 P. 663.
COLERIDGE.
341
y
him the prerogative. It is astonishing how often, when you
have discovered in others of all dates, or (as you may fondly
hope) found out for yourself, some critical truth, you will re-
member that after all Coleridge in his wanderings has found
it before, and set it by the wayside for the benefit of those
who come after. For all, I believe, of these later days-cer-
tainly for all whose mother-tongue is English-- Coleridge is
the critical author to be turned over by day and by night.
Never take him on trust: it is blasphemy to the Spirit of
Criticism to do that with any critic. Disagree with him as
often as you like, and as you can stand to the guns of your
disagreement. But begin with him, continue with him, come
back to him after excursions, with a certainty of suggestion,
stimulation, correction, edification. C'est mon métier à moi
d'être professeur de littérature, and I am not going to parvify my
office. But if anybody disestablished us all (with decent pen-
sions, of course), and applied the proceeds of our Chairs to
furnishing the boxes of every one who goes up to the Univer-
sity with a copy of the Biographia Literaria, I should decline
to be the person chosen to be heard against this revolution,
though I should plead for the addition of the Poetics and of
Longinus.
And if any one is still dissatisfied with particular critical
utterances, and even with the middle axioms interspersed
among them, let him remember that Coleridge-not
He intro-
duces once
ce Addison, not the Germans, not any other is the
for all the real introducer into the criticism of poetry of the
criterion of ..
realising and disrealising Imagination as a criterion
Imagination,
realising Even a hundred years more after his earliest day as
and dis-
a critic, the doctrine, though much talked of, is ap-
realising.
parently little understood. Even such a critic as the
late Mr Traill, while elsewhere 1 admitting that “on poetic
expression." Coleridge has spoken the absolutely last word,”
almost apologised 2 for his putting on a level “lending the
charm of imagination to the real” and “lending the force of
reality to the imaginary.” He confessed that, “ from the point
i Coleridge (“ English Men of ? Ibid., pp. 46, 47.
Letters," London, 1884), p. 156.
342
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
of view of the highest conception of the poet's office there can
be no comparison ”—where indeed I might also “say ditto to Mr
Burke,” but in a sense opposite to his. And if, on such a mind
and such an appreciation as Mr Traill's, this one-sided inter-
pretation of “the esenoplastic faculty” had hold, how much
more on others in increasing measure to the present day? The
fallacy is due, first, to the hydra-like vivacity of the false idea
of mimesis, the notion that it is not re-presentation, re-creation
adding to Nature, but copying her; and, secondly, to the
Baconian conception of poetry as a vinum dcmonum, a poison
with some virtue as a medicine. What power these errors
have all our history has shown,—all Histories of Criticism
that ever can be written will show if they are written faith-
fully. But Coleridge has provided-once for all, if it be not
neglected—the safeguard against this in his definitions of the
two, the co-equal, the co-eternal functions of the exercise
of the poetic Imagination.
In the title of the present chapter I have used the word
"companions” in a double sense--the first and special appli-
The " Com- cation of it being that in which it is technically ap-
panions.” plied to the Companions of the Prophet-to the
early coadjutors of Mahomet in his struggle with the Koreish.
Of these the chief are Southey, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt,
with perhaps as an even closer ally—though unknowing and
unknown-William Blake. Then follow companions in the
wider sense--associates in the work, who varied from nearly
complete alliance, as with Scott, to very distant and lukewarm
participation, as in Campbell, and (in literary position) from
the captaincy of Scott again and of Shelley to the more than
respectable full-privateship of the contributors to the Retro-
spective Review. As for the “Adversaries,” they can be more
briefly dealt with, for their work was mostly “wood, hay,
stubble”; but Gifford and Jeffrey at least could not be ex-
cluded here, and a few more may deserve notice. So let the
inquiry proceed in this order.
It may seem at first sight curious, and will perhaps always
SOUTHEY.
343
II
remain a little so, that we have no collected examples, nor
many uncollected but singly substantive pieces, of
Southey.
age strictly critical work, from the most widely read
and the most industrious of the whole literary group of
1800-1830 in England - from a man who, for eleven years
at least, wrote reviews almost wherever he could place them
without hurting his conscience, and who for another five-
and-twenty was a pillar of one of the greatest of critical
periodicals. But Southey's earlier reviewing is for the most
part not merely whelmed in the dust-bins of old magazines,
but, as his son and biographer complains, extremely difficult
to trace even there; and his later was, by choice or by chance
(more I think by the former than by the latter), mainly devoted
to subjects not purely literary. If that great Bibliotheca
Britannica 1 (which so nearly existed, and which is a thing
lacking in English to this present day, a hundred years
later) had come actually into existence, it would hardly have
been necessary to look beyond that: as it is, one has the
pleasing but rather laborious and lengthy duty of fishing out
and piecing together critical expressions from The Doctor and
other books to some extent, and from the two parallel col-
lections of the Life and Correspondence 2 and the Letters 3 to
a still greater. The process is necessary for a historian of
criticism, and the results, if hardly new to him, are interest-
ing enough; but they cannot claim any exhibition at all
correspondent to the time taken in arriving at them. Nor
will any such historian, if he be wise, complain, for Southey
is always delightful, except when he is in his most desper-
ately didactic moods: and the Goddess of Dulness only knows
how even the most egregious of her children, unless from
pure ignorance, has managed to fix on him the title of
“dull."
That “a man's criticism is the man himself” is almost truer
1 See Life and Correspondence, ii.
316 sq. especially, for Coleridge's mag-
nificent “Spanish-Castlery” in con-
Dection.
2 6 vols., London, 1850.
34 vols., London, 1856. The
Letters to Caroline Bowles (London,
1881) are even fuller proportionately :
and Omniana, the Wesley, the Cowper,
Espriella, the Colloquies, with almost
everything, contribute.
344
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
than the original bestowal of the phrase; and it is nowhere
General
w truer than with Southey. That astonishing and
character. almost godlike sanity which distinguished him, in
istics of his almost all cases save as regards the Anti-Jacobin,
Criticism.
"** Mr Pitt, the Roman Catholic Church, and my Lord
Byron (who, by the way, lacked it quite as conspicuously in
regard to Southey), is the constant mark of his critical views.
Except his over-valuation of Kirke White, which was un-
doubtedly due to his amiable and lifelong habit of helping
lame dogs, I cannot, at the moment or on reflection, think
of any critical estimate of his (for that of himself as a poet
is clearly out of the question) which is flagrantly and utterly
wrong; and I can think of hundreds which are triumphantly
right. In respect of older literature, in particular, his catho-
licity is free from the promiscuousness of Leigh Hunt, and his
eclecticism from the caprice of Charles Lamb: while, prejudiced
as he can be, I do not remember an instance in which prejudice
blinds or blunts his critical faculty as it does Hazlitt's. On
all formal points of English poetry he is very nearly impec-
cable. He may have learnt his belief in substitution and
equivalence from Coleridge ; but it is remarkable that his
defences of it to Wynn 3 are quite early, quite original, and
quite sound, while Coleridge's own account long after, in the
preface to Christabel, is vague and rather wofully incorrect.
He knew, of course, far more literary history than any one
of his contemporaries — an incalculable advantage --- and he
could, sometimes at least, formulate general critical maxims
well worth the registering.
1 But see a very curious glimpse of
resipiscence in Letters, ii. 171 sq.
2 The projected Rhadamanthus, a
periodical on something like the lines
of the later Retrospective Review, was
& real loss.
3 Letters, i. 69, and elsewhere, also,
I think-e.g., Life and Corr., iv. 106.
Wynn was evidently a precisian of
Bysshism. For other noteworthy
critical things in this collection, see
i. 173 (Suggestion of Hist. Novels); ii.
91) (Crabbe) ; 214 (Engl. Hexameters);
iii. (the various letters about Eng.
lish Hexameters);iv. 47, Sayers' Poems.
I give but few here, because the Letters
have an index. I wish these and my
other references may prompt and help
some one to examine, at greater length
than would be possible or proper here,
the literary opinions of the best-read
man in England for some fifty years
1790-1840.
SOUTHEY.
345
Of his regular critical work, however, which can be traced
in the Annual and Quarterly Reviews from the list given by
his son at the end of the Life, some notice must
Reviews.
* be taken, though the very list itself is a tell-tale
in the large predominance of Travels, Histories, and the like,
over pure literature. That he should have made a rule for
himself after he became Laureate not to review poetry (save
in what may be called an eleemosynary manner) is merely
what one would have expected from his unvarying sense of
propriety; but there were large ranges of belles lettres to which
this did not apply. The articles which will best repay the
looking up are, in the Annual, those on Gebir, Godwin's Chaucer,
Ritson's Romances, Hayley, Froissart, Sir Tristram, Ellis's
Specimens, Todd's Spenser, and Ossian; in the Quarterly, those
on Chalmers's Poets, Sayers, Hayley again, Camoens, and Lope
de Vega, with some earlier ones on Montgomery (James, not
Robert).2
The Doctor also must have its special animadversion, for this
strangely neglected and most delightful book is full of critical
The Doctor.
matter. Its showers of mottoes--star-showers from
the central glowing mass of Southey's enormous and
never “dead” reading — amount almost in themselves to a
critical education for any mind which is fortunate enough to
be exposed to them when young, while the saturation of the
whole book with literature can hardly fail to produce the
same effect. It is lamentable, astonishing, and (the word is
not too strong) rather disgraceful that, except the “Three Bears ”
story, the appendix on the Cats, and perhaps the beautiful
early passages on the Doctor's birthplace and family, the
book should be practically unknown. But it by no means
owes its whole critical value to these borrowed and reset
1 It is unlucky that Guest's English in reference to Guest's astonishing
Rhythms came too late in the evening heresies on Shakespearian and Mil-
of his day for him to carry out his tonic prosody. I know no one-not
expressed purpose of reviewing it. even Gray-who seems to have had,
He evidently recognised its extraordin before the whole range of English verse
ary value as a Thesaurus: and his sum was known, juster notions on the whole
mary of the earlier part as“worthless” of English prosody. Even his wander-
is of course not deliberate or final, ings after hexameters are not fatal.
though it is a very natural expression
346
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
jewels. The passages of original criticism-direct or slightly
“applied ” — which it contains are numerous and important.
The early accounts of the elder Daniel's libraryl and of
Textor’s dialogues 2 are valuable; the passage on “Taste and
Pantagruelism ”3 much more so. On Sermons,4 on Drayton,
on the Principles of Criticism, on the famous verse-tournament
of the Poitiers Flea, on the Reasons for Anonymity,' on Mason 9
(for whom Southey manages to say a good word), on Bowdleris-
ing and Modernising, and (by an easy transition) Spenser 10—the
reader will find nuggets, and sometimes whole pockets, of
critical gold, the last-mentioned being one of the richest of
all. It is to Southey's immortal honour (an honour not suffici-
ently paid him by some Blakites) that he recognised and quoted
at length 11 the magnificent “Mad Song,” which is perhaps
Blake's most sustained and unbroken piece of pure poetry.
His discussion on Styles 12 is of great value: while the long
account 13 of the plays of Langeveldt (Macropedius), and of
our kindred English Morality Everyman, shows how admir-
ably his more than once projected Literary Histories would
have been executed.
Still, I am bound to say that he conveys to my mind the
impression of not quite having his soul bound up in the
Horrother exercise of his critical function. He was a little too
somewhat fond of extending his love of books to those which,
impar sibi. as Lamb would say, are no books—of giving the
children's bread unto dogs. Occasionally, moreover, that want
of the highest enthusiasm and sympathy, the highest in-
spiration, which-after the rather ungracious and ungrateful
suggestion of Coleridge—it has been usual to urge against him,
and which cannot be wholly disproved, does appear. Some
would say that this was due to his enormous reading, and to
1 The Doctor (1 vol., London, 1848),
p. 18.
2 P. 34.
3 P. 42.
4 P. 65.
5 P. 86.
6 P. 99.
7 P. 194.
8 P. 245. It is curious, by the way,
that Southey bewails the absence in
English of any synonym for the Span-
ish desengaño. That shows that
“disillusionment," one of those strictly
analogous and justifiable neologisms
which he rightly defends, had not then
come into use.
9 P. 315.
10 P. 379
11 P. 476.
12 P. 536.
13 P. 610.
LAMB.
347
the penal servitude for life to what was mostly hack-work,
which fate and his own matchless sense of duty imposed upon
him. I do not think so; but of course if it be said that no
one with the more translunary fancies, the nobler gusts, could
have so enslaved himself, an authorityl who takes so high a
ground must be allowed his splendid say. Anyhow, and on
the whole, we must return to the position that Southey does
not hold a very high position among English critics, and that
it is easier to give plausible reasons for the fact than entirely
to understand it.2
In criticising the criticism of Charles Lamb 3 one has to walk
warily; for is he not one of the most justly beloved of
Lamb.
English writers, and are not lovers apt to love
one more well than wisely? I shall only say that
if any be an “Agnist," I more. Ever since I can remember
reading anything (the circumstance would not have seemed
trivial to himself), I have read and revelled in, and for nearly
fifty years I have possessed in fee, a copy of the original
Elia of 1823, in the black morocco coat which it put on, at
least seven years before Lamb's death, in 1827. I have also
read its contents, and all other attainable Agnalia, in every
edition in which I have come across them, with introductions
by “Thaunson and Jaunson,” in and on all sorts of shapes and
types and papers and bindings. I have never wearied of read-
1 Such an authority, for instance, (very interesting, on a prophesied
as one of the reviewers of this poor return of "preciousness” and “meta-
book, who decided that “no man of physical” style in poetry); v. 245 (a
critical genius” would have attempted never-carried-out plan of continuing
to write it.
Warton); v. 99 (his own method of
2 Some readers may like a few out writing); vi. 93 (To Bowles-reasons
of hundreds of possible references to for not reviewing poetry).
Life and Corr., which has no Index : 3 The editions of Lamb in parts are
i. 85 (Ariosto and Spenser); 122 now fortunately very numerous, and
(Construction); 316-318 (Chapelain, be there are even several of the whole,
fore and after reading) ; ü. 197 (Greek some of which have been begun since
and Latin taste in poetry); 211, 212 the text was written. It is therefore
(Modern Ballads); iii. 9 (Archaisnas superfluous to give pages, especially
and Neologisms); 140 (the Epistles in as the individual articles are almost
Marmion); 145 sq. (Rhyme, &c.); 205 always short. But I generally use the
(the purple patch in Kehama); 213, late R. H. Shepherd's 1 vol. ed. of
265 (Advice to E. Elliott); 277 (blank the Works (London, 1875), and Canon
verse); 295 (Spenser); iv. 301, 338 Ainger's of the Letters (London, 1888).
348
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
ing them; I am sure I never shall weary as long as eye and
brain last. That Lamb is one of the most exquisite and de-
lightful of critics, as of writers, is a proposition for which I
will go to the stake; but I am not prepared to confess him as
one of the very greatest in his critical capacity.
The reasons for this limitation are to be found in two
passages of his friend Hazlitt—a ruthless friend enough, but
His OC- one who seldom goes wrong in speaking of friend
cultism” or foe, unless under the plain influence of a.
prejudice which here had not the slightest reason for existing.
The passages (referred to again elsewhere) are that on “the
Occult School” in the “Criticism”i and one in the “Fare-
well.” 2 The first speaks of those “who discern no beauties
but what are concealed from superficial eyes, and overlook all
that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind.” “If an
author is utterly unreadable they can read him for ever.”
“ They will no more share a book than a mistress with a
friend.” “Nothing goes down with them but what is caviare
to the multitude," &c. The other, in which Lamb is actually
named, contrasts his “surfeit of admiration," the antiquation
of his favourites after some ten years, with the “continuity of
impression” on which Hazlitt prided himself.
I am inclined to think that both these charges—made with
what is (for the author) perfect good-humour, and only in the
and alleged first case slightly exaggerated, as was almost per-
inconstancy, missible when he was dealing ostensibly with a
type not a person-are quite true. One would not indeed
have them false; it would be most “miserably wise " economy
to exchange Lamb, as he is, for a wilderness of consistent,
equitable, catholic mediocrities. As Hazlitt himself admits,
this “Occult Criticism” does not or need not come from any
affectation or love of singularity: indeed, some occult critics
“smack of genius and are worth any money.” The Lothario
part of the indictment, the desertion after enjoyment, is per-
haps less easy to authenticate as well as to defend; but I
think it existed, and was indeed a necessary consequence of
the other tendency. If you love merely or mainly as a
1 Table Talk, pp. 313, 314, ed. cit. inf. ? Winterslow, p. 463, ed. cit. inf.
11
LAMB.
349
collector, and for rarity,—if not only thus but because others
do not,—the multiplication of the object or of the taste must
necessarily have a disgusting effect. “The bloom is off the rye."
And I should say that, beyond all reasonable question, there
is a distinct character of eccentricity in the strict sense, of whim,
of will-worship, about many, if not most, of Lamb's preferences.
There is no affectation about him; but there is what might be
affectation in another man, and has been affectation in many
and many another. Take the most famous instances of his
criticism-the defence of Congreve and Wycherley, the exalta-
tion of Ford, the saying (productive of endless tribulation
to the matter-of-fact) that Heywood is “a prose Shakespeare,”
the enthusiasm shown towards that rather dull-fantastic play
A Fair Quarrel, while the magnificence of the same author's
Changeling was left to Leigh Hunt to find out—these and other
things distinctly show the capriccio. Lamb, not Hunt, is really
the “Ariel of Criticism," and he sometimes pushes tricksiness
to a point which would, we fear, have made his testy Highness
than in writing that his fickleness showed itself: we can never
conceive Lamb writing down anything that he had ever written
up. But something of disillusionment must, as has been said,
almost necessarily have resulted from the peculiarly whimsical
character of his inamoration. Canon Ainger has noted, as the
distinguishing features of Lamb's critical power, "width and
versatility.” One differs with the Master of the Temple un-
willingly and suo periculo: but neither term seems to me quite
appropriate. “Width” implies continuity, and there is little
of this in Lamb: “versatility” implies a power of turning to
what you will, and Lamb, I think, loved, not as he would but
as he could not help it at the time.
But he wants nothing save method and certainty (in response
—not even this in touch), and he has critical graces of his
The early own which make him all but as great as Cole-
Letters. ridge or Hazlitt, and perhaps more delightful than
either. In his very earliest critical utterances, in the Letters.
to Coleridge and Southey especially, much of this delightfulness
i Now, as he, alas ! became, between pen and press, the late Master.
350
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
displays itself as well as its two parents—Lamb's unconquer-
able originality of thought and feeling, and his unsurpassable
quaintness and piquancy of phrase. The critic. is, as is in-
evitable from his youth, and from the as yet very imperfect
reading which he frankly confesses, a little uncertain and in-
adequate. His comparative estimates of Coleridge and Southey,
Southey and Milton, Southey and Cowper, and of all or most
of these poets and others in themselves, exhibit an obviously
unregulated compass—a tendency to correct impression rather
overmuch, because the first striking off of it has been hasty.
But this soon disappears : and though the eccentricity above
noted rather increases than lessens with years, the critic's real
virtues—those just indicated—appear ever and ever more dis-
tinctly and more delightfully.
In a certain sense they never appear to greater advantage
than in the brief notes included in the Specimens of Dramatic
The Poets (1808). Everything necessary to excite Lamb's
Specimens. critical excellence united here,-actual merit, private
interest (for, though the study of the minor as well as of
the major Elizabethans had been progressing steadily, and
“Dodsley” had gone through several editions, yet the authors
were caviare to the general still); presence of the highest ex-
cellence ; and, as we see from the Letters, years of familiarity
and fondness on the part of the critic.
The Notes themselves pretend to no method, and fulfil their
pretence very strictly. Lamb is distinctly inferior to both
his great friends and rivals in grasp. His appreciation is tan-
gential—though in a different sense from that in which Hazlitt
applies the word to Coleridge. Lamb is not so much desul-
tory or divagatory as apt to touch his subject only at one
(sometimes one very small) point. The impact results in a
spark of the most ardent heat and glowing light, but neither
heat nor light spreads much. Sometimes, as is inevitable in a
this style of criticism, he can be only disappointing: one is
inclined to be pettish with him for seeing nothing to notice in
the vast and shadowy sweep of Tamburlaine save an interesting
evidence that Pistol was not merely jesting. Nor is perhaps
Barabas "a mere monster brought in with a large painted
LAMB.
351
0
nose to please the rabble.” But you must get out of this
mood if you are to enjoy Lamb. How he makes it all up, and ·
more than up, on Faustus; and (when he comes to Dekker)
on Old Fortunatus! “Beware! beware!" is the cry here also,
lest we steal too much of his honeydew. Fortunately it has
been so widely used, even for the vulgar purpose of sweeten-
ing school-editions, that it has become generally accessible.
The famous passage on the Witches, which Hazlitt loved to
quote, is perhaps as characteristic as any: the Webster and
Chapman notices are perhaps critically the best.
Next in order of time come the articles contributed to the
Reflector, especially the magnificent paper on “The Tragedies
of Shakespeare" and their actableness. I may be pre-
judiced in favour of this, by caring myself infinitely to read
the drama, and not caring at all to see it acted; but this
objection could not be made to Lamb, who was notoriously a
playgoer, and an eager though unfortunate aspirant to the
honours of the boards. The piece, of course, shows some traces
of the capriccio,—especially in the confession of being utterly
unable to appreciate “To be or not to be," because of its
being “spouted.” Shakespeare himself might have taught
Lamb better, in a certain passage about age and custom. To
learn, to hear, nay, direst curse of all! to teach “ To be or not
to be" leaves it perfect Cleopatra. But Lamb must be Lamb
and keep his Lambish mind: and he keeps it here to great
purpose. The Lear passage, the best known and the most
generally admitted as forcible, is not more so than those on
the Tempest and on Macbeth. They all come to that position
of the true critic (as I believe it to be), which has been
indicated elsewhere, that drama may be literature but is not
bound to be—that they are different things, and that the points
which drama need not have, and perhaps to which it cannot
do full justice, are in literature of the greatest importance.
It is natural, though they were written so long afterwards,
to take the “Notes on the Garrick Plays” with these other
The Garrick forerunners and suggesters; nor do I think that so
Play Notes. much of the “first sprightly running” is lost as has
sometimes been thought. How Lamb-like and how pleasant is
352
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
the phrase on Day's quaint Parliament of Bees—“the very air
seems replete with humming and buzzing melodies.” (Most
obvious, of course: only that nobody had met it before !) And
the imploration to Novello to set the song from Peele's Arraign-
ment; and the fine and forcible plea for the minor Elizabethans
in the note to The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (a play,
by the way, every fresh reading of which makes one more
thoroughly agree with Lamb). The fewness and slightness of
these notes should not be allowed to obscure their quality.
It was seldom that the bee-like nature of Lamb's own
genius could settle long on a single flower; and his regular
Miscella- “studies” are few, and not always of his very best.
neous Essays. The actual state of the paper on The Excursion, after
its mangling by Gifford, illustrates the wisdom of that editorial
counsel, “Always keep a copy,” which the contributor (alas !
we are all guilty) doth so unwisely neglect; and the two best
that we have among the miscellaneous essays are those on
Wither and on Defoe's secondary novels. It is difficult to
say which is the better: but the singular unlikeness of the
two subjects (except that both Wither and Defoe are eminently
homely) shows what I presume Canon Ainger meant by the
“versatility” of the critic's genius. Both are admirable, but
most characteristically “promiscuous.” The Defoe piece
avowedly gives stray notes; but the “Wither,” though it has
a beginning, has very little middle, and no end at all.
As for Elia itself, it is fortunately too well known to need
any analysis or much detailed survey. In the first and more
famous collection the literary element is rather a
Elia.
as saturation than a separable contingent. Except the
" Artificial Comedy” paper, there is none with a definitely
literary title or ostensible subject: while this itself starts in
the closest connection with the preceding paper on Actors,
and is dramatic rather than literary. But the “saturation”
is unmistakable. As one turns the beloved and hundred-
times - read pages, the constant undercurrent of allusion to
books and reading strikes one none the less—perhaps indeed
the more—for familiarity, whether it is at some depth, as in
: places, or whether it bubbles up to and over the surface, as in
LAMB.
353
“Oxford in the Vacation," and the book-borrowing close of
“The Two Races of Men,” and that other close of that “New
Year's Eve” which so unnecessarily fluttered Southey's ortho-
doxy, and not a little of “All Fool's Day”; and in quotations
everywhere. But in the Last Essays Lamb exhibits the master-
passion much more openly. The “Detached Thoughts on Books
and Reading” of course lays all concealment asidė,—it is a
regular affiche, as are also “The Genteel Style in Writing”
and (most of all) “On Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney--
the valiant and triumphant sally against Hazlitt—with not a
little of “Old China" itself. Everywhere there is evident the
abiding, unfailing love of “the book.”
And if we recur to the Letters we shall find the most
abundant proof of this quality. How admirable are those
The later criticisms 1 of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads
Letters. which, because they are not “neat” praise, roused
the poetic irritability, not merely of Wordsworth, whose
views respecting the reception of his own verse were always
Athanasian, but of Coleridge, who had, at any rate, intervals
of self-perception! How sound the judgment of Mrs Barbąuld
and of Chapman (a pleasing pair) to Coleridge himself on Oct.
23, 1802 !2 How sure the touch of the finger on that absurdity
in Godwin's Chaucer which has been so frequently copied since,
“the fondness for filling out the picture by supposing what
Chaucer did and how he felt” ! 3 The choicest of his observa-
tions are naturally those to Coleridge, almost passim : but the
vein is so irrepressible that he indulges it even in writing to
Wordsworth, though he knew perfectly well that the most
favourable reception could only be a mild wonder that people
could think or talk of any literature, and especially any poetry,
other than “W. W.'s” own. Even his experiences in 1800
could not prevent him from handling 4 the Poems of 1815 with
the same “irreverent parrhesia” which he uses immediately
after 5 also to Southey on Roderick as compared with Kehama
2
t
1 Letters, ed. Ainger, i. 162 sq., with
the most amusing additional letter in
the Appendix, p. 328 sq., on the wrath
of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
2 Ibid., i. 189, 190.
SP. 207.
4 P. 286 sq.
5 P. 290.
354
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
and Madoc. His famous appreciation of Blake 1 (of whom 'tis
pity that he knew no more) is one of the capital examples of
pre-established harmony between subject and critic. That he
could not, on the other hand, like Shelley, is not unsusceptible
of explanations by no means wholly identical, though partly,
with those which account for Hazlitt's error. Lamb did not
like the word “unearthly” (he somewhere objects to its use) and
he did not like the thing unearthliness. The regions where, as
Mr Arnold has it,“ thin, thin, the pleasant human noises sound,"
were not his haunt. Now Blake always has a homely domestic
everyday side close to his wildest prophetisings,2 and Shelley
has not. On the other hand, how completely does he grasp
even Cervantes in the few obiter dicta to Southey on Aug. 19,
1825,3 and how instantly he seizes the “charm one cannot
explain ” in Rose Aylmer. 4 And his very last letter concerns a
book, and a book on poetry, Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum.
His love was, as we said, “ of the book," perhaps, rather
than, as in Hazlitt's case, “of literature.” The Advocatus
Uniqueness Diaboli may once more suggest that to Lamb the
of Lamb's book was a very little too much on a level with
redu style the tea-pot and the engraving—that he had a shade
in excess of the collector's feeling about him. But the Court
will not call upon the learned gentleman to say anything more
on that head. It is time to acknowledge, without reservations
or provisos, the unique quality of “Elia’s ” critical appreciation,
Very much of this quality—if a quality be separable into parts
-arises from his extraordinary command of phrase,—the phrase
elaborate without affectation, borrowed yet absolutely individual
and idiosyncratic, mannered to the nth, but never manner-
ised, in which, though he might not have attained to it
without his great seventeenth-century masters, he stands
original and alone. In no critic perhaps—not even in Mr
Pater--does style count for so much as in Lamb; in none
certainly is it more distinctive, and, while never monotonous,
nore homogeneous, uniform, instantly recognisable and self-
1 Ibid., ii. 105.
the sketches of gnashing fiends.
3 P. 138.
2 Even as the exquisite figure of
Mrs Blake, sitting on the bedside, faces
4 P. 278.
LAMB.
355
.
bewrayed. The simulative power-almost as of the leaf-insect
and suchlike creatures—with which he could imitate styles, is of
course most obvious in the tour de force of the Burton counter-
feits. But in his best and most characteristic work it is not
this which we see, but something much nobler, though closely
allied to it. It is not Browne, or Fuller, or Burton, or Glanvill,
but something like them, yet different. And though it has
more outré presentation in some of his miscellaneous writing
than in his criticism, yet it is never absent in the most striking
pieces of this, and gives them much of their hold on us.
Still, those who, however unnecessarily (for no one surely
is going to deny it save in a mood of paradox or of mono-
and mania), insist that style must be the body of
thought. thought-nay, that this body itself must think
(in Donne's phrase), and not merely live, will find no diffi-
culty in claiming Lamb as theirs. Nothing of the kind is
more curious than the fact that, strongly marked as are his
peculiarities and much as he may himself have imitated, he
is not imitable; nobody has ever, except in the minutest
shreds rather actually torn off from his motley than repro-
ducing it-written in Lamb's style save Lamb. And accord-
ingly no one (though not a few have tried) has ever criticised
like Lamb. It is very easy to be capricious, fantastic, fas-
tidious--as easy as to wear yellow stockings and go cross-
gartered, and as effective. To Lamb's critical attitude there
go in the first place that love for the book which has been
spoken of; then that faculty of sound, almost common-sense,
“taste” which is shown in the early letters to Coleridge and
Southey; then the reading of years and decades; and, lastly,
the je ne sais quoi that “fondoos” the other things, as the
old Oxford story has it a story to be constantly borne in
mind by the critic and the historian of criticism. Even the
1 There may be people who do not
know this, and those who know it
already need not read it. A college
cook (I think of Brasenose) was par-
ticularly famous for that most ex-
cellent dish the fondue, but would
uever tell his recipe. At last some
Arthur Pendennis (of the other shop)
got round him to this extent: “Why,
sir,” said he, "you see I takes the
eggs, and the butter, and the cheese,
you know, and the other things; and
then I just fondoos 'em."
356
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
other ingredients are not too common, especially in conjunc- :
tion: the je ne sais quoi itself is here, and nowhere else..
Leigh Hunt1 claims less space from us than either of his
friends, Hazlitt and Lamb. This is not because he is an
Leigh Hunt: inconsiderable critic, for he is by no means this,
his some- As has been said, he has the immense and sur-
what in-
ferior posi- prising credit of having first discovered the great-
tion. ness of the tragic part of Middleton's Changeling, as
an individual exploit, and in more general ways he has that,
which Macaulay duly recognised in a well-known passage,2
of being perhaps more catholic in his tastes as regards Eng-
lish Literature than any critic up to his time. He has left
a very large range of critical performance, which is very rarely
without taste, acuteness, and felicity of expression; and he has,
as against both the greater critics just named, the very great
advantage of possessing a competent knowledge of at least
one modern literature 3 besides his own, and some glimmerings
of others. He has the further deserts of being almost always
readable, of diffusing a pleasant sunny atmosphere, and of
doing very much to keep up the literary side of that period-
ical production which, for good or for evil, was, with the
novel, the great literary feature of the nineteenth century.
These are not small merits: and while they might seem greater
if they were not thrown somewhat into the shade by the
superior eminence of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the superior
attractiveness of Lamb, they retain, even in the vicinity of
these, claims to full acknowledgment.
A severely critical estimate, however, will discover in Leigh
· Hunt- perhaps in very close juxtaposition and in a sort of
Reasons causal relation to these merits themselves--some-
for it. .thing which is not quite so good. Even his cath-
olicity may be set down in part, by the Enemy, to a certain
loose facility of liking, an absence of fastidiousness and se-,
lection. If Lamb goes too far towards the ends of the Eng-
1 There is no complete ed. of Hunt, pretty American pocket issue of the
and there could not well be one. I Italian Poets.
shall refer here to the 7 vols. of Messrs ? At the beginning of the Essay on
Smith & Elder's cheap and uniform Restoration Drama.
reprint of a good deal, and to the 3 Italian.
LEIGH HUNT.
357
·lish literary earth for the objects of his affection, Hunt is
rather too content to find them in triviis et angiportis. He does
not exactly “like grossly,” but he likes a little promiscuously.
The fault is no very bad one; and it becomes exceedingly
venial—nay, a positive virtue in time and circumstance—when
we compare it with the unreasonable exclusiveness of the
Neo-classic period. But it is a kind of criticism which in-
clines rather too much to the uncritical.
A further objection may be taken by applying that most
dangerous of all tests, the question “What does he dislike ?"
His attitude For the twentieth time (probably) let us repeat
to Dante. that in criticism likes and dislikes are free; and
likes what the consensus of good criticism approves, is entitled
to say so, and had much better say so. But he gives his
to do him justice, is not like Mr Rymer--it is not his habit
“no wise to allow.” But it is certainly a pity that one of
his exceptions should be Dante, and it is certainly a much
greater pity that among the reasons given for unfavourable
criticism 1 should be because Dante “puts fabulous people with
real among the damned,” because Purgatory is such a very
disagreeable idea, and because the whole poem contains “ab-
surdities too obvious nowadays to need remark."
This, however, was merely an exceptional outburst of that
“Liberal ” Philistinism and blundering which, it is only fair
to say, had been provoked by plentiful exhibition of the same
qualities on the other side, and which was more particularly
excusable in Leigh Hunt (humanly, if not critically, speaking),
because nobody, not even Hazlitt, had received worse treatment.
from that side. than himself. But it does something affect his
critical position; for even Hazlitt managed, in some queer
fashion, to distinguish between the prostitute baronet, Sir
Walter Scott, and “the Author of Waverley," between that
1 Of course it is not all unfavour-
able : Leigh Hunt is far too much
of a critic and a lover of poetry for
that. But he is constantly put off
and put out by Dante's “bigotry,"
his “uncharitableness,” the "barbar.
ous pedantries” of his age, and the
like.
358
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
(D
wicked Mr Burke and the author of the great speeches and
treatises. But the main reasons why Hunt must go with
shorter measure than others, is the combination of abundance
in quantity with a certain want of distinction in quality, which
mars his writings. Not even the largest space here possible
would enable us to go through them all, and we should be
able to select but a few that are of unquestionably distinctive
and characteristic race. It is, indeed, rather in his favour
that you may dip almost anywhere into him with the cer-
tainty of a wholesome, pleasant, and refreshing critical bath
or draught. He is very rarely untrustworthy; and when
he is, as in the Dante case, he tells the fact and its secret
more frankly even than Hazlitt himself. But it would be
unjust to refer to no samples of him, and a few of the
most characteristic shall therefore be given.
Fortunately there is an extremely favourable example of
his criticism which fills a whole book to itself, and is written
under something like a general scheme. This is
Examples
from the volume-modestly sub-titled “Selections,” but
Imagination containing a very large proportion of comment and
and Fancy.
i original matter—which he called Imagination and
Fancy,' and intended to follow up with four others, though
only one, Wit and Humour, 2 was ever written. The plan
was begun late (1844); but as we have seen in almost every
instance, a man's critical work very rarely declines with years,
unless he actually approaches dotage: and the book is, on the
whole, not merely the most favourable but the most representa-
tively favourable example of Leigh Hunt's criticism. It opens
by a set Essay on the question “What is Poetry ?” from
which, perhaps, any one who knew the author's other work,
but not this, might not expect very much, for Hunt had
not an abstract or philosophical head. He acquits himself,
however, remarkably well. His general definition that Poetry
is “the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power,
i New ed., ut sup. : London, 1883. work, from the Examiner, "whose rery
? This is good, but not so good : and name is Hunt," and the Indicator, and
elsewhere—though critical matter will the Reflector, to the Tatler, and the
be found in all Hunt's collected books London Journal-we shall never find
and in all his uncollected periodical him better and seldom so good.
LEIGH HUNT.
359
embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and
fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety
in uniformity,” is not bad; but these things are never very
satisfactory. It will be seen that Hunt, like Coleridge, though
with a less “Cimmerian" obscurity of verbiage,“ dodges” the
frank mention of “metre” or “verse”; but this is not because
he is in any way inclined to compromise. On the contrary,
he says 1 (taking, and perhaps designedly, the very opposite
line to Wordsworth) that he “knows of no very fine versifica-
tion unaccompanied with fine poetry." But the strength of
the “Essay," as of the whole book, is in the abundant and
felicitous illustration of the various points of this definition
by commented selections from the poets themselves.
That catholicity which has been said to be his main critical
virtue will be found (without any of the vice which has been
hinted as sometimes accompanying it in the very list of
the authors selected from-Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare,
Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Dekker, and
Webster, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats: while the
less “imaginative” poets are by no means neglected, and in
particular Leigh Hunt brings out, often as no one had ever
done before, that sheer poetical quality of Dryden to which
the critics of 1800-1830 had been as a rule unjust. But the
comment (and one cannot say more) is usually worthy of the
selection. The fullest division of all is that on Spenser-indeed
Leigh Hunt's appreciation of this at once exquisite and
magnificent poet is one of the very best we have, and would
be the best of all if it had been a little more sensitive to
Spenser's “ bravest translunary things," to the pervading ex-
altation and sublimation of thought and feeling which purifies
the most luscious details, and unites the most straggling divaga-
tions in a higher unity. But, short of this, it would be difficult
to have a better detailed eulogium, pièces en main, of the
subject; nor does Hunt fail to make out something of a
case against, at least, the exaggeration of Lessing's attack
on the ut pictura poesis view. But his limitations appear in
his complete misunderstanding of Coleridge's exact and pro-
1 P. 51, ed. cit.
'n
360
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
found observation that Spenser's descriptions are “not in
the true sense of the word picturesque, but composed of a
wondrous series of images as in dreams." What Coleridge
meant, of course, is that sequence rather than strict “com-
position” is Spenser's secret—that his pageants dissolve into
one another. But in these finesses Hunt is seldom at his
ease. So, again, he blasphemes one of the most beautiful
lines of The Tempest-
“The fringed curtains of thine eye advance"-
as “elaborate nothingness, not to say nonsense" ſhow nothing.
ness can in any case be sense he shall tell us], "pompous,"
“declamatory," and disapproved of by-Pope !
One really blushes for him. Could he possibly be unaware
that when a person is about to look at anything, the natural
gesture is to lower the head and thrust it a little forward,
raising or depressing the eyelids at the same time? or be insen-
sible to the exquisite profile image of Miranda with the long
eyelashes projected against the air ? And he was the author
of A Criticism of Female Beauty! But if he sometimes mis-
understands, he seldom misses good things such as (it is true
Warton put him on this) the Medea passage of Gower.1 Ben
Jonson made him uncomfortable, which is again a pity; and
on Beaumont and Fletcher he is at almost his very worst:
but he is sounder than some greater ones on Ford and
Massinger, and his great" catch” of De Flores deserves yet a
third mention. He is at his very best and pleasantest, too,
where most men fail—where they are even often very un-
pleasant-on his contemporaries, Coleridge, and Shelley, and
Keats. When you have said such a thing as this 2 of Cole-
ridge, “Of pure poetry, ... consisting of nothing but its
essential self, ... he was the greatest master of his time,”
you had better “stand down." Your critical claim is made
out: you may damage but can hardly increase it. Yet it
is only in the severe court of critical history that one would
wish to silence Hunt: for, in truth, nine-tenths of his criticism
i It is curious what power that dead
sorceress has had on almost all her
poets.
? P. 250, ed. cit.
HAZLITT.
361
is admirable, and most admirably suited to instruct and en-
courage the average man. Impressionism and Rulelessness are
almost as fairly justified of him, their child, as of any other
that I can think of. They scarcely ever lead him wrong in
liking; and he mentions what he dislikes so seldom that he
has only occasional chances of being wrong there.
But the greatest of the “Cockney critics ” (quelle Cocaigne !)
has yet to come. There is “a company of warm young men,"
... as Dryden has it, who would doubtless disdain the
Hazlitt. as
* inquiry whether Coleridge or Hazlitt, is the greatest
of English critics; and it is quite certain that this inquiry
might be conducted in a sufficiently futile sense and manner.
There are others, less disdainful, who might perhaps be staggered
by the acknowledgment in limine that it is possible to answer
the question either way-nay, for the same person to give
both answers, and yet be “not unwelcome back again" as a
reasonable disputant. I have myself in my time, I think,
committed myself to both propositions; and I am not at all
disposed to give up either--for reasons which it will be more
proper to give at the end than at the beginning of an examina-
tion of Hazlitt himself. That he was a great critic there will
probably now be little dispute, though Goethe is said not to
have found much good in him; though persons of worship,
including Mr Stevenson, have thought him greater as a mis-
cellaneous essayist; and though you may read writings of
considerable length upon him in which no attempt is made
to bring out his critical character at all.
His critical deliverances are so numerous and so voluminous
that the “brick of the house" process, which we have
Method of frequently found applicable, has in his case to be
dealing given up, or at least considerably modified—for it
him. is too much the principle of the present History
to be given up altogether. Fortunately there is no difficulty
in the modification. Hazlitt is not, like Coleridge, remarkable
for the discovery and enunciation of any one great critical
principle, or for the emission (obiter or otherwise) of remarkable
mediate dicta, or for marginalia on individual passages or
lines, though sometimes he can do the last and sometimes
362
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
also the second of these things. What he is remarkable for
is his extraordinary fertility and felicity, as regards English
literature, in judgments, more or less“ grasped,” of individual
authors, books, or pieces. As, by preference, he stops at
the passage, and does not descend to the individual line or
phrase, so, by preference also," he stops at the individual
example of the Kind, and does not ascend to the Kind itself,
or at least is not usually very happy in his ascension. But
within these limits (and they are wide enough), the fertility
and the felicity of his criticism are things which strike one
almost dumb with admiration; and this in spite of certain
obvious and in their way extremely grave faults.
The most obvious, though by far the least, of these,-indeed
one which is displayed with such frankness and in a way
so little delusive as to be hardly a fault at all, though it is
certainly a drawback, —is a sort of audacious sciolism-ac-
quiescence in ignorance, indifference about "satisfying the
examiners"for half a dozen different names would be required
to bring out all the sides of it.
His almost entire ignorance of all literatures but his own
gives him no trouble, though it cannot be said that it does
His surface him no harm. In treating of comic writers, not
and occa- in English only but generally, he says 2 (with perfect
Imperfect
4: truth) that Aristophanes and Lucian are two of the
knowledge four chief names for comic humour, but that he
method. shall say little of them, for he knows little. Would
all men were as honest! but one cannot say, “Would all critics
were as ignorant!” In his Lectures on the English Poets he is
transparently, and again quite honestly, ignorant of mostly
all the earlier minorities, with some not so minor. He almost
prided himself upon not reading anything in the writing
period of his life; and he seems to have carried out his
principles só conscientiously that, if anything occurred in
1 Preference only, of course : the
exceptions are numerous, but not
enough to destroy the rule.
2 References will be made here
throughout to the reprints of Hazlitt's
literary work in the Bohn Library,
7 vols. This is to The English Comic
Writers, p. 33. The newer and com-
pleter edition of Messrs Waller &
Glover had but begun when the texte
was originally written.
HAZLITT.
363
the course of a lecture which was unknown to him, he never
made the slightest effort to supply the gap. His insouciance
in method was equal to that in regard to material; and when
we find 1 Godwin and Mrs Radcliffe included, with no satiric
purpose, among “The English Comic Writers,” they are
introduced so naturally that the absurdity hardly strikes us
till some accident wakes us up to it. If inaccuracies in matters.
of fact are not very common in him, it is because, like a
true critic, he pays very little attention to such matters, and
is wholly in opinion and appreciation and judgment, and other
things where the free spirit is kept straight, if at all, by its
own instinct. But he does commit such inaccuracies, and
would evidently commit many more if he ran the risk of
them oftener.
The last and gravest of his drawbacks has to be mentioned,
and though it may be slurred over by political partisanship,
Bertran those who admire and exalt him in spite of and not
literary because of his politics, are well entitled to call
prejudice. attention to it. To the unpleasantness of Hazlitt's.
personal temper we have the unchallengeable testimony of his
friends Lamb, who was the most charitable, and Hunt, who
with all his faults was one of the most good-natured, of mortals.
But what we may call his political temper, especially when it
was further exasperated by his personal, is something of the
equal of which no time leaves record. Whenever this east
wind blows, the true but reasonable Hazlittian had better,
speaking figuratively, “go to bed till it is over," as John Hall
Stevenson is said to have done literally in the case of the
literal Eurus. Not only does Hazlitt then cease to be a critic,
-he ceases to be a rational being. , Sidney and Scott are the
main instances of its effect, because Sidney could not have
annoyed, and Scott we know did not in any way annoy, Hazlitt
personally. Gifford is not in this case, and he was himself
so fond of playing at the roughest of bowls that nobody need
pity him for the rubbers he met. But Hazlitt's famous Letter
to him, which some admire, always, I confess, makes me think
of the Doll's-dressmaker's father's last fit of the horrors in
1 Ibid., p. 170 sq., and p. 176 sq.
364
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
Our Mutual Friend, and of the way in which the luckless
“man talent" fought with the police and “laid about him
hopelessly, fiercely, staringly, convulsively, foamingly.” For-
tunately the effect was not so fatal, and I know no other
instance in which Hazlitt actually required the strait waist-
coat. But he certainly did here: and in a considerable
number of instances his prejudices have made him, if not
exactly non compos mentis, yet certainly non compos judicii.
Fortunately, however, the wind does not always blow from
this quarter with him, and when it does the symptoms are so
Gis radical unmistakable that nobody can be deceived unless
and usual he chooses to be, or is so stupid that it really does
cellence. not matter whether he is deceived or not. Far
more usually it is set in a bracing North or fertilising West,
not seldom even in the “summer South” itself. And then you
get such appreciations, in the best, the most thorough, the most
delightful, the most valuable sense, as had been seldom seen
since Dryden, never before, and in him not frequently. I do
not know in what language to look for a parallel wealth.
Systematic Hazlitt's criticism very seldom is, and, as hinted
above, still seldomer at its best when it attempts system. But
then system was not wanted; it had been overdone; the
patient required a copious alterative. He received it from
Hazlitt as he has—virtue and quantity combined—received it
from no one else since: it is a “patent medicine” in everything
but the presence of quackery. Roughly speaking, Hazlitt's
criticism is of two kinds. The first is very stimulating, very
, interesting, but, I venture to think, the less valuable of the
two. In it Hazlitt at least endeavours to be general, and takes
a lesson from Burke in “prodigious variation" on his subject.
The most famous, the most laboured, and perhaps the best
example is the exordium of the Lectures on the English Poets,
with its astonishing “amplification” on what poetry in general
is and what it is not. A good deal of this is directly Cole-
ridgean. I forget whether this is the lecture which Cole-
1 He is, however, dangerously near
requiring it with regard to Scott (see
the end of the article on him in The
Spirit of his Age), and whenever he
speaks of the Duke of Wellington.
HAZLITT.
365
- ridge himself, when he read it, thought that he remembered
“talking at Lamb’s”; but we may be quite sure that he had
talked things very like it. Much in the “Shakespeare and
Milton” has the same quality, and may have been partly
derived from the same source: the critical character of Pope 1
is another instance, and probably more original. For Hazlitt
had not merely learnt the trick from his master but had him-
self a genius for it; and he adorned these disquisitions with
more phrase than Coleridge's recalcitrant pen usually allowed
him, though there seems to have been plenty in his speech.
The Pope passage is specially interesting, because it leads us
to the second and, as it seems to me, the chief and principal
class of Hazlitt's critical deliverances—those in which, without
epideictic intention, without, or with but a moderate portion
of, rhetoric and amplification and phrasemaking, he handles
separate authors and works and pieces. I have said that I
think him here unsurpassed, and perhaps unrivalled, in the
quantity and number of his deliverances, and only surpassed,
if so, in their quality, by the greatest things of the greatest
persons. These deliverances are to be found everywhere in
his extensive critical work, and it is of a survey of some of
them, conditioned in the manner outlined above, that the main
body of any useful historical account of his criticism must con-
sist. The four main places are the Lectures on The English
Poets (1818), on The English Comic Writers (1819), on Eliza-
bethan Literature (1820), and the book on Characters of Shake-
speare (1817). We may take them in the order mentioned,
though it is not quite chronological, because the chronological
dislocation, in the case of the second pair, is logically and
methodically unavoidable.
How thoroughly this examination of the greater particulars
(as we may call it) was the work which he was born to do is-
The English illustrated by the sketches (at the end of the first
Poets. Lecture on The English Poets 2) of The Pilgrim's Pro-
gress, Robinson Crusoe, the Decameron, Homer, the Bible, Dante,
and (O Groves of Blarney!) Ossian. Hazlitt's faults (except
prejudice, which is here fortunately silent) are by no means-
1 English Poets, ed. cit., pp. 92-95.
2 Pp. 18-25.
366
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
hidden in them-irrelevance, defect of knowledge, “casualness,".
and other not so good things. But the gusto, the spirit, the
inspiriting quality, are present in tenfold measure. Here is a
man to whom literature is a real and live thing, and who can
make it real and alive to his readers—a man who does not
love it or its individual examples " by allowance," but who
loves it “with personal love." Even his Richardsonian di-
gression 2_horrible to the stop-watch man-is alive and real
and stimulating with the rest. The Dante passage is a little
false perhaps in parts, inadequate, prejudiced, what you will in
others. But it is criticism-an act of literary faith and hope
and charity too—a substance; something added to, and new-born
in, the literary cosmos. He is better (indeed he is here almost
at his very best) on Spenser than on Chaucer, but why? Be-
cause he knew more about Spenser, because he was plentifully
read in sixteenth- and hardly read at all in fourteenth-century
literature. And so always: the very plethora of one's notes
for comment warning the commentator that he is lost if he
indulges rashly. Where Hazlitt is inadequate (as for instance
on Dryden) he is more instructive than many men's adequacy
could be, and where he is not-on Collins, on the Ballads, and
elsewhere-he prepares us for that ineffable and half-reluctant
outburst-a very Balaam's blessing—on Coleridge, which
stands not higher than this, not lower than that, bút as an
A-per-se, consummate and unique.
In a sense the Comic Writers are even better. The general
exordium on Wit and Humour belongs to the first class of
The Comic Hazlitt's critical performances as defined above,
Writers and is one of the cleverest of them; though it may
perhaps have the faults of its class, and some of those of its
:author. That on Comedy--the general part of it—incurs this
:sentence in a heavier degree; for Aristotle or somebody else
seems to have impressed Hazlitt too strongly with the necessary
shadiness of Comedy, and it is quite clear that of the Romantic
variety (which to be sure hardly anybody but Shakespeare
1 This favourite word of his has been
adopted by all competent critics as
best describing his own manner.
? Pp. 19, 20.
8 The last page of The English Poets.
HAZLITT.
367
has ever hit off) he had an insufficient idea. He is again in-
adequate on Jonson; it is indeed in his criticism, because of
its very excellence, that we see— more than anywhere else,
though we see it everywhere—the truth of his master's de-
nunciation of the “criticism which denies.” But his lecture
or essay on the capital examples of the comedy which he
really liked—that of the Restoration—is again an apex: and,
as it happens, it is grouped for English students with others-
the morally excellent and intellectually vigorous but rather
purblind onslaught of Collier, the again vigorous but somewhat
Philistine following thereof by Macaulay, the practical con-
fession of Lamb's fantastic and delightful apology, Leigh Hunt's
rather feeble compromise—after a fashion which shows it off to
a marvel. While as to the chapter on the Eighteenth-century
Novel it has, with a worthier subject, an equal supremacy of
treatment. You may differ with much of it, but always agree
to differ : except in that estimate of Lovelace which unfortun-
ately shows us Hazlitt's inability to recognise a cad in the
dress and with the manners of a fine gentleman.l
The Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth (which succeeded the
Comic Writers, as these had succeeded the Poets) maintain, if
The Age of they do not even raise, the standard. Perhaps there
Elizabeth. is nothing so fine as the Coleridge passage in in-
dividual and concentrated expression ; nor any piece of con-
nected criticism so masterly as the chapter on the Novel. But
the level is higher : and nowhere do we find better expression,
of that gusto—that amorous quest of literary beauty and rap-
great merit. His faults are here, as always, with him and
with us. Even the faithful Lamb was driven to expostulate ?
with the wanton and, as it happens, most uncritical belittle-
ment of Sidney, and (though he himself was probably less
influenced by political partisanship or political feeling of any
kind than almost any great writer of whom we know) to
1 It is curious that the critic's failed.
blunder had been anticipated, though ? In the paper on Sir Philip's
not excused, by the author's. Richard. Sonnets, noted above.
son of course meant to make Lovelace 3 Lect. vi., p. 201 sq.
what Hazlitt sees in him : only he
368
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
assign this to its true cause. It is odd 1 that à critic, and
a great critic, should contrive to be inadequate both on Browne
and on Dryden: and again one cannot but suspect the com-
bination to be due to the fact that both were Royalists. But
the King's Head does not always come in: and it is only fair
to Hazlitt to say that he is less biassed than Coleridge by the
ultra-royalism of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the supposed
republicanism of Massinger. And in by far the greater part
of the book-nearly the whole of that part of it which deals
with the dramatists—there is no disturbance of this kind.
The opening, if somewhat discursive, is masterly, and with
very few exceptions the lecturer or essayist carries out the
admirable motto-in fact and in deed the motto of all real
critics__"I have endeavoured to feel what was good, and to
give a reason for the faith that was in me when necessary
and when in my power.” 2 Two of his sentences, in dealing
with Beaumont and Fletcher, not merely set the key-note of
all good criticism but should open the stop thereof in all fit
readers. “It is something worth living for to write or even
read such poetry as this, or to know that it has been
written.” Again, “And so it is something, as our poets
themselves wrote, 'far above singing."" 3
The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays is perhaps not as good
as any of these three courses of Lectures; but it should be
Chometano remembered that it came earlier in time, and that
of Shake- the critic had not "got his hand in.” The notes
speare. are as a rule nearly as desultory as Coleridge's,
with less suggestiveness; there is at least one outburst, in
the case of Henry V., of the usual disturbing influence; there
is very much more quotation than there need be from Schlegel ;
and there are other signs of the novitiate. Yet the book con-
tains admirable things, as in the early comparison of Chaucer
and Shakespeare, where, though Hazlitt's defective knowledge
of Chaucer again appears, there is much else good. Among
the apices of Shakespearian criticism is the statement that the
1 But not as unique as odd.
2 P. 181.
3 Pp. 115, 126. The elaborate char
acters of Bacon, &c., in this course
should be compared with those of
Pope, and others earlier.
HAZLITT.
369
LU
poet “has no prejudice for or against his characters,” i that he
makes “no attempt to force an interest: everything is left for
time and circumstance to unfold.”2 There is perhaps some-
thing inconsistent with this as well as with truth in the
observation on Lear, that “He is here fairly caught in the
web of his own imagination”; but, like most of the greater
critics, Hazlitt cares very little for superficial consistency.
The characters of Falstaff and Shylock are masterpieces in his
bravura style, and one need perhaps nowhere seriously quarrel
with any critical statement of his except the astonishing one,
that All's Well that Ends Well. is “one of the most pleasing"
of the plays.
In the remaining volumes the literary articles or passages
are only occasional, and are often considerably adulterated
with non-literary matter. In The Plain Speaker, for instance,
the opening paper on “The Prose Style of Poets” holds out
almost the highest promise, and gives almost the lowest per-
formance. Hazlitt, as is not so very uncommon with him,
seems to have, deliberately set himself to take the other side
from Coleridge's. That it happens also to be the wrong side
matters very little. But even his attack on Coleridge's own
prose style (open enough to objection.) has nothing very happy
in it except the comparison, "To read one of his disquisitions
is like hearing the variations to a piece of music without the
score.” So, too, “On the Conversation of Authors,” though in-
tensely interesting, has no critical interest or very little—the
chief exception being the passage on Burke's style. Far
more important is the glance at the theory of the single word
in “On Application to Study," 4 and in that in “On Envy” 5
on the taste of the Lake School.
Much of The Plain Speaker is injured as a treasury of
criticism, though improved as a provision of amusement, by
The Plain Hazlitt's personal revelations, complaints, agonies;
Speaker. but the critical ethos of the man was so irrepressible
that it will not be refused. There is a curious little piece 6
of critical blasphemy, or at least “dis-gusto” (the word is
1 P. 64, ed. cit.
3 P. 108.
5 P. 139.
2 P. 75.
* P. 77.
6 P. 185.
2 A
370
:
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
wanted and is fairly choice Italian), in “On the Pleasure of
Hating," and, almost throughout the series, the sharp flux and
reflux of literary admiration and political rage in respect of
Scott is most noteworthy. “On the Qualifications necessary
to Success in Life” contains yet anotherl of those passages on
Coleridge which are like nothing so much as the half-fond,
half-furious, retrospects of a discarded lover on his mistress-
which are certainly like nothing else in literature. But “On
Reading Old Books” does not belie the promise of its title, and
is a complete and satisfactory palinode to the fit of critical
headache noted just now. One must not venture to cite from
it; it is to be read and re-read, and hardly any single piece,
except the immortal “Farewell to Essay-Writing," gives us so
much insight into Hazlitt's critical temperament as this. “On
People of Sense” contains many critical glances, and, unfor-
tunately, one of those on Shelley which show Hazlitt at his
worst. One might think that he who found others so “far
above singing" could not miss the similar altitude of the
author of Prometheus Unbound. But Shelley was a contem-
porary, something of an acquaintance, a man of some means,
a gentleman--so Hazlitt must snarl 3 at him. Let us sigh and
pass.
“Antiquity,” though on one side only, is almost throughout
ours, and therefore not ours: and there is not a little for us in
“On Novelty and Familiarity," while “Old English Writers
and Speakers” speaks for itself, and is specially interesting
for its glances on matters French and its characteristically
Hazlittian fling-one I confess with which I have for once no
quarrel--that “'Tis pity She's a Whore will no more act than
Lord Byron and Goethe together could have written it."! It
puts one in charity for the absurd description, contradicted by
1 P. 278. These passages may re-
mind some of the story of one of
George Sand's old lovers pausing be
fore a photograph of her in a shop-
window, and saying to his companion,
"Et je l'ai connue belle !"
2 P. 344.
3 The usual dog-metaphors are no
triviality in regard to Hazlitt when
he is in this mood. Every one who
knows dogs must have noticed the
way in which they often snarl, as if
they could not help it; the growl and
gnash are forced from them.
4 P. 441.
5 P. 449.
HAZLITT.
371
his own remarks, of Redgauntlet as “the last and almost worst"
of Scott's novels, and the prediction (alas ! to be falsified) that
“Old Sir Walter will last long enough”-in the flesh, not in
fame.? “Scott, Racine, and Shakespeare” is not unworthy of its
title, though it is really on the first and last only. Racine is
brought in perfunctorily, and justice is done to him in neither
sense.
Table-Talk, one of the greenest pastures of the Hazlittian
champaign generally, is among the least literary of the books,
and yet so literary enough. “On Genius and Common Sense"
contributes its Character of Wordsworth,2 on whom Hazlitt
is always interesting, because of the extraordinary opposition
between the men's temperaments. The companion on Shelley,3
which is supplied by “On Paradox and Commonplace,” is
hardly less interesting, though, for the reasons above indicated,
much less valuable. “On Milton's Sonnets, however, is, as it
ought to be, a pure study and an admirable one. “The Aristo-
cracy of Letters” carries its hay high on the horn, yet it
is not negligible: and “On Criticism,” which follows, really
deserves the title, despite its frequent and inevitable flings
and runnings-amuck. The good -humoured, though rather
“home” description of “the Occult School” 5 (v. supra on
Lamb) is perfectly just. “On Familiar” Style is also no
false promiser, and yet another passage on Coleridge meets
us in the paper “On Effeminacy of Character."
Nor is the interesting “omnibus” volume, which takes its
general title from The Round Table, of the most fertile. The
The Round collection of short papers, properly so called, was
Table, &c. written earlier (1817) thán most of the books
hitherto discussed, and therefore has some first drafts or vari-
ants of not a little that is in them. In a note of it & occurs the
i The end-note of this piece coincides ? P. 56. 3 P. 203.
curiously with a remark once made to 4 Yet Hazlitt cannot resist a re-
me by a person unusually well ac- newed fling at Sidney.
quainted with France but, I feel sure, 5 P. 351.
quite unaware that he was echoing 6 P. 150, ed. cit. I wish that some
Hazlitt. "The Frenchman has a cer one, in these excerpting days, would
tain routine of phrases into which his extract and print together all Hazlitt's
ideas run habitually as into a mould; passages on Burke, Scott, and Cole.
and you cannot get him out of them."
372
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
passage on Burke, which, with that on Scott in the Spirit of
the Age, is Hazlitt's nearest approach to the sheer delirium
tremens of the Gifford Letter : but he is not often thus. “The
Character of Milton's Eve” is a fine critical paper of its kind,
and “takes the taste out” well after the passage on Burke.
The long handling of The Excursion is very interesting to
compare with that in the English Poets, as is the earlier
“Midsummer Night's Dream” with similar things elsewhere.
“Pedantry” and others give something: and though no human
being (especially no human being who knows both books)
has ever discovered what made Hazlitt call John Buncle “the
English Rabelais,” the paper on Amory's queer novel is a
very charming one. “On the Literary Character” does some-
what deceive us: “ Commonplace Critics” less so: but to
“Poetical Versatility” we must return. Of the remaining
contents of the volume, the well-known Conversations with
Northcote (where the painter plays Hazlitt's idea of an Ad-
vocatus Diaboli on Hazlitt) gives less still. But there is a
striking passage on Wordsworth, 1 a paradox (surely ?) on Tom
Paine 2 as “a fine writer” (you might as well call a good
getter of coal at the face “a fine sculptor"), an interesting
episode 3 on early American nineteenth-century literature;
and not a few others, especially the profound self-criticism
(for no doubt Northcote had nothing to do with it) on Hazlitt's
abstinence from society. In Characteristics, one of the few
notable collections of the kind in English, CCXC, a most
curious and pretty certainly unconscious echo of Aristotle,5
is our best gleaning; while the 52d" Commonplace," on Byron
and Wordsworth, and the 12th and 11th “Trifles light as
air,” on Fielding and on “modern” critics, play the same part
there.
On the other hand, The Spirit of the Age (with the exception
The Spirit of some political and philosophical matter) is wholly,
of the Age. literary; and may rank with the three sets of Lec-
tures and the Characters of Shakespeare as the main storehouse
LU
1 P. 246.
2 P. 248.
8 P. 317.
4 P. 431.
5“We have more faith in a well-
written romance than in common his.
.tory.”
HAZLITT.
373
of Hazlitt's criticism. Here, too, there is much repetition,
and here, at the end of the Scott article, is the almost insane
outburst more than once referred to. But the bulk of the
book is at Hazlitt's very best pitch of appreciative grasp.
If he is anywhere out of focus, it is in reference to Godwin's
novels—the setting of which in any kind of comparison with
Scott's (though Hazlitt was critic enough from the first to
see that Godwin could by no possibility be the “Author of
Waverley”) is a remarkable instance of the disadvantage of
the contemporary, and, to some extent, the sympathiser. But
the book certainly goes far to bear out the magnificent eulogy
of Hazlitt for which Thackeray 1 took it as text, quite early
in his career.
The Sketches and Essays are again very rich, where they are
rich; and advertise the absence of riches most frankly where
Sketches they are not. “On Reading New Books”; not a
and Essays. little of “Merry England”; the whole of “On
Taste” and “Why the Heroes of Romances are insipid” speak
for themselves, and do not bewray their claim. “Taste," especi-
ally, contains a one of Hazlitt's own titles to critical supremacy
in his fixing on Perdita's primrose description as itself supreme,
when “the scale of fancy, passion, and observation of nature
is raised” high enough. And as for Winterslow,
Winterslow.
its first and its last papers are "things enskied”
in criticism, for the one is “My First Acquaintance with
Poets,” and the last “The Farewell to Essay Writing."
These two last, the sentence on
“That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty";
and (say) the paper referred to a little above on “Poetical
Versatility,” will serve as texts for some more general remarks
te on Hazlitt's critical character. We have said at
critical the beginning of this notice everything that need
itue, be said by way of déduction or allowance; we have
only hinted at the clear critical “balance to credit” which
1 In 1845, reviewing Horne's very vol. (1886) of the ordinary ed. of
rashly entitled New Spirit of the Age. Thackeray's Works.
The review will be found in the 13th 2 P. 173.
<
374
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
remains; and these essays and passages will help to bring
this out.
To take the “Poetic Versatility” first, it is an interesting
paper, and with the aid of those “ characters” of poets, &c.,
which have been indicated in the survey just completed, gives
the best possible idea of one (and perhaps the most popular) of
Hazlitt's forms of critical achievement and influence. In it
he eddies round his subject-completing his picture of it by
strokes apparently promiscuous in selection, but always tending
to body forth the image that presents itself to him, and that
he wishes to present to his readers. “Poetry dwells in a
perpetual Utopia of its own.” It “does not create difficulties
where they do not exist, but contrives to get rid of them
whether they exist or not." "Its strength is in its wings; its
element the air.” We“may leave it to Time to take out the
stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself.” Poets “either
find things delightful or make them so," &c. &c., some of the
etceteras drawing away from the everlasting, and condescend-
ing rather lamentably to the particular.
Now there is no need to tell the reader-even the reader of
this book, I hope—that this, of these utterances, is a repro-
duction of Longinus (whom Hazlitt most probably
s had not read), or that of Coleridge, whom most
certainly he had both read and heard. “The man who plants
cabbages imitates too”: and it is only the foolishest folk of
rather foolish times who endeavour to be original, though the
wisest of all times always succeed in being so. The point with
Hazlitt is that in these circlings round his subject—these
puttings of every possible way in which, with or without the
help of others, it strikes him he gives the greatest possible
help to others in being struck. One of the blows will almost
certainly hit the nail on the head and drive it home into any
tolerably susceptible mind: many may, and the others after
the first will help to fix it. Of method there may not be very
1 "Its strength is in its wings” is, in
idea, of course, as old as Plato. But
the nearest expression of it, the “la
lyre est un instrument aile" of Joubert,
though by a man more than thirty
years Hazlitt's senior, was never, I
think, published till ten years after
Hazlitt's death.
HAZLITT.
375
and
much—there is rather more here than in most cases; but
whether there is method or not, “everything," in the old mili-
tary phrase, “ goes in”; the subject and the reader are carried
by assault, mass, variety, repetition of argument, imagery,
phrase. Hazlitt will not be refused; he takes towns at a
hand-gallop, like Condé at Lerida—and he does not often lose
them afterwards.
In this phase of his genius, however, there is perhaps, for
some tastes at any rate, a little too much of what has been
called bravura—too much of the merely epideictic.
universally. It is not so in the other. Appreciate the apprecia-
tion of the Winter's Tale passage ; still more take to heart
(they will go to it without much taking where there is one)
the “First Acquaintance with Poets,” or still better the
marvellous critical swan-song of the “Farewell,” and there
can be no more doubt about Hazlitt. Quia multum amavit is
at once his best description and his greatest glory. In all
the range of criticism which I have read I can hardly think of
any one except Longinus who displays the same faculty of
not unreasonable or unreasoned passion for literature; and
Longinus, alas ! has, as an opportunity for showing this to us,
scarcely more than the bulk of one of Hazlitt's longest Essays,
of which, long and short, Hazlitt himself has given us, I suppose,
a hundred. Nor, as in some others (many, if not most of whom,
if I named them, I should name for the sake of honour), is a
genuine passion made the mere theme of elaborate and de-
liberate literary variations. As we have seen, Hazlitt will
often leave it expressed in one sentence of ejaculatory and
convincing fervour; it seldom appears at greater length than
that of a passage, while a whole lecture or essay in the key of
rapture is exceedingly rare. Hazlitt is desultory, irrelevant,
splenetic, moody, self-contradictory; but he is never merely
pleonastic,—there is no mere verbiage, no mere virtuosity,
in him.
And the consequence is that this enthusiastic appreciation
of letters, which I have, however heretically, taken throughout
this book to be really the highest function of criticism,
catches: that the critical yeast (to plagiarise from ourselves)
376
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM,
never fails to work. The order of history, as always, should
probably be repeated, and the influence of Coleridge should be
felt, as Hazlitt himself felt it, first: it is well to fortify also with
Longinus himself, and with Aristotle, and with as many others
of the great ones as the student can manage to master. But
there is at least a danger, with some perhaps of not the worst
minds, of all this remaining cold as the bonfire before the torch
is applied. The silex scintillans of Hazlitt's rugged heart will
seldom fail to give the vivifying spark from its own inward
and immortal fire.
D
There have been times — perhaps they are not quite over
-when the admission of William Blake 2 into the category
of critics would have been regarded as an absurdity,
Blake.
or a bad jest. Nothing is more certain, however,
than that the poet-painter expresses, with a force and direct-
ness rather improved by that lack of complete technical
sanity which some of his admirers most unwisely and need-
lessly deny, the opinions of the “Extreme Right," the high-
fliers of the Army of Romanticism. He may often be thinking
of painting rather than of poetry; but this is sometimes
expressedly not the case, and many of his most pointed
sayings apply to the one art just as well as to the other-
if indeed it would not be still more correct to say that, except.
i Below Hazlitt (who as well as
Lamb praised him, though the former
more suo fell foul of him as well) may
be best placed, in the note which is as
much as he deserves, that much-
written - of "curiosity of literature,"
the poisoner, connoisseur, and coxcomb,
Waipewright. "Janus,” however, was
too much occupied with pictures, plays,
bric-à-brac, Montepulciano, veal-pies in
red earthenware dishes, the prize-riog,
and other fancies or fopperies, to busy
himself directly with literature, save,
perhaps, in the curious paper "Janus
Weatherbound," which seems to have
been his “farewell to essay writing.”
It is, however, fair to say that, odious
as he was in ways not merely moral,
he had something of "a taste" here
also. His quotations, which are numer-
ous, are singularly well selected; he
admired not merely Fouqué but
Shelley long before it was the fashion
to do so; and you may pick out of
the works, rather probably than cer-
tainly his (Essays and Criticisms, by
T. G. Wainewright, ed. W. C. Haz-
litt: London, 1880), stray literary
notes not without value.
2 I use for Blake Gilchrist's Life and
Works (2nd ed., 2 vols., London, 1880),
Mr Swinburne's William Blake (Lon-
don, 1868), Mr Rossetti's Aldine
Poetical Works (London, 1874), and
Messrs Ellis and Yeats's great Blakian
Thesaurus (3 vols., London, 1893).
wat olie
BLAKE.
377
when they concern mere technique, they always apply to both.
His work, despite the attention which it has received from
hands, sometimes of the most eminent, during the last forty
years, has never1 yet been edited in a fashion making its
chaos cosmic or the threading of its labyrinths easy: and
it may be well to bring together some of the most noteworthy
critical expressions in it. That which has been referred to
in a former passage, “Every man is a judge of pictures who
has not been connoisseured out of his senses," 2 is in itself
almost a miniature manifesto of the new school of criticism.
For “connoisseurship”-the regular training in the orthodox
system of judgment by rule and line and pattern—is substituted
the impression of the natural man, unconditioned except by
the requirement that it shall be impression, and not prejudice.
So, again, that remarkable expression of the Prophet Isaiah 3
when, as Blake casually mentions, he and Ezekiel “dined
His critical with me”-an occasion on which surely any one
position and of taste would like to have completed the quartette.
ta. The poet-host tells us that he asked, “Does a firm
persuasion that a thing is so make it so ?” and that the
prophet-guest answered, “All poets believe that it does”-
a position from which Neo-Classicism and the reluctance to
“surrender disbelief” are at once crushed, concluded, and
quelled.
In the remarkable engraved page on Homer and Virgil,4
Blake adventures himself (not with such rashness as may
at first seem) against Aristotle (or what he takes for Aristotle),
by laying it down that Unity and Morality belong to philosophy,
not poetry, or at least are secondary in the latter; that good-
ness and badness are not distinctions of “character” (a saying
in which there is some quibbling but much depth as well);
dicta.
* Save by Mr Sampson for the Poems
(Oxford, 1905).
2 Letter to the Monthly Magazine of
July 1, 1806. "O Englishmen! know
that every man ought to be a judge
of pictures, and every man is so who
has not been connoisseured out of his
senses.” The whole letter is given
by Mr Swinburne, pp. 62, 63, op. cit.
. 3 In The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell. Compare with this Vico's famous
doctrine that "the criterion of truth
is to have made it."
Facsimiled in Ellis and Yeats, vol.
iii. Printed as Sibylline Leaves in Gil.
christ, ii. 178, 180.
378
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
that the Classics, not Goths or Monks,“ desolate Europe with
wars ” (a great enough dictum at the junction of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries); and that “Grecian [wit] is mathe-
matical form,” which is only “eternal in the reasoning memory,"
while Gothic is “living form, that is to say, eternal existence"
--- perhaps the deepest saying of the whole, though it wants
large allowance and intelligent taking.
The “Notes on Reynolds” are naturally full of our stuff.
“Enthusiastic admiration is the first principle of know-
The
ledge.” [Sir Joshua had stated just the contrary.]
“Notes on “What has reasoning to do with the art of paint-
holds ing [or, we may safely add, of poetry)?”
“ Knowledge of ideal beauty is not to be acquired; it is
born in us.".
“One central form... being granted, it does not follow
that all other forms are deformity. All forms are perfect
in the poet's mind, ... they are from imagination.”
“To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the
great distinction of merit.” [The “streak of the tulip" re-
habilitated, and with a vengeance !]
“Invention depends altogether upon execution.”
“Passion and expression are beauty itself.”
“ Ages are all equal: but genius is always above its age.”
It is worth while to add to these the very remarkable
annotations upon Wordsworth’s Prefaces: "I don't know
and Words- who wrote these : they are very mischievous, and
worth. direct contrary to Wordsworth's own practice"
(where if Blake had added the words “when he is a poet,"
he would simply have given the conclusion of the whole
matter], with the very shrewd comment that Wordsworth is
not so much attacking poetic diction, or defending his own,
as “vindicating unpopular poets."
Scanty as this critical budget may seem, its individual items
are of extraordinary weight, when we remember that some
and of them were written before the Lyrical Ballads
ing position themselves appeared, and all of them by a
of these. man of hardly any reading in contemporary litera-
ture, and quite out of the circle of Coleridgean influence. It
Ca
BLAKE.
379
U
is scarcely, if at all, too much to say that they are almost
enough to start, in a fit mind, the whole system of Romantic
criticism in its more abstract form, and sometimes even in
its particular and concrete applications. All the eighteenth-
century Dagons — the beliefs in official connoisseurship, in
the unapproachable supremacy of the ancients, in the barbar-
ism and foolishness of Gothic art and literature, in the
superiority of the general to the particular, in the necessity
of extracting central forms and holding to them, in the
supremacy of reason, in the teachableness of poetry, in the
virtues of copying, in the superiority of design to execution,-
all are tumbled off their pedestals with the most irreverent
violence. That the critic's applications in the sister art to
Rubens, to Titian, to Reynolds himself, are generally unjust,
and not infrequently the result of pure ignorance, does not
matter; his own formulas would often correct him quite as
thoroughly as those of the classical school. What is important
is his discovery and enunciation of these formulas themselves.
For by them, in place of these battered gods of the classical
or neo-classical Philistia, are set up Imagination for Reason,
Enthusiasm for Good Sense, the Result for the Rule; the
execution for the mere conception or even the mere selection
of subject; impression for calculation; the heart and the eyes
and the pulses and the fancy for the stop-watch and the
boxwood measure and the table of specifications. It is not
necessary to argue the question whether Blake's own poetical
work (we are not concerned with his pictorial) justifies or
disconcerts the theories under which it was composed; it may
be very strongly suspected, from utterances new as well as old,
that approval of the theory and approval of the practice, as
well as disapproval in each case, are too intimately bound up
with each other to make appeal to either much of an argument.
But for our main purpose, which is purely historical, the
importance of Blake should, even in these few pages, have been
put out of doubt. In no contemporary—not in Coleridge
himself — is the counter-creed to that of the Neo-classics
formulated with a sharper precision, and withal a greater width
of inclusion and sweep.
380
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
on
There are more senses than one (or for the matter of that
two) in the famous proverb, “The better is the enemy of the
Sir Walter good.” And in one of them, though not the
i commonest, it is eminently trúe of the criticism of
monly under-
valued as a Sir Walter Scott. No one, of course, would give to
critic. Scott any such relative rank as a critic as that
which is his due either as poet or as novelist; but the extent
to which his fame as poet and novelist has obscured his
reputation as critic is altogether disproportionate and unfair.
It is even doubtful whether some tolerably educated persons
ever think of him as a critic at all. For his so-called “Prose
Works” (except Tales of a Grandfather) are very little read,
and as usual the criticism is the least read part of them. Yet
it is a very large part-extending, what with the Lives of Swift
and Dryden, the shorter “Biographies,” the Chivalry, Ronance,
and Drama, and the collection or selection of Periodical
Criticism, to ten pretty solid volumes, while even this excludes
a great amount of critical matter in the notes and Introductions
to the Poems, the Novels, the Dryden and Swift themselves,
and other by-works of Sir Walter's gigantic industry. .
Mere bulk, however, it may be said, is nothing—indeed it
is too often, in work of which posterity is so shy as it is of
criticism, a positive misfortune and drawback. What makes
the small account taken of Scott as a critic surprising and
regrettable is the goodness as well as the bulk of his critical
production. Perhaps it may be urged with some justice, in
defence of this popular neglect, that his want of attention to
style is particularly unfortunate here. He is notoriously a
rather "incorrect" writer; and he does not, as many so-called
incorrect writers have known how to do, supply the want of
academic propriety by irregular brilliances of any kind.
Another charge sometimes brought against him—that he is
too good-natured and too indiscriminate in praise--will less hold
water;1 and indeed is much too closely connected with the
LA
I See in particular his admirable re-
view of Godwin's Chaucer, and his just
condemnation of the absurd practice-
simply wallowed in since by biographers
and historians- of bolstering out a
book with what the subject might harc
seen, done, thought, or suffered.
SCOTT.
381
popular notion of the critic as, a sort of “nigger"-overseer,
Injustice of whose business is to walk about and distribute lashes
this. -a notion which cannot be too often reprobated.
As a private critic Scott was sometimes too easy-going, but
by no means always or often in his professional utterances.
And he had what are certainly two of the greatest requirements
of the critic, reading and sanity. Sometimes some amiable
prepossession (such as the narrower patriotism in his relative
estimate of Fielding and Smollett) leads him a little astray;
but this is very seldom-far seldomer than is the rule with
critics of anything like his range. Here, as elsewhere, he does
not much affect the larger and deeper and higher generalisa-
tions; but here, as elsewhere, his power of reaching these has
been considerably underrated. And the distaste itself saves
him and his readers—from the hasty and floundering failures
of those who aim more ambitiously at width, depth, and height.
In the methodic grasp and orderly exposition of large and
complicated subjects (as in the Romance 1 and Drama examples)
he leaves nothing to desire. Sometimes, in his regular
reviews, he condescends too much to the practice of making
the review a mere abstract of the book; but I have known
readers who complain bitterly of any other mode of proceeding,
Moreover, in two most important divisions of the critic's art
Scott has very few superiors. These are the appreciation
of particular passages, books, and authors, and the writing
of those critical biographies which Dryden first essayed in
English, and of which Johnson is the acknowledged master.
The Prefaces to the Ballantyne Novels 2 are the best among
Scott's good things in this kind on the small scale, as the
Dryden and the Swift are on the great: for evidences of
the former excellence the reader has only to open any one
of the half-score volumes referred to above. And those golden
1 The two qualities lauded above,
knowledge and judgment-are specially
noteworthy here, when we compare the
article, not merely with the less fully
informed work of Hurd, Percy, and
Warton (not to say Ritson), but with
more recent compositions by persons
who had the originals easily at dis-
posal.
2 They will also be found printed
together in the two vols. of Bio-
graphies, as well as, more recently,
and alone, in a vol. of Everynian's
Library (London, 1910).
382
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
qualities of heart which accompanied his genius are illustrated,
as well as that genius itself, in, his frequent critical writing
on other novelists. The criticism of creators on their fellows
is not always pleasant reading, except for those who delight
to study the weaknesses of the verdammte Race. Scott criticises
great and small among the folk of whom he is the king, from
the commonest romancer up to Jane Austen, with equal gener-
osity, acuteness, and technical mastery. Nor ought we, in
this necessarily inadequate sketch, to omit putting in his
cap the feather so often to be refused to critics—the feather
of catholicity. Macaulay could not praise the delightful lady,
whom both he and Scott did their utmost to celebrate, without
throwing out a fling at Sintram, as if there were no room for
good things of different kinds in the great region of Romance.
In Scott's works you may find, literally side by side, and
characterised by equal critical sense, the eulogy of Persuasion
and the eulogy of Frankenstein.
Campbell's critical work is chiefly concentrated in two
places, one of them accessible with some difficulty, the other
Campbell. only too accessible after a fashion. The first is
his Lectures the Lectures on Poetry, which, after delivering them
oetry. at the Royal Institution during the great vogue of
such things in 1820, he refashioned later for the New Monthly
Magazine when he was its editor, so that they are only to
be had by one of the least agreeeable of all processes, the
rummaging for a purpose in an old periodical.
The accessibility of the other place—the critical matter
contributed to the well-known Specimens of the British Poets,
His and to some extent the actual selections themselves
Specimens. -is greater because they are in nearly all the
second-hand book-shops, where from sixpence to a shilling a
on Poe
i Periodical Criticism, vol. ii.
2 In connection with Sir Walter, one
may pay a note of tribute to the ex-
treme and now too little known criti-
cal ability of his "discoverer," J. L.
Adolphus, whose Letters to Heber on
the Authorship of Waverley would come
in well as an excursus-subject. Exam-
ining, as he did, certain known works
of an at least hypothetically unknown
writer, he was bound to give that at..
tention to the work itself, which was
the great thing necessary; and he gave
it with remarkable ability, craftsman.
ship, and knowledge of literature.
CAMPBELL.
383
volume will buy-well bound often and in perfectly good con-
dition—matter which, at any proper ratio of exchange, is worth
a dozen times the money. This worth consists of course mainly
in the matter selected: but the taste which selected it must
figure for no small increment, and the purely critical frame-
work is, to say the least, remarkably worthy of both.
Campbell, a very puzzling person in his poetry, is by no
means a very easily comprehensible or appraisable one in his
critical attitude. In the general arrangement of this he is
distinctly of the older fashion, as the fashions of his time
went. Like his style, though this is a very fair specimen
of the “last Georgian," still in a manner the standard and
staple of the plainer English prose, his opinions are a thought
periwigged and buckrammed. He demurs to the “Romantic
Unity” of Hurd earlier and Schlegel later; and when in his
swashing blow (and a good swashing blow it is of its kind)
on the side of Pope in the weary quarrel, he tries to put
treatment of artificial on a poetical level with treatment of
natural objects, we must demur pretty steadily ourselves.
But, on the other hand, he distinctly champions (and was,
I believe, the first actually so to formulate) the princïple that
“in poetry there are many mansions,” and, what is more, he
lives up to it. He really and almost adequately appreciates
Chaucer: it is only his prejudice about Unity and the Fable
that prevents him from being a thorough-going Spenserian;
and when we come to the seventeenth century he is quite
surprising. Again, it is true, his general creed makes him
declare that the metaphysicians “thought like madmen.” But
he is juster to some of them than Hazlitt is; he has the great
credit of having (after a note of Southey's, it is true) re-
introduced readers to the mazy but magical charms of Pharon-
nida; and he admits Godolphin and Stanley, Flatman and
Ayres. If the history of the earlier part of his Introductory
Essay is shaky, it could not have been otherwise in his time;
and it shows that the indolence with which he is so often
charged did not prevent him from making a very good use
of what Warton and Percy, Tyrwhitt and Ritson and Ellis,
had provided.
384
OF CRITICISM.
OD
THE RECONSTRUCTION al
This indolence, however, is perhaps more evident in the.
distribution of the criticism, which, if not careless, is exceed-
ingly capricious. Campbell seems at first to have intended
to concentrate this criticism proper in the Introduction (to
which nearly the whole of the first volume is allotted), and
to make the separate prefaces to the selections mainly bio-
graphical. But he does not at all keep to this rule; the main
Introduction itself is, if anything, rather too copious at the
beginning, while it is compressed and hurried at the end : not
a few of the minor pieces and less prominent poets have no
criticism at all; while, in the case of those that have it, it
is often extremely difficult to discover the principle of its
allotment. Yet, on the whole, Campbell ought never to be
neglected by the serious student; for even if his criticism were
solely directed from an obsolete standpoint, it would be well
to go back to it now and then as a half-way house between
those about Johnson and those about Coleridge, while as a
matter of fact it has really a very fair dose of universal quality.1
There are several critical passages in Shelley's Letters, but,
as formally preserved, his criticism is limited to the Defence of
mo. hic Poetry, which, despite its small bulk, is of extreme
Defence of interest. It is almost the only return of its times
vetry. to that extremely abstract consideration of the
matter which we found prevalent in the Renaissance, and
which in Shelley's case, as in the cases of Fracastoro or of
Sidney, is undoubtedly inspired by Plato. It seems to have
been immediately prompted by some heresies of Peacock's :
but, as was always its author's habit, in prose as well as in
verse, he drifts “away, afar” from what apparently was his
starting-point, over a measureless ocean of abstract thinking.
He endeavours indeed, at first, to echo the old saws about men
“ imitating natural objects in the youth of the world” and the
Po
i Those who will not take the trouble
to search the Specimens themselves will
find copious and admirably selected ex-
amples in Jeffrey's article on the book
(Essays, 1 vol. ed., p. 359 sq.), one of
the best reviews he ever wrote, but for
some superfluous, unjust, and, in the
context (v. above), specially ungenerous
flings at Southey.
2 This may be found not merely in
the edd. of the Works, but in Prof.
Vaughan's interesting selection of
Literary Criticism (London, 1896).
SHELLEY-KEATS.
..
.
385
(D
like, but he does not in any way keep up the arrangement, and
we are almost from the outset in contact with his own ardent
imagination-of which quality he at once defines poetry as
the expression. Again, the poetic faculty is “the faculty of
approximation to the beautiful.” Once more we have the
proud claim for poetry that poets are not merely the authors
of arts, but the inventors of laws, the teachers of religion.
They “ participate in the eternal, the infinite, and the one."
They are not necessarily confined to verse, but they will be
wise to use it. A poem is the very image of life, expressed in
its eternal truth. “Poetry is something divine," the “centre
and circumference of knowledge,” the “perfect and consummate
surface and bloom of all things," the “record of the best and
happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." All which
(or all except the crotchet about verse) I for one do most
powerfully and potently believe: though if any one says that,
as generally with Shelley, one is left stranded, or rather float-
ing, in the vague, denial is not easy. One can only wish one-
self, as Poins wished his sister, “no worse fortune.” 1
1 It is with some misgiving, and and automatic, somewhat too much of
after more than one change of mind, a mere other phase of his creation, to
that I place Shelley's great poetical twin deserve the name of criticism properly
(or rather tally) in a note only here. so-called. He speaks of Shakespeare
The early Sleep and Poetry belongs admirably, because he has the same
to us as giving Keats's perhaps oue- quintessentially English cast of poetry
sided but very vigorous and remarkable that Shakespeare had. When he
verse-formulation of the protest against speaks of poetry in the abstract, as he
Neo - classicism; the two prefaces does admirably and often, it is this
(especially the final one) to Endymion poetry speaking of herself, and there.
have been generally recognised by the fore speaking truly but not critically.
competent as perhaps the most Even in the wonderful remark (vol. v.
astonishingly just judgments which p. 111., ed. Forman, Glasgow, 1901) on
any poet has ever passed on himself : himself and Byron, “He describes
and the Letters are full of critical or what he sees : I describe what I im-
quasi-critical passages of the highest agine" (where he repeats Philostratus
interest. I myself have a sheaf of without in the least knowing it), the
them duly noted ; and some persons thing is not criticism : it is self-
of distinction whom I know would speaking. And beyond this he seldom
admit them to the very Golden Book goes, and is seldomer happy in his
of Criticism. I hope, however, that rare excursions. He might have be-
my own judgment is not too much come a critic, as he might have become
sicklied o'er with crotchet in holding almost anything good; but I do not
that Keats's criticism of himself and think he was one.
others is somewhat too spontaneous
2 B
386
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
In the course of this History we have seen not infrequent
examples of Criticism divorced from Taste-a severance to
which the peculiarities of classical and neo-classical
Landor.
censorship lent but too much encouragement. It
must be obvious that the general tendency of the criticism
which we are calling Modern inclines towards the divorce of
Taste from Criticism - to the admission of the monstrous
regiment of mere arbitrary enjoyment and liking, not to say
mere caprice. But it is curious that our first very dis-
tinguished example of this should be found in a person who,
both by practice and in theory, had very distinct “classical”
tendencies—who, in fact, with the possible. exception of Mr
Arnold, was the most classical of at least the English writers
of the nineteenth century.
Landor's1 critical shortcomings, however, are the obvious
and practically inevitable result of certain well - known
His lacle of peculiarities of temperament, moral rather than
judicial intellectual, and principles of life rather than of
quality. literature. With him, as with King Lear (whom
in more ways and points than one he resembled, though, luckily,
with the tragedy infinitely softened and almost smoothed
away), the dominant is impotentia—the increasing and at last
absolute incapacity of the intellect and will to govern the
emotions and impulses. Now, as criticism is itself an endless
process of correcting impressions—or at least of checking and
auditing them till we are sure that they are genuine, co-ordin-
ated, and (with the real if not the apparent consistency) con-
sistent-a man who suffers from this impotentia simply cannot
be a real critic, though he may occasionally make observations
critically sound.
The rule and the exceptions hold good with Landor unfail-
ingly. He was an excellent scholar; his acquaintance with
In regular modern literatures, though much smaller and ex-
Criticism. tremely arbitrary, was not positively small, and
his taste, in some directions at least, was delicate and exquisite.
But of judicial quality or qualities he had not one single
1 My copy is the eight-volume ed. various pieces will enable them to be
of 1874-76 : but the titles of the found in others.
D
LANDOR.
387
trace, and, even putting them out of the question, his intelli-
gence was streaked and flawed by strange veins of positive
silliness. We need not dwell too much on his orthographical
and other whims, which have been shared by some great ones
-the judgments are the things. In the very first paragraph
of his very first regular criticism we find the statement that
the Poems of Bion and Moschus are not only “very different”
from those of Theocritus but “very inferior.” Inferior in
what? in bulk certainly: but in what else are the Adonis
and the Bion itself inferior to anything Theocritean? A
critic should have been warned by his own“ different” not
to rush on the “inferior,” which is so often fallaciously con-
sequent. I shall not be accused of excessive Virgil-worship,
but what criticism is there in the objection to me ceperat annus
as “scarcely Latin” (really! really! Mr Landor, you were
not quite a Pollio!), and in the flat emendation of mihi coeperat;
or in the contemptuous treatment of that exquisite piece con-
taining
õ Đạp 8 88alve Seulºs,
φοβείτο γαρ Κυθήρων,
a phrase which, for simplicity, pictorial effect, and sugges-
tion, is almost worthy of Sappho ? Such a sentence as that
of Politian's poems, “one only has any merit,” is simply
disabling: mere schoolboy prejudice has evidently blinded
the speaker. Yet it occurs in his best critique, that on
Catullus.
These set criticisms, however, are few, and Landor was
evidently not at ease in them. The literary “Conversations,"
The Conver- it may be said, are the true test. And it is at
sations. least certain that these conversations supply not
a few of those more excellent critical observations which have
been acknowledged and saluted. Especially must we acknow-
ledge and salute onel which, though of considerable length,
must be made an exception to the rule of “not quoting.”
Nowhere, in ancient or modern place, is the education of the
1 See the opening of “Southey and irony, which is an uncertain quality,
Porson.” It is, of course, not improved too often inclining either to horse-play
by the presence of the Landorian or to peevishness : but this is not fatal.
388
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
critic outlined with greater firmness and accuracy; and those
who, by this or that good fortune, have been put through
some such a process, may congratulate themselves on having
learnt no vulgar art in no vulgar way.
I would seriously recommend to the employer of our critics,
young and old, that he oblige them to pursue a course of study
such as this; that, under the superintendence of some
Loculus
respectable student from the University, they first read
and examine the contents of the book-a thing greatly
more useful in criticism than is generally thought; secondly, that
they carefully write them down, number them, and range them
under their several heads; thirdly, that they mark every beautiful,
every faulty, every ambiguous, every uncommon expression. Which
being completed, that they inquire what author, ancient or modern,
has treated the same subject; that they compare them, first in
smaller, 'afterwards in larger portions, noting every defect in pre-
cision and its causes, every excellence and its nature; that they
graduate these, fixing plus and minus, and designating them more ac-
curately and discriminately by means of colours stronger or paler.
For instance purple might express grandeur and majesty of thought;
scarlet, vigour of expression; pink, liveliness; green, elegant and
equable composition; these, however, and others as might best
attract their notice and serve their memory. The same process
may be used where authors have, not written on the same subject,
when those who have are wanting or have touched on it but
incidentally. Thus Addison and Fontenelle, not very like, may
be compared in the graces of style, in the number and degree of
just thoughts and lively fancies ; thus the dialogues of Cicero with
those of Plato, his ethics with those of Aristotle, his orations
with those of Demosthenes. It matters not if one be found
superior to the other in this thing and inferior in that: the
qualities of two authors are explored and understood and their
distances laid down, as geographers speak, from accurate survey.
The plus and minus of good and bad and ordinary will have some-
thing of a scale to rest upon: and after a time the degrees of the
higher parts in intellectual dynamics may be more nearly attained,
though never quite exactly.
Yet in close context with this very passage comes an idle
But again "splurt” (evidently half-due to odium anti-theologi-
disappoint- cum) at Coleridge --- a thing exactly of the kind
ing.
which such discipline as has been just recom-
mended should check. And everywhere, especially in the long
THE POPE QUARREL—BOWLES.
389
AU
Miltonic examen between “Southey and Landor,” the effects
of Landor's character appear side by side with a sort of peddling
and niggling censorship which one might have thought not
natural to that character at all, and which perhaps is a
damnosa hereditas from the worse kind of classical scholarship.
Even on Boileau 1 he manages to be unfair; and at his objec-
tion to one of Milton's most exquisite and characteristic lines-
“Lancelot and Pelleas and Pellinore"-
one can but cover the face. Caprice, arbitrary legislation,
sometimes positive blindness and deafness, these are Landor's
critical marks when he quits pure theory, and sometimes when
he does not quit it.
With him we leave the “majorities ”—those who, whether
greater or lesser critics, were great either as such or in other
The revival paths of letters. Some smaller, but in some cases
of the Pope not so small, persons remain, with one or two ex-
quarrels. amples-one specially famous-of what we have
called “the Adversaries." And first we must touch (if only in
order to deal with yet another of the majorities themselves,
who has seemed to some to be a critic) on the “Pope a Poet”
quarrel.
We have seen 2 that this quarrel, originally raised by Joseph
Warton, was even by him latterly waged as by one cauponans
Bowles.
bellum ; but a lazily and gingerly waged war is
*generally a long one, and this instance did not
discredit the rule. Johnson's intervention 3 in it, in his Life
of Pope, was sensible and moderate - indeed, with certain
necessary allowances, it is fairly decisive. But Pope, among
his other peculiarities, has had the fate of making foes of his
editors, and this was the case with the Reverend William Lisle
Bowles, who revived the fainting battle,4 not to any one's
advantage or particular credit, and to his own dire tribulation.
Bowles is one of those not uninteresting people, in all divisions
i See " Landor and Delille.”
Rhys (op. cit. sup.) has given some
2 V. sup., p. 259.
of Bowles's rejoinders to Byron, with
3 V. sup., p. 224.
Byron's own Letter, mentioned below,
4 From 1801, when his edition ap- and some references to the battle in
peared, till well into the 'Twenties. Mr his Introduction.
390
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
of history, who, absolutely rather null, have not inconsiderable
relative importance. The influence of his early sonnets on
Coleridge, and through Coleridge on the whole Romantic revival
in England, is well known, and not really surprising. In the
remainder of his long and on the whole blameless life, he com-
mitted a great deal of verse which, though not exactly bad,
is utterly undistinguished and unimportant. His theory of
poetry, however, though somewhat one-sided, was better than
his practice: and it was rather as a result of that dangerous
thing Reaction, and from a lack of alertness and catholicity,
than from positive heresy, that he fell foul of Pope. In his
edition he laid down, and in the controversy following he
defended," certain “invariable principles of Poetry,” of which
the first and foremost was that images, thoughts, &c., derived
from Nature and Passion, are always. more sublime and pathetic
than those drawn from Art and Manners. And it was chiefly
on this ground that he, of course following his leader Warton,
but using newer material and tactics, disabled, partially or
wholly, the claims of Pope. Hereupon arose a hubbub.
Campbell in the specimens 2 took a hand; Byron wrote a Letter
to John Murrays in defence of his favourite, and in ridicule
of Bowles; auxiliaries and adversaries ran up on both sides.
Whether Bowles was most happy or unhappy in the turmoil
I am unable to say, but he was certainly put in a great state
of agitation, and showered Pamphlets with elaborate titles,
which one may duly find, with their occasions and rejoinders,
in the library of the British Museum. At last dust settled
on the conflict, which, however, is itself not quite settled to
the present day, and in fact never can be, because it depends
on one of the root-differences of poetical taste. However,
it probably helped the wiser sort to take the via media, even
such a Romantic as Hazlitt vindicating Pope's possession of
" the poetical point of view," and did, for the same sort, a "
service to the general history of criticism by emphasising the
1 They will be found usefully rear.
ranged by himself in the extract of his
answer to Byron given by Mr Rhys
(Appendix to vol. ii., op. cit.)
2 i. 262 sq.
3 1821. To be found, outside the
edd. of the author, in Mr Rhys' book,
ii. 162 sq.
THE POPE QUARREL—BYRON.
391
&c.
above-mentioned difference. Bowles himself, if he had been
less fussy, less verbose, less given to "duply and quadruply”
on small controversial points, and more a man of the world
and of humour, might not have made by any means a bad
critic. As it was, he was right in the main.
We must, however, I suppose, say something, if only in this
connection, of Byron as a critic. I do not think it necessary
to say very much ; and I shall not, as I could most
Byron.
" easily do, concatenate here the innumerable con-
tradictions of critical opinion in his Letters, which show that
they were mere flashes of the moment, connected not merely
by no critical theory but by no critical taste of any consistency,
flings, “half-bricks" directed at dog or devil or divinity, ac-
cording to the mood in which the “noble poet” chose to find
himself. Let us confine ourselves to that unquestionably
The Letter remarkable Letter to John Murray on Bowles and
to Murray, Pope, which is admittedly his critical diploma-piece.
There are of course very good things in it. Byron
was a genius; and your genius will say genial things now
and then, whatsoever subject he happens to be treating. But
he cannot in the very least maintain himself at the critical
point: he is like the ball in the fountain, mounting now and
then gloriously on the summit of the column and catching
the rays that it attracts and reflects, much more often lying
wallowing in the basin. Never was such critical floundering,
He blasphemes at one moment the “invariable principles of
poetry," about which the amiable but somewhat ineffectual
Bowles prated; he affirms them at the next, by finding in his
way, and blindly picking up, the secret of secrets, that the poet
who executes best is the highest, whatsoever his department;
and he makes his affirmation valueless, by saying, almost before
we have turned the page, that Lucretius is ruined by his ethics,
and Pope saved by them. Even setting ethic against ethic,
the proposition is at least disputable: but what on earth has
Ethic to do with Execution, except that they both occur in
the dictionary under E? There are other excellent things
in the letter, and yet others the reverse of excellent; but I
have not the least intention here of setting up a balance-sheet
392
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
ode
after the manner of Robinson Crusoe, of ranging Byron's un-
doubtedly true, though not novel, vindication of the human
element as invariably necessary to poetry, against his opinion
of Shelley, and of Keats, and of the English poetry of his
greatest contemporaries generally, as "all Claudian," and
against the implied estimate of Claudian himself. This would
be a confusion like his own, a parallel ignoratio elenchi, a
fallacia a fallacioribus. Suffice it to say, that to take him
seriously as a critic is impossible.1
Of the work which-sometimes of the inner citizenship of
the critical Rome and at the worst of its “utmost last pro-
Otheme: vincial band ”_was done by a great number of
Isaac Dis- individuals and in no small number of periodicals,
dictionaries, and what not, we cannot speak here
as fully as would be pleasant,—the historian must become
a “reasoned cataloguer” merely, and that by selection. Two
contemporary and characteristic figures are those of Isaac
Disraeli and of Sir Egerton Brydges. Both had the defects
of the antiquarian quality. Rogers, though unamiable, was
probably not unjust when, in acknowledging the likelihood of
Isaac Disraeli's collections enduring, he described him as "a
man with half an intellect." In formation and expression of
opinion, Lord Beaconsfield's father too often wandered from
the silly to the self-evident and back again, like Addison
between his two bottles at the ends of the Holland House
gallery: and his numerous collectanea would certainly be more
useful if they were more accurate. But the Curiosities, the
Amenities, the Quarrels, and all the rest show an ardent love
for literature itself, and a singularly wide knowledge of it:
they are well calculated to inoculate readers, especially young
readers, with both.
Brydges's work, less popular, is of a higher quality. His ex-
tensive editing labours were beyond price at his date; in books
like the Censura Literaria much knowledge is still readily ac-
-
1 It has been suggested to me that
Byron ought to have the benefit, as
well as the disadvantage, of my de-
scription of Keats's critical utterances
on the other side, as a phase of his
creation. There is something in this :
but Byron seems to me less genuine
even on this showing.
THE RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW.
393
cessible, which can only be picked up elsewhere by enormous
Sir Egerton excursions of reading at large; and his original criti-
Brydges. cal power was much higher than is generally allowed.
Such enthusiastic admiration of Shelley as is displayed in
the notes to his Geneva reprint of the English part of Phillips'
Theatrum Poetarum in 1824,1 is not often shown by a man of
sixty-two for a style of poetry entirely different from that
to which he has been accustomed. And it shows, not merely
how true a training the study of older literature is for the
appreciation of newer, but that there · must have been some-
thing to train.
Moreover, this first period of enthusiastic exploration did
not merely produce the lectures of Coleridge and Hazlitt,
The Retro, and the unsurpassed essays of Lamb, the hardly
:spective surpassed ones of Leigh Hunt. It produced also,
V. by the combined efforts of a band of somewhat
less distinguished persons, a periodical publication of very
considerable bulk and of almost unique value and interest.
It is not for nothing that while old magazines and reviews
are usually sold for less than the cost of their binding, and
not much more than their value as waste-paper, The Retro-
spective Review 2 still has respectable, though of course not
fantastic, prices affixed to it in the catalogues. It was
started in 1820, under the editorship of Henry Southern,
a diplomatist from the Cantabrigian . Trinity, and of the
antiquary afterwards so well known as Sir Harris Nicolas.
Opening with a first volume of extraordinary excellence, it
kept up for seven years and fourteen volumes, on a uniform
principle. The second series, however, which was started
after I know not what breach of continuity,4 was less for-
i The Censura, extending to 10 vols.,
but oftenest found incomplete, ap-
peared in 1805-9. The British Biblio
grapher, Restituta, &c., came later.
2 First Series, 14 vols., 1820-26;
Second, 2 vols., 1827-28. Its con-
tributors included Hartley Coleridge,
Talfourd, and others; while Thomas
Wright wrote largely in a Third, much
later (1854).
3 Southern afterwards came in con-
tact with Borrow at Madrid. See The
Bible in Spain and Dr Knapp's Life.
4 There is none in the dates, but the
title-page is different, the former vig-
nette of a gateway (Trinity ? “I can.
not tell, I am an Oxford man”) dis-
appearing, and being replaced by the
editors' names.
394
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
tunate, and extends to two volumes only, though these contain
much more matter apiece than the earlier ones. It is not
uncommon to find these two volumes, and even some of the first
series, wanting in library sets, which librarians should do their
best to complete; for though, toward the end, the purely
antiquarian matter encroached a very little upon the literary,
there is not a volume from first to last which does not contain
literary matter of the highest interest and value.
The proud-looked and high-stomached persons who pronounce
the best in this kind but shadows, and regard old criticism as
being—far more than history in its despised days—"an old
almanack,” will of course look prouder and exalt their stomachs
higher at the use of such terms. So be it. Some day people
will perhaps begin to understand generally what criticism is,
and what is its importance. Then more—as some do already
—will appreciate the interest and the value of this work of
Nicolas, Palgrave, Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, and other good
men. It would be perfectly easy to make fun of it. The
style may be to modern tastes a little stilted when it is
ambitious, and a little jejune when it is not-in both cases
after the way of the last Georgian standard prose. Although
there is much and real learning, our philologers might doubt-
less exalt their stomachs over the neglect of their favourite
study: and the fetichists of biography might discover that
many a Joan is called Jane, and many a March made into
February. These drawbacks and defects are more than com-
pensated by the general character of the treatment. While
not despising bibliography, the writers as a rule do not put
it first, like Sir Egerton Brydges : nor do they indulge in
the egotistical pot - pourri of “Chandos of Sudeley.” They
have the enormous advantage, in most cases, of coming quite
direct from the original brass, with the aid of their own ap-
preciation, unmarred and unmingled by reminiscences of this
essay and that treatise, by the necessity of combating this or
i The so-called “Third Series" (in
2 vols., 1854) can hardly be considered
as really forming part of the original,
from which it is separated by a thirty
years' interval. But it has (v. sup.)
some good work in it.
THE RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW.
395
that authority on their subject. They look at that subject
itself, and even when they show traces of a little prejudicem
as in the opposite cases of the man who is rather hard on
Dryden and the man who is, for the nineteenth century,
astonishingly “soft” on Glover—the impression is obviously
genuine and free from forgery.
What is more, these Reviewers give themselves, as a rule,
plenty of room, and supply abundant extracts—things of the
first importance in the case of books, then as a rule to be
found only in the old editions, and in many cases by no means
common now. The scope is wide. The first volume gives,
inter alia, articles on Chamberlayne (one for Pharonnida and
one for Love's Victory), on Crashaw and Dryden, on Rymer and
Dennis and Heinsius, on Ben Jonson and Cyrano de Bergerac,
on the Urn Burial, and on such mere curiosities as The Voyage
of the Wandering Knight. The papers throughout on Drama,
from the Mysteries onward, and including separate articles
on the great Elizabethan minors, were, till Pearson's reprints
thirty years ago, the most accessible source of information
on their subjects, and are still specially notable; as are also
the constituents of another interesting series on Spanish
Literature. The Arcadia balances Butler’s Remains in vol. ii.
Vaughan and Defoe, Imitations of Hudibras, and that luckless
dramatist and mad but true poet, Lee,1 have their places in
the Third, where also some one (though he came a little too
early to know the Chansons de gestes, and so did not put
"things of Charlemagne" in their right order) has an in-
teresting article on the Italian compilation La Spagna. I
should like to continue this sampling throughout the sixteen
volumes, but space commands only a note on the rest in
detail.2
1 It is the only adequate thing on at Cambridge, and one of singular and
him that I know.
wide-reaching merit on the Roman
? Specially good are, in vol. iv., the Comique ; in xv., an interesting tracing
dramatic papers ; in v., one on Witch- of Scott's quotations in the novels ; in
craft; in vi., those on Coryat and Sir xvi., an admirable paper on Shadwell.
T. Urquhart; in vii., on Donne and But there is practically nothing negli-
Ariosto ; in ix., on Chaucer (con gible: and good taste, good manners,
tinued later); in x., on Minor French good temper, and good learning abound
Poetry (Dorat); in xii., on Latin Plays throughout.
11
396
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
Nor are, they afraid of more general discussion. In the
above-mentioned article on John Dennis there is a long passage
which I do not remember to have seen anywhere extracted,
dealing in a singularly temperate and reasonable fashion with
the “off-with-his-head” style of criticism put in fashion by
the Edinburgh; and others will be easily found. But they
do not as a rule lay themselves out much for “preceptist"
criticism. It is the other new style of intelligent and well-
willing interpretation to which they incline, and they carry
it out with extraordinary ability and success. To supply those
who may not have time, opportunity, or perhaps even inclina-
tion to read more or less out-of-the way originals with some
intelligible and enjoyable knowledge of them at second-hand;
to prepare, initiate, and guide those who are able and willing
to undertake such reading; to supply those who have actually
gone through it with estimates and judgments for comparison
and appreciation—these may be said to be their three objects.
Some people may, of course, think them trivial objects or un-
important; to me, I confess, they seem to be objects extremely
well worth attaining, and here very well attained. The papers
in the Retrospective Review, be it remembered, anticipated
Sainte-Beuve himself (much more such later English and
American practitioners as Mr Arnold, who was not born, and
Mr Lowell, who was but a yearling when it first appeared) in
the production of the full literary causerie, the applied and
illustrative complement, in regard to individual books, authors,
or small subjects, of the literary history proper. When people
at last begin to appreciate what literary history means, there
will probably be, in every country, a collection of the best
essays of this kind arranged from their authors' works con-
veniently for the use of the student. And when such a
collection is made in England, no small part in it will be
played by articles taken from the Retrospective Review.
For the last subdivision of this chapter we must go a little
be Bavied backwards. The phenomena of English criticism
and Anti- in the last decade of the eighteenth century are
Jacobin, curious: and they might be used to support such
very different theories of the relations of Criticism and Creation,
Tas
GIFFORD, ETC.
397
that their most judicious use, perhaps, is to point the moral of
the riskiness of any such theories. During this decade one
great generation was dying off and another even greater was
but coming on. Except Boswell's Life of Johnson, and Burke's
last and best work (which were both entirely of the past, and
in the former case, at least, presented a purely personal product),
and the Lyrical Ballads (which were wholly of the future), with
the shadowy work of Blake (hardly of any time or even any
place), nothing of extraordinary goodness appeared. But a
great deal appeared of a most ordinary and typical badness,
and this seems to have excited a peculiar kind of irregular or
Cossack criticism to carry on a guerilla war against the hosts of
dreary or fantastic dulness. Criticism had at this time little
of a standing army: the old Critical and Monthly Reviews
were sinking into dotage (though such a man as Southey
wrote in the former), and the new class of comparatively in-
dependent censorship, which put money in its purse and
carried its head high, was to wait for the Edinburgh and the
next century. But Hayley and Sir James Bland Burges and
the Della Cruscans; but Darwin even, and even Godwin; nay,
the very early antics of such men as Coleridge and Southey
themselves, with some things in them not so antic perhaps,
but seeming to their contemporaries of an antic disposition-
were more than critical flesh and blood could stand. The
with Walest spirit which had animated Rivaroll on the other
and side of the Channel came to animate Wolcot (who
Lathias. had indeed showed it for some time 2) and his
enemy Gifford, and the greater wits of the Anti-Jacobin, and
even the pedantic and prosaic Mathias.
Now the result of dwelling upon the works of that Pindar
who was born not in Baotia but in Devonshire, and on the
ever-beloved and delightful Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, if not
also on its prose, would no doubt be far more agreeable to the
reader than much of what he actually finds here: and to dwell
on them would fall in with some of the writer's oldest and
most cherished tastes. Nay, even the Baviad and Moviad, out
MO
1 Hist. Crit., ii. 534.
? His best literary skit, “Bozzy and
Piozzi,” deals with the Tour, not the
Life.
398
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
of proportion and keeping as is much of their satire, and the
Pursuits of Literature itself,—despite its tedious ostentation of
learning, its endless irrelevance of political and other note-
divagation, and its disgusting donnishness without the dignity
of the better don,-give, especially in the three first cases,
much marrowy matter in the texts, and an abundance of the
most exquisite unintentional fooling in the passages cited by
the copious notes. Unfortunately so to dwell would be itself
out of keeping and proportion here. The things 1 are among
the lightest and best examples of the critical soufflé, well
cheesed and peppered. Or (if the severer muses and their wor-
shippers disdain a metaphor from Cookery, that Cinderella of
the Fine Arts) let us say that they exemplify most agreeably
the substitution of a sort of critical banderilla, sometimes fatal
enough in its way, for the Thor's hammer of Dryden and the
stiletto of Pope. But they are only symptoms,we have seen
things of their kind before, from Aristophanes downwards and
we must merely signal and register them as we pass in this
adventure, keeping and recommending them nevertheless for
quiet and frequent reading delectationis causa. The infalli-
bility and vitality of the Anti-Jacobin, in particular, for this
purpose, is something really prodigious. The Rovers and the
New Morality and the Loves of the Triangles seem to lose none
of their virtue during a whole lifetime of the reader, and after
a century of their own existence.
There is, however, one point on which we not only may but
must draw special attention to them. There can be little doubt
that these light velitations of theirs prepared the
The in-
. way and sharpened the taste for a very considerable
fluence of
the new refashioning and new - modelling of the regular
Reviews, &c. critical - Periodical army which followed so soon.
In this new-modelling some of them-Gifford, Canning, Ellis
-were most important officers, and there can be no doubt at
all that many others transferred, consciously or unconsciously,
i The earlier Rolliad is partly, but
less, literary. For more on most of
these I may refer to an essay of mine,
Twenty Years of Political Satire, which
originally appeared in Macmillan's
Magazine, and is reprinted in Essays
in English Literature, 2nd series,
London, 1895,
JEFFREY.
399
this lighter way of criticising from verse to prose, or kept it
up in verse itself such as Rejected Addresses, which in turn
handed on the pattern to the Bon Gaultier Ballads in the
middle, and to much else at the end, of the nineteenth century.
Part of the style was of course itself but a resharpening
of the weapons of the Scriblerus Club; but these weapons
were refurbished brightly, and not a little repointed. The
newer critic was at least supposed to remember that he
was not to be dull. Unfortunately the personal impertinence
which, though not pretty even in the verse-satirist, is by
a sort of prescription excusable or at least excused in him,
transferred itself to the prose: and the political intolerance
became even greater.1
It is not the least curious freak of the whirligig of time, as
shown working in this history, that not a century ago one of
the chief places here would have seemed inevitably
Jeffrey.
9• due to Francis Jeffrey, while at the present moment
perhaps a large majority of readers would be disposed to grudge
him more than a paragraph, and be somewhat inclined to skip
that.
We cannot “stint his sizings” to that extent. Yet it is also
impossible to give him much space, more particularly because
His loss of his interest has shrunk to, and is very unlikely ever
place and greatly to swell from, that of a kind of representa-
cause. tive position. Jeffrey is no mere English La Harpe,
as some think: he does not exemplify the Neo - classical
"Thorough,” the rigour of the Rule, after the fashion which
makes that remarkable person so interesting. On the con-
trary, he is only the last and most noteworthy instance of
that mainly Neo-classic inconsistency which we pointed out
and on which we dwelt in the last volume. Except that he
1 I do not think it necessary to give
Gifford's prose or periodical criticism
a separate place. It is by no means
easily separable as such; and if separ-
ated I fancy there would be very little
to say for it, and that what would
have to be said against it is better
summed up in the words of no less
a political sympathiser and personal
friend than Scott. A “cankered
carle” cannot be a good critic, any
more than a mildewed grape can give
good wine. But Gifford was not quite
so bad as he has seemed to some; and
his editorial work, especially on Jonson,
deserres almost the highest praise.
400
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
looks more backward than forward, Jeffrey often reminds us
rather of Marmontel. He has inherited to the fullest ex-
tent the by this time ingrained English belief that canons of
criticism which exclude or depreciate Shakespeare and Milton
“will never do,” as he might have said himself: but he has
not merely inherited, he has expanded and supplemented it.
He has not the least objection to the new school of students
and praisers of those other Elizabethan writers, compared
with whom Shakespeare would have seemed to La Harpe
almost a regular dramatist, and quite a sane and orderly person.
He has a strong admiration for Ford. He will follow a safe
fellow-Whig like Campbell in admiring such an extremely anti-
“classical” thing as Chamberlayne's Pharonnida. He uses
about Dryden and Pope language not very different from Mr
Arnold's, and he is quite enthusiastic (though of course with
some funny metrical qualms) about Cowper.
But here (except in reference to a man like Keats, who had
been ill-treated by the Tories) he draws the line. There may
His incon- have been something political in the attitude which
sistency. the Edinburgh assumed towards the great new school
of poetry which arose between 1798 and 1820. But politics
cannot have had everything to do with the matter, and it
cannot be an accident that Crabbe is about the only contem-
porary poet of mark, except Byron, Campbell, and Rogers, whom
Jeffrey cordially praises. Above all, the reasons of his de-
preciation of poets so different as Scott and Wordsworth, and
the things of theirs that he specially blames, are fatal. There
is plenty to be said against Scott as a poet, and plenty to be
said against Wordsworth. The Lay of the Last Minstrel is far
from faultlessly perfect: but the beauty of its subject, its
adaptation of antique matter and manner, and its new versi-
fication, are almost beyond praise from the poetical point of
view. It is exactly these three things that Jeffrey most
blames. There are scores and hundreds of things in Words-
worth which are helplessly exposed to the critical arrows: but
a man who pronounces the Daffodils "stuff" puts himself down
once for all, irrevocably, without hope of pardon or of atone-
ment, a person insensible to poetry as such, though there may
JEFFREY.
401
be kinds and forms of poetry which, from this or that cause,
he is able to appreciate.
Once more, as in Leigh Hunt's case (though on the still
smaller scale desirable), we can take a “brick of the house”
His criticism with advantage and without absurdity. Indeed I
on Madame hardly know anywhere a single Essay which exhibits
taelo a considerable critic so representatively as is done
for Jeffrey by his article on Madame de Staël's De La Littéra-
ture, which appeared in the Edinburgh for November 1812 and
stands after the Tractate on Beauty in the forefront of his
Collected Works. He was in the full maturity of his critical
powers; as a woman (for Jeffrey was quite a chivalrous person),
and as a kind of foreign and female Whig, his author was sure
of favourable treatment; the "philosophic” atmosphere of the
book appealed to his education, nationality, and personal sym-
1
required. 3
And the article is a very good article,-polite in its mild
exposure of Madame de Staël's hasty generalisations, extremely
clever and capable in its own survey of literature-Jeffrey was
particularly good at these surveys and naturally inclined to
them—sensible, competent, in the highest degree readable.
It would not be easy, unless we took something of Southey's
on the other side, better to illustrate the immense advance
made by periodical criticism since the Edinburgh itself had
shown the way.
Yet there are curious drawbacks and limitations which ex-
plain why Jeffrey has not kept, and why he is perhaps not
1 I know, of course, that even Cole- Selections from Jeffrey will be found
ridge spoke unadvisedly about these
immortal flowers. But he had got a 1894) and Mr Nichol Smith's Jeffrey's
“philosophical” craze at the moment: Literary Criticism (London, 1910).
and he did not call them "stuff.”
3 He makes indeed an awkward slip
? Contributions to the Edinburgh Re by linking Machiavel as a contempor-
view, London, pp. 36-63 of this the ary with Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne,
one vol. ed., 1853. The “Beauty” and Galileo ; but it is only recently,
itself requires very little notice. It if even recently, that literary history
is an ingenious variation upon Alison, has been carefully attended to, and
whose book it reviews, praises, and sup- Coleridge himself makes slips quite as
ports, with some unfairness to Gerard. bad.
20
402
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
very likely to recover, his pride of place. Part of his idiosyn-
crasy was a very odd kind of pessimism, which one would
rather have expected from a High Tory than from a “ blue and
yellow," however symbolical these colours may be of fear. To
Jeffrey_in the second decade of the new flourishing of English
poetry, which had at least eighty good years to run; in the very
year of the new birth of the novel; with Goethe still alive
and Heine a boy in Germany; with the best men of the great
French mid-nineteenth century already born-it seems that “the
age of original genius is over.” Now, when a man has once
made up his mind to this, he is not likely to be very tolerant
of attempts on the age's part to convince him that he is wrong.
But even his judgments of the past exhibit a curious want of
catholicity. The French vein, which is so strong in him, as
well as the general eighteenth-century spirit, which is so much
stronger, appears in a distinct tendency to set Latin above
Greek. He commends the Greeks indeed for their wonderful
"rationality and moderation in imaginative work,” suggesting,
with a mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, that the reason
of this is the absence of any models. Having no originals,
they did not try to be better than these. His criticism of the
two literatures is taken from a very odd angle—or rather from
a maze and web of odd angles. “The fate of the Tarquins,"
he says, “could never have been regarded at Rome as a worthy
occasion either of pity or horror.” And he does not in the
least seem to see—probably he would have indignantly denied
--that in saying this he is denying the Romans any literary
sense at all. In Aristophanes he has nothing to remark but
his “extreme coarseness and vulgarity”; and “the immense
difference between Thucydides and Tacitus” is adjusted to the
advantage of the Roman. He actually seems to prefer Au-
gustan to Greek poetry, and makes the astonishing remark
that “there is nothing at all in the whole range of Greek
literature like ... the fourth book of Virgil,” having ap-
parently never so much as heard of Apollonius Rhodius."
? How much of this was got from
his author herself I leave to others
to decide. “She was very capable of
having it happen to her," as Marl-
borough said of his beaten Dutch
general.
HALLAM.
403
11
That of mediæval literature he says practically nothing is
not surprising, but it must be taken into account: and his
defence of English Literature against his author, though
perfectly good against her, is necessarily rather limited by its
actual purpose, and suggests somehow that other limitations
would have appeared if it had been freed from this.
In short, though we cannot support the conclusion further,
the very word “limitation” suggests the name of Jeffrey, in the
sphere of criticism. He seems to be constantly
Its lesson.
"* "pulled up” by some mysterious check-rein, turned
back by some half-invisible obstacle. Sometimes -- by no
means quite always—we can concatenate the limiting causes,-
deduce them from something known and anterior, but they
are almost always present or impending. As Leigh Hunt is
the most catholic of critics, so Jeffrey is almost the most
sectarian: the very shibboleths of his sectarianism being
arbitrarily combined, and to a great extent peculiar to himself.1
Let us conclude the chapter with a figure scarcely less
representative of the anti-enthusiast school of critics, and
much more agreeable than either Gifford or Jeffrey.
Hallam.
* To the English student of literary history and of
literary criticism, Henry Hallam must always be a name
clarum et venerabile; nor--as has been so often pointed out in
these pages, and as unfortunately it seems still so often
necessary 2 to point out-need disagreement with a great many
1A fuller development of view that he played the Advocatus Diaboli
about Jeffrey as a critic may be found better than either Mr Arnold, Mr
in the present writer's Essays in Shairp, or my late friend Mr Henley.
English Literature, First Series, pp. ? The popularity, in late gears, of
100-134. Articles of his own specially the singularly uncritical words “sym-
worth examining are, besides the pathetic” and “unsympathetic” in
“Staël," “ Cowper," “ Ford,” “Keats," describing Criticism, would of itself
and “Campbell's Specimens," those on point to this necessity. It would
W. Meister (very curious and interest- seem impossible for a large number
ing), Richardson, Scott, and Byron of persons to "like" otherwise than
(very numerous and full of piquancies), “grossly” in Dryden's sense, or to
Crabbe, Wordsworth of course (though imagine that any one else can like
with as much wisdom as good feeling delicately, with discrimination, in the
he kept much of the most offensive old sense "nicely.” A“sympathetic"
matter, both on Wordsworth and notice or criticism is one which pours
Southey, out), and Burns. In regard unmixed cataracts of what the cooks
to the latter I cannot help thinking call oiled butter all over the patient:
404
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
of his own critical judgments and belief that—for those who
merely swallow such judgments whole-he is not the safest
of critical teachers, interfere with such due homage. For
Hallam was our first master in English of the true compara-
His achieve- tive-historical study of literature—the study without
ment. which, as one main result of this volume should be
to show, all criticism is now unsatisfactory, and the special
variety of criticism which has been cultivated for the last
century most dangerously delusive. His Introduction to the
Literature of Europe, with its sketch of mediæval and its fuller
treatment of Renaissance and seventeenth-century Literature,
is the earliest book of the kind in our language: it is not far
from being, to this day, the best book of the kind in any.
A first attempt of its sort (it cannot be said here with
too much frankness and conviction) can even less than any
...other book be faultless: and it is almost a suf-
Its merits
"ficient proof of Hallam's greatness that his faults
are not greater. Some things, indeed, that seem to me faults
may not even seem to be so at all to others. He was aware
that he must “pass over or partially touch" some departments
of at any rate so-called literature; but his preference or re-
jection may seem somewhat remarkable. Few will quarrel,
at least from my point of view, with the very large space
given to mere “scholars, but it is surely strange that a his-
torian should have thought History of secondary importance,
while according ample space not only to Philosophy and
Theology, but even to Anatomy and Mathematics. A more
serious and a more indisputable blemish is the scanty and
second-hand character of his account of mediæval literature,
which he might almost as well have omitted altogether. It
cannot be too peremptorily laid down that second-hand
a notice that questions this part of
him, rejects that, but gives due value
to the gold and the silver and the
precious stones, while discarding the
hay and the stubble, is “unsym-
pathetic.” Many years (many lustres
even, alas !) ago, an old friend and
colleague of mine, since distinguished
in his own country as a critic, M.
Paul Stapfer, complained that English-
men, and still more English women,
had only two critical categories—the
“dry” and the “pretty." These were
unsatisfactory enough, but I think they
were better than “sympathetic” and
“unsympathetic" as now often used.
HALLAM.
405
accounts of literature are absolutely devoid of any value
whatever:—the best and latest authorities become equally
“not evidence” with the stalest and worst. Hallam was
aware of this principle to some extent, and he
and defects.
** almost states it, though of course in his own more
measured way, and with reference to quotation mainly, in his
preface. But his first chapter is really nothing but a tissue
of references to Herder and Eichhorn, Meiners and Fleury,
with original remarks which do not console us. The account
of Boethius at the very beginning is a pretty piece of rhetoric,
but, as the Germans would say, not in the least “ingoing.”
It is a horrible heresy to say 1 that “It is sufficient to look
at any extracts” from the Dark Ages “to see the justice
of this censure," for no collection of extracts will justify the
formation of any critical opinion whatsoever, though it may
support, or at least illustrate, one formed from reading whole
works.
Further, in a note of Hallam's? I think may be found the
origin of Mr Arnold's too exclusive preference for “the best
uz and principal” things and his disparagement of the
In general
distribution historic estimate, though I trust that Mr Arnold 3
and treat- would not have shared Hallam's contempt, equally
superfine and superficial, for the “barbarous Latin "
of the Dark Ages. Finally, it is difficult to conceive a more
inadequate reference to one of the most epoch-making of
European poems (which is at the same time in its earlier part
one of not the least charming) than the words “A very cele-
brated poem, the Roman de la Rose, had introduced an un-
fortunate taste for allegory in verse, from which France did
not extricate herself for several generations.” It is all the
worse because nothing in it is positively untrue.
It may be said to be unjust to dwell on what is avowedly
a mere overture: but unluckily, when Hallam comes to his
subject proper, all trace of second-hand treatment does not
disappear. The part played by direct examination becomes
ment.
1 P. 5, in the convenient 1-vol. re-
print of Messrs Ward and Lock (Lou-
don: n. d.)
3 On the same page, ed. cit.
3 Who loved the Vulgate.
406
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
In soine
very much larger; and the writer's reading is a matter of
just admiration, nor does he ever for one moment pretend to
have read what he has not. But he has no scruple in sup-
plementing his reading at second-hand, or even in doubling
his own frequently excellent judgments with long quoted
passages from writers like Bouterwek. Further, the surprise
which has been hinted above as to his admissions and ex-
clusions, and at his relative admissions in point of depart-
ments, may perhaps after a time change into a disappointed
conviction that his first interest did not lie in literature, as
literature, at all; but in politics eccesiastical and civil, juristics,
moral and other philosophy, and the like. I am inclined to
think that Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Grotius have, be-
tween them, more space than is devoted to all Hallam's figures
in belles lettres from Rabelais to Dryden.
I could support this with a very large number of pièces if it
were necessary; but a few must suffice, and in those few we
one shall find a further count against Hallam arising.
particular Note, for instance, his indorsement of Meiners'
es. complaint that Politian “did not scruple to take
words from such writers as Apuleius and Tertullian," an
indorsement which in principle runs to the full folly of
Ciceronianism, and with which it is well to couple and perpend
the round assertion elsewhere that Italian is--even it would
seem for Italians--an inferior literary instrument to Latin.
Secondly, take the astounding suggestion that the Epistolae
Obscurorun Dirorum “surely” have “not much intrinsic
merit," and the apparent dismissal of them as “a mass of
vapid nonsense and bad grammar.” As if the very vapidity of
the nonsense did not give the savour, and the badness of the
grammar were not the charm! Here again another judgment
(on the Satire Menippée) clinches the inference that Hallam's
taste for humour was small. If he is not uncomplimentary,
he is strikingly inadequate, on Marot: and in regard to the
Pléiade he simply follows the French to do evil, and as else-
where puts himself under the guidance of-La Harpe! Few
“heroic enthusiasts” will read his longer and more appreciative
notice of Spenser without perceiving “some want, some cold-
insi
HALLAM407
III
.
ness" in it; fewer will even expect not to find these privations
in that of Donne. But the shortest of his shortcomings are
reached in his article on Browne, and in part of that on
Shakespeare. In the latter the famous sentence on the Sonnets
is not, I think, so unforgivable as the slander on Juliet ;1 in
the former one can simply quote in silence of comment. “His
style is not flowing, but vigorous; his choice of words not
elegant, and even approaching to barbarism in English phrase: .
yet there is an impressiveness, an air of reflection and serenity,
in Browne's writings which redeem many of his faults.” 2 The
sentence that “Gondibert is better worth reading than The
Purple Island, though it may have less of that which distin-
guishes a poet from another man”-in other words, that an
unpoetical poem is better worth reading than a poetical one-
is sufficiently tell-tale. It is not surprising, after it, that Hallam
speaks respectfully of Rymer-a point where Macaulay, so
often his disciple, fortunately left him.
Something, it has been said, will inevitably emerge from
these utterances on a tolerably intelligent consideration,
His central Hallam has abundant erudition, much judicial qual-
weakness, ity, a shrewdness which generally guides him more
or less right in points of fact; sense; fairness; freedom from
caprice-even (except as regards the Middle Ages, and especially
mediæval Latin and its ancestors back to the late Silver Age)
a certain power of regarding literature impartially. But he
has, as is so often done (he alludes to the fact himself some-
where), spoken his own doom in words which he applies (with
remarkable injustice as it happens) to Fontenelle. He has
11 decline to sully these pages
with it: let it go to its own place,
buckled neck and heels with Rapin's
on Nausicaa.
2 We could abandon Owen Felltham
to him with more equanimity if he did
not describe; as "vile English, or
properly no English,” such words as
"nested," "parallel” as a verb, and
"uncurtain," all excellent English of
the best brand and vintage, formed
on the strictest and most idiomatic
patents of analogy. There is still far
too much criticastry and pedanticulism
(here's for them !) of this kind about,
and men like Hallam are very mainly
responsible for it. Even “obnubilate,"
to which he also objects, is a perfectly
good word, on all-fours with “compen-
sate," which he himself uses in the same
context, though less usual. A sover-
eign of just weight, fineness, and stamp
is none the worse for having been little
circulated : nor is a word.
408
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
ond
“cool good sense, and an incapacity, by natural privation, of
feeling the highest excellence in works of taste.”
In short, “The Act of God”: and for such acts it is as
unreasonable as it is indecent to blame their victims. But at
the the same time we may carry our forbearance to
value left natural privations too far by accepting blind men
by et. as guides in precipitous countries, or using as a
bloodhound a dog who has no scent. And therefore it is
impossible to assign to Hallam a high place as a critic. He
may be—he is-useful even in this respect as a check and
a reminder of the views which once were taken by men of
wide information, excellent discipline, literary disposition, and
(where it was not seared or paralysed) positive taste; but he
will not soon recover any other value. Even thus he is to
a critic that always critically estimable thing a point de repère,
and in the kindred but not identical function of literary
historian, the praise which was given to him at the opening of
this notice may be maintained in spite of, and not inconsist-
ently with, anything that has been said meanwhile,1
Nay, more, Specialism has made such inroads upon us—has
bondaged the land to such hordes of robber-barons—that we
may not soon expect again, and may even regard with a tender
desiderium, the width, the justice, the far-reaching and self-
sufficing survey and sovereignty of Hallam.
1 I can only think of one important
blunder that he makes as a historian,
the statement that Opitz" took Holland
for his Parnassus.” Now Ronsard
(Hist. Crit., ii. 362) was not exactly
a Dutchman.
409
INTERCHAPTER V.
(WITH AN EXCURSUS ON PERIODICAL CRITICISM.)
TT
NA
WE here come to the point antipolar to that reached earlier
in this book,1 where we gave a sketch of the Classic or Neo-
classic creed. The challenge to array definitions of Classicism
and Romanticism in a tabular form has already?, been re-
spectfully declined: but that this refusal comes neither from
pusillanimity, nor yet from complacency in purblindness,
may be best proved by undertaking the much more perilous
adventure of an anti-creed to that formerly laid down. Even
there we had to interpose the caution that absolute subscrip-
tion, on the part of all the critics concerned, ought not to be
thought of: but here the very essence and quiddity of the
situation is that no such agreement is in any way possible.
In fact, no single and tolerably homogeneous document could
possibly here be drawn up, for there would be minority (or some-
times majority) counter-reports on every article. Even those
who resist the extremer developments take large licences upon
the old classical position. You have your Jeffrey expressing
admiration of a Pharonnida which would have seemed to
Dennis a monstrous stumbling-block, and to Johnson mere
foolishness : while among the extremists themselves, each
man is a law unto himself. Still, it is perhaps possible to
draw up some articles of the Modern or Romantic Criticism
which was reached during this period, and we have already,
in the last two books, described at some length the process
by which they were reached. These articles will be best
i P. 94.
2 V. Hist. Crit., ii. 386.
410
SUMMARY OF THE REVOLT.
separated into two batches, the first representing the creed
of centre and extremes at once, the second that of extremes
(left or right) only: and it will be well to mark the difference
from the former statement by giving the articles separately,
and not arranging them in paragraphs.
The more catholic creed is very mainly of a negative and
protesting character, and its articles might run somewhat
thus:-
**IN
All periods of literature are to be studied, and all have
lessons for the critic. “ Gothic ignorance” is an ignorant
absurdity.
One period of literature cannot prescribe to another.
Each has its own laws; and if any general laws are to
be put above these, they must be such as will embrace
them.
Rules are not to be multiplied without necessity :
and such as may be admitted must rather be extracted
from the practice of good poets and prose-writers than
imposed upon it.
“Unity” is not itself uniform, but will vary accord-
ing to the kind, and sometimes within the kind,
itself.
The Kind itself is not to be too rigidly constituted:
and subvarieties in it may constantly arise.
Literature is to be judged by the event”: the
presence of the fig will disprove the presence of the
thistle.
The object of literature is Delight; its soul is Imagin-
ation ; its body is Style.
A man should like what he does like :1 and his
likings are facts in criticism for him.
To which the extremer men would add these, or some of
them, or something like them :-
Nothing depends upon the subject; all upon the treat-
ment of the subject.
It is not necessary that a good poet or prose writer
i See the note above, p. 233, for Dennis's counter-assertion.
SUMMARY OF THE REVOLT.
411
should be a good man : though it is a pity that he
should not be. And Literature is not subject to the
laws of Morality, though it is to those of Manners.?
Good Sense is a good thing, but may be too much
regarded : and Nonsense is not necessarily a bad one.
The appeals of the arts are interchangeable : Poetry
can do as much with sound as Music, as much with
colour as Painting, and perhaps more than either with
both.
The first requisite of the critic is that he should be
capable of receiving Impressions : the second, that he
should be able to express and impart them.
There cannot be Monstrous Beauty : the Beauty itself
justifies and regularises.
Once more it has to be stipulated that these articles are not
to be regarded as definitely proposed ends and aims, which the
critical practice of the period set before itself, and by which
it worked. They are, for the most part, piecemeal results and
upshots of a long and desultory campaign, often reached as
it were incidentally, “windfalls of the Muses," kingdoms found
while the finder is seeking his father's (or anybody's) asses. If
anything general is to be detected before and beneath them,
it is a sort of general feeling of irksomeness at the restraints
of Neo-classicism,-a revolt against its perpetual restrictions
and taboos.
To recur once more to those egregious juvenilia of Addison's,
which, though not to be too much pressed as stigmata on his
own memory, are a useful caricature of Neo-classicism in regard
to English, some lover of English literature feels that there is
much more in Chaucer than vulgar jests, now not even fashion-
ably vulgar, and in Spenser than tiresome preaching. He
looks about to support his feeling with reasons, and he "finds
salvation" in the Romantic sense, more or less fully, more or
less systematically, more or less universally. The ways and
manners of the finding have been dealt with earlier; the results
them I take no keep.
I Certain persons would, of course,
onit even the provisos here; but of
412
SUMMARY OF THE REVOLT.
LU
of it, in critical form, may deserve some summary and rationale
here.
In the remarkable group of English critics whom we have
called “the companions” of Coleridge, and in Coleridge him-
self, the contemporary quality, and in some cases the direct
suggestion, of that great critic appear unmistakably, while in
at least most cases they are free from the chaotic or paralytic
incompleteness which he hardly ever, save in the Biographia,
shook off. They all show, as he does, though in varying
degrees, the revolt or reaction from the hidebound failure of
the baser kind of Neo-classic to appreciate the effort really to
taste, to enjoy, and so to deliver that judgment which without
enjoyment is always inadequate. And it would be unjust to
regard them as merely the sports and waifs of an irresistibly
advancing tide. There is something of this in them, the
worst of the something being the uncritical scorn with which
they sometimes regarded even the greatest of the departed or
departing school—the astonishing injustice of Coleridge himself
to Gibbon, and Johnson, and the Queen Anne men; of many
of them to Pope; of Hazlitt even to Dryden. But they were
not only carried, they swam,-swam strongly and steadily and
skilfully for the land that was ahead. Their appreciation is
not mere matter of fashion ; it is genuine. They are honestly
appetent of the milk and honey of the newly opened land of
English literature for themselves, and generously eager to
impart it, and the taste for it, to others.
But we must not-for these merits, or even for what some
may think the still higher one of providing, for almost the
first time in any literature, a great bulk of matter which is at
once valuable criticism and delightful literature itself-make a
refusal of our own critical duty as to their shortcomings, which
were neither few nor inconsiderable, and which led directly to
the singular decadence of English criticism in the middle third
of the nineteenth century. The first and the greatest of these
-let us fling it frankly and fairly to any partisan of the older
critical dispensation who “expects his evening prey” as our
history draws towards its close — was, or at any rate was a
result of, the very lawlessness and rulelessness by which they
SUMMARY OF THE REVOLT.
413
had effected their and our emancipation. True, many of the
rules that they threw off were bad and irrational, most per-
haps were inadequate, irrelevant, requiring to be applied with
all sorts of provisos and easements. But they had at any
rate kept criticism methodical, and tolerably certain in its
utterances. There had been a Creed; there had been not
the slightest difficulty in giving reasons, though they might
be doubtful ones, for a faith which, if incomplete and not
really catholic, was at any rate formally constituted. With
the new men it was different. Coleridge indeed boasted
mediate and even higher rules and principles behind his in-
dividual judgments. But with the rest it was rather a case
of sheer private judgment, of “meeting by yourself in your
own house."
Another drawback, dangerous always but intensified in danger
by its connection with the former, is that, while most of them
were much less intimately acquainted with the classics than
the critics of former generations had been, this deficiency was
not generally compensated by any of that extensive knowledge
of modern literature which the ruleless or scantily ruled
system of criticism imperatively requires. Nay, they were
all, including even Coleridge himself and De Quincey (the two
most learned, not only of these but of all English critics), very
imperfectly acquainted with French literature - which, as a
whole, is the best suited to qualify the study of our own,
correct it, and preserve it from flaws and corruptions. Leigh
Hunt knew little but Italian; and in Italian knew best the
things that are of least real importance for the English student.
As for Lamb, he was more than a fair Latin scholar; but he
seems to have known very little Greek, and not to have had
wide reading in the classics, either Greek or Latin, while he
betrays hardly the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, any
foreign modern literature whatever. Hazlitt's case is worse
still, for he evidently knew very little indeed, either of the
classics or of foreign modern literature, except a few philosophic
writers, here of next to no use. In fact, one cannot help
wondering how, knowing so little, he came to judge so well-
till the wonder nearly disappears, as we see how much better
1
414
SUMMARY OF THE REVOLT.
he would have judged if he had known more. Wilson (to
look forward a little as we have done with De Quincey) had
some classics : and Lockhart had not only classics, but German
and Spanish. But one suspects the former to have known next
to nothing of modern literature: and the latter did not
use critically that which he knew. Even as regards English
itself, the knowledge of all these critics was very gappy and
scrappy. They did not, with all their advantages of time,
know anything like so much of early English literature (even
putting Anglo-Saxon out of the question) as Gray had known
nearly a hundred years earlier, and Mitford in their own
early days.
Thus, while they had deliberately, and in the main wisely,
discarded the rules which at least were supposed deductively
to govern all literature, they had not furnished themselves
with that comparative knowledge of different literatures, or
at the very least of all the different periods of one literature,
which assists literary induction, and to some extent supplies
the place of the older rules themselves. They were therefore
driven to judge by the inuer light alone; and as, fortunately,
that inner light, in at least some of them, burnt with the clearest
and brightest flame, they judged very well by it. But their
system was a dangerous one when it came to be applied, as
it inevitably had to be applied, in the majority of cases, when
their own torches went out, by the aid of smoky farthing rush-
lights in blurred horn lanterns.
Yet, allowing for these drawbacks of commission and of
example in the most illiberally liberal manner, there will yet
remain to their credit such a sum as hardly any other group1
in any country—as none in ours certainly—can claim. Here
at last, and here almost for the first time, appears that body
of pure critical appreciation of the actual work of literature
for which we have been waiting so long, which we have missed
so sorely in ancient times, and which, in the earlier modern,
has been given to us stinted and, what is worse, adulterated, by
arbitrary restrictions and preoccupations. In Coleridge, in
i The Germans did it rather earlier if not quite as well, and more volumi-
but not so well : the French almost nously, but later,
PERIODICAL CRITICISM.
415
Hazlitt, in Lamb, in Leigh Hunt even, to name no others, we
have real “judging of authors,” not—or at any rate not mainly
-discussion of kinds, and attempts to lay down principles.
They are judges, not jurists, “lawmen," not lawmongers and
potterers with codes. Appreciation and enjoyment, with their,
in this case necessary, consequences, the communication of
enjoyment and appreciation—these are the chief and principal
things with them, and these they never fail to provide.
And in English, as in French and German, with whatever
diversity of immediate aim, exact starting-point, felicity of
method, and perfection of result--all the dominant and rep-
resentative criticism of this time tends in the direction and
obeys the impulse of some form or other of that general creed
which we have endeavoured to sketch earlier in this Inter-
chapter, and so contributes to the general progress (straight or
circular, who shall say ?) of which this book is the history.
And when, rather, as usual, by the influence of creative than of
critical literature, and by that of Scott and Byron above all, the
same purpose was inspired in yet other countries, the results
were again the same. The dislike of Rule; the almost in-
stinctive falling back upon mediæval literature as an alter-
ative from classical and (recent) modern; the blending of the
Arts; the cultivation of colour- and sound-variety in poetry;
the variegation and rhythmical elaboration of prose, -in all
these ways, by all these agencies, literary Criticism as well as
literary practice was reconstructed. And the end is not
even yet.
1
Some more general remarks on the sub-period must be post-
poned to the several parts of the Conclusion. But there is one
phenomenon which, first appearing somewhat earlier, now
becomes what the Germans call hervorragend, persistently and
almost aggressively prominent. And on this we must say
something
1 The criticism of neither of these a little later. Full accounts of it, and
nations produced much effect on of what followed in these two countries
English critics, except on Coleridge, and in others, will be found in the
during the period surveyed in the last larger History. (See especially on
chapter, but it became very influential Goethe, üi. 361-377.)
416
PERIODICAL CRITICISM.
i To enter into all the questions connected with the Period-
ical here, would be obviously impossible. That it has multi-
plied criticism itself is a truism ; that it has necessarily
multiplied bad criticism is maintainable; the question is
whether it has actually multiplied good. I think it has. It is
very difficult to conceive of any other system under which a
man like Sainte-Beuve—not of means, and not well adapted to
any profession—could have given his life practically to the
service of our Muse as he actually did. It is difficult to imagine
any other which would have equally well suited a man like Mr
Arnold, with abundant, and fairly harassing, avocations on the
one hand, and with apparently no great inclination to write
elaborate books on the other. Many officials, professional men.
persons "avocated ” in the real sense) from criticism by this
or that vocation, have been enabled by the system to give us
things sometimes precious, and probably in most times not
likely to have been given at all under the book-and-pamphlet
dispensation. Above all, perhaps, the excuse of the surplusage
which besets the regular treatise has disappeared, while the
blind (or too well-seeing) editor, with his abhorred shears, is
apt to lop excrescences off if they attempt to appear.2 Al-
though there certainly has been more bad criticism written in
the nineteenth century than in any previous one,-probably
more than in all previous centuries put together,—it is quite
certain that no other period can show so much that is good.
And the change which has resulted in it was needed. The
Bibliothecce of the late seventeenth century wanted pliancy,
variety, combination of industrial power: the Reviews succeed-
ing them were too apt to be mere booksellers' instruments,
while their wretched pay kept many of the best hands from
them, and kept those who were driven to them in undue
dependence. And further, the increasing supply of actual
literature required more criticism than could easily be had
1 The rest of this Interchapter may
be taken--as also the Appendix-for
samples of a very much larger body of
“Critical Excursus” which I should
like to give, if I thought that readers
would endure it.
? Add some other blessings, as that
the periodical can contradict itself-
which the book sometimes does, but
should not.
PERIODICAL CRITICISM.
417
0
under the old system of few periodicals, eked out by inde-
pendent treatises and pamphlets.
These are not unimportant considerations, but they lie a little
outside of—or only touch—the question of the altered quality
and increased or decreased goodness of criticism as a whole
and in itself. And when we come to discuss this, the question
assumes rather a different aspect. The better pay, the increased
repute, the greater independence, might be thought likely to
attract, and did attract, a better class of writers to the work:
but whether this better class was always better fitted for the
particular task itself one may sometimes doubt. And there
can be no doubt at all that the same attractions must neces-
sarily tempt, and that the increased demand must almost force,
a very much larger supply of inferior talent to the said task.
Again, this increased demand, if not for critics, for somebody
who would undertake to criticise (which is not quite the same
thing), coincided with a gradual removal of the not very severe
requisitions of competence which had up to this time been
imposed upon the aspirant. The Mr Bludyer of the eighteenth
century was at least supposed to know his Aristotle and his
Longinus, his Horace and his Quintilian, his Boileau and his Le
Bossu, his Dryden and his Addison. In the majority of cases
he did know them—after a fashion-though he constantly
misinterpreted the best of them and put his faith chiefly in the
worst. But the Mr Bludyer of the nineteenth has not been
supposed to know anything at all of the history and theory of
his art. Now, when you at once set up a Liberty Hall, and
dispense good things therein freely to all comers, your Liberty
Hall is too likely before long to become a Temple of
Misrule.
As the older arrangements went to make the critic's trade
not merely homely and slighted, but cramped by too many,
too strict, and too little comprehended rules and formulas,
so the new tended rather to make it a paradise of the ignoramus
with a touch of impudence. It has never perhaps been quite
sufficiently comprehended, by what may be called the laity,
that though, in a way, Blake was perfectly right in saying
that every man is a judge of art who is not connoisseured
. 2 D
418
PERIODICAL CRITICISM.
out of his senses, yet it does not quite follow that every man
without training and without reading, is qualified to deliver
judgment, from the actual bench, on so complicated and treacher-
ous a work of art as a book. You can take in at least great
part of the beauty of a picture at the first glance; and, no
matter what the subject may be, many of the details, with
all the colour and some of the drawing and composition, require
neither previous education nor prolonged and attentive study,
though study and attention will no doubt greatly improve the
comprehension and enjoyment of them. In the case of a book
it is very different. The most rapid and industrious reader
will require some minutes—it may even be some hours—to put
himself in a position to deliver any trustworthy judgment on it
at all: and he must be an exceedingly well-informed one who is
at home with every subject treated in every volume that he has
to review. You have to find out what it is that the author has
endeavoured to do, and then-the most impossible of tasks to
some critics, it would seem-to consider whether he has done
it, and not whether he has or has not done something else which
you wanted him to do. You have to guard against prejudices
innumerable, subtle, Hydra-headed,- prejudices personal and
political, prejudices social and religious, prejudices of style and
of temperament, prejudices arising from school, university,
country, almost every conceivable predicament of man. You
must be able first to grasp, then to take off a total impression,
then to produce that impression in a form suitable for easy
conveyance to the public. One would not perhaps be quite pre-
pared to assert that every one of the hundreds and thousands
who have, under the new dispensation, undertaken the office of
a critic, has been divinely endowed with these gifts before
undertaking that office, or that all of them, even if they took
the trouble to acquire what may be acquired, were likely to
succeed. There remains, of course, the comfortable doctrine
that “practice makes perfect”: or, as one of the most agreeable
and acute of modern political satirists, himself an admirable
critic, has ironically put it-
“That by much engine-driving at intricate junctions
One learns to drive engines along with the best.”
PERIODICAL CRITICISM.
419
And if this seem small comfort to the suffering author, who
thinks that he has had too great a share of the bad criticism
and too little of the good, there are two other consolations for
him. The one is that under any other system his book would
very probably have received no notice at all, which would in
some cases (not in all) annoy him worse than blame. If he
be of another sort, he may perhaps anticipate the question,
all-healing to any alma passably sdegnosa, “Would you rather
not have written so, and be praised ?"
One very necessary branch of the new criticism, as regarded
poetry, the average critic, whether in or out of periodicals, was
sadly slow to learn-indeed for the most part he recalcitrated
furiously against learning it. This was the proper appreciation
of the new effects in verbal painting and verbal music. There had
always, of course, been much of this in the great old masters :
but there had not been so much of it, and the critic had
been wont to treat it alternately in a peddling and in a high-
sniffing fashion. On the musical side especially, theory had
chiefly confined itself to the remarks on “suiting the sound
to the sense,” in a comparatively infantine fashion,—putting
plenty of ss's into a line about a snake or a goose, and plenty
of r's into a line about a dog; giving trisyllabic feet in a line
that meant swift movement, and clogging it with consonants
when effort or tardiness came in. The new poets-Coleridge,
Keats, Tennyson,-in increasing degree, changed this simple
and rudimentary proceeding into a complicated science of
word-illumination and sound-accompaniment, which the new
critics perhaps could not see or hear, and at which they were
by turns loftily contemptuous and furiously angry. That there
was some genuine inability in the matter may appear from
looking back to Johnson's well-known and very interesting
surprise at Pope's fondness for his couplet-
“Lo ! where Mæotis sleeps, and hardly flows
The freezing Tanais, through a waste of snows.”
This couplet is beautiful, though the homeoteleuton of “ Mæotis"
and “Tanais” is a slight blemish on it. But its beauty arises
from such subtle things as the contrast of the metrical rapidity
420
PERIODICAL CRITICISM.
of “Tănăis” and the sluggish progression of its waters, and
from the extremely artful disposition and variation of the
vowel notes, o, a, el.
Even this is not very complicated: and it occurs, with Pope
and his clan, once in a thousand or ten thousand lines. The
Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are simply compact of the
colouring symphonies of sound: and the palette becomes
always more intricate, the tone- schemes more various and
more artful, as you journey from the Eve of St Agnes to the
Palace of Art, and from the Drean of Fair Women to Rose
Mary. In the Palace especially i the series of descriptions
of the pictures pushes both these applications of the two
sister arts towards — almost to the limits of the possible.
Rossetti alone has since surpassed them. Take, for instance,
the cunning manipulation of the actual quatrain itself to
begin with; the figures and colour of the various designs; and
the sound-accompaniment, to suit these figures and colours,
in such a stanza as-
“One seemed all dark and red : a tract of sand,
And some one pacing there alone,
Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon." ?
Now the "values" of this are not really difficult to make
out: they can be thoroughly mastered for himself, without book
or teacher, by an intelligent boy of sixteen or seventeen, who,
having a taste for poetry, has read some—and who happens
to have been born within the nineteenth century. But they
do need intelligent, sympathetic, and to a certain extent sub-
missive, co-operation on the part of the person who is to
enjoy them. The adjustment of the stanza, with its successive
lines of varying capacity and cadence; the fitness of those
lines themselves to receive and express more or less detailed
images, and add, as it were, not merely stroke after stroke, but
plan after plan, to the picture; the monosyllables; the allitera-
tion of the last line, and the crowning effect whereby the
1 It was originally published, re- 2 The original form of this, in
member, before the death of Coleridge, 1832-33, was less perfect, but the aim
and well within our present period. and the principle are there already.
ahol 33, mariginal for
PERIODICAL CRITICISM.
421
picture is lightened after being displayed in shadow; the
trisyllabic foot thrown in by “glimmering," whether you take
it in the last or the last but one of the third verse; the
atmosphere-accompaniment,—all these things might well be
almost invisible and inaudible to a critic brought up on
eighteenth-century principles. And if he saw or heard them
at all, they might affect him with that singular impatience
and disgust at refinement and exquisiteness in pleasure which
was affected by ancient philosophers, and which seems to be
really genuine in many excellent Englishmen whom the Gods
have not made in the very least philosophical. I have never
myself understood why it is godliness to gulp and sin to savour;
why, if a pleasure be harmless in itself, it becomes harmful
in being whetted, and varied, and enhanced by every possible
innocent agency. But there are doubtless some people who
think it a "poisoning of the dart too apt before to kill.” And
there are, I strongly suspect, a good many more whose senses
are too blunt to taste or feel the refinements, and who receive
the attentions of the poetic fairies with as little apprecia-
tion, though usually with by no means as much good-humour,
as Bottom showed to those of Titania and her meyny.
This, however, is undoubtedly something of a digression, per-
haps something too much of it. But it illustrates the perils
to which the new reviewers were exposed, and at the same
time (which is the excuse for the divagation) the 'constant
opportunity of salvation which reviewing provides.
Nor need much be said of the general quality of the articles
in these famous collections. Persons of enterprise have gone
“exploring,” like Mrs Elton (on or off their donkeys, and with
or without their little baskets), into the review - province of
Edinburgh and Quarterly, and have come back saying, more
or less wisely, that the land is barren. Some of the more
practical of them have brought back specimens of its flora
and fauna, its soil and its rocks. It is perhaps more profit-
able to digest some of the general considerations which have
1 Mr Hall Caine, in his Cobwebs of
Criticism (London, 1883); Mr E.
Stevenson, in a useful and unpre-
tentious collection of Early Reviews
(London, n. d.), &c., &c.
422
PERIODICAL CRITICISM.
already been stated or indicated than to dwell on particulars.
Not that these particulars are useless or always uninterest-
ing. It is good to know that The Monthly Review, in an article
which could not be called unfriendly, thought The Ancient
Mariner: “a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoher-
ence” [the whole thing is as clear to us as a proposition in
Euclid), with “poetic touches of an exquisite kind.” It is
very interesting, and not at all surprising (especially when
we remember Voltaire), to find the Edinburgh, the oracle of
political Whiggery, enunciating the doctrine of Poetical Divine
Right in its article on Thalaba. It is interesting, again, and
almost more instructive, to find the Quarterly, in the article
which did not kill John Keats, finding fault with that poet
and his master Leigh Hunt, not (as might have been done
plausibly enough) for a flaccid mollities, for the delumbe and
the in labris natantia,2 but, of all things, for “ruggedness.” If
we have pursued our critical studies aright, we know the
symptoms, we know the diseases. They are all varieties of
Kainophobia,--the horror and the misunderstanding of the un-
accustomed.
But though it is not original, it is very far from superfluous
co point out that these poor old unjust judges, these Doubters
and Bloodmen of the poetic Mansoul at this crisis of its his-
tory, the Giffords, and Jeffreys, and Crokers, were by no means
without their excuses. The original form of The Ancient
Mariner is only less inferior to the later form which most
people know now, than Tennyson's Poems 3 as they appear
in the editions since 1842 are superior to themselves as they
appeared to risk the knout of Wilson and the thumbikins of
Croker. Southey's unrhymed vers libres in Thalaba are, when
all is said and done, a mistake: and their arrangement is some-
times as unmusical as the least successful parts of Mr
1 “Poetry has this much at least in
common with religion, that its stan-
dards were fixed long ago by certain
inspired writers, whose authority it is
no longer lawful to call in question.”
There may seem to be an ironic touch
in this : but the whole article is writ-
ten to the text.
? Critical phrases of Persius.
3 These texts can be seen partly in
more than one modern book on Tenny-
son, and wholly in the late Professor
Churton Collins's useful reprint of the
Early Poems (London, 1900).
PERIODICAL CRITICISM.
423
intoxicating as is the atmosphere, of Endymion, no one
nowadays could pronounce it free from faults of taste of
more kinds than one, or deny that as, after all, it holds
itself out to be a story, the demand for some sort of intel-
ligible narrative procession is not so irrelevant as when it
is put to a lyric, in even the widest sense of that word. And
the critics were, in every one of these cases, justified of their
victims. Coleridge and Tennyson altered into perfection the
poems which had been so imperfect. Southey added rhyme
and better rhythm in Kehama; Keats grew from the incoher-
ence of Endymion, and its uncertain taste, to the perfection
of Lamia and the great Odes and the Eves of St Agnes and
St Mark. “They also serve, who only stand and—whip." But
it is better to have a soul above mere whipping.
40
424
CHAPTER VII.
BETWEEN COLERIDGE AND ARNOLD.
THE ENGLISH CRITICS OF 1830-60 — WILSON - STRANGE MEDLEY OF HIS
CRITICISM —THE 'HOMER' AND THE OTHER LARGER CRITICAL COLLEC-
TIONS—THE 'SPENSER '—THE "SPECIMENS OF BRITISH CRITICS '--'DIES
BOREALES '-FAULTS IN ALL, AND IN THE REPUBLISHED WORK—DE
QUINCEY: HIS ANOMALIES AND PERVERSITIES AS A CRITIC, IN
REGARD TO ALL LITERATURES—THEIR CAUSES—THE 'RHETORIC' AND
THE 'STYLE'-HIS COMPENSATIONS — LOCKHART— DIFFICULTY' WITH
HIS CRITICISM—THE TENNYSON' REVIEW NOT HIS-ON COLERIDGE,
BURNS, SCOTT, AND HOOK — HIS GENERAL CRITICAL CHARACTER-
HARTLEY COLERIDGE- FORLORN CONDITION OF HIS CRITICISM — ITS
QUALITY-DEFECTS AND EXAMPLES—DAGINN-HIS PARODY-CRITICISMS
AND MORE SERIOUS EFFORTS — MACAULAY — HIS EXCEPTIONAL COM-
PETENCE IN SOME WAYS—THE EARLY ARTICLES—HIS DRAWBACKS—
THE PRACTICAL CHOKING OF THE GOOD SEED—HIS LITERARY SURVEYS
IN THE “ LETTERS'HIS CONFESSION—THE 'ESSAYS '—SIMILAR DWIND-
LING IN CARLYLE—THE EARLIER "ESSAYS'-THE LATER-THE ATTI-
TUDE OF THE 'LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS —THE CONCLUSION OF THIS
MATTER -- THACKERAY - HIS ONE CRITICAL WEAKNESS AND HIS EX-
CELLENCE-'BLACKWOOD,' IN 1849, ON TENNYSON-GEORGE BRIMLEY-
HIS ESSAY ON TENNYSON--HIS OTHER WORK-HIS INTRINSIC AND
CHRONOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE — “GYAS AND CLOANTHUS” - MILMAN,
CROKER, HAYWARD-SYDNEY SMITH, SENIOR, HELPS - ELWIN, LAN-
CASTER, HANNAY-DALLAS—THE POETICS ''THE GAY SCIENCE'--
OTHERS : J. S. MILL.
THERE are few things so difficult to the conscientious writer,
and few which he knows will receive so little consideration
from the irresponsible reader, as those overlappings on the
one hand, and throwings-back on the other, which are incum-
bent on all literary historians save those who are content to
abjure form and method altogether. The constituents of the
WILSON.
425
1930
present chapter give a case in point. Some of them may
seem unreasonably torn away from their natural companions
in our last chapter dealing with English criticism ; some
unreasonably kept back from the society of the next. But,
once more, things have not been done entirely at the hazard
of the orange-peel or the die.
There is, to the present writer at any rate, a distinct colour,
or set of colours, appertaining to most of the English criticism
mollish of 1830-1860, and it seems worth while to bring
Critics of this out by isolating its practitioners to a certain
1830-60.
extent. We shall find these falling under three
main divisions--the first containing the latest-writing, and
in some cases hardly the least, of the great band of periodical
critics, mostly Romantic in tendency, of whom Coleridge is
the Generalissimo and Hazlitt the rather mutinous Chief of
the Staff. Then come the mighty pair of Carlyle and Macau-
lay; and then a rear-guard of more or less interesting minors
and transition persons. So, first of the first, let us deal with
one who, not only to his special partisans and friends, seemed
a very prince of critics in his day.
The difficulties of appraising “Christopher North" as a critic
are, or should be, well known in general; but it is doubtful
whether many persons have recently cared to put
Wilson.
* themselves in a position to appreciate them di-
rectly. No such revival has come to him as that which has
come to Hazlitt: and I have elsewhere given at some length 1
the reasons which make me inclined to fear that no such
revival is very likely to come soon. For Wilson accumulated,
with a defiance valorous enough but certainly not discreet,
provocation after provocation to Nemesis and Oblivion. He
is immensely diffuse; he is not more diffuse than he is desul-
tory; and in the greater part of his work he sets his criticism
with a habitual strain of extravagant and ephemeral bravura
which even the most tolerant and catholic may not seldom
find uncongenial. But all this, though bad, is followed by
things worse — critical incivility of the worst kind, violent
1 In an essay originally published in and reprinted in Essays in English
Macmillan's Magazine for July 1886, Literature (3rd. ed., London, 1896).
426
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
political and other partisanship, a prevailing capriciousness
which makes his critical utterances almost valueless,
Strange
medley of except as words to the wise; and occasional ac-
his criti- cesses of detraction and vituperation which suggest.
cism.
either the exasperation of some physical ailment, or
a slight touch of mental aberration. And yet, side by side
with all this, there is an enthusiastic love of literature; a very
wide knowledge of it; a real capacity for judging, wherever
this capacity is allowed to exercise itself; a generosity (as in
the famous palinodes to Leigh Hunt and to Macaulay) which
only makes one regret the more keenly that this generosity
is so Epimethean; and, lastly, a faculty of phrase which,
irregular and uncertain as it is, apt as it is to fall on one:
side into bombast and on the other into bathos, is almost
always extraordinary. An anthology of critical passages might.
be extracted from Wilson which few critics could hope to-
surpass; but the first and probably the last exclamation of
any one who was driven by this to the contexts would be,
“How on earth could such good taste live in company with
a Siamese brother so hopelessly bad !”1
Wilson's admirers, from his daughter downwards, have
lamented that the Homer—a good thing but not his best-
The Homer was the only one of his longer and more connected
and the
critical exercitations that was included 2 in his
other larger
critical collected works, while three others—the Spenser,
collections. the Specimens of British Critics, and the dialogue
Dies Boreales—were excluded. The reasons of the exclusion
seem obvious enough. At a rough and unprofessional “cast-
off,” I should guess each of the two earlier series at about
1 As I am not speaking enfarin
hadamente about Wilson's faults, I
may fairly protest against an exagger-
ation of them. It is surely unlucky
of Mr Buxton Forman (Keats's Letters,
i. 46, ed. 1900) to talk of Blackwood's
Magazine having “a monopoly of
frowsy and unsavoury personal gibes"
in " the possession of Christopher
North,” when he had himself a few
papers earlier cited Hazlitt's almost
Bedlamite Billingsgate against Southey
in the Examiner.
? As the 4th vol. of Essays Critical and
Imaginative (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1856-
57). It follows Wilson's usual lines.
of a running study of the poem and
those who have written about it.
Much of it, as of the essay on the
Agamemnon which follows, is occupied
by a not uninteresting parallel-collec-
tion of translations.
WILSON.
427
300 of these present pages, and the Dies at nearer 400. This
would have meant at least another three volumes added
to a collection already consisting of twelve. The Devil's
Advocate, moreover, would have had other things to urge.
Whatever Wilson had gained by age and sobering (and he
had gained much), he had lost nothing of his tendency to
exuberance and expatiation. After the first paper or two,
the whole of the Spenser criticism is occupied with an ex-
amination of the First Book of the Faerie Queene only—the
best known part of the poem. The specimens of British
Critics—an admirable title which might have served for a
most novel, useful, and interesting work—means in fact a
very copious examination of Dryden's critical utterances and
a rather copious one of those of Pope—so that this professor
at any rate has not filled this hiatus. And the Dies, though
they have got rid of some of the superabundant animal spirits
of the Noctes, are it is necessary to say it) very much duller.
Yet the regretters had some reason. I myself could relin-
quish without much sorrow, from the matter actually repub-
lished, more than as much as would accommodate
The Spenser. +
ser the Spenser, nearly as much as would make room
for the Specimens also. As for the former, the famous com-
pliment of Hallam 1 (not a person likely, either on his good
or his bad side, to be too lenient to Wilson's faults) is at least
a strong prerogative vote. Nor does it a stand in need of this
backing. Wilson spends far too much time in slaying for-
gotten Satans that never were very Satanic—the silliness of
the excellent Hughes, the pedantry of the no less excellent
Spence, the half-heartedness, even, of Tom Warton. He does
not entirely discard his old horse-play and his old grudges,
though we can well pardon him for the fling that “the late
Mr Hazlitt" did not think Sidney and Raleigh gentlemen.
But he discards them to a very great extent; as well as the
old namby-pambiness which sometimes mars his earlier work,
when he is sentimental, and which, with him as with Landor,
1 Literature of Europe, chap. xiv.,
$ 82.
? It will be found in Blackwood's
Magazine, vols. xxxiv., xxxvi., and
xxxvii. (Edinburgh, 1833-35).
428
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
2
was a real danger. And the thing is full of admirable things,
-the generous admission that “Campbell's criticism is as
fine and true as his poetry”; the victorious defence of the
Spenserian stanza against those who think it a mere following
of the Italians: a hundred pieces of good exposition and appre-
ciation. While as for mere writing, we have “written fine"
after De Quincey and Wilson himself for some eighty years.
But have we often beaten this: “Thus here are many elegies
in one; but that one [Daphnaida] is as much a whole as the
sad sky with all its misty stars” ?1
The Specimens of British Critics, ten years later, maintains,
and even with rare exceptions improves, the standard of taste
in the Spenser, but its faults of disproportion, ir-
The Speci-
mens of relevance, and divagation are much greater. The
British
author himself once insinuates that his work may be
Critics.
* taken for “an irregular history of British Criticism,"
and it certainly might have been made such—"nor so very
irregular neither," as they would have said in the days when
Englishmen were allowed to write English, and grammarians
to prate about grammar. But Wilson cannot resist his pro-
pensity to course any hare that starts. As has been said
above, he has the compass of a by no means meagre volume
for dealing ostensibly with no British critics but Dryden and
Pope. If he dealt with them only, and only as critics, there
would not be much fault to find, though we might wish for
a better and fuller planned work. But not a quarter-not,
we might almost venture to say, a tenth-of his space is
occupied with them or with criticism. A very large part is
given to discussion, not merely of Dryden and Pope but of
Churchill as satirists; Dryden's plays, rhymed and other,
receive large consideration, his theory of translation almost
a larger, with independent digressions on every poet whom he
translates. Two or three whole papers are devoted to Chaucer,
not merely as Dryden translated him but in all his works, in
his versification, and so forth. I do not wonder that, seeing
i For this is one of the metaphors
which (as Théophile Gautier boasted
of his own, and as so few others can
boast) se suivent.
2 Ibid., vols. lvii., lviii. (1849).
WILSON.
429
a farrago so utterly non-correspondent to its title, any one
should have hesitated to reprint it. But I do know that there
is admirable criticism scattered all over it, that if it appeared
as Miscellanies in English Criticism, or Critical Quodlibeta, or
something of that sort, it would be worth the while of every
one who takes an interest in the subject to read it: and I do
think it a pity that it should be practically as if it were not.
Perhaps hardly as much can be said of Dies Boreales," which
was written when the author's bodily strength was breaking,
Dies and which betrays a relapse on senescent methods,
Boreales. with, naturally, no relief of juvenile treatment. The
dialogue form is resumed, but “Seward,” “Buller,” and “Tall-
boys” are, as Dryden might have said, “ the coolest and most
insignificant” fellows, the worst possible substitutes for
“Tickler,” and the Shepherd, and the wonderful eidolon of
De Quincey in the · Noctes. There is no gusto in the descrip-
tions, even of Loch Awe: and among the rare and melan-
choly flashes of the old genial tomfoolery, the representation
of a banquet at which these thin things, these walking
gentlemen, sit down with the ghost of Christopher to a
banquet of twenty-five weighed pounds of food per man, is
but ghastly and resurrectionist Rabelaisianism. But if there
is not the old exuberance, there is the old pleonasm. Wilson
seems unable to settle down to what is his real subject-critical
discussion of certain plays of Shakespeare and of Paradise Lost.
Nor, when the discussions come, are they quite of the first class,
though there are good things in them. The theory of a “double
time” in Shakespearemone literal and chronological, which is
often very short, and another extended by poetical licence is
ingenious, if somewhat fantastic, and, critically, quite unneces-
sary. But the main faults of the writer, uncompensated for the
most part by his merits, are eminently here:
These faults, to be particularised immediately, result in a
lack of directness, method, clean and clear critical grip, which
Faults is continuous and pervading. Forty pages could
in all, generally be squeezed into fourteen, and not seldom
into four, with great gain of critical, no loss of literary,
1 Blackwood's Magazine, vols. lxv.-lxvii, and lxxii. (1849-52).
430
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
merit. Now diffuseness, a bad fault everywhere, is an absol-
utely fatal one in critical literature that wishes to live. It is
hard enough for it to gain the ear of posterity anyhow; it is
simply impossible when the real gist of the matter is whelmed
in oceans of divagation, of skirmishes, courteous or rough-and-
tumble, with other critics, of fantastic flourish and fooling. It
is no blasphemy to the Poetics and the IIepi "Tfous them-
selves to say that to their terseness they owe at least half
their immortality.
In the earlier, better known, and more easily accessible work
the same merits and defects appear in brighter or darker colours,
nd in the as the case may be. In once more going through
republished the ten volumes of the Noctes, and the Recreations,
and the Essays, I can find nothing more representa-
tive than the Wordsworth Essay, the famous onslaught on
Tennyson's early Poems, and the eulogy of Macaulay's Lays,4
though I should now add An Hour's Talk about Poetry from
the Recreations. In the first the author tries to be systematic,
and fails; in the second he is jovially scornful, not without
some acute and generous appreciation; in the third he is
enthusiastically appreciative, but not, on the whole, critically
satisfactory; in the fourth he compasses English sea and land
to find one Great Poem, and finds it only in Paradise Lost.
Everywhere he is alive and full of life; in most places he is
suggestive and stimulating at intervals; nowhere is he criti-
.cally to be depended upon. Praise and blame; mud and
incense; vision and blindness alike lack that interconnection,
that “central tiebeam,” which Carlyle, in one of the least
unsympathetic and most clear-sighted of his criticisms of his
contemporaries, denied him. The leaves are not merely—are ·
not indeed at all—Sibylline; for it is impossible to work them
into, or to believe that they were ever inspired by, a continuous
1 There is much good as well as
bad criticism here; but it is almost
inevitable that the goodness should be
obscured to too many tastes, and the
bad intensified to almost all, by the
setting of High Jinks. Yet Wilson,
like Shakespeare according to Collier,
“could be very serious," and his de-
fence of Croker against Macaulay is
far more valid than has usually been
allowed.
? Essays, i. 387 sq.
3 Ibid., ii. 109 sq.
4 Ibid., üi. 386. 6i, 179.
DE QUINCEY.
431
anon
and integral thought or judgment. There is enjoyment on
the reader's part, as on the writer's, but it is “casual fruition":
there is even reasoning, but it is mostly on detached and
literally eccentric issues. A genial chaos: but first of all,
and, I fear, last of all, chaotic.
Wilson's neighbour, friend, contributor, and, in a kindly
fashion, half-butt, De Quinceyi is, like Southey, though in
De Quincey : different measure, condition, and degree, rather
his
puzzling as a critic. He, too, had enormous reading,
alies a keen interest in literature, and a distinctly critical
temperament. Moreover, during great part of his long life,
he never had any motive for writing on subjects that did not
please him : and, even when such a motive existed, he seems to
have paid sublimely little attention to it. The critical “ places”
in his works are in fact very numerous ; they meet the reader
almost passin, and often seem to promise substantive and im-
portant contributions to criticism. Nor, as a matter of fact,
are they ever quite negligible or often unimportant. They
constantly have that stimulating and attractive property
which is so valuable, and which seems so often to have been
acquired by " the Companions” from contact with the loadstone-
rock of Coleridge. Every now and then, as in the well-known
“Note on the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," De Quincey
will display evidence (whether original or suggested) of almost
dæmonic subtlety. Very often, indeed, he will display evidence,
if not of dæmonic yet of impish and almost fiendish acuteness,
as in his grim and (for a fellow artificial- Paradise seeker)
rather callous suggestion ? that Coleridge and Lamb should
have put down their loss of cheerfulness in later years not
to opium or to gin but to the later years themselves. “Ah,
dear Lamb," says the little monster,3 “ but note that the
1 As De Quincey had, for one who
was not a novelist, the probably unique
honour of four complete editions of his
Works in his last years and the genera-
tion succeeding his death, it is not
easy to refer to him. But the last
- Professor Masson's of 1890—has the
merit of methodical arrangement; and
its tenth volume contains most of the
purely critical things.
2 In Coleridge and Opium Eating.
3 As it is very dangerous to write
about De Quincey, let me observe that
this is a phrase of Mr Thackeray's
about another person, and implies affec-
tion and even admiration.
432
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
drunkard was fifty-six years old and the songster twenty-
three!”
Yet De Quincey is scarcely-on the whole, and as a whole-
to be ranked among the greatest critics. To begin with, his
and per unconquerable habit of “rigmarole” is constantly
versities as leading him astray: and the taste for jaunty per-
critica sonality which he had most unluckily imbibed from
Wilson leads him astray still further, and still more gravely
and damagingly. In the volume on The Lake Poets I do not
suppose that there are twenty pages of pure criticism, putting
all orts and scraps together. The main really critical part
of the essay on Lamb—then a fresh and most tempting subject
- is a criticism of- Hazlitt! The extremely interesting
subject of “Milton v. Southey and Landor” (though the paper
does contain good things, and, in particular, some excellent
remarks on Metre) is all frittered and whittled off into
shavings of quip, and crank, and gibe, and personality. The
same is the case with what should have been, and in part is,
one of his best critical things, the article on Schlosser's
Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. The present writer
will not be suspected, by friend or foe, of insisting ruthlessly
on a too grave and chaste critical manner : but De Quincey
here is too much for anything and anybody. “For Heaven's
sake, my good man," one may say almost in his own words,
“ do leave off fooling and come to business.” In the very long
essay on Bentley he has little or no criticism at all; and here,
as well as in the “Cicero," he is too much stung and tormented
by his hatred of the drab style of Conyers Middleton to see
anything else when he gets near to that curious person, as he
must in both. On Keats, without any reason for hostility, he
has almost the full inadequacy of his generation, with not much
less on Shelley; and when he comes to talk even of Words-
worth's poetry, though there was no one living whom he
honoured more, he is not very much less unsatisfactory.
Nor are these inadequacies and perversities limited to
English. There was a good excuse (more than at one time
people used to think under the influence of the fervent Goethe-
worship of the mid-nineteenth century) for his famous and
DE QUINCEY.
433
literatures.
furious attack on Wilhelm Meister ; but what are we to think
word of a man who (admitting that much has been said
to aiš and thought of it) coolly “dismisses,”1 without so
cres. much as an unfavourable opinion, the lyric and
miscellaneous poetry of one of the greatest lyric poets of
Europe, or the world ? He persistently belittles French
literature: and he had, of course, a right to give his judgment.
But, unfortunately, he not only does not give evidence of
knowledge to support his condemnation, but does give negative
evidence of ignorance. That ignorance, as far as contemporary
literature went, seems to have been almost absolute. Even
Chateaubriand (a rhetorician after his own heart) he merely
names in his dealing with French writers in company with
Florian (!), and expressly denies him rhetoric; while the
subject before the seventeenth century seems to have been
equally a blank to him. But he is most wayward and most
uncritical about the classics. He gives himself all the airs
of a profound scholar, and seems really to have been a very
fair one. Yet that “Appraisal of Greek Literature” which
Professor Masson has ruthlessly resuscitated ? might almost
have been written by the most ignorant of the “Moderns,” two
hundred years ago, for its omissions and commissions. He
seems to have been in his most Puckish frame of mind if he
was not serious; if he was, actum est (or almost so) with him
as a critic.
The truth seems to be that he had no very deep, wide, or
fervent love of poetry as such. He could appreciate single
lines and phrases,—such as
“Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,"
or
"Beyond the arrows, views, and shouts of men";
but on the whole his curious, and of course strictly “inter-
ested,” heresy about prose - poetry made him as lukewarm
Their towards poetry pure and simple as it made him
causes. unjust to the plainer prose, such as that of
Middleton, that of Swift, and even (incomprehensible as this
* In his “ biography" of Goethe. 2 Vol. x., ed. cit. Date, 1838-39.
UIT
2 E
434
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
particular injustice may seem) that of Plato. Yet we should
not be sorry for this heresy, because it gave us, independently
of the great creative passages of the Confessions, the Suspiria,
and the rest, the critical pieces of the Rhetoric and the
Style. It is somewhat curious that in the midst of an apprecia-
tive period we should have to fall back upon “preceptist”
work. But it is certainly here that De Quincey, though not
without his insuperable faults, becomes of most consequence
in the History of Criticism. In fact, he may be said to have
been almost the “instaurator”l of this preceptist criticism
which, since its older arguments had become nearly useless
from the disuse of the Neo-classic appreciation upon which they
were based, or which was based upon them, very urgently and
particularly required such instauration.
The Rhetoric in particular, with all its defects, has not been
superseded as a preceptist canvas, which the capable teacher
can broider and patch into a competent treatise of
The
Rhetoric the ornater English style. Its author's unconquer-
and the able waywarduess appears in his attempt-based
Style.
in the most rickety fashion and constantly self-
contradictory - to combine the traditional and the popular
senses of the word in a definition of Rhetoric as unconvinced
fine writing,—the deliberate elaboration of mere tours de force
in contradistinction to genuine and heartfelt Eloquence. But
its view is admirably wide—the widest up to its time that can
be found anywhere, I think; it is instinct with a crotchety
but individual life; and if the defects of the new method
appear when we compare it with Rapin or Batteux, the merits
thereof appear likewise, and in ample measure. Nor, despite
some digression, is there much of the author's too frequent
tomfoolery. His erudition, his interest in the subject, and
(towards the end) his genuine and alarmed eagerness to con-
tradict Whately's damaging pronouncements as to poetry and
pruse, keep him out of this. The Style is much more question-
1 As such it will prove interesting to
compare him with Nisard or Planche,
especially the latter. But the com-
parison will, I fear, bring out that
superiority of French criticism at this
time which, denying it at others, I
fully admit. (See the larger History
for dealings with these.)
DE QUINCEY.
435
able, and has much more ephemeral matter in it-the author
rides out all his favourite cock-horses by turns, and will often
not bate us a single furlong of the journey to Banbury Cross
on them. Moreover, much of it is occupied with often just
condemnation of the special vices of ordinary English news-
paper-and-book style in the earlier middle nineteenth century
-Satans which, though not quite extinct, have given main
place to other inhabitants of Pandemonium. But the paper,
with the subsidiary pieces on Language and Conversation, will
never lose interest and importance.
No incident in the ruthless duty of the critical historian has
given me more trouble, or been carried through with more
His com- reluctance, than this handling of De Quincey. I
pensations. have to acknowledge a great, a very early, and a
constantly continued indebtedness to him. I could, as was
hinted at the beginning of this notice, compile a long and
brilliant list of separate instances in which his Old-man-of-
the-sea caprices have left him free to give admirable critical
pronouncements. His suggestive and protreptict quality cannot
be overrated. On a philosophical point of criticism he is very
rarely wrong, though even here he is too apt to labour the
point, as in his deductions in the Appraisal from the true and
important caution that “sublime” is a defective and delusive
word for the subject of Longinus. But he is of those critics,
too commonly to be found in the present stage of our inquiry,
who are eminently unsafe—who require to be constantly sur-
rounded with keepers and guards. I do not remember that Mr
Matthew Arnold often, or ever, refers to De Quincey. But I
cannot help thinking that, in his strictures on the English critics
of his earlier time, he must often have had him in mind. He
could not have charged him with narrow reading. He could
not have charged him with mere insularity, or with flattery of
his co-insulars. But he might easily have produced him,—and
it would have been very difficult to get him out of the Arnoldian
clutches—as a victim of that "eternal enemy of Art, Caprice.”
There are few critics of whom we have been less allowed to
1 The objection of some folk to this for by their spelling it "protreptric."
useful word may be perhaps accounted
436
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
form a definite and well-grounded opinion, than of one of the
Lockhart.
most famous of the practitioners of the art in the
"*first half of the nineteenth century. Some, I should
hope, of the very unjust obloquy which used to rest on Lock-
hart for his “scorpion ” quality has been removed by Mr Lang's
Life: but of his more than thirty years of criticism not much
more is accessible than what was public the day after his
death. It is true that this— the main articles of it being
the Scott, the Burns, the Theodore Hook, and the earlier Peter's
Letters is a very goodly literary baggage indeed, and one
which any man of letters might consent to have produced, at
the cost of a large curtailment of his peau de chagrin. It
Difficulty is true, further, that great part of it puts Lockhart
with his in the forefront of the critical army. But its
criticism. criticism, like the mousquetaireship of Aramis, is
but of an interim order; and of the great body of anonymous
reviewing, wherein at once the sting and the strength of his
critical powers must have been revealed, we have but few
instances even indirectly authenticated, as he has now been
cleared of the famous Quarterly review of Tennyson's early
work.2 Eking this further with indications from letters and
the like, we shall find in Lockhart a notable though a more
accomplished instance of the class of critic to which, on the
other side, Jeffrey also belonged. He is differentiated from
Jeffrey by a harder, if clearer and stronger, intellect, by more
critical system, and, no doubt, by less amiability of temper.
He had formed his taste by a deeper and wider education, he
possessed a better style, and he had, as his non-critical work
shows, far more imagination.
The “Tennyson” paper, though not his own, was published
min man under his editorship, and it represents the school
son review of criticism to which he belongs, very far from
at the best, but far also from at the worst. This
worst would have been nearly reached by him, if we could
1 This book, which often occurs in ated, is less interesting.
catalogues at a very moderate price, 2 For this, with the earlier achieve-
may be strongly recommended to in- ment on Keats, has now (1910) been
telligent book-buyers. Janus, another indisputably fathered, in the Quarterly
waif, in which he and Wilson collabor- itself, on Croker.
not
LOCKHART.
437
believe the earlier “Keats” article in Blackwood to be his
-a charge which, fortunately, is also pretty certainly to be
transferred to the heavily laden shoulders of Croker. Un-
doubtedly Lockhart was capable of indulging in that style
of sneering insolence which, though it is intellectually at a
higher level by far than the other style of hectoring abuse, is
nearly as offensive, and less excusable because it requires and
denotes this very intellectual superiority. But the author of
the Tennyson article displays neither. He is merely polite and
even good-tempered for the most part; and it is constantly
necessary to remember, that if there were beauties which ought
to have drawn his eyes away from the faults, there were, in
the earlier versions of these early poems, faults enough to draw
the eyes of any critic of his stamp away from the beauties.
There were trivial and mawkish things which have disappeared
entirely; flawed things which have been reforged into perfect
ring and temper; things, in the main precious, which were
marred by easily removable disfigurements. From unwilling-
ness to accept the later stages of a movement of which he
had joyfully shared the earlier, Lockhart could not have been
cleared, but Croker can.
In Lockhart's own undoubted work little requires apology.
Quite early, in Peter's Letters, he had defended the genius
ode of Coleridge against his detractors with admirable
ridge, Burns, vigour and sense. He is extraordinarily good on
Scott, and Burns. The abundant critical remarks which he has
Hook.
interspersed in the Life of Scott itself, afford a won-
derful exhibition of sensitiveness and fineness of taste, with
nothing to be set on the other side except the very pardonable
tendency to undervalue and grudge a little in the case of the
non-Scottish novels. But an almost better instance of Lock-
hart's critical power, on the biographical as well as the literary
side, is to be found in his article on Theodore Hook, with its
remarkable welcome of the new school of Victorian novelists,
which shows that his want of receptivity, as regards new
poetry, did not extend to prose fiction.
On the whole, we have few better examples than Lockhart,
if we have any, of the severer type of critic--of the newer
438
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY. ·
school, but with a certain tendency towards the older—a little
His general too prone, when his sympathies were not specially
critical enlisted, to think that his subjects would be “nane
character. the waur of a hanging”-a little too quick to ban,
and too slow to bless—but acute, scholarly, logical, wide enough
in range, when his special prejudices did not interfere, and
entitled to some extent to throw the responsibility of those pre-
judices on the political and literary circumstances of his time.
If the pixies had not doomed Hartley Coleridge 1 to a career
(or an absence of one) so strange and in a manner so sad, there
Hartley would pretty certainly have been a case, not merely of
Coleridge. poetic son succeeding poetic father, against the alleged
impossibility or at least non-occurrence of which succession
he himself mildly protested, but of critical faculty likewise
descending in almost the highest intensity from father to son.
And the not ungracious creatures might plead that, after all,
opportunity was not lacking. During that strange latter half
of his lifetime when he fulfilled, more literally than happily,
the poetic prophecy of Wordsworth in his childhood, he
seems to have had very little other occupation-indoors at
least, besides criticism actual and practical. But, with the
inveterate Coleridgean habit of " marginalling," and the equally
inveterate one of never turning the Marginalia to. any solid
account, the results of this practice, save in the case of the
famous copy of Anderson's Poets (shabbiest and slovenliest
treasure-house of treasures immortal and priceless!) which
bears his father's and uncle's notes as well as his own, are
mostly Sibylline Leaves after the passage of the blast. When
Thomam com a man commits his critical thoughts to the narrow
dition of his margins of weekly newspapers unbound-indeed, if
criticism. he had them bound, the binder would no doubt have
exterminated them after the fashion of his ruthless race-he
might just as well write on water, and better on sand. Still,
the disjecta membra do exist–in the Biographia Borealis, or
Northern Worthies, to some extent; in the Essays, collected by
i Works, 7 vols. (London, 1851-52),
ed. Derwent Coleridge; Poems and
Memoir, 2 vols.; Essays, 2; Northern
Worthies, 3. An eighth, of Fragments,
was promised; but if it ever appeared,
I have not seen it.
HARTLEY COLERIDGE.
439
the pious, if sometimes a little patronising, care of his brother
Derwent, to a much greater; and perhaps in one instance only,
the “Massinger and Ford” Introduction, after a fashion in a
manner finished. Yet even here the intended critical coda is
wanting, and the inevitable critical divagation too much
present.
But in all this there is also present, after a fashion of which
I can remember no other instance, the evidences of a critical
genius which not only did not give itself, but which
Its quality.
wage absolutely refused itself, a chance. Hartley Cole-
ridge has never, I think, been the subject of much study: but a
more tempting matter for “problem” lovers can hardly exist.
Nothing in his known history accounts for the refusal. He
was admittedly not temperate : but no one has ever pretended
that he was the slave of drink to the extent to which his
father was the slave of opium; his interest in literature was
intense and undying—that every page that he ever wrote
shows beyond possibility of doubt; and the fineness of his
critical perceptions is equally indubitable. But the extra-
ordinary and, I think, unparalleled intellectual indolence-
or rather intellectual paralysis — which beset him,
seems to have prevented him not merely from writ-
ing, but from that mere reading in which men, too indolent to
make any great use of it, constantly indulge as a mere pleasure
and pastime. He confesses frankly that he had read very little
indeed: and this, though he had been almost all his life within
reach of, and for great part of it actually under the same roof
with, Southey's hardly equalled library. This ignorance leads
him wrong not only on matters of fact, but also on matters of
opinion : indeed, he seldom goes wrong, except when he does
not know enough about the matter.
It is unfortunate that we have hardly anything finished
from him in the critical way, except the “Massinger and
Ford” and the Essays he wrote for Blackwood, while these
last bear such a strong impress of Wilson's own manner1
i
Defects
seems to have
1 "The Professor,” it is hardly nec. . he seems to have regarded with par-
essary to say, was an early and lifelong ticular affection.
friend and neighbour of Hartley, whom
440
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
that it is impossible not to think them Christopherically
sophisticated. In the Northern Worthies he professes not to
meddle with Criticism at all, or to touch it very little. In the
“Marvell,” however, the “Bentley," the “Ascham," the
“Mason," the “Roscoe," and the “Congreve," he is better than
his word, and gives some excellent criticism as a seasoning to
the biography. One cannot, indeed, but grudge the time that
and ex- he spends on such worthless stuff as Elfrida and
amples. Caractacus, but we must remember that in that
generation of transition, the generation of Milman and Talfourd
earlier, of Henry Taylor and others later, the possibility of
reviving the serious drama was a very important subject
indeed. Hartley, whose reverence for his father is as pleasant
as his affection for his mother, evidently thought much of
Remorse and Zapolya, and might probably, if he ever could
have got his will to face any hedge, have tried such things
himself. On Congreve he is nearly at his best: and his essay
certainly ought to be included in that unique volume of
variorum critical documents on the Restoration Drama, which
somebody some day may have the sense to edit.
But he would be neither Hartley nor Coleridge if he were
not best in the Marginalia, good as the “ Massinger and Ford”
introduction is in parts. The “ Anderson ” notes, and those on
Shakespeare, deserve the most careful reading: and I shall be
man who wrote them at least had it in him to have made no
inadequate thirdsman to his father and Hazlitt.
Very few people nowadays, in all probability, think much
of “bright, broken Maginn” 2 as a critic; and of those few
.. some perhaps associate his criticism chiefly with
Maginn.
warme such examples of it as the article on Grantley
Berkeley, which almost excused the retaliation on its unfor-
1 It is, perhaps, not officious to sub-
join a reminder that we have the
curious pleasure of S. T. C.'s notes on
Hartley in the Biographia Borealis.
One of these — an objection to the
phrase "prose Shakespeare" for Hey-
wood-is very odd, as apparently show-
ing forgetfulness of the fact that the
phrase is not his eldest son's, but his
oldest friend's.
2 Miscellanies, Prose and Verse, by
William Maginn, ed. R. W. Montagu.
2 vols., London, 1885.
MAGINN.
441
tunate publisher, or the vain attempt to "bluff" out the Keats
matter by ridiculing Adonais. Even as to most of his exercita-
tions in this very unlovely department, or rather corruption,
of our art, there is perhaps something to be said for him. He
fights, as a rule, not with Lockhart's dagger of ice-brook
temper, nor with Wilson's smashing bludgeon, but with a kind
of horse - whip, stinging indeed enough, but letting out no
life and breaking no bones at worst and heaviest, at lightest
not much more than switching playfully. Had there,
however, been nothing to plead for him but this, there would
have been no room for him here. But his favourite way of
proceeding in his lighter critical articles, though not invented
by himself (as it was not of course invented even by Canning
and his merry men, from whom Maginn took it), the method
His parody. of parody-criticism 1 is, if not a very high variety,
criticisms and especially not in the least a convincing one,
still one which perhaps deserves a few lines of reference, and
of which he was a really great master.
Still, a mere allusion would suffice for them if they stood
alone, and Maginn's paragraph might be completed by observ-
more ing that he has repaired the absolutely false state-
serious ment, that “Michael Angelo was a very indifferent
S poet," by the far too true one, that “Any modern
sermon, after the Litany of the Church of England, is an
extreme example of the bathos."2 But his Essay on Dr
Farmer's Learning of Shakespeare, and the much shorter but
still substantial Lady Macbeth, 4 are by no means to be omitted
or merely catalogued. These two pieces show that Maginn, if
only he could have kept his hand from the glass, and his pen
aged
1 They are scattered all over the
Memoirs of Morgan O'Doherty, and
often form independent items of the
Miscellanies. The style has borne good
fruit since in Aytoun and Martin's Bon
Gaultier Ballads (1845), in Aytoun's
Firmilian (1854), and in the work of
Calverley and Traill (v. sup.)
"after" the Authorised.
2 It would have been interesting to
hear Maginn on the Revised Version
3 Ed. cit., ii. 1-116. Let me guard
carefully against being supposed my.
self to speak disrespectfully of Farmer,
whose Essay will be found recently
reprinted in Mr Nichol Smith's collec-
tion. Farmer is at least as right
against his adversaries as Maginn
against him.
4 Ibid., pp. 117-144.
442
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
from mere gambols or worse, not only might but would have
been one of the most considerable of English critics. The
goodness, and the various goodness, of both is all the more
remarkable because Maginn seems to have owed little or
nothing to the influence of Coleridge. Almost the only fault
in the first is the hectoring incivility with which Farmer
himself is spoken of, and this, as we have seen, is but too old
a fault with critics, while it was specially prevalent at this
period, and our own is far from guiltless of it. But the sense
and learning of the paper are simply admirable: and Maginn's
possession of almost the last critical secret is shown by his
wise restraint in arguing that Farmer's argument for Shake-
speare's ignorance is invalid, without going on, as some would
do, and have done, to argue the poet omniscient by learn-
ing as well as by genius. As for the Lady Macbeth, the sense
is reinforced, and the learning (here not necessary) replaced,
by taste and subtlety of the most uncommon kind. I do not
know a piece of dramatic character - criticism (no, not the
thousand-times- praised thing in Wilhelm Meister) more un-
erringly delicate and right. And this man, not, as the cackle
goes, by “neglect of genius,” by the wicked refusal of patrons
to patronise, not by anything of the kind, but by sheer lack of
self-command, wasted his time in vulgar journalism at the
worst, and with rare exceptions? in mere sport-making at the
best !
We have been occupied since the beginning of this chapter
by men who, save in the case of Hartley Coleridge, were
closely connected with the periodical press, and owed almost
all their communication with the public to it. We now come
to a pair, greater than any of them, who were indeed “ contrib-
utors,” but not contributors mainly.
Another great name is added, by Macaulay, to the long and
pleasant list of our examples how “Phibbus. car” has, in un-
expected and puzzling but always interesting ways, “ made or
1 In prose such as The Story without Quart, with at least some others.
a Tail, and in verse such as The Pewter
MACAULAY.
443
marred the" not always “ foolish Fates” of critics and criticism.
When we first meet him as a critic of scarcely four-
Macaulay.
9o and-twenty, in the articles contributed to Knights
Quarterly, we may feel inclined to say that nobody whom
we have yet met (except perhaps Southey) can have had at that
age a wider range of reading, and nobody at all an apparently
keener relish for it. He is, what Southey was not, a competent
scholar in the classics; he knows later (if unfortun-
His excep-
tional com- ately not quite earlier) English literature extra-
petence in ordinarily well; he has, what was once common
some ways.
way with us, but was in his days getting rare, and has
since grown rarer, a pretty thorough knowledge of Italian, and he
is certainly not ignorant of French (though perhaps at no time
did he thoroughly relish its literature), while he is later to
add Spanish and German. But he does not only know, he
loves. There is already much personal rhetoric and mannerism
especially in the peroration of his review of Mitford's Greece,
where he reproaches that Tory historian with his neglect of
Greek literature. But it is quite evidently sincere. He dis-
played similar enthusiasm, combined in a manner not banal,
in his earlier article on Dante, and he shows wonderful and
prophetic knowledge of at least parts of literature in his
paper on the Athenian Orators, as well as in the later article
on History, belonging to his more recoguised literary period.
From a candidate of this kind, but just qualified to be a
deacon of the Church in years, we may surely expect a
The early deacon in the craft of criticism before very long,
articles. particularly when he happens to possess a ready- .
made style of extraordinarily, and not merely, popular qualities.
There are some who would say that this expectation was fully
realised: I am afraid I cannot quite agree with them, and it
is my business here to show why.
We have said that, even in these early exercitations,
Macaulay's characteristics appear strongly : and among not
. His draw- the least strongly appearing are some from which,
backs. unless a man disengages himself, he shall very hardly
become a really great literary critic. The first of these is the
well-known and not seriously to be denied tendency, not merely
444
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
.
to “cocksureness," but to a sweeping indulgence in super-
latives, a “kuock - me-down - these - knaves” gesticulation,
which is the very negation of the critical attitude. Even the
sound, the genuine, the well-deserved literary preferences
above referred to lose not a little by this tone of swagger-
ing sententiousness in their expression; and they lose a
great deal more by the simultaneous appearance of the hope-
lessly uncritical habit of making the whites more dazzling
by splashing the deepest black alongside of them. The very
eulogy of Dante as a whole seems to Macaulay incomplete
without an elaborate pendant of depreciation of Petrarch,
while “Tasso, Marino, Guarini, and Metastasio” are swept
into a dust-bin of common disdain, and we are told that the
Secchia Rapita," the best poem of its kind in some respects,"
is “painfully diffuse and languid," qualities which one might
have thought destructive of any “bestness.”
It is of less importance-because the fault is so common
as to be almost universal—that the “Mitford” displays very
strong political prejudice, which certainly affects,
cal choking as it should not do, the literary judgment. Mitford
of the good may have been an irregular and capricious writer,
but the worst vices of the worst Rymer - and -
Dennis criticism appear in the description of him as “bad.”
His style could not possibly be so described by a fair critic who
did not set out with the major premiss that whatever is unusual
is bad. And not only here, but even in the purely literary essays,
even at their most enthusiastically literary pitch, we may, I
. think, without any unfairness, perceive an undertone, an under-
current, of preference for the not purely literary sides of the
matter—for literature as it bears on history, politics, manners,
man, instead of for literature in itself and for itself.
With the transference from Knights to the Edinburgh, which
was political and partisan-political, or nothing, these seeds oî
evil grew and flourished, and to some extent choked the others.
The “Milton," the “Machiavelli,” the early and, for a long time,
uncollected “Dryden,” serve as very hot-beds for them. All
three are, as the French would say, jonchés with superlatives,
arranged side by side in contrast, like that of a zebra. The
seed.
MACAULAY.
445
"Dryden”-a very tempting subject for this kind of work-
is not the worst critically; indeed it is perhaps the best.
It is, at any rate, far the most really literary, and it may
not be unfair to think that this had something to do with the
fact that Macaulay did not include it in the collected Essays.
The real locus classicus, however, for Macaulay's criticism
is perhaps to be found, not in his published works at all, but
mom in the letters which he wrote to Flower Ellis from
surveys in Calcutta, taken in connection with their context in
etters. Sir George Trevelyan's book, and especially with
the remarkable avowal which occurs in a letter, a very little
later, to Macvey Napier. Macaulay, as is well known, availed
himself of his Indian sojourn to indulge in almost a debauch
of reading, especially in pure literature, and especially (again)
in the classics. And his reflections to Ellis, a kindred spirit,
are of the most interesting kind. He tells his correspondent
that he has gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite
astonishing to himself. He had been enraptured with Italian,
little less pleased with Spanish, but when he went back to
Greek he felt as if he had never known before what intellect-
ual enjoyment was. It is impossible to imagine a happier
critical diathesis: and the individual symptoms confirm it.
Admiration of Æschylus is practically a passport for a
man claiming poetical taste: admiration of Thucydides holds
the same place in prose. And Macaulay puts them both
super cethera. But it is a tell-tale that his admiration for
Thucydides (of whom he says he had formerly not thought
much) seems to have been determined by his own recent atten-
tion to “historical researches and political affairs." He does
full justice to Lucian. He is capital on Niebuhr: a good deal
less capital on the Greek Romances; for though Achilles Tatius
is not impeccable in taste and exceeding peccable in morality,
it is absurd to call his book “detestable trash.” Perhaps he
is hard on Statius as compared with Lucan: but here taste
is free. It is more difficult to excuse him for the remark that
St Augustine in his Confessions (a boak not without interest)
“expresses himself in the style of a field-preacher.” The
? Life, p. 309 sq., ed. cit.
446
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
present writer is not fond of conventicles, either house or
hedge. But if he knew of a field-preacher who preached as
St Augustine writes, he fears he might be tempted astray.
And then, after the six months' voyage home in the slow
His con- Lord Hungerford (which must have been six months'
fession. hard reading, though not penal), comes the great
avowal to Macvey Napier, now editor of the Edinburgh :-
of genijuestions of which should be
You cannot suspect me of any affectation of modesty: and you
will therefore believe me that I tell you what I sincerely think,
when I say that I am not successful in analysing the effect of works
of genius. I have written several things on historical, political, and
moral questions of which, on the fullest reconsideration, I am not
ashamed, and by which I should be willing to be estimated; but
I have never written a page of criticism on poetry or the fine arts
which I would not burn if I had the power. Hazlitt used to say of
himself, “I am nothing if not critical.” The case with me is ex-
actly the reverse; I have a strong and acute enjoyment of works
of the imagination, but I have never habituated myself to dissect
them. . . . Trust to my knowledge of myself; I never in my life
was more certain of anything than of what I tell you, and I am sure
that Lord Jeffrey will tell you exactly the same.1
Such a deliberate judgment on himself by such a man, close
on the “ age of wisdom,” 2 after fifteen years' constant literary
practice, is practically final; but probably not a few readers
of Sir George's book felt, as the present writer did, that it
merely confirms an opinion formed by themselves long before
they ever read it.
At any rate, in nearly all the best known Essays the
literary interest dwindles and the social-historic grows. I
do not object, as some do, to the famous “Robert
*** Montgomery.” This sort of criticism ought not
to be done too often: and no one but a Dennis of the other
kind enjoys doing it, except when the criminal's desert is of
peculiar richness. But it has to be done sometimes, and it
is here done scientifically, without rudeness I think, with as
much justice 3 as need be “for the good of the people," and well.
The Essays. v
1 Life, p. 343 ed. cit.
? He was thirty-eight.
3 One of the injustices is curious
from a man of Scottish blood, though
every Englishman would commit it,
as I own I should have done till very
MACAULAY.
447
Still, it is not in the hangman's drudgery, it is in the herald's
good office, that Macaulay's critical weakness shows. There
are some who, in all good faith and honest indignation, will
doubtless cry “What! is there no literary interest in the
“Milton” itself or in the “Bunyan”? Certainly there is.
But, in the first case, let the Devil's Advocate's devil (it is
too easy for his chief) remind us that there is very strong
party feeling in both—that no less a person than Mr Matthew
Arnold denied criticism to the “Milton ”—that the author
of the “Bunyan” himself puts in the forefront of his praise of
The Pilgrim's Progress its “strong human interest,” and that
he goes on to make one of his too frequent uncritical contrasts,
and one of his very rare gross blunders of fact, as to the
Faerie Queene. And, besides, he was still in the green tree,
as he was also when he gave the, in part, excellent criticism
of the “Byron,” where the sweeping general lines of the
sketch of the poetry of “correctness” follow those of some
inferior but more original surveys of Macaulay's editor Jeffrey.
And though there is interesting criticism in the “Boswell,”
it is pushed to the wall by the (I fear it must be said) ignoble
desire to “dust the varlet's jacket," and pay Croker off in the
Edinburgh for blows received at St Stephen's.
Indeed it would be quite idle to stipulate that anything here
said to the detriment of Macaulay's criticism is said relatively,
if there were not a sort of doubtless honest folk who seem
to think that denying a man the riches of Cresus means that
he is penniless and in debt. Macaulay was a critic on his
day-a good one for a long time, and perhaps always a great
one in potentia. But his criticism was slowly edged out
by its rivals or choked by its own parasitic plants. It
late in my reviewing life. It is the
satire on the comparison of a woman's
eyes to dew on “a bramble," which
of course in England means a bush,
and in Scotland a berry. I wonder
whether R. L. S. meant to appease the
other poor Robert's manes when he
wrote the phrase "eyes of gold and
bramble-dew," and I should have asked
him had Fate permitted.
It may seem whimsical: but I
doubt whether any one of a really
critical ethos would put down, even in
his private diary, that a private enemy
and a hostile reviewer was “a bad,
a very bad man, a scandal to politics
and letters." Criticism herself would,
I think, condescend to give any of her
favourite children's ears an Apollonian
twitch.
448
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
occupies about a twentieth part (to adopt his own favourite
arithmetical method) of the Essay on Bacon, about one-tenth
of that on Temple. In the famous piece on “Restoration
Drama" it is the moral and social, not the literary or even
the dramatic, side of the matter that interests Macaulay : and
in dealing with Addison himself, a man who, though not quite
literary or nothing, was certainly literary first of all, the purely
literary handling is entirely subordinated to other parts of
the treatment. This may be a good thing or it may be a
bad thing: the tendenz - critics, and the criticism - of - life
critics, and the others, are quite welcome to take the first view
if they please. But that it is a thing; that Macaulay him-
self acknowledged it, and that despite his unsurpassed de-
votion to literature and his great performance therein-it must
affect our estimate of him, according to the schedules and
specifications of this book, is not, I think, deniable by any
honest inquirer.
A phenomenon by no means wholly dissimilar in kind, but
conditioned as to extent and degree by the differing tempera-
Similan ments and circumstances of the two men, may be
dwindling seen in the criticism of Macaulay's great contem-
tyle. porary, opposite, and correotive, Carlyle;1 and those
who care for such investigations might find it interesting to
compare both with the admitted instances of dwindling literary
interest-not critical but simply enjoying-in cases like that
of Darwin. But leaving this extension as out of our province,
and returning to our two great men of letters themselves, we
shall find differences enough between them, here as elsewhere,
but a remarkable agreement in the gradual ascendancy, ob-
tained by anthropology over (in the old and good sense, not the
modern perversion) philology. Carlyle had always the more
catholic, as Macaulay had the exacter, sense of literary form;
but it may be suspected that at no time was the form .chiefly
eloquent to either: and in Carlyle's attitude for many years
after the somewhat tardy commencement of his actual critical
career, something ominous may be observed. It may seem
1 Carlyle was an older man than original work later.
Macaulay, but he began to publish
CARLYLE.
449
tal stimulation to a who acknowledge no
and who rank him
strange and impious to some of those who acknowledge no
greater debt for mental stimulation to any one than to Carlyle,
and who rank him among the greatest in all literature, to find
one who joins them in this homage, and perhaps outgoes most
of them therein, questioning his position as a critic. Let us
therefore examine the matter somewhat carefully.
Carlyle's criticism, like his other qualities, interpenetrates
nearly all his work, from Sartor to the “Kings of Norway":
it appears in the Life of Schiller,1 in Heroes and Hero-
Worship, in Past and Present, in the Life of Sterling, while it
fuliginates itself to share in the general fuliginousness of the
Latter-day Pamphlets, and is strewn even over the greater
biographies and histories of the Cromwell and the Frederick.
We shall, however, lose nothing, and gain much, by confining
ourselves mainly to the literary constituents of the great collec-
tion of Essays in this place. The discussion can be warranted
to be well leavened with remembrance of the other work.
Who indeed is more rememberable than Carlyle? Of late
years, partly from having read them so much, partly from
having so much else to read, I have left parts of these Essays
unopened for a long time. Yet, in looking them through for
the purpose of this present writing, I have found myself con-
stantly, even in the least familiar and famous parts, able to
shut the book and complete clause, sentence, or even to some
extent paragraph, like a text, or a collect, or a tag of Horace
or Virgil. But in this re-reading it has struck me, even more
forcibly than of old, how much Carlyle's strictly critical in-
clinations, if not his strictly critical faculities, waned as he
grew older. In the earlier Essays—those written before and
during the momentous period of the Craigenputtock sojourn-
there is a great deal of purely or almost purely literary criti-
cism of an excellent kind—sober and vigorous, fresh and well
disciplined. There may be, especially in regard to Richter and
1 Any one anxious really to appreci- been largely practised by anybody ex-
ate Carlyle's potentia as a literary critic cept apart - dwelling stars like Cole-
may be specially commended to this. ridge. But it brands the author as a
It was written, of course, not merely great critic if he chose. He did not
before he developed hiş own style, but wholly choose : and, later, he refused,
before the freer modern criticism had
2 F
450
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Goethe, a slightly exaggerated backing of the German side.
But it is hardly more than slightly exaggerated, and the
treatment generally is of the most thorough kind compatible
with an avowed tendency towards “philosophical” rather than
“formal” criticism. Professor Vaughan was certainly justified
in including part of the Goethe in his selected specimens of
English criticism for its general principles and examples of
method. Nor is Carlyle less to be praised for his discharge
of the more definitely practical part of the critic's business.
He is thought of generally as “splenetic and rash”: but it
would be impossible to find anywhere a more good-humoured,
and (in parts at least) a more judicial censure than that of
William Taylor's preposterous German Poetry, or a firmer,
completer, and at the same time less excessive condemnation
than that of the equally preposterous method of Croker's
original Boswell. We may see already that the critic evidently
prefers matter to form, and that he is by no means quite
catholic even in his fancy for matter. But he has a right to
be this; and altogether there are few things in English criti-
The earlier cism better worth reading, marking, and learning,
Essays. by the novice, than the literary parts of these earlier
volumes of Essays. It may be that the channels in which his
ink first flowed (especially that rather carefully, not to say
primly, banked and paved one of the Edinburgh) imposed some
restriction on him; it may be that he found the yet unpub-
lished, or just published, Sartor a sufficient “lasher” to draw
off the superfluous flood and foam of his fancy. But the facts
are the facts.
And so, too, it is the fact that, later, he draws away from
The later.
the attitude of purely literary consideration, if he
“ does not, as he sometimes still later does, take up
one actually hostile to this. The interesting “Characteristics”
i London, 1896.
2 Not that all Taylor's ideas were
preposterous. He and others of the
Norwich School would make a good
excursus. Even the “quotidian and
stimulant” theory, of which Carlyle
makes such fun, might have a chance
with Carlyle's own “highest aim of a
nation."
3 More especially those on the Ni-
belungenlied and Early German Poetry
generally. These could hardly have
been better done.
CARLYLE.
451
(as early as 1831) is one of the places most to be recommended
to people who want to know what Carlyle really was, and not
what divers more or less wise or unwise commentators have
said of him. The writer has flings at literary art—especially
conscious literary art — towards the beginning : afterwards
(which is still more significant) he hardly takes any notice of it
at all. In the much better known “Boswell,” “ Burns," and
“Scott” i Essays, his neglect of the purely literary side is again
the more remarkable, because it is not ostentatious. In the
“Diderot,” dealing with a subject who was as much a man of
letters first of all (though of very various and applied letters)
as perhaps any man in history, he cannot and does not neglect
that subject's literary performance; but the paper is evidence
of the very strongest how little of his real interest is bestowed
upon it. It is of the man Diderot—and of the man Diderot's
relation to, and illumination of, that condition of the French
mind and state of which some good folk have thought that
Carlyle knew nothing—that he is thinking, for this that he
is caring. Later still, he will select for his favourite subjects
people like Mirabeau, who had much better have written no
books at all, or Dr Francia, whose connection with literature
is chiefly limited to the fact of his having written one immortal
sentence. And this sentence, not having myself seen or
wished to see the works of Rengger, I have always suspected
that Carlyle or “Sauerteig” edited for him.
And then things get worse. That invocation of the Devil
w in the Latter - day Pamphlets, 3 “ to fly away with
The attitude
of the the poor Fine Arts,” is indeed put off on “one of
Latter-day our most distinguished public men.” But Carlyle
Pamphlets.
avows sympathy with it. He even progresses
from it to the Platonic view that “Fiction” at all “is not
(D
-
1 As an out-and-out Scottite and
Carlylian, I would respectfully depre-
cate hasty judgment of this. It is a
crux ansata, and you may easily get
hold of the wrong handle.
2“O people of Paraguay ! how long
will you continue idiots ?" If a casual
half-breed really thus put politics and
life in a nut-shell, he was certainly
somebody.
3 The different paging of the different
editions makes it useless to give exact
references. Nor are they wanted : for
the “Contents” and Indices of Carlyle's
works are ideal.
452
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
quite a permissible thing" - is “sparingly permissible" at
any rate. "Homer" was meant for “history”:1 the arts
were not "sent into the world to fib and dance." As for
Literature more particularly, “if it continue to be the haven
of expatriated spiritualisms," well: but “if it dwindle, as is
probable, into mere merry-andrewism, windy twaddle, and
feats of spiritual legerdemain," there “will be no hope for
it.” Its “regiment” is “extremely miscellaneous," “more
a canaille than a regiment,” and so forth. The “brave young
British man ” is adjured to be “rather shy of Literature than
otherwise, for the present,”—a counsel which, it is well known,
Mr Carlyle repeated in his Edinburgh Rectorial address sixteen
years later. Nor did he ever alter the point of view which
he had now taken up, either in book, or minor published work,
or Letters, or autobiographic jottings, or those Ana which still
flit on the mouths of men concerning his later years.
A man who speaks thus, and thinks thus, has perforce re-
nounced the development of any skill that he may once have
The con had in the analysis of the strands of the tight-
clusion of rope, or the component drugs of the Cup of Abom-
this matter. inations. Still less can he be expected to ex-
patiate, with the true critic's delight, on the elegance with which
the dancer pirouettes over vacancy, or on the iridescent rich-
ness of the wine of Circe, as it moveth itself in the chalice.
I do not know that great critic, really, as he had been earlier
and always might have been the loss of his services in this
function is much to be regretted. For he did other things
which assuredly most merely literary critics could not have
done: and not a few good workmen stepped forward, in the
last thirty years of his life, to do the work which he thus left
undone, not without some flouting and scorning of it. But,
once more, the fact is the fact: and his estrangement from
the task, like that of Macaulay, undoubtedly had something
to do with the general critical poverty of the period of English
literature, which was the most fertile and vigorous in the
literary life of both.
Another of the very greatest gods of mid-nineteenth century
1 Had he been reading Vico ?
THACKERAY.
453
literature in England displays the slightly anti-critical turn
of his time still more curiously. It is one of the
Thackeray.
9. oddest and most interesting of the many differences
between the two great masters of English prose fiction in the
mid-nineteenth century that, while there is hardly any critical
view of literature in Dickens, Thackeray is full of such views.
He himself practised criticism early and late; and despite
the characteristic and perhaps very slightly affected deprecia-
tion of the business of “reading books and giving judgment
on them,” which appears in Pendennis and other places, it is
quite clear that he pursued that business for love as well
as for money. Moreover, from first to last,—from his early
and long uncollected “High - Jinkish” exploits in Fraser to
the Roundabout Papers,—he produced critical work from which
an anthology of the very finest critical quality, and by no
means small .in bulk, might be extracted with little pains
and no little pleasure.. If he “attains not unto the first
three," it is I think only from the effect of the reaction or
ebb that we note in this chapter, and from a certain deficiency
His one
me in that catholic sureness which a critic of the
?
critical highest kind can hardly lack. Nobody is obliged
weakness to like everything good; probably no one can like
everything good. But, in case of disliking, the critic must
be able either to give reasons (like those of Longinus in regard
to the Odyssey) relatively, if not positively, satisfactory: or
he must frankly admit that his objections are based upon
something extra-literary, and that therefore, in strictness, he
has no literary judgment to give.
Now Thackeray does not do this. He was not, perhaps,
very good at giving reasons at all: and he was specially
affected by that confusion of literary and extra-literary consider-
ations from which all times suffer, but from which his own
time and party--the moderate Liberals of the mid-nineteenth
century in England-suffered more than any time or party
known to us. Practically we have his confession, in the famous
and dramatically paradoxical sentence on Swift, that, though
1 Since the text was written, full anepecdota, have appeared in Messrs
collections of his criticism, with many Macmillan's and the "Oxford” editions.
454
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
he is the greatest of the Humourist company," I say we should
hoot him.” The literary critic who has “got salvation ” knows
that he must never do this — that whatever his dislike for
the man- Milton, Racine, Swift, Pope, Rousseau, Byron,
Wordsworth (I purposely mix up dislikes which are mine
with those which are not)—he must not allow them to colour
his judgment of the writer. Gulliver may be a terrible, humil-
iating, heart-crushing indictment, but nothing can prevent it
from being a glorious book: and so on. Now Thackeray, by
virtue of that quality of his, different sides of which have
been-with equal lack of wisdom perhaps-labelled “cyni-
cism” and “sentimentality," was wont to be very “peccant
in this kind,” and it, with some, though less, purely political
or religious prejudice, and a little caprice, undoubtedly flawed
his criticism.
When, however, these outside disturbers kept quiet, as they
very often did, Thackeray's criticism is astonishingly catholic
and his and sound, and sometimes he was able to turn the
excellence. disturbers themselves out. He had a most unhappy
and Philistine dislike of the High Church movement: yet the
passage in Pendennis on The Christian Year is one of the sacred
places of sympathetic notice. The well-known locus in The New-
comes, as to the Colonel's horror at the new literary gods, shows
how sound Thackeray's own faith in them was: yet he, least
of all men, could be accused of forsaking the old. He had that
generous appreciation of his own fellow-craftsmen by which
novelists have been honourably distinguished from poets ;
though not all poets have been jealous, and though, from
Richardson downwards, there have been very jealous novelists.
If there were more criticism like the famous passage on Dumas
in the Roundabouts, like great part of the solid English
Humourists, like much elsewhere, our poor Goddess would
not be liable to have her comeliness confounded with the
ugliness of her personators, as is so often the case. And his
is no promiscuous and undiscriminating generosity. He can
“like nicely,” and does.
Still, though he has sometimes escaped the disadvantages of
his temperament, he has often succumbed to those of his time;
'BLACKWOOD' ON TENNYSON.
455
and what those disadvantages were cannot be better shown
than by an instance to which we may now turn.
When, in writing a little book upon Mr Matthew Arnold, 1 the
present writer spoke severely of the state of English criticism
ekwood between 1830 and 1860, some protests were made, as
in 1849, on though the stricture were an instance of that “un-
nnyson. fairness to the last generation " which has been
frequently noticed, and invariably deprecated and condemned
here. I gave, on that occasion, some illustrative instances;2
I may here add another and very remarkable one, which I
had not at that time studied. In April 1849 there appeared
in Blackwood's Magazine an article of some length on Tennyson's
work, which at the time consisted of the revised and consoli-
dated Poems of 1842 (still further castigated in the one-volume
form, so familiar to the youth of my generation), and of The
Princess. This article 3 is not in the least uncivil—“Maga"
had now outgrown her hoydenish ways: but we do not find the
maturer, yet hardly less attractive, graces of the trentaine. The
writer proclaims himself blind and deaf at every moment. He
misses—he positively blasphemes—the beauty of many things
that Wilson had frankly welcomed. He selects for praise such
second- or third-rate matter as The Talking Oak. Claribel, not
Tennyson's greatest thing, but the very Tennyson in germ,
“leaves as little impression on the living ear as it would on
the sleeper beneath.” The exquisite Ode to Memory, with all
its dreamy loveliness, is “an utter failure throughout," it is a
“mist” “coloured by no ray of beauty." But the critic is
made most unhappy by the song “A spirit haunts the last
year's bowers.” It is “an odious piece of pedantry.” Its ad-
mirable harmony, at once as delightful and as true to true
English prosody as verse can be, extracts from him the remark,
“What metre, Greek or Roman, Russian or Chinese, it was
intended to imitate, we have no care to inquire: the man
was writing English, and had no justifiable pretence for tortur-
? Edinburgh, 1899, p. 59.
author of Thorndale and other books
% Ibid., note, p. 10.
much prized by good judges, a man of
3 It is all the more remarkable that great talents, wide reading, and ad-
the writer was "not the first comer.” . mirable character.
He was, I believe, William Smith, the
Linn
DUNU
456
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
ing our ears with verse like this." The Lady of Shalott is
“intolerable,” “odious,” “irritating," "an annoyance," "a
caprice": anybody who likes it “must be far gone in dilettante-
ism.” Refrains are "melancholy iterations." With a rather
pleasing frankness the critic half confesses that he knows he
ought to like the Marianas, but wholly declares that he does
not. He likes the Lotos-Eaters, so that he cannot have been
congenitally deprived of all the seven senses of Poetry; but he
cannot even form an idea what “the horse with wings kept
down by its heavy rider" means in the Vision of Sin, and he
cannot away with the Palace and the Dream, now purged, let
it be remembered, of their “ balloons” and Groves-of-Blarney
stanzas, and in their perfect beauty. “Giving himself away,"
in the fatal fashion of such censors, he does not merely in effect
pronounce them both with rare exceptions“ bad and unread-
able," but selects the magnificent line-
“Throb through the ribbed stone"--
for special ridicule. "To hear one's own voice throbbing
through the ribbed stone is a startling novelty in acoustics,"
which simply shows, not merely that he had never heard his
own or any other voice singing under a vaulted roof, but that
he had not the mite of imagination necessary for conceiving
the effect. With The Princess, as less pure poetry-good as
it is—he is less unhappy; but he is not at all comfortable
there.
To do our critic justice, however, though it makes his case
a still more leading one, he is not one of the too common
carpers who string a reasonless “I don't like this” to a tell-
tale “I can't understand that,” until they can twist a ball (not
of cowslips) to fling at a poet. He has, or thinks he has, a
theory: and in some respects his theory is not a bad one.
He admits that “the subtle play of imagination ” may be “the
most poetical part of a poem,” that it may “constitute the differ-
ence between poetry and prose,” which is good enough. But he
thinks you may have too much of this good thing, that it may
be “too much divorced from those sources of interest which
affect all mankind”; and he thinks, further, that this divorce
BRIMLEY.
457
has taken place, not merely in Tennyson, but in Keats and in
Shelley. Yet, again, as has been indeed already made evident,
he has not in the least learnt the secret of that prosodic
freedom, slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent of
early Middle English writers, and Chaucer, and the Balladists,
and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Coleridge, which
it is the glory of the nineteenth century to have perfected. And
he detests the new poetic diction, aiming at the utmost reach of
visual as well as musical appeal, which came with this freedom.
His recoil from the “jingling rhythm” throws him with a
shudder against the “resplendent gibberish.” In other words,
he is not at focus: he is outside. He can neither see nor hear:
and therefore he cannot judge.
But others' eyes and ears were opening, though slowly, and
with indistinct results, at first.
I hardly know a book more interesting to the real student
of real criticism than George Brimley's Essays.1 That it gives
George us, with Matthew Arnold's earliest work, the first
Brimley. courses of the new temple of English Criticism is
something, but its intrinsic attraction is its chief. The writer
was apparently able to devote his short but not unhappy life,
without let or hindrance other than that of feeble health, to
literature; he was unhampered by any distracting desire to
create ; he could judge and enjoy with that almost uncanny
calmness which often results, in happy dispositions, from the
beneficent effect of the mal physique, freed from the aggravation
of the mal moral.2 He has idols; but he breaks away from
them, if he does not quite break them. He puts no others
in their places, as Arnold did too often: and, like Dryden
(though they had no other point of resemblance than in both
being admirable critics, and both members of Trinity College,
Cambridge), he never goes wrong without coming right, with
a force and vehemence of leap only intensified by his recoil.
In his best work, what should be the famous, and is, to those
i My copy is the 2nd ed. Mr W. G. to Mme. de Mauconseil, on Christmas
Clark's preface to the 1st is clated" Ap. Day 1755 : Il me semble que le mal
1858," rather less than a year after physique attendrit autant que le mal
Brimley's death.
moral endurcit le coeur.
2 Cf. Chesterfield's profound remark
458
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
who know it, the delightful, Essay on Tennyson, we have a
thing profitable at once for example, for reproof, and for in-
struction, as few critical things are.
We find him at the opening a little joined to one idol, that
the poet must somehow or other deal with modern life. Even
from this point of view he will not give up Tennyson, but he
apologises for him, and he colours nearly all his remarks on
at least the early Poems by the apologies. He cannot shake
himself quite free. He sees the beauty of Claribel : but he
will not allow its beauty to be its sole duty. It “is not quite
certain what the precise feeling of it is,” and “no poem ought
to admit of such a doubt.” No music of verse, no pictorial
power, “will enable a reader to care for such creatures of the
fancy’” as Margaret or Eleanore, as the Sea Fairies, and many
His others. “If expression were the highest aim
Essay on of poetry," Mariana would be consummate :
nnysone but- ! Mr Tennyson “moved in the centre of
poems present faint evidences of this,” strange to say! The
Miller's Daughter, and The Gardener's Daughter, and The May
Queen are dwelt on at great length, and with an evident feel-
ing that here is something you can recommend to a practi-
cal friend who cannot embrace day-dreanis. Mariana in the
South should "connect itself more clearly with a person
brought before the mind”—with a certificate of birth, let us
say, and something about her parentage, and the bad man
who left her, and the price of beans and garlic in the next
village. The Lady of Shalott“ eliminates all human interest.”
Fatima, justly admired, “has neither beginning, middle, or
end." The Palace of Art has “no adequate dramatic presen-
tation of the mode in which the great law of humanity works
out its processes in the soul.” [So lyric poets, we understand,
are not entitled to speak lyrically; but must write drama !]
And, greatest shock of all, The Dream of Fair Women is
i This idol had already had notice
to quit. The Essay is of 1855, when
it originally appeared in Cambridge
Essays. Matthew Arnold's admirable
Preface is two years older.
BRIMLEY.
459
ore woven into one
of Life itself from
of Hell, the
not so much as mentioned. When Brimley wrote it had
long shaken off its earlier crudities, — had attained its final
symmetry. It was there, entire and perfect, from the exquisite
opening, through the matchless blended shiftings of life and
literature, woven into one passionate whole, to those last two
stanzas which give the motto of Life itself from youth to age,
the raison d'être of Heaven, the undying sting of Hell, the
secret of the peace that grows on the soul through Purgatory.
And the critic says nothing about it!
Yet he has justified his instinct if not quite his cleared
vision—from the first. Of Claribel itself, of the Marianas,
of The Lotos- Eaters, of the Palace, he has given analytic
appreciations so enthusiastic, and at the same time so just,
so solidly thought, and so delicately phrased, that there is
nothing like them in Mr Arnold (who was rather grudging of
such things), and nothing superior to them anywhere.
There is a priceless wavering, a soul-saving “suppose it were
true ?” in that “If” (most virtuous of its kind !),—“ If ex-
pression were the highest aim of poetry," nor do I think it
fanciful to see in the blasphemy about music and painting not
saving "creatures of the fancy," a vain protest against the con-
viction that they do. Where he can get his prejudice and his
judgment to run in couples—as in regard to Locksley Hall-
the car sweeps triumphantly from start to finish, out of all
danger from the turning pillar. When he comes to Maud
(which the folk who had the prejudice, but not the judgment,
were blaspheming at the very moment at which he wrote), he
turns on them with a vehemence almost inconsistent-but with
the blessed inconsistency which is permissible--and lays it
down plump and plain, that “it is well not to be frightened
out of the enjoyment of fine poetry ... by such epithets
as morbid, hysterical, spasmodic.” Most true, and it would be
still better to add “beginning,” “middle,” “ end,” “not human,”
the neglect of acquaintance with the most distinguished young
men of the university, the absence of dramatic presentation,
and the rest of them, to the herd of bogies that should first be
left to animate swine, and then be driven into the deep. Once,
indeed, afterwards he half relapses, observing that there is
460
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
“incongruity” in The Princess. But his nerves have grown
firmer from his long bath of pure poetry, and he agrees to make
the best of it.
This “Tennyson ” essay is one of a hundred pages, though
not very large ones: but the only other piece of length which
His other has been preserved, à paper on “Wordsworth ” not
work. much shorter than the “ Tennyson," is, as was per-
haps natural, seeing that it was published immediately after
the poet's death, mainly biographical, and so uninteresting:
while the remaining contents of the volume are short reviews.
The “Wordsworth” starts, however, with reasoned estimates
of Byron, Scott, and Shelley, as foils to Wordsworth: and
to these, remembering their time, the very middle of the
century, we turn with interest. The “Byron" and the “Scott”
reward us but moderately: they are in the main “what he
ought to have said,”_competent, well-balanced, true enough as
far as they go, but showing no very individual grip. The
Shelley, a better test, is far more satisfactory in the result. It
is quite clear that Brimley sympathised neither with Shelley's
religious views, nor with his politics, nor with his morals. He
may be thought to be even positively unjust in saying that
Shelley's “mind was ill-trained, and not well furnished with
facts,” for intellectually few poets have been better off in this
respect. Yet, in spite of all this, he says, “ with one exception
a more glorious poet has not been given to the English nation,"
which once more shows how very much sounder he was on
the subject of poetry than Arnold, and how little beginnings,
and middles, and ends, with all their trumpery, really mattered
to him. Among the shorter pieces, the attempts at abstract,
or partly abstract, treatment in “Poetry and Criticism” and
“The Angel in the House” (only part of which latter is actually
devoted to its amiable but rather wool-gathering title-subject)
are not conspicuously successful; they are, in fact, trial-essays,
by a comparative novice, in an art the secrets of which had
been almost lost for nearly a generation. But the attempt in
“Poetry and Criticism” to gather up, squeeze out, and give
1 The "Wordsworth” is some years peared in Fraser during the summer
earlier than the “Tennyson.” It ap- of 1851.
BRIMLEY.
461
form to the Coleridgean vaguenesses (for that is very much
what it comes to), has promise and germ. As for the smaller
reviews, Mr Brimley had the good fortune to deal as a reviewer
with Carlyle, Thackeray, and Dickens, as well as Bulwer and
Kingsley, not to mention such different subjects as the Noctes
Ambrosiance and the Philosophie Positive: and the merit of
coming out, with hardly a stain upon his character, from any
one of these in some cases very high) trials. We may think
that he does not always go fully right; but he never goes
utterly wrong. And when we think what sorrowful chances
have awaited the collision of great books at their first appear-
ance even with by no means little critics, the praise is not
small.
Yet a sufficient study of the “Tennyson” essay should have
quite prepared the expert reader for these minor successes.
em Brimley, as we have said, was only partially favoured
His intrinsic
and chrono- by time, place, and circumstance, even putting
logical im- health out of the question. He was heavily handi-
portance.
e capped in that respect: and he had no time to work
out his critical deliverance fully, and to justify it by abundant -
critical performance. But he has the root of the matter in him:
and it throws out the flower of the matter in that refusal to
be“ frightened out of the enjoyment of fine poetry by epithets.”
When a man has once shown himself ausus contemnere vand
in this way, when he has the initial taste which Brimley every-
where shows, and the institution of learning which he did not
lack, it will go hard but he is a good critic in posse already,
and harder if he is not a good one in such actuality as is
allowed him. And this was well seen of George Brimley.
It is one of the penalties, late but heavy, of an attempt to
take a kingdom (even one not of Heaven) by storm for the
- Gyas and first time, that you have to “refuse” or “mask”
Cloanthus.” not a few of its apparently strong places—and if
their strength be more than apparent, the adventurer will not.
be conqueror. There are in English, as in other nineteenth-
century literatures, many persons who addressed themselves.
more or less seriously to criticism, who obtained more or less.
name as critics, with whose works every well-read person is.
more or less acquainted, yet who must be so refused or masked.
462
.
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY. :
1,
at the writer's peril of the reader's disappointment or dis-
approval. Many of them seemed to be pillars of the early
and middle nineteenth-century reviews; from some of them,
no doubt, some institution in criticism has been received by
readers of all the three generations which have passed since
the appearance of the earliest. It may seem intolerable outre-
Milman cuidance to put Milman and Croker and Hayward,
Croker, Sydney Smith and Senior and Helps, with others
ayward. not even named, as it were “in the fourpenny box”.
of our stall. Yet it is unavoidable, and the stall-keeper must
dare it, not merely—not even mainly-because he has no room
to give them better display. Milman was at least thought
by Byron a formidable enough critic to have the apocryphal
crime of “killing John Keats" assigned to him by hypothesis :
and his merits (not of the bravo kind) are no doubt much
greater than the bad critics who, after Macaulay, depreciate
his style, and the maladroit eulogists of his free thought, who
would make him a sort of nineteenth-century Conyers Middleton,
appear to think. But he has no critical credential, known to
the present writer, that would give him substantive place
here. Croker was neither such a bad man nor such a bad
writer as Macaulay would have had him to be: but the Keats
article is a terrible sin, and the Tennyson one only in part
excusable. Senior, before he became a glorified earwig, or, if
this seem disrespectful, the father of all such as interview, was
a sound, if not very gifted, reviewer, but little more: Hay-
Sydney
ward, a much cleverer and, above all, much more
Smith, worldly-wise Isaac Disraeli, who made the most of
Senior, being “in society” (see Thackeray), talked better
Helps.
than he wrote, but still wrote well, especially by
the aid of l'esprit des autres. Of Sydney Smith earlier, and
Sir Arthur Helps later, the fairest thing to say in our
present context is, that neither held himself out as a literary
critic at all. Sydney could give admirable accounts of books:
but he nowhere shows, or pretends to, the slightest sense of
literature. Helps, starting 2 a discussion on Fiction,—the very
most interesting and most promising of all literary subjects
1 He will reappear in the Appendix of Poetry.
devoted to holders of the Oxford Chair ? In Friends in Council.
ELWIN-LANCASTER-HANNAY.
463
for a man of his timea subject which was just equipped with
material enough at hand, and not yet too much, neither novel
to the point of danger nor stale to the point of desperation,-
“ keeps to the obvious,” as one of his own characters acknow-
ledges, in a fashion almost excusing the intrinsically silly
reaction from obviousness, which distinguished the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, and is now itself obviously stale.
The influence of works of fiction is unbounded. The Duke of
Marlborough took his history from Shakespeare. Fiction is good
as creating sympathy. It is bad as leading us into dreamland.
Real life is more real than fiction. Writers of fiction have
great responsibility. In shorter formula, “We love our Novel
with an N because it is Nice; we hate it because it is some-
times Naughty; we take it to the Osterial of the Obvious, and
treat it with an Olio of Obligingness and Objurgation.” But
Helps, in this very passage, tells us that he prefers life to
literature, and no one can be a good critic who, when he
criticises, does that: though he may be a very bad one, and
yet make the other preference.
We must still extend this numerus a little in order to do
that justice—unjust at the best—which is possible here, and
Ellerin which is yet not quite so futile and inadequate as
Lancaster, some still more unjust judgments would have it.
annay. For the object of this History is to revive and
keep before the eye of the reader the names, the critical posi-
tion, and, if only by touches, the critical personality, of as
many of those who have done good service to criticism in the
past as may be possible. A little less wilfulness and exclusive-
ness of personal taste, or rather less opportunity of indulging
it, would probably have made of Whitwell Elwin—who sur-
vived till the earlier portion of this book was published, but
did his critical work long ago — a really great critic. Even
as it is, his Remains 2 contain some of the best critical essays,
not absolutely supreme, to be found among the enormous
stores of the nineteenth century, especially on the most English
Englishmen of letters during the eighteenth, such as Fielding
and Johnson. A short life, avocations of business, and perhaps
London, 1902.
? I have slipped from N to 0 : but
it is only next door.
464
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the absence of the pressure of professional literary occupation,
prevented the work of Henry Lancasterl from being much
more than a specimen : but his famous essay on Thackeray
showed (and not alone) what he could do. On the other hand,
the not always mischievous, though too often galling, yoke of
the profession was not wanting to James Hannay. His literary
work was directed into too many paths, some of them too much
strewn with the thorns and beset with the briars of journalism.
But there are very few books of the kind which unite a certain
“popularity” in no invidious sense, and an adaptation for the
general reader, with sound and keen criticism, as does his far
too little known Course of English Literature ; 2 while many of
his scattered and all but lost essays show admirable insight.
To one remarkable critic, however, who, though a younger
man than Mr Arnold, is on the whole of a Præ-Arnoldian type,
and to whom justice, I think, has not usually been
Dallas.
* done, a little larger space must be given. I must
admit that, having been disgusted at the time of the appearance
of The Gay Science 3 by what I then thought its extremely
silly, and now think its by no means judicious, title, I never
read it until quite recently, and then found (of course) that
Mr Dallas had said several of my things before me, though
usually with a difference. But I have not the least inclina-
tion to say Pereat: on the contrary, I should like to revive
him. Fourteen years earlier than the date of his principal
book, as a young man fresh from the influence of the Hamil- ·
tonian philosophy, and also, I think, imbued with not a little
of Ruskinism, he had written a volume of Poetics, which,
The Poetics.
though it does not come to very much, is a remark-
able book, and a very remarkable one, if we consider
its date--a year before Mr Arnold's Preface, and when Brimley
1 Essays and Reviews, London, 1876. can most honestly and conscientiously
The other papers-on Macaulay, Car- say that I am sure I did not take it
lyle, Ruskin, George Eliot-are good, from him; and if we both took it
but not so good, and show that diffi- from somebody else (to adopt the
culty of the mid-century critic in comfortable principles of Miss Teresa
"sticking to literature,” which is the MʻWhirter at the conclusion of A
theme of this chapter.
Legend of the Rhine), I do not know
2 London, 1866.
who the somebody else was.
3 Loudon, 1866.
5 London, 1852.
4 Of every one of them, however, I
DALLAS.
465
and others were only waking up by fits, and starts, and relapses,
to the necessity of a new criticism. Not that Dallas is on the
right track : but he is on a track very different from that of
most English critics since Coleridge. He revives, in an odd way,
-odd, at least, till we remember the Philistinism of the First
Exhibition period, the Apologetic for Poetry; he establishes,
rather in the old scholastic manner, the distinction between
Poetry the principle and Poesy the embodiment: he talks about
the “ Law of Activity," the “ Law of Harmony," and the like.
There is, for the time, not a little promise in this: and there
is much more, as well as some, if not quite enough, perform-
The Gay ance, in the later book. The Gay Science (an adapta-
Science. tion, of course, of the Provençal name for Poetry
itself) was originally intended to be in four volumes: but the
reception of the two first was not such as to encourage the
author—who had by this time engaged in journalism, and
become a regular writer for The Times—to finish it. I cannot
agree with the author of the article in the D. N. B., that the
cause of its ill-success was its “ abstruseness”: for really there
is nothing difficult about it. On the contrary, it is, I should
say, rather too much in the style of the leading article-facile,
but a little “woolly.” Its faults seem to lie partly in this,
but more in the two facts that, in the first place, the author
“embraces more than he can grasp"; and that, in the second,
he has not kept pace with the revival of criticism, though
he had in a manner anticipated it. He knows a good deal;
and he not only sees the necessity of comparative criticism,
but has a very shrewd notion of the difference between
the true and the false Comparisons. Acuteness in perception
and neatness in phrase appear pretty constantly: and he cer-
tainly makes good preparation for steering himself right, by
deciding that Renaissance criticism is too verbal (he evidently
did not know the whole of it, but is right so far); German too
idealist; Modern generally too much lacking in system. Yet,
when he comes to make his own start, he “but yaws neither.”
He is uncomfortable with Mr Arnold (who, by this time, had
published not merely the Preface but the Essays in Criticism),
and finds fault with him, more often wrongly than rightly.
2 G
466
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Especially he shows himself quite at a loss to comprehend
Sainte-Beuve, whom he, like some later persons, hardly thinks
a critic at all. He gets boldly into the “psychological coach,"
and books himself, as resolutely as any German, for the City
of Abstraction. “The theory of imitation,” we are told, “is
now utterly exploded”-a remarkable instance of saying nearly
the right thing in quite the wrong way. We travel arm-in-
arm with “Imagination” and “The Hidden Soul” (which
seems to be something like Unconscious Cerebration); we hear
even more than from Mr Arnold about the “Play of Thought";
we have chapters on chapters about Pleasure-not the specially
poetic pleasure, but pleasure in general. In short, we are here
in the presence, not so much of what we have called "meta-
critic” as of something that might almost better be called
" procriticº-altogether in the vestibule of critical inquiries
proper. Of course it is fair to remember the two unwritten
or unpublished volumes. But I venture very much to doubt,
from a perusal of both his published works, whether Dallas
would have ever thoroughly “collected” his method, or have
directed it to that actual criticism of actual literature, of which,
however (as of most things), there are fragments and essays
in his work. The disturbing influences which, as we have
seen, acted on so many of his contemporaries or immediate
seniors acted differently on him, but they acted: and his
literary “ideation” was, I think, too diffuse to make head
completely against them. Yet he had real critical talent:
and it is a pity that it has not had more adequate recognition.
But it is time to leave this part of the subject, only
casting back among the elders, because each of these has
“become a name,"—to John Foster, and W. J. Fox, Henry
1 It is important to notice that he is conditioned by his moral and religious
not hostile, he is simply puzzled. The preoccupations — may be easily ap-
great method, which emerges first in praised by reading his Essays on "A
Dryden, and which Sainte-Beuve per- Man Writing his Own Memoirs” and
fected, of “shaking together” different “The Epithet Romantic" in Bohn's
literary examples, is still dark to him Library.
in practice, though, as has been said, 3 Fox has the credit of “discover-
he had a glimpse of its theory. ing” Browning, but there were per-
? Foster's interest in literature sonal reasons here. Much more, of
real, but very strongly coloured and course, were there such in A. H.
OTHERS--J. S. MILL.
467
W
Rogers, and the first Sir James Stephen, not even naming
others of perhaps hardly less fame. And let us salute the man
Others: among these elders who, at first sight and frankly,
J. S. Mill. could pronounce The Lady of Shalott, “except that
the versification is less exquisite [it was much improved later),
entitled to a place by the side of The Ancient Mariner and
Christabel," who doubted whether “poetic imagery ever con-
veyed a more intense conception of a place and its inmate
than in Mariana," and who justified his right to pronounce
on individual poems by the two very remarkable articles on
" What is Poetry ?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry.” One
remembers, with amused ruth, Charles Lamb's friend and his
“What a pity that these fine ingenuous youths should grow
up to be mere members of Parliament?” as one thinks of
the Juvenilia and the Senilia of John Stuart Mill.2
Hallam's essay on Tennyson—a rather
overrated thing.
i Rogers is even “mentioned in
despatches”—that is, by Sainte-Beuve.
2 See his Early Essays in Bohn's
reprint. The criticism of certain rom-
antic poets of the mid century would
make an interesting excursus of the
kind which I have indicated as if it
were possible) fit to be included in
such a History as this is. Horne's
New Spirit of the Age (1845), though
exhibiting all the singular inadequacies,
inequalities, and inorganicisms of the
author of Orion, does not entirely de-
serve the severe contrast which Thack-
eray drew between it and its original
as given by Hazlitt. Mrs Browning,
who took some part in this, has left
a substantive critical contribution in
The Greek Christian Poets and the
English Poets, in which again the weak
nesses of the writer in poetry are in
terestingly compensated by weaknesses
in criticism, but in which again also,
and much more, “the critic whom
every poet must (or should] contain"
sometimes asserts himself not unsuc-
cessfully. W. C. Roscoe, whose verse
is at least interesting, and has been
thought something more, is critically
not negligible. But perhaps the most
interesting document which would have
to be treated in such an excursus is
Sydney Dobell's Nature of Poetry, de-
livered as a lecture (it must have
been something of a choke - pear for
the audience) at Edinburgh in 1857.
Here the author, though not nomin-
atim, directly traverses Matthew Ar-
nold's doctrine in the great Preface
(see next chapter), by maintaining that
a perfect poem will be the exhibition
of a perfect mind, and, we may sup-
pose, a less perfect but still defensible
poem the exhibition of a less perfect
mind — which principle, no doubt, is,
in any case, the sole possible justifica-
tion of Festus and of Balder. Others
(especially Sir Henry Taylor) might be
added, but these will probably suffice.
468
CHAPTER VIII.
ENGLISH CRITICISM FROM 1860–1900.
MATTHEW ARNOLD : ONE OF THE GREATER CRITICS-HIS POSITION DEFINED
EARLY-THE 'PREFACE' OF 1853—ANALYSIS OF IT, AND INTERIM
SUMMARY OF ITS GIST—CONTRAST WITH DRYDEN-CHAIR-WORK AT
OXFORD, AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS --'ON TRANSLATING
HOMER'-"THE GRAND STYLE”-DISCUSSION OF IT-THE STUDY OF
CELTIC LITERATURE-ITS ASSUMPTIONS—THE 'ESSAYS': THEIR CASE
FOR CRITICISM-THEIR EXAMPLES THEREOF-THE LATEST WORK-THE
INTRODUCTION TO WARD'S ENGLISH POETS '-" CRITICISM OF LIFE"
-POETIC SUBJECT OR POETIC MOMENT-ARNOLD'S ACCOMPLISHMENT
AND POSITION AS A CRITIC—THE CARLYLIANS-KINGSLEY-FROUDE-
RUSKIN-G. H. LEWES-HIS 'PRINCIPLES OF SUCCESS IN LITERATURE
-ĦIS 'INNER LIFE OF ART - BAGEHOT-R. H. HUTTON-HIS EVASIONS
OF LITERARY CRITICISM-PATER—BIS FRANK HEDONISM-HIS “POLY-
TECHNY” AND HIS STYLE-HIS FORMULATION OF THE NEW CRITICAL
ATTITUDE-'THE RENAISSANCE'- OBJECTIONS TO ITS PROCESS —-IM-
PORTANCE OF 'MARIUS THE EPICUREAN'-'APPRECIATIONS' AND THE
“GUARDIAN” ESSAYS-UNIVERSALITY OF HIS METHOD--J. A. SYMONDS
-THOMSON (“B. V.")-WILLIAM MINTO-HIS BOOKS ON ENGLISH PROSE
AND POETRY-H. D. TRAILL—HIS CRITICAL STRENGTH-ON STERNE
AND COLERIDGE-ESSAYS ON FICTION—THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR"-
OTHERS : MANSEL, VENABLES, STEPHEN, LORD HOUGHTON, PATTISON,
CHURCH, ETC.—PATMORE-EDMUND GURNEY-THE POWER OF SOUND?
-TERTIUM QUID.'
In coming to Mr Matthew Arnold we come again, but for the
last time, to one of our chiefs of the greater clans of criticism.
Matthew Vixere fortes post Mr Arnold; let us hope that
Arnold: vivunt. We have heard, more or less vaguely, of
one of the
greater
new schools of criticism since, in more countries
critics. than one or two, and an amiable enthusiasm has
declared that the new gospels are real gospels, far truer
; MATTHEW ARNOLD.
469
and better than any previously known. I am not myself,
by any means, in general agreement -I am often in very
particular disagreement with Mr Arnold's critical canons,
and (less often) with his individual judgments. But as I
look back over European criticism for the years (approaching
a century) which have passed since his birth, I cannot find
one critic, born since that time, who can be ranked above or
even with him in general critical quality and accomplishment.
And, extending the view further over the vast expanse, from
Aristotle to that birth-date, though I certainly find greater
critics—critics very much greater in originality, greater in
catholicity, perhaps greater in felicity of individual utterance
-I yet find that he is of their race and lineage, free of
their company, one of them, not to be scanted of any sizings
that can be, by however unworthy a manciple, allotted to
them.
It was the way of some of these greater critics in Critical
History, at this or that period of their career, to launch a kind
position of manifesto or confession, of which their other
defined critical work is but, as it were, the application and
early. amplification : while others have never done this,
but have built up their critical temple, adding wing to wing and
storey to storey, not seldom even deserting or ruining the earlier
constructions. Mr Arnold, in practice as in principle, belonged
to the first class, and he launched his own manifesto about as
early as any man can be capable of forming a critical judgment
which is not a mere adaptation of some one else's, or (a thing
really quite as unoriginal) a flying-in-the-face of some one
else's, or a mere spurt and splash of youthful self-sufficiency.
You can be a bishop and a critic at thirty-not before (by
wise external rule) in the former case; hardly before, according
to laws of nature which man has unwisely omitted to codify
for himself, in the latter. Mr Arnold was a little over thirty
when, collecting such things as he chose to collect out of his
earlier volumes of Poetry, and adding much to them, he
published the collection with a Preface in October 1853. I
doubt whether he ever wrote better, either in sense or in style;
470
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
and I am quite sure that, while some of the defects of his
criticism, as it was to be, appear quite clearly in the paper, all
the pith and moment of that criticism appear in germ and
principle likewise.
In the interesting and important “ Advertisement” which,
eight months later, he prefixed to the second edition of this
The Preface book, Mr Arnold himself summed up the lessons of
of 1853. the Preface, which followed it, under two main heads,
-the insistence on the importance of the subject--the “great
action”; and the further insistence on study of the ancients,
with the specified object of correcting the great vice of our
modern, and especially English, intellect—that it “is fantastic,
and wants sanity.” He thus, to some extent, justified the
erection of these into his two first and great commandments-
the table-headings, if not the full contents, of his creed and
law. But, for our purpose, we must analyse the Preface
itself rather more closely,
It opens with an account of the reasons which led the
| author to exclude Empedocles, not because the subject was
“a Sicilian Greek,” but from a consideration of the situation
itself. This he condemns in a passage which contains a very
great amount of critical truth, which is quite admirably ex-
pressed, and which really adds one to the not extensive list
of critical axions of the first class. Even here one may
venture to doubt whether the supreme poet will not
vindicate his omnipotence in treating poeticamente. But if
the sentence were so qualified as to warn the poet that
he will hardly succeed, it would be absolutely invulnerable
or impregnable.
But why, he asks, does he dwell on this unimportant and
private matter? Because he wishes particularly to disclaim
Analysis any deference to the objection referred to above as
of it, to the choice of ancient subjects: to which he,
might have added (as the careful reader of the whole piece
will soon perceive), because insistence on the character of
the Subject was his critical being's very end and aim. In
effect, he uses both these battle-horses in his assault upon
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
471
D
the opposite doctrine that the poet must “leave the exhausted
past and fix his attention on the present.”] It is needless
to say that over his immediate antagonists he is completely
victorious. Whatever the origin of the ignoble and inept
fallacy concerned, this particular form of it was part of the
special mid-nineteenth century heresy of "progress.” But
whether he unhorses and " baffles” it in the right way may
be another question. His way is to dwell once more, and
with something already of the famous Arnoldian iteration,
on the paramount importance of the “action," on the vanity
of the supposition that superior treatment will make up
'for subjective inferiority. And he then exposes himself
dangerously by postulating the superior interest of “Achilles,
Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido,” to the personages of any ·
modern poem, and, perhaps still more dangerously, by
selecting as his modern poems Hermann and Dorothea, Childe
Harold, Jocelyn [!!!], and The Escursion. He may be said
here to lose a stirrup at least: but on the whole he certainly
establishes the point-too clear to need establishment—that
the date of an action signifies nothing. While if the further
'statement that the action itself is all-important is disputable,
it is his doctrine and hypothesis.
He is consistent with this doctrine when he goes on to
argue that “the Greeks understood it far more clearly than
we do”—that “they regarded the whole, we the parts ”—that,
while they kept the action uppermost, we prefer the expression.
Not that they neglected expression — "on the contrary,
they were ... the masters of the grand style.” Where
they did not indulge in this, where they were bald or trivial,
it was merely to let the majesty of the action stand forth
without a veil. “Their theory and practice alike, the admir-
able treatise of Aristotle and the unrivalled works of their
poets, exclaim with a thousand tongues, ‘All depends upon
the subject. Choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself with
1 The immortality of critical error that Mr Arnold had sufficiently crushed
-the impossibility of quelling the and concluded this fallacy. It has
Blatant Beast - to which we have been seen again-in places where it
alluded more than once, is again illus- should not have been-in these last
trated here. One might have thought few years.
472
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the feeling, of its situations; this done, everything else will
follow.'”1
As a necessary consequence, they were “rigidly exacting.”
as to construction : we believe in “the brilliant things that
arise under the poet's pen as he goes along." We refuse
, to ask for a “total impression" instead of requiring that
the poet shall as far as possible efface himself, we even lay
it down that “a true allegory of the state of one's own mind
in a representative history is perhaps the highest thing one
can attempt in the way of poetry.” Against this Mr Arnold
pronounces Faust—though the work of “the greatest poet of
modern times, the greatest critic of all times” 2-defective,
because it is something like this. Next he deplores the want
of a guide for a young writer, “a voice to prescribe to him
the aim he should keep in view"-and, in default of it,
insists once more on models.
The foremost of these models for the English writer is, of
course, Shakespeare, of whom Mr Arnold speaks with becoming
reverence, and of whom he had earned the right to speak
by his magnificent sonnet years earlier. But his attitude
towards Shakespeare, as a literary Bible, is guarded. Shake-
speare chose subjects “than which the world could afford no
better”; but his expression was too good—too “eminent and
, unrivalled," too fixing and seductive to the attention, so
to draw it away from those other things which were “his
excellences as a poet." 3 In leading writers to forget this,
Shakespeare has done positive harm, and Keats's Pot of Basil
is taken as an instance, whence the critic diverges to a long
condemnation of this great but erring bard's “difficulty” of
language, and returns to the doctrine that he is not safe as a
model. The ancients are: though even in them there is some-
i This very generous assumption
comes, I feel sure, from the blending
of Wordsworth (v. sup., on him) with
Aristotle.
2 Mr Arnold never explicitly re-
tracted this "pyramidal” exaggeration
is a transparent “hedge," a scarcely
anbiguous palinode. For Dobell's con-
tention, see note at end of last chapter.
3 I think Mr Arnold, especially after
italicising these words, should really
have told us as a WHAT we are to
whole of his French Critic on Goethe
greatest expressions.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
473
thing narrow, something local and temporary. But there is
so much that is not, and that is an antidote to modern banes,
| that we cannot too much cling to them as models. These, he
adds at some length, the present age needs morally as much
as artistically. He has himself tried, in the poems he is
issuing, to obey his own doctrines: and he ends with the
famous peroration imploring respect for Art, and pleading for
| the observance and preservation of “the wholesome regulative
laws of Poetry," lest they be “condemned and cancelled by
the influence of their eternal enemy, Caprice."
Comment on this, beyond the remarks already made, had
best be postponed till we can consider Mr Arnold's criticism
and interim as a whole. But to one thing we should draw ?
summary of attention, and that is, that here is a critic who
its gist. knows what he means, and who means something
not, directly, or as a whole, meant, or at least said, by any
earlier critic. That “all depends on the subject” had been
said often enough before: but it had not been said by any
one who had the whole of literature before him, and the
tendency – for half a century distinctly, for a full century
more or less—had been to unsay or gainsay it. Further, the
critic has combined with the older Neo-classic adoration of
the “fable” something perhaps traceable, as hinted above, to
the Wordsworthian horror of poetic diction, a sort of cult of
baldness instead of beauty, and a distrust, if not horror, of
“expression.” In fact, though I do not believe that he in the
least knew it, he is taking up a position of direct and, as it
were, designed antagonism to Dryden's, in that remarkable
Contrast preface to.An Evening's Love, one of those in which
with he comes closest to the Spaniards, where he says
den. plumply “the story is the least part," and declares
that the important part is the workmanship — that this is
the poiesis. It is hardly possible to state the “dependence”—
in the old duelling sense-of the great quarrel of Poetics, and
almost of Criticism, more clearly than is done in these two
Prefaces by these two great poet-critics of the seventeenth and
the nineteenth centuries in England.
I do not think that there is any published evidence of the
474
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Y
U
LAGU
A
time or of the circumstances at and in which Mr Arnold
Chair-work began contributing critical articles to periodicals.
at Oxford, But his appointment (which must have been, at
and con
tributions to any rate to some extent, due to the Preface as well
periodicals. as to the Poems) to the Professorship of Poetry at
Oxford in 1857 gave him a strong stimulus towards the
development of his critical powers in reasoned form; while,
shortly afterwards, the remarkable developments of the press,
towards the end of the 'Fifties, which began by the institution
of Macmillan's and the Cornhill Magazine, and continued
through the establishment of a strongly literary and critical
daily newspaper in the Pall Mall Gazette, to the multiplication
of monthly reviews proper in the Fortnightly, Contemporary,
and Nineteenth century, supplied him with opportunities of
communicating these studies to a public larger than his Oxford
audience, and with a profitable and convenient intermediate
stage between the lecture and the book. He was, however,
always rather scrupulous about permitting his utterances the
“third reading”: and some of them (notably his Inaugural
Address at Oxford) have still to be sought in the catacombs.
But the matter of more than a decade's production, by which
he chose to stand, is included in the three well-known volumes,
On Translating Homer and The Study of Celtic Literature for
the Oxford Lectures, and the famous Essays in Criticism for
the more miscellaneous work, the last, however, being rounded
off and worked up into a whole by its Preface, and by its two
opening pieces, The Function of Criticism in the Present Time
and The Influence of Academies.
In these three books the expression of critical attitude,
displayed, as we have said, unmistakably in the Preface of 1853,
is not only developed and varied into something as nearly
approaching to a Summa Criticismi as was in Mr Arnold's not.
excessively systematic way, but furnished and illustrated by
an extraordinarily interesting and sufficiently diversified body
of critical applications in particular. Yet there is no divergence
from the lines marked out in the Preface, nor is there to be
found any such divergence - if divergence imply the least
contradiction or inconsistency--in the work of the last decade
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
475
of his life, when he had dropped his ill-omened guerilla against
dogma and miracles, and had returned to the Muses. He is
pas much a typical example of a critic consistent in consistency
as Dryden is of one consistent in inconsistency: and it
naturally requires less intelligence to comprehend him than
appears to be the case in the other instance. In fact, he could
never be misunderstood in general: though his extreme wilful-
ness, and his contempt of history, sometimes made him a
little bewildering to the plain man in detail.
In discussing the first, and indeed all, of these, it is, of
course, important to keep what is suitable for a History of
On Trans. Criticism apart from what would be suitable only
lating for a monograph on Mr Arnold. Yet the idiosyn-
ber. crasies of the greater critics are as much the subject
of such a general history as their more abstract doctrines. We
see, then, here something which was not difficult to discern,
even in the more frugal and guarded expression of the Preface,
and which, no doubt, is to some extent fostered and intensified
by that freedom from the check of immediate contradiction or
criticism which some have unkindly called the dangerous pre-
rogative of preachers and professors. This something is the
Arnoldian confidence -- that quality which Mr Hutton, per-
haps rather kindly, took for “sureness,”, and which, though
strangely different in tone, is not so very different in actual
nature from the other “sureness” (with a prefix) of Lord
Macaulay. We may think that this confidence is certainly
strengthened, and perhaps to some extent caused, by a habit
of turning the blind eye on subjects of which the critic does
not know very much, and inspecting very cursorily those which
he does not much like. But we shall see that, right or wrong,
partial or impartial, capricious or systematic as he may be, Mr
Arnold applies himself to the actual appreciation of actual
literature, and to the giving of reasons for his appreciation, in
a way new, delightful, invaluable.
The really important part or feature of the tractate for us
“ The grand is its famous handling of “the Grand Style." He
style." had used this phrase, italicising it, in the Preface
itself, had declared that the ancients were its “unapproached
476
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
11 11
masters,” but he had not said much about it or attempted to
define it. Here he makes it almost his chief battle-charger-
presenting Homer, Dante, and Milton as the greatest masters
of it, if not the only sure ones, denying any regular posses-
sion of it to Shakespeare, and going far to deny most other
poets, from Tennyson down to Young, the possession of it at
all. It was impossible that this enigmatic critical phrase,
applied so provocatively, should not itself draw the fire of
critics. He could not but reply to this in his “ Last Words,”
but he had to make something of a confession and avoidance,
with much sorrow, perhaps not without a very little anger.
For those who asked “What is the Grand Style ?” mockingly,
he had no answer: they were to “die in their sins.” To others
he vouchsafed the answer that the grand style “arises in poetry
when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or
severity a serious subject.” Let us, with as much simplicity
and seriousness, but with as little severity as may be, treat
both the expression and the definition.
The expression itself—the origin of which, like that of some
others in our special lexicon, is to be found in the criticism,
Discussion not of literature, but of Art in the limited sense,
of it. and which was, I think, first made current in
English by Sir Joshua Reynolds—is of course a vague one,
and we must walk warily among its associations and sug-
gestions. At one end it suggests, with advantage to itself
and to us honest inquirers, the fos of Longinus. At the
other, it has perhaps a rather damaging suggestion of the
French style noble, and a still more dangerous echo-hint of
“grandiose.” And Mr Arnold himself once (Preface, ed.
1853, p. xix) uses "grandiose," as, it is true, the Latins and
the French have sometimes done, as equivalent to “grand.”
Corning, then, unsatisfied by these vaguenesses, to the definition,
we shall perhaps think it permissible to strike out the first
two members, as in the former case almost self-confessedly, in
the second quite, superfluous. That the Grand Style in poetry
will only arise when the stylist is poetically gifted scarcely
requires even enunciation: that the nature which produces
the grand style must be pro tanto and pro hac vice "noble,"
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
477
' is also sun-clear. Something of the Longinian circularity in
one point 1 seems to have infected Mr Arnold here. But with
the rest of the definition preliminary and prima facie inquiry
has no fault to find. Let us take it that the Grand Style
in poetry is the treatment of a serious subject with simplicity
or severity. Even to this a fresh demurrer arises, which may
be partly, but cannot be wholly, overruled. Why this anti-
thesis, this mutual exclusion, between “simplicity” and “sever-
ity”? “Severe simplicity” is a common, and is generally
thought a just, phrase: at any rate, the two things are closely
related. We may note this only — adding in Mr Arnold's
favour that his special attribution of simplicity to Homer and
- severity to Milton would seem to indicate that by the latter
word he means “gorgeousness severely restrained." .
This, with such additional and applied lights as are provided
I by Mr Arnold's denunciation of affectation as fatal to the
Grand Style, will give us some idea of what he wished to mean
by the phrase. / It is, in fact, a fresh formulation of the Class-
ical restraint, definiteness, proportion, form, against the Romantic
! vague, the Romantic fantasy. | This had been the lesson of
the Preface, given after the preceptist manner. It is now the
applied, illustrated, appreciative lesson of the Lectures. It is
a doctrine like another: and, in its special form and plan,
an easily comprehensible reaction from a reaction in fact,
the inevitable ebb after the equally inevitable flow. But when
we begin to examine it (especially in comparison with its
Longinian original) as a matter of theory, and with its own
illustrations as a matter of practice, doubts and difficulties
come thick upon us, and we may even feel under a sad
necessity of “dying in our sins," just as Mr Carlyle thought
that, at a certain period of his career, Ignatius Loyola "ought
to have made up his mind to be damned.”
To take the last first, it is difficult, on examining Mr
Arnold's instances and his comments, in the most impartial
and judicial manner possible, to resist the conclusion that
his definition only really fits Dante, and that it was originally
derived from the study of him. To that fixed star of first
1 As to "Figures” and “Sublimity.”
478
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
magnitude in poetry it does apply as true, as nothing but
true, and perhaps even as the whole truth. Nobility, quint-
essential poetry, simplicity in at least some senses, severity
and seriousness in almost all,-—who will deny these things to
the Commedia ? But it is very difficult to think that it applies,
in anything like the same coequal and coextensive fashion, to
either Homer or Milton. There are points in which Homer
touches Dante; there are points in which Dante touches
Milton; but they are not the same points. It may, further,
be very much doubted whether Mr Arnold has not greatly
exaggerated both Homer's universal “simplicity” and his
universal “seriousness.” The ancients were certainly against
him on the latter point. While one may feel not so much
doubt as certainty that the application of "severity” to Milton
-unless it means simply the absence of geniality and humour
is still more rash. .
But when we look back to Longinus we shall find at least
a hint of a much more serious defect than this. Why this
unnecessary asceticism and grudging in the connotation of
grandeur ? why this tell-tale and self-accusing limitation
further to a bare three poets, two of them, indeed, of the very
greatest ? Mr Arnold himself feels the difficulty presented by
Shakespeare so strongly that he has to make, as it were,
uncovenanted grand-style mercies for him. But that is only
because you have simply to open almost any two pages out of
three in Shakespeare, and the grand style smites you in the face,
as God's glory smote St Stephen. We can afford, which shows
our strength, to leave Shakespeare alone. Longinus of old has
no such damaging fencing of the table of his Grand Style. The
Greeks, it is known, thought little of Love as a subject: yet he
admitted the sublimity of Sappho. And if he objected to the
πλεκτάνην χειμάρροον οf Eschylus, it was only because he
thought it went too far. How much wiser is it, instead of
fixing such arbitrary limits, to recognise that the Grand Style
has infinite manifestations; that it may be found in poets who
have it seldom as well as in those who have it often; that
Herrick has it with
“In this world—the Isle of Dreams";
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
479

that Tennyson has it again and again; that Goethe has it in
the final octet of Faust; that Heine and Hugo, and hundreds
of others, down to quite minor poets in their one moment of
rapturous union with the Muse, have it. How much wiser to
recognise further that it is not limited to the simple or severe:
whether it is to the serious is another question. For my
part, I will not loose the fragile boat or incur the danger of the
roof,-speaking in a Pickwickian-Horatian manner --with any
one who denies the grand style to Donne or to Dryden, to
Spenser or to Shelley. The grand is the transcendent: and it
is blasphemy against the Spirit of Poetry to limit the fashions
and the conditions of transcendence.1
The other “chair”-book, The Study of Celtic Literature, is
tempting in promise, but disappointing in performance. Much
Study of it is not literary, and when it becomes so, there
of Celtic are difficulties. In the Preface itself, and in the
Literature. Homer, Mr Arnold had sometimes been unjust or
unsatisfactory on what he did not know or did not like-
Mediæval literature, the Ballad, &c.,—but his remarks and
his theories had been, in the main, solidly based upon what
he did not know thoroughly and did appreciate—the Classics,
Dante, Milton, Wordsworth. Here not Pallas, I think, but
some anti-Pallas, has “invented a new thing." Whether Mr
Arnold knew directly, and at first-hand, any Welsh, Breton,
Cornish, Irish, or Scotch Gaelic, I do not know. He cer-
tainly disclaims anything like extensive or accurate know-
ledge, and it is noticeable that (I think invariably) he
quotes from translations, and only a few well-known trans-
lations. Moreover he, with his usual dislike and distrust
of the historic method, fences with, or puts off, the inquiry
what the dates of the actual specimens which we possess of
this literature may be. Yet he proceeds to pick out (as if
1 The present writer has applied the years ago, which has not yet been
gist of this argument on the grand printed.
style, in detail, to Milton (Milton ? Those to the manner born or
Memorial Lectures, 1908), to Shake- matriculated in it have generally been
speare (English Association Essays and kind to him : but then he has given
Studies, 1910), and to Dante in a them rather considerable bribes.
lecture before the Dante Society some
D
480
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY,
directly acquainted with the literatures themselves, at dates
which make the matter certain) divers characteristics of “mel-
ancholy," " natural magic, &c., in Celtic literature, and then,
unhesitatingly and without proof of any kind, to assign the
presence of these qualities, in writers like Shakespeare and
Keats, where we have not the faintest evidence of Celtic blood,
to Celtic influence.
Now, we may or may not deplore this proceeding; but we
must disallow it. It is both curious and instructive that
Its assump- the neglect of history which accompanied the pre-
tions. valence of Neo-classicism, and with which, when it
was dispelled, Neo-classicism itself faded, should reappear in
company with this neotato-classicism, this attempt to recon-
struct the classic faith, taking in something, but a carefully
limited something, of Romanticism. But the fact is certain :
and, as has been said, we must disallow the proceeding.
Whether melancholy, and natural magic, and the vague do
strongly and especially, if not exclusively, appear in Celtic
poetry, I do not deny, because I do not know; that Mr Arnold's
evidence is not sufficient to establish their special if not ex-
clusive prevalence, I deny, because I do know. That there is
melancholy, natural magic, the vague in Shakespeare and in
Keats, I admit, because I know; that Mr Arnold has any
valid argument showing that their presence is due to Celtic
influence, I do not admit, because I know that he has produced
none. With bricks of ignorance and mortar of assumption
you can build no critical house.
In that central citadel or canon of the subject, Essays in
Criticism, this contraband element, this theory divorced from
history, makes its appearance but too often: it can
The Essays:
their case and need only be said, for instance, that Mr Ar-
for Criti- nold's estimate of the condition of French, and still
cism.
more of German, literature in his own day, as com-
pared with English, will not stand for five minutes the ex-
amination of any impartial judge, dates and books in hand.
But the divorce is by no means so prominent-indeed most
of the constituent essays were, if I mistake not, written
before the Celtic Lectures were delivered. The book is so
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
481
much the best known of Mr Arnold's critical works-except
perhaps the Preface to Mr Ward's Poets—that no elaborate
analysis of it here can be necessary. Its own Preface is de-
fiantly vivacious—and Vivacity, as we are often reminded, is
apt to play her sober friend Criticism something like the
tricks that Madge Wildfire played to Jeanie Deans. But it
contains, in the very last words of its famous epiphonema to
Oxford, an admission (in the phrase "this Queen of Romance")
that Mr Arnold was anything but a classic pur sang. The
two first Essays, “The Function of Criticism at the Present
Time” and the “Influence of Academies," take up, both in the
vivacious and in the sober manner, the main line and strategy
of the old Preface itself. We may, not merely with gener-
osity. but with justice, “write off” the, as has been said,
historically false parallels with France and Germany which
the writer brings in to support his case. That case itself is
perfectly solid and admissible. Those who are qualified to
judge - not perhaps a large number --- will admit, whether
they are for it or against it, that no nonsuit is possible,
and perhaps that no final decision for it or against is possible
either, except to the satisfaction of mere individual taste and
opinion.
The case is, that the remedy for the supposed or supposable
deficiencies of English literature is Criticism — that the
business of Criticism is to discover the ideas upon which crea-
tive literature must rest—that there is not enough “play of
mind” in England—that Criticism again is the attempt “to
know the best that is known and thought in the world ”—that
foreign literature is specially, valuable, simply because it is
likely to give that in which native literature is lacking,
These are the doctrines of the First Essay, mingled with much
political-social application and not a little banter. The second
takes them up and applies them afresh in the direction of
extolling the institution of Academies, and contrasting the
effects of that influence on French critics and the absence of
it in English, very much to the disadvantage of the latter,
especially Mr Palgrave. For Mr Arnold had adopted early
in his professorial career, and never gave up, the very dubious
---
--
--
1
2 H
482
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
habit of enforcing his doctrine with “uses” of formally polite
but extremely personal application.
Now, this case or bundle of cases is, I have said, quite fairly
and justly arguable. Even though I hope that the whole of
this volume will have shown and show that Mr Arnold
was quite wrong as to the general inferiority of English
criticism, he was (as I have, not far back, taken the pains to
show also) not quite wrong about the general criticism of his
own youth and early manhood—of the criticism which he him-
self came to reform. Nor was he wrong in thinking that there
is, in the uncultivated and unregenerate English mind, a sort
of rebelliousness to sound critical principles. Very much of
his main contention is perfectly good and sound: nor could
he have urged any two things more universally and ever-
lastingly profitable than the charge never to neglect criticism,
and the charge always to compare literatures of other countries,
religious-social diathesis of the actual patient.
It is generally acknowledged that the influence of Sainte-
Beuve was an “infortune of Mart” or of Saturn, when it
om induced Mr Arnold to take his two first examples
amples of this comparative study from interesting but un-
thereof.
*.
impor
important people like the Guérins. But except
persons determined to cavil, and those of whom the Judicious
Poet remarks-
“For what was there each cared no jot,
But all were wroth with what was not”-
every one will admit that the rest of the seven—the “ Heine,"
the “ Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” the “Joubert,"
the “Spinoza,” and the “M. Aurelius ”-form a pentad of critical
excellence, and brilliancy, and instruction, which can nowhere
be exceeded. I, at least, should find it hard to match the
1 He has been largely imitated in
this, and I cannot help thinking that
it is a pity. If a man is definitely and
ostensibly "reviewing” another man's
work, he has a perfect right, subject to
the laws of good manners, to discuss
him quoad hoc. But illustrations of
general discourses by dragging in liv-
ing persons seem to be forbidden by
those laws as they apply in the literary
province.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
483
group in any other single volume of criticism. Idle that we
may frequently smile or shake the head—that we must in some
cases politely but peremptorily deny individual propositions !
Unimportant that, perhaps even more by a certain natural
perversity than by the usual and most uncritical tendency to
depress something in order to exalt something else, English
literature is, with special reference to the great generation of
1798-1834, unduly depreciated! These things every man can
correct for himself. How many could make for themselves
instances of comparative, appreciative, loosely but subtly judi-
cial criticism as attractive, as stimulating, as graceful, as varied,
and critically as excellent, being at the same time real examples
of creative literature ?
We are fortunately dispensed here from inquiring into the
causes, or judging the results, of that avocation from literature,
The latest or at least literary criticism, which held Mr Arnold
work. for exactly ten years, from 1867 to 1877. Nor
will it be necessary (though it would be pleasant) to discuss
in detail all the contributions of the slightly longer period
which was left him, from his return to his proper task in the
spring of 1877 with the article on M. Scherer’s “Milton,” to
his sudden and lamented death in the spring of 1888. Just
before that death he had published an article on Shelley,
which (for all the heresy glanced at below) is one of the very
best things he ever did; little less can be said of the Milton-
Scherer paper eleven years earlier, and whenever he touched
literature (which was fairly often) during the interval, he was
almost always at a very high level. A good deal, though not
quite all, of the ebullience of something not quite unlike
flippancy, which had characterised his middle period, had
frothed and bubbled itself away; his general critical views
had matured without altering; and their application to fresh
subjects, if it sometimes (as very notably in the case of Shelley)
brought out their weakness, brought out much more fully
their value and charm. The article on Mr Stopford Brooke's
Primer of English Literature, the prefaces to the selected Lives
of Johnson, to Wordsworth, to Byron, the papers in Mr Ward's
Poets on Gray and Keats (postponing for a moment the more
.
484
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
important Introduction to that work as a whole), the literary
part of the Discourses in America, and (though I should put
this last quartette on a somewhat lower level) those on M.
Scherer's Goethe, George Sand, Tolstoi, and Amiel, form a
critical baggage, adding no doubt nothing (except in one case)
to the critic's general Gospel or theory, but exemplifying
his critical practice with delightful variety and charm.
The possible or actual exception, however, and the piece
which contains it, require more individual notice. In the
The Intro- Introduction to Mr Ward's book, Mr Arnold devised
on to no one really new thing, but he gathered up and
Ward's
English focussed his lights afresh, and endeavoured to
Poets. provide his disciples with an apparently new
definition of poetry. He drove first at two wrong estimates
thereof, his dislike of the second of which—the “personal”
estimate-had been practically proclaimed from the very first,
and may be allowed to be to a great extent justified, while
his dislike of the first—the “historic” estimate--had always
been clear to sharp-eyed students, though it lacked an equal
justification. In fact, it is little more than a formulation of
Mr Arnold's own impatience with the task-laborious enough,
no doubt, and in parts ungrateful—of really mastering poetic,
that is to say literary, history. Of course, mere age, mere
priority, confers no interest of itself on anything. But to say
-if we may avail ourselves of Gascoigne's instance—that the
first discoverable person who compared a girl's lip to a cherry
does not acquire, for that now unpermissible comparison, merit
and interest, is not wise. To assume, on the other hand,
some abstract standard of “high" poetry, below which time
and relation will not give or enhance value, is still less wise.
Portia, in a context of which Mr Arnold was justly fond, might
· have taught him that “nothing is good without respect," and
that no “respect” is to be arbitrarily barred.
But even from the sweetest and wisest of doctors he would
not, I fear, have taken the lesson. He is set to prove that
“ Criticism we must only pay attention to “the best and
of. Life.” principal things” as of old,—to class and mark these
jealously, and to endeavour to discover their qualification,
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
485
II
You must not praise the Chanson de Roland or any early
French poetry very highly, but you may praise Homer, Milton,
and Dante without limit. Chaucer, not merely like Dryden
and Pope, but like Burns and Shelley, has not “high serious-
ness.” And poetry is expressly defined as “a criticism of life,
under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of
poetic truth and poetic beauty."
| It is important (though very difficult) to keep undue repetition
out of such a book as this, and we shall therefore, in regard
to “high seriousness," merely refer the reader to what has
been said above on the “grand style." | And we shall cut down
criticism of the definition as much as possible, to return to it
presently. The defence of it once made, as “not a definition
but an epigram," certainly lacks seriousness, whether high or
low. The severest strictures made on Mr Arnold's levity
would not have been misplaced had he offered an epigram
here. Nor need we dwell on the perhaps inevitable, but
certainly undeniable, “circularity” of the formula. The
jugulum at which to aim is the use of the word “criticism”
at all. Either the word is employed in some private jargon, or it
has no business here. Mr Arnold's own gloss of the “applica-
tion of ideas to life,” gives it perhaps the doubtful benefit of
the first supposition : but, either in this way or in others,
does it very little good. All literature is the application of
ideas to life: and to say that poetry is the application of
ideas to life, under the conditions fixed for poetry, is simply
à vain repetition.
Yet insufficient, and to some moods almost saugrenu, as
such a definition may seem at first sight, it is, calmly and
in Sub critically considered, only a re-forming of the old
ject or Poetic line of battle. Once more, and for the last time
Moment. formally, Mr Arnold is taking the field in favour of
the doctrine of the Poetic Subject, as against what we may,
perhaps, make a shift to call the “Doctrine of the Poetic
Moment." It is somewhat surprising that, although this anti-
nomy has been visible throughout the whole long chain of
documents which I have been endeavouring to exhibit in order,
no one, so far as I know, has ever fully brought it out, at
486
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
least on the one side. Mr Arnold-like all who agree with
him, and all with whom he and they agree, or would have
agreed, from Aristotle downwards—demands a subject of dis-
tinct and considerable magnitude, a disposition of no small
elaborateness, a maintained and intense attitude, which is vari-
ously adumbrated by a large number of terms, down to “grand
style” and “high seriousness.” The others, who have fought
(we must confess most irregularly and confusedly as a rule)
under the flag which Patrizzi, himself half or wholly unknow-
ing, was the first to fly, go back, or forward, or aside to the
Poetic Moment to the sudden transcendence and transfiguration
-by“treating poetically," that is to say, by passionate interpreta-
tion, in articulate music-of any idea or image, any sensation or
sentiment. They are perfectly ready to admit that he who has
these moments most constantly and regularly under his com-
mand—he who can co-ordinate and arrange them most skilfully
and most pleasingly—is the greatest poet, and that, on the other
hand, one or two moments of poetry will hardly make a poet
of any but infinitesimal and atomic greatness. But this is the
difference of the poets, not of the poetry. Shakespeare is an ·
infinitely great poet, and Langhorne an infinitesimally small
one. Yet when Langhorne writes
“Where longs to fall that rifted spire
As weary of the insulting air,” 1
he has in the italicised line a “poetic moment” which is, for its
poetic quality, as free of the poetic Jerusalem as “We are such
stuff,” or the dying words of Cleopatra. He has hit “what it
was so easy to miss,” the passionate expression, in articulate
music, unhit before, never to be poetically hit again save by
accident, yet never to perish from the world of poetry. It is
only a grain of gold (“fish-scale” gold, even, as the mining ex-
perts call their nearly impalpable specks), but it is gold: some-
thing that you can never degrade to silver, or copper, or
pinchbeck.
1 This pearl of eighteenth century Scott's unequalled combination of
minor poetry occurs in the 7th ("The memory and taste has used it some-
Wallflower") of its author's Fables of where as a motto.
Flora (Chalmers, xvi. 447). I think
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
487
To Mr Arnold this doctrine of the Poetic Moment, though he
never seems to have quite realised it in its naked enormity
(which, indeed, as I have said, has seldom been frankly, as here,
unveiled), was from the first the Enemy. He attacked it, as we
saw in his Preface, when he was young, and he fashions this
Introduction so as to guard against it in his age. Yet it is
curious that in his practice he sometimes goes perilously near
to it. On his own showing, I cannot quite see, though I can
see it perfectly well on mine, why even such a magnificent
line as
“In la sua volontade e nostra pace"
should not only prove Dante's supremacy, but serve as an
infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of
high poetic quality in other poetry. High poetic quality
depends, we have been told, on the selection and arrangement
of the subject. Dante, we know accidentally and from outside,
has that selection and arrangement. But suppose he had not?
The line itself can tell us nothing about them.
Nevertheless, as has been said so often, the side which a man
may have taken in the everlasting and irreconcilable critical
Arnolds ac-
battle of judges by the arrangement, and judges by
complishment the result, hardly affects his place in Criticism as it
and position should be allotted by a final Court of Appeal. How
as a critic.
ce does he express for himself, and how does he promote in
others, the intelligent appreciation, the conscious enjoyment of
literature ? That is the question: and few critics can meet this
question more triumphantly than Mr Arnold. Like others, he
can but give what he has. If you ask him for a clear, com-
plete, resumed, and reasoned grasp of a man's accomplishment
-for a definite placing of him in the literary atlas-he will not
have much answer to give you. He does not pretend, and has
never pretended, to give any. A certain want of logical and
methodical aptitude, which may be suspected, a dislike of
reading matter that did not interest him, which is pretty clear,
and that dread and distrust of the “historic estimate," which
he openly proclaimed, would have made this impossible. But
we were warned at the very outset not to go to him for it.
488
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
And for acute, sensitive, inspired, and inspiring remarks on the
man, or the work, or this and that part of work and man-
attractively expressed, ingeniously co-ordinated, and redeemed
from mere desultoriness by the constant presence of the general
critical creed—no critic is his superior.
Nor are these his only " proofs ”—his only “pieces in hand.”
He may be said-imperfectly Romantic, or even anti-Romantic,
as he was to have been the very first critic to urge the
importance, the necessity, of that comparative criticism of
different literatures, the half-blind working of which had
helped to create, if it had not actually created, the Romantic
movement. In England he was absolutely the first to do this
systematically, and with something like — though not with
complete—impartiality. The knowledge of Spanish and Italian
poetry and romance, long very common with us, had died down
in the first half of the nineteenth century, and had not been
much used for critical purposes while it lasted. The engoue-
ment for French, of the late seventeenth and eighteenth, had
reacted itself-in men as different as Coleridge, Landor, and De
Quincey-into a depreciation which, if not “violently absurd,”
as Mr Arnold translates Rémusat's term of saugrenu applied
to it, was certainly either crassly ignorant or violently unjust.
German had, it is true, been exalted on the ruins of the popu-
- larity of the three Romance literatures; but it had been wor-
shipped scarcely according to knowledge: and of the whole
mediæval literature of Europe there was hardly any general
critical appreciation. Mr Arnold himself, in fact, was still
too much in the gall of bitterness here. It was imperative, if
the Romantic and result-judging” criticism was not to become
a mere wilderness of ill-founded and partial individualisms,
that this comparison should be established. It was equally
imperative that it should be established, if Mr Arnold's own
“neotato-classicism," as we have called it, was not to wizen and
ossify like Neo-classicism itself. He was its first preacher with
us: and there had not, to my knowledge, been any such definite
preacher of it abroad, though the practice of Germany had im-
plied and justified it from the first. And he was one of its
most accomplished practitioners,—Lessing not being equal to
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
489
him in charm, and Sainte-Beuve a little his inferior in passion
for the best things.
Yet another watch-word of his, sovereign for the time and
new in most countries, which he constantly repeated (if, being
human, he did not always fully observe it himself), was the
caution against confounding literary and non-literary judgment.
No one rejected the exaggeration of “ Art for Art's sake only"
more unhesitatingly; but no one oftener repeated the caution
against letting the idols of the nation, the sect, the party inter-
fere with the free play of Art herself, and of critical judgment
on Art.
His services, therefore, to English Criticism, whether as a
“preceptist” or as an actual craftsman, cannot possibly be
overestimated. In the first respect he was, if not the absolute
reformer,--these things, and all things, reform themselves under
the guidance of the Gods and the Destinies, not of men,—the
leader in reform, of the slovenly and disorganised condition into
which Romantic criticism had fallen. In the second, the things
which he had not, as well as those which he had, combined to
give him a place among the very first. He had not the sub-
lime and ever new-inspired inconsistency of Dryden. Dryden,
in Mr Arnold's place, might have begun by cursing Shelley a
little, but would have ended by blessing him all but wholly.
He had not the robustness of Johnson; the supreme critical
“reason” (as against understanding) of Coleridge; scarcely the
exquisite, if fitful, appreciation of Lamb, or the full-blooded and
passionate appreciation of Hazlitt. But he had an exacter
knowledge than Dryden's; the fineness of his judgment shows
finer beside Johnson's bluntness; he could not wool-gather like
Coleridge; his range was far wider than Lamb's; his scholar-
ship and his delicacy alike gave him an advantage over Hazlitt.
Systematic without being hidebound; well-read (if not exactly
learned) without pedantry; delicate and subtle, without weak-
ness or dilettanteism; catholic without eclecticism; enthusiastic
without indiscriminateness,-Mr Arnold is one of the best and
most precious of teachers on his own side. And when, at those
moments which are, but should not be, rare, the Goddess of
Criticism descends, like Cambina and her lion-team, into the
490
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.'
lists, and with her Nepenthe makes men forget sides and sects
in a common love of literature, then he is one of the best and
most precious of critics.
Mr Arnold's criticism continued to be fresh and lively,
without a touch of senility, or of failure to adapt itself to new
conditions, till the day of his death: and when that evil day
came, the nineteenth century had little more than a decade to
run. On the other hand, though almost all his juniors were
more or less affected by him, it cannot be exactly said that
he founded any definite school, or started any by reaction from
himself. The most remarkable approach to such a school that
has been made since was made by Mr Pater, quite fifteen years
before Mr Arnold died. No very special necessities of method,
therefore, impose themselves upon us in regard to the classifi-
cation of our remaining subjects in the English division: and
we shall be safe in adopting a rough chronological order,
taking first three very remarkable persons who—though con-
temporaries of Arnold-show in criticism as in other literature
the influence of Carlyle.
The increasing disinclination to take the standpoint of pure
literary criticism which we noticed in the master, and which
The Car- characterised the second quarter of the century,
lylians. naturally and inevitably reproduced itself in the
three most brilliant of his disciples-Ruskin, Froude, and Kings-
ley—with interesting variants and developments according to
the idiosyncrasy of the individual. There was, indeed, in them
something which can hardly be said to have been in Carlyle
at all a weakness which his internal fire burnt out of him.
This weakness, formulated most happily by an erratic person
of genius whom I have alternately resolved to admit and decided
to exclude here—Thomas Love Peacock,-is the principle that
you “must take pleasure in the thing represented, before you
can derive any from the representation."i Incidentally and
indirectly, no doubt, omnes eodem cogimur: or at least there
are very few who escape the suck of the whirlpool. But the
declaration and formal acceptance of this principle is compara-
i Gryll Grange, chap. xiv..
KINGSLEY.
491
tively modern: and it is one of the worst inheritances of that
Patristic attitude which was referred to long ago.1 It is indeed
closely connected with the doctrine that "all depends upon the
subject”: but the Greeks were too deeply penetrated with
æsthetic feeling to admit it openly, and, from the earliest times,
philosophised on the attraction of repulsive subjects. It is
indirectly excluded, likewise, by the stricter kinds of Neo-classic
rule-criticism, which saw nothing to disapprove in such poems
as the Syphilis. But it has, like other dubious spirits,
been let loose by “the Anarchy.” That you may and should
“like what you like " is open to the twist of its correlative
—that you may dislike what you choose to dislike.
At any rate, all these three distinguished persons showed
the Carlylian-Peacockian will-worship in their different ways,
to an extent which makes them, as critics, little
Kingsley.
? more than extremely interesting curiosities. Kings-
ley, the least strong, intellectually speaking, of the three,
shows it strongly enough. His saying (reported, I think, by
the late Mr Kegan Paul), when one of his children asked who
and what was Heine,“ A bad man, my dear, a bad man,” is a
specially interesting blend of the doctrine formulated by
Peacock with the old Platonic-Patristic “the poet-is-a-good
man” theory. Heine was not quite “a proper moral man" in
his early years, certainly: though one might have thought that
those later ones in the Matraszen-Gruft would have atoned in
the eyes of the sternest inquisitor. But “bad” would have
been a harsh term for him at any time. Still, it emphasises
the speaker's inability to distinguish between morality and
genius, between the man and the work.' This inability was
pretty universal with him, and it makes Kingsley's own work
as criticism almost wholly untrustworthy, though often very
1 This attitude was not quite uni.
versal. We find an interesting ex-
pression of more moderate opinion
from St Basil, the pupil of Libanius,
also the fellow-student of Julian, which
can be introduced here with a reference
to the excellent translation published,
with Plutarch's How to Read Poetry (v.
sup., i. 140), by Professor Paculford of
the University of Washington (“Yale
Studies," No. xv. : New York, 1902).
The Saint allows the study of the
purer profane literature as a useful
and ornamental introduction to higher
things.
492
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY,
interesting and stimulating to readers who have the proper
correctives and antidotes ready: it even (which is not so very
common a thing) affects his praise nearly as much as his blame.
You must be on your guard against it, when he extols Euphues
and the Fool of Quality I as much as when he depreciates Shelley.
There was less sentimental and ethical prejudice in Mr
Froude than in his brother-in-law, but his political and, in a
wide, not to say loose, sense philosophical, prejudices
Froude.
* were even stronger, and he drew nearer to Carlyle
than did either Kingsley or Ruskin in a certain want of interest
in literature as literature.?
We reach, however, as every one will have anticipated, the
furthest point of our “eccentric" in Mr Ruskin. His way-
.. wardness is indeed a point which needs no labour-
Mr Ruskin.
vol ing, but it is never displayed more incalculably to
the unwary, more calculably to those who have the clue in
their hands, than in reference to his literary judgments. In-
justice would be done to Rapin and Rymer if we did not
give some of the enormous paradoxes and paralogisms to which
he has committed himself in this way: but the very abundance
of them is daunting, and fortunately his work is not so far from
the hands of probable readers as the dustbin-catacombs where
those poor old dead lie. “Indignation is a poetical feeling if
excited by serious injury, but not if entertained on being
cheated out of a small sum of money." You may admire the
budding of a flower, but not a display of fireworks. Contrast
the famous exposure of the “pathetic fallacy” with Scott's
supposed freedom from it, and you will find some of the most
exquisite unreasons in literature. The foam in Kingsley's song
must not be "cruel,” but the Greta may be “happy," simply
because Ruskin does not mind finding fault with Kingsley,
but has sworn to find no fault with Scott — perhaps also
because he, very justly, likes sea - foam. Squire Western
i Not that he is wholly wrong in re-
gard to either: while he does allow
some of the almost unbelievable ab-
surdities of Brooke's eccentric, though
far from "unimportant," purpose-
novel. But it is evident-and, indeed,
confessed that he is thivking of the
ethical tone and spirit first, midmost,
and almost last also.
? Not, again, that the Short Studies
especially can be neglected, even from
our point of view.
G. H. LEWES.
493
is not “a character," because Ruskin had determined that
only persons "without a fimetic taint” can create character,
and Fielding had a fimetic taint. And dramatic poetry "de-
spises external circumstance" because Scott did not despise
external circumstance, and explanation is wanted why he could
not write a play. Whether, with the most delicious absurdity,
he works out a parallel between a “fictile” Greek vase (which
is also, one hears, “ of the Madonna") and “fiction," or is very
nearly going to worship a locomotive when it makes a nasty
noise and convinces him of its diabolism, this same exquisite
unreason is always at the helm. It very often, generally
indeed, is committed in admiration of the right things; it is
always delightful literature itself. But it never has the
judicial quality, and therefore it is never Criticism.1
That George Henry Lewes had many of the qualities of
the critic it would be mere foolish paradox to deny. His
Goethe and his History (if not) of Philosophy yet
G. H. Lewes.
10" of Philosophers” are sufficient proofs for any
one to put in: and of his mastery of that element of
criticism which goes to the making of an impresario the
wonderful success with which he formed and trained his
companion, George Eliot, is a still more convincing demon-
stration. I understand, also, that he had real merits as a
dramatic critic. But his chief critical work, The
His Prin-
ciples of Principles of Success in Literature,2 betrays by its
Success in very title the presence of an element of vulgarity in
Literature.
w him, which can indeed scarcely escape notice in
other parts of his work, and which is by no means removed
or neutralised by the quasi-philosophic tone of the work itself.
Much may be forgiven to a man, born in the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, when he uses the words “progress,"
“success," and the like: but not everything. Fame may be the
? I have purposely taken all these
examples from the Selections, where
they will be easily found.
2 The Essays comprising this, with
their sequel and complement The Inner
Life of Art, appeared in the Fortnightly
Review (which Lewes edited) at its
beginning in 1865, and have been use-
fully reprinted by Mr T. S. Knowlson
(London, n. d.) I may observe that
the cheap and useful collection (the
“Scott Library') in which this re-
print appears provides a large amount
of other valuable critical matter.
494
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
last infirmity of noble minds; Success is but the first and last
morbid appetite of the vulgar. And, as has been said, Lewes
does not fully redeem his title by his text. There is plenty
of common sense and shrewdness. There is plenty of apparent
and some real philosophy. Some, no doubt, will delight to
be told that there are three Laws of Literature, that “the
intellectual form is the Principle of Vision; the moral form
the Principle of Sincerity; and the æsthetic form the Principle
of Beauty," and then to have these various eggs tossed and
caught, in deft arrangements, for some chapters..
Indeed, there be many truths in the book, and I would most
carefully guard against the idea that Lewes knowingly and
deliberately recommends a mere tradesman - like view of
literature. On the contrary, he strongly protests against
it: and writes about Sincerity with every appearance of being
sincere. But his view of Imagination is confessedly low, and
almost returns to the Addisonian standpoint of." ideas furnished
by sight.” And when, with a rather rash hiatus, he promises 2
" for the first time to expound scientifically the Laws that con-
stitute the Philosophy of Criticism,” we listen even less hope-
fully and even more doubtfully than somebody did when he
understood somebody else to say that he had killed the Devil.
Lewes is not unsound on the subject of imitation of the
classics. He has learnt from Coleridge, or from Wordsworth,
or from De Quincey, that style is the body not the dress of
thought: and much that he says about it is extremely shrewd
and true. But when he comes to its actual Laws and gives
them as Economy, Simplicity, Sequence, Climax, and Variety,
the old not at all divine despair comes upon us. All these
are well, but they are not Style's crown; they are only and
hardly some of the balls and strawberry leaves of that crown.
A sentence, or a paragraph, or a page may be economic, simple,
sequacious, climacteric, and various, and not be good style. I
am not sure that a great piece of style might not be produced
to which, except by violence, no one of these epithets—I am
sure that many such pieces could be produced to which not
all—will apply. Once more the light and holy soul of liter-
1 Chap. iii. p. 47 sq., ed. cit.
2 Ibid., p. 113.
BAGEHOT.
495
ature has wings to fly at suspicion of these bonds—and uses
them.
Lewes's best critical work by far1 is to be found in the
Essay on The Inner Life of Art, where he handles, without
His Inner ceremony and with crushing force, the strange old
Life of Art. and new prudery about the connection of verse and
poetry, declaring plumply that the one is the form of the other.
But it is noticeable that this Essay is in the main merely a
catena or chrestomathy of critical extracts, united by some
useful review-work. On the whole, even after dismissing or
allowing for any undue "nervous impression” created by the
unlucky word “Success,” it is not very possible to give him,
as a critic, a position much higher than one corresponding to
the position of Helps. Lewes is a Helps much unconven-
tionalised and cosmopolitanised, not merely in externals. He
is not only much more skilled in philosophical terminology,
but he really knows more of what philosophy means. He has
more, much more, care for literature. But the stamp of the
Exhibition of 1851 is upon him also: and it is not for nothing
that his favourite and most unreservedly praised models of
style are. drawn from Macaulay. I have no contempt for
Macaulay's style myself: I have ventured in more places
than one or two to stigmatise such contempt as entirely un-
critical. But the preference of this style tells us much in this
context, as the preference of champagne in another.
The evils of dissipation of energy have been lamented by
the grave and precise in all ages : and some have held that
Bagehot.
w they are specially discoverable in the most modern
.. times. It is very probable that Criticism may
charge to this account the comparatively faint and scanty
service done her by one who displayed so much faculty for
that service as Walter Bagehot. A man whose vocations and
avocations extend (as he himself says in a letter quoted by
Mr Hutton) from hunting to banking, and from arranging
Christmas festivities to editing the Economist, can have but
1 Excepting (largely) the exceptions newspapers. The Leader, under his
already made, and also the huge mass. editorship, was a pioneer of improve-
of his unreprinted contributions to ment in reviewing.
496
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
odd moments for literature. Yet this man's odd moments
were far from unprofitable. His essay on Pure, Ornate, and
Grotesque Art in Poetry would deserve a place even in a not
voluminous collection of the best and most notable of its kind.
The title, of course, indicates Wordsworth, Tennyson, and
Browning: and the paper itself may be said to have been one
of the earliest frankly to estate and recognise Tennyson-the
earliest of importance perhaps to estate and recognise Brown-
ing-among the leaders of mid-nineteenth century poetry. As
such titles are wont to do, it somewhat overreaches itself, and
certainly implies or suggests a confusion as to the meaning of
“pure.” If pure is to mean “unadorned,” Wordsworth is
most certainly not at his poetical best when he has most of
the quality, but generally at his worst; if it means “sheer,”
“intense,” “quintessential,” his best of poetry has certainly no
more of it than the best of either of the other two. The
classification suggests, and the text confirms, a certain “popu-
larity” in Bagehot's criticism. But it is popular criticism of
the very best kind, and certainly not to be despised because
it has something of mid-nineteenth century, and Macaulayan,
materialism and lack of subtlety. This derbheit sometimes
led him wrong, as in that very estimate of Gibbon which
the same Mr Hutton praises, but oftener it contributed sense
and sanity to his criticism. And there are not many better
things in criticism than sanity and sense, especially when, as
in Bagehot's case, they are combined with humour and with
good-humour.1
The criticism of a critic just cited, the late Mr R. H.
Hutton, affords opportunity for at least a glance at one of
R. H. the most important general points connected with
Hutton. our subject—the general distaste for pure criticism,
and the sort of relief which l'homme sensuel moyen seems to
feel when the bitter cup is allayed and sweetened by sentimental,
or political, or religious, or philosophical, or anthropological,
or pantopragmatic adulteration. Mr Hutton's criticism was,
i The posthumous Literary Studies,
and Mr Hutton's essay (v. ed. cit. on next
paragraph), are the places for studying
him. The study may result, without
protest from me, in a high opinion of
his criticism.
PATER.
497
1
it is believed, by far the most popular of his day; the very
respectable newspaper which he directed was once eulogised
as “telling you what you ought to read, you know”-a phrase
which might have awakened in a new Wordsworth thoughts too
deep for tears or even for laughter.
The commentary on it is supplied by the two volumes of
Mr Hutton's selected and collected Essays. These constantly
His ensasions deal with things and persons of the highest import-
of literary ance in literature; but they abstain with a sort of
sm. Pythagorean asceticism from the literary side of them.
In his repeated dealings with Carlyle, it is always as a man,
as a teacher, as a philosopher, as a politician, as a moralist,
that he handles that sage-never directly, or at most rapidly
and incidentally, as a writer. On Emerson he is a little more
literary, but not much: and on him also he slips away as
usual. Even with Poe, whom one might have thought literary
or nothing, he contrives to elude us, till his judgment on the
Poèms suggests that inability to judge literature caused his
refusal. Dickens, Amiel, Mr Arnold himself-the most widely
differing persons and subjects — fail to tempt him into the
literary open; and it is a curious text for the sermon for
which we have here no room that he most nearly approaches
the actual literary criticism of verse, not on Tennyson, not on
“ Poetry and Pessimism," not on Mr Shairp's Aspects of
Poetry, but on Lord Houghton. He goes to the ant and is
happy: with deans, and bishops, and archbishops, and cardinals
he is ready to play their own game. But if Literature, as
literature, makes any advances to him, he leaves his garment
in her hands and flees for his life. .
To assert too positively that Mr Walter Pater was the most
important English critic of the last generation of the nineteenth
century-- that he stands to that generation in a
Pater.
* relation resembling those of Coleridge to the first,
and Arnold to the latter part of the second-would no doubt
cause grumbles. The Kingdom of Criticism has been of old
compared to that of Poland, and perhaps there is no closer
point of resemblance than the way in which critics, like
* 2 vols., London, 1894.
21
498
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Y
11
Polacks, cling to the Nie pozwalam, to the liberum veto. So,
respecting this jus Polonice, let us say that those are fair
reasons for advancing Mr Pater to such a position, while
admitting that he is somewhat less than either of his fore-
runners.
His minority consists certainly not in faculty of expression,
wherein he is the superior of both, nor in fineness of apprecia-
His frank tion, in which he is at least the equal of either :
Hedonism. but rather in a certain eclectic and composite
character, a want of definite four-square originality, which has
been remarkably and increasingly characteristic of the century
itself. In one point, indeed, he is almost entitled to the
highest place, but his claim here rests rather on a frank
àvowal and formulation of what everybody had always more
or less admitted, or by denying had admitted the acceptance
of it by mankind at large-to wit, the pleasure-giving quality
of literature. Even he, however, resolute Hedonist as he was,
falters sometimes in this respect - is afraid of the plain
doctrine that the test of goodness in literature is simply and
solely the spurt of the match when soul of writer touches
reader's soul, the light and the warmth that follow
In two other main peculiarities or properties of his—the,
we will not say confusion but, deliberate blending of different
His poly- arts in method and process, and the adoption
techny and (modifying it, of course, by his own genius) of the
style. doctrine of the “single word,”-he is again more of
a transmitter than of a kindler of the torch. The first
proceeding had been set on foot by Lessing in the very act
of deprecating and exposing clumsy and blind anticipations
of it; the second was probably taken pretty straight from
Flaubert. But in the combination of all three, in the supple-
ments of mother-wit, and, above all, in the clothing of the
whole with an extraordinarily sympathetic and powerful
atmosphere of thought and style-in these things he stands
quite alone, and nearly as much so in his formulation of
that new critical attitude which we have seen in process of
development ever since the Romantic uprising.
The documents of his criticism are to be chiefly sought
2
PATER.
499
in the Studies in the History of the Renaissance, in parts of
Marius the Epicurean, and, of course, in the volume
His formu-
lation of the of Appreciations, and the little collection of Essays
new critical reprinted from The Guardian.? The posthumous
attitude.
books are less to be depended on, in consequence
of Mr Pater's very strong tendency to cuver son vin—to alter
and digest and retouch. I do not know any place setting forth
that view of criticism which I have myself always held more
clearly than the Preface of the Studies. “To feel the virtue of
the poet, or the painter, to disengage it, to set it forth,—these
are the three stages of the critic's duty.” The first (Mr Pater
does not say this but we may) is a passion of pleasure, passing
into an action of inquiry; the second is that action consummated;
the third is the interpretation of the result to the world. ; -
He never, I think, carried out his principles better than in
his first book, in regard to Aucassin et Nicolette, to Michelangelo,
The Re- to Du Bellay, as well as in parts of the “Pico"
naissance. and “Winckelmann” papers. But the method is
almost equally apparent and equally helpful in the more
purely “fine art” pieces—the "Lionardo," the “Botticelli,” the
" Luca della Robbia.” In that passage on the three Madonnas
and the Saint Anne of Da Vinci, which I have always re-
garded as the triumph both of his style and of his method,
the new doctrine (not the old) of ut pictura poesis comes out
ten thousand strong for all its voluptuous softness. This is
the way to judge Keats and Tennyson as well as Lionardo :
nay, to judge poets of almost entirely different kinds, from
Æschylus through Dante to Shakespeare. Expose mind and
sense to them, like the plate of a camera : assist the reception
of the impression by cunning lenses of comparison, and history,
and hypothesis; shelter it with a cabinet of remembered read-
ing and corroborative imagination ; develop it by meditation,
and print it off with the light of style :—there you have, in
but a coarse and half-mechanical analogy, the process itself.
1 I fully expect to be told by some
critic that there is no such book, just
as I once was told that Browning
wrote no such poem as James Lee.
2 Printed by Mr Gosse (London,
1896) privately : but I believe it has
been included in the complete edition.
500
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
I fancy that objections to this proceeding take something
like the following form : “In the first place, the thing is too
Objections to effeminate, too patient, too submissive,- it substi-
its process. tutes a mere voluptuous enjoyment, and a dilettante
examination into the causes thereof, for a virile summoning of
the artist-culprit before the bar of Reason to give account of
his deeds. In the second, it is too facile, too fainéant. In
the third, it does not give sufficient advantage to the things
which we like to call great.' The moments of pleasure are too
much atomised: and though it may be admitted that some
yield larger, intenser, more continuous supplies of moment than
others, yet this is not sufficient. Lastly [this is probably
always subaud., but seldom uttered except by the hotter gos-
pellers], we don't believe in these ecstatic moments, analysed
and interpreted in tranquillity; we don't feel them, and we
don't want to feel them; and you are a nasty hedonist if you
do feel them.”
Which protest could, no doubt, be amplified, could, with no
doubt also, be supported to a certain extent. Nor is it (though
he should placard frankly the fact that he agrees in the main
with Mr Pater) exactly the business of the present historian to
defend it at any length here, inasmuch as he is writing a
history, not a “suasory.” Let it only be hinted in passing
tliat the exceptions just stated seem inconclusive—that the
wanters of a sense cannot plead their want as an argument
that no others have it; that the process has certainly given
no despicable results; that it has seldom demonstrably failed
as disastrously as the antecedent rule-system; and, most of
all, that nothing can be falser than the charge of fainéantise.
and dilettanteism. Only as “the last corollary of many of an
effort" can this critical skill also be attained and maintained,
At any rate, though, as often happens to a man, he became
rather more of a preceptist and less of an impressionist after-
wards, Mr Pater certainly exemplified this general
Importance
of Marius theory and practice in a very notable manner.
the Epi- Marius is full of both: it is much more than the
Wilhelm Meister of the New Criticism. It is this
which gives the critical attitude of Flavian, the hero's friend
outcode
Wilhelm Mersie
PATER.
501
and inspirer, the supposed author of the Pervigilium; this,
which is the literary function of “Neo-Cyrenaicism” itself-
the uovóxpovos ń dovń, the integral atom, or moment of pleasure,
being taken as the unit and reference-integer of literary value;
this, which gives the adjustment ad hoc of the Hermotimus.
The theory and the practice take their most solid, permanent,
and important form in this most remarkable book, of which
I find it hard to believe that the copy, “From the Author,''
which lies before me, reached me more than twenty years ago.
The Renaissance holds the first blooms and promises of them;
Appreciations and the Guardian Essays the later applications
and developments; but the central gospel is here.
That the opening essays of the two later books happen
to contain references to myself is a fact. But I fancy that
this will not be the main interest of them to
Apprecia-
tions and the posterity, nor, strange as it may seem, is it their
“Guardian” main interest to me. The Essay on Style which
Essays.
opens the larger and more important book, is, I
think, on the whole, the most valuable thing yet written
on that much-written-about subject. It presents, indeed, as
I have hinted, a certain appearance of “hedging," especially
in the return to matter as the distinction between “good
art” and “great art,” which return, as easily rememberable
and with a virtuous high sound in it, appears to have
greatly comforted some good if not great souls. Certainly
a pitcher of gold is in some senses greater than a pitcher
of pewter of the same design, especially if you wish to dis-
pose of it to Mr Polonius. A pewter amphora is again in some
senses greater than a pewter cyathus. But it does not seem
to me that this helps us much. How good, on the other hand,
and how complete, is that improvement upon Coleridge's dictum,
which makes Style consist in the adequate presentation of
the writer's “sense of fact," and the criticism of the documents
adduced! How valuable the whole, though we may notice as
.
1 I have always wondered what made
him think that I personally prefer plain
to ornate prose. The contrary, if it
were of any moment, happens to be
the case, though I own I think, as
even De Quincey thought, that the
ornate styles are not styles of all work,
502
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY,
to the writer's selection of prose literature as the representative
art of the nineteenth century, that this was his art, his in
consummate measure, and that verse was not. Altogether,
in short, a great paper,--a "furthest” in certain directions.
There is an interesting tender, or rather pilot-boat, to this
Essay in the first of the Guardian Reviews on “English Litera-
ture,” where the texts are the present writer's Specimens,
Professor's Minto's English Poets, Mr Dobson's Selections from
Steele, and one of Canon Ainger's many bits of yeoman's service
to Lamb. The relation is repeated between the Wordsworth
Essay in Appreciations and a Wordsworth review among the
Guardian sheaf: while something not dissimilar, but even more
intimate, exists between the “ Coleridge” Essay and the intro-
duction to that poet in Mr Ward's well-known book, which
Introduction actually forms part of the Essay itself. In the
two former cases, actual passages and phrases from the smaller,
earlier, and less important work also appear in the larger
and later. For Mr Pater—as was very well known, when more
than forty years ago it was debated in Oxford whether he
would ever publish anything at all, and as indeed might have
been seen from his very first work, by any one with an eye,
but with no personal knowledge—was in no sense a ready writer,
and, least of all, anxious to write as he ran, that those who run
might read. There have been critics who, without repeating
themselves, and even, perhaps, with some useful additions
and variations, could write half a dozen times on the same
subject; and indeed most literary subjects admit of such
writing. But such (we need not say frivolity but) flexibility
was not in accordance with Mr Pater's temperament. .
There is hardly one of the papers in either book (though
some of the Guardian pieces are simple, yet quite honest and
adequate reviews) that does not display that critical attitude
which we have defined above, both directly and in relation to
the subjects. The most interesting and important passages
are those which reveal in the critic, or recognise in his authors,
this attitude itself—as when we read of Amiel: “In Switzer-
land it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of
such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens
PATER.
503
with A., we feel that there has been and, with success, an
intellectual effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of
this pleasure—to define feeling.” Indeed, I really do not
know that “to define feeling” is not as good-it is certainly
as short-a definition of at least a great part of the business
of the critic as you can get. And so again of Lamb: “To
feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, . . . and
then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others, . . . this
is the way of his criticism." .
It is certainly the way of Mr Pater's, and it is always good-
to walk with him in it-better, I venture to think, thani to
endeavour to follow him in his rarer and never quite successful
attempts to lift himself off it, and flutter in the vague. Good,
for instance, as is the Essay on “ Æsthetic Poetry,” it would
have been far better if it had contented itself with being, in
fact and in name, what it is in its best parts—a review of
Mr William Morris. This, however, was written very early,
and before he had sent out his spies to the Promised Land in
The Renaissance (and they had brought back mighty bunches
of grapes !), still more before he had reached the Pisgah of
Marius. Even here though, and naturally still more in the
much later paper on Rossetti, he presents us, as he does almost
everywhere, with admirable, sometimes with consummate, ex-
amples of “defined feeling” about Wordsworth and Coleridge,
about Browning and Lamb, about Sir Thomas Browne (one of
his most memorable things), about more modern persons—Mr
Gosse, M. Fabre, M. Filon. Particularly precious are the three
papers on Shakespeare. I have always wished that Mr Pater
had given us more of them, as well as others on authors pos-
sessing more of what we may call the positive quality, than
those whom he actually selected. It would, I think, speaking
without impertinence, have done him some good: and it would,
speaking with certainty, have done us a great deal. One may
sometimes think that it was in his case (as in some others,
though so few !) almost a pity that he was in a position to
write mainly for amusement. But it is not likely that his
i Nor do I think the “Postscript"
of Appreciations, where the writer
“ Arnoldises” somewhat, one of his
best things, good as it is.
504
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
sequestered and sensitive genius could ever have done its best
--if it could have done anything at all—at forced draught.
So, as usual, things are probably better as they are.
What, however, is not probable but certain, and what is
here of most importance, is that the Paterian method is co-
Universality, extensive in possibility of application with the
of his entire range of criticism—from the long and slow
method.
degustation and appreciation of a Dante or a
Shakespeare to the rapidest adequate review of the most
trivial and ephemeral of books. Feel; discover the source of
feeling (or no- feeling, or disgust, as it will often be in the
trivial cases); express the discovery so as to communicate the
feeling: this can be done in every case. And if it cannot be
done by every person, why, that is only equivalent to saying
that it is not precisely possible for everybody to be a critic,
which, again, is a particular case of a general proposition
announced in choice Latin a long time ago, practically antici-
pated in choicer Greek long before, and no doubt perfectly well
understood by wise persons of all nations and languages at
any time back to the Twenty-third of October B.C. 4004, or
any other date which may be preferred thereto. Besides the
objections before referred to, there may be others such as
that the critic's powers, even if he possesses them, will become
callous by too much exercise,-an objection refuted by the fact,
so often noticed, that there is hardly an instance of a man
with real critical powers becoming a worse critic as he grew
older, and many a one of his becoming a better. But, at
any rate, this was Mr Pater's way of criticism : this had
already been the way pursued, more or less darkling or in
clear vision, by all modern critics— the way first definitely
formulated, and, perhaps, allowing for bulk of work, most
consistently pursued, by himself. And I have said-perhaps
often enough—that I do not know a better.
Although the relation of "moon” to “sun," so often used
as an image in literary history, will not work with pedantic
J. A. exactness in relation to Mr J. A. Symonds and the
Symonds. critic just mentioned,--for the moon is not many
times more voluminous than the sun, and there are other
S
SYMONDS—THOMSON.
505
difficulties,-it applies to a certain extent. Both were literary
Hedonists; both were strongly influenced by Greek and Italian.
But Mr Symonds's mind, like his style, was very much more
irregular and undisciplined than Mr Pater's (which had almost
something of Neo-classic precision adjusting its Romantic luxu-
riance), and this want of discipline let him loosel into a
loquacity which certainly deserved the Petronian epithet of
enormis, and could sometimes hardly escape the companion one
of ventosa. His treatise on Blank Verse, interesting as it is,
would give the enemy of the extremer “modern” criticism far
too many occasions to blaspheme by its sheer critical anti-
nomianism: and over all his extensive work, faults of excess
of various kinds swarm. But beauties and merits are there
in ample measure as well as faults : and in the literary parts
of The Renaissance in Italy the author has endeavoured to put
some restraint on himself, and has been rewarded for the sac-
rifice. From some little acquaintance with literary history,
I think I may say that there is no better historical treat-
ment of a foreign literature in English. One can never help
wishing that the author had left half his actual subject un-
touched, and had completed the study of Italian literature.3
Not much need be said of the critical production-arrested,
like the poetical, by causes unhappy but well known-of
Thomson James Thomson “the Second,” hardly “the Less,"
(“B. V.") but most emphatically “the Other.” It ought to
have been good: and sometimes (especially under the unex-
pected and soothing shadow of Cope's Tobacco Plant) was so.4
Thomson had much of the love, and some of the knowledge,
required; his intellect (when allowed to be so) was clear and
strong; he was, in more ways than one, of the type of those
poets who have made some of the best critics, despite the
alleged prodigiousness of the metamorphosis. But the good
1 Especially in his numerous volumes
of Essays and Studies, under various
names.
? London, 1895.
3 A “pair" for Mr Symonds from
the other University 'might be found
in the late Mr Frederick Myers, who,
with more philosophical and less ar-
tistic tendency, exhibited an equally
flamboyant style.
+ Its chief monuments or repertories
are Essays and Phantasies (London,
1881) and Poems, Essays, and Frag.
ments (London, 1892).
506
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
seed was choked by many tares of monstrous and fatal growth.
The least of these should have been (but perhaps was not) the
necessity of working for a living, and not the necessity, but
the provoked and accepted doom, of working for it mostly in
obscure and unprofitable, not to say disreputable, places,
imposed upon a temperament radically nervous, "impotent,"
in the Latin sense, and unresigned to facts. That temperament
itself was a more dangerous obstacle: and the recalcitrance to
religion which it was allowed to induce was one more danger-
ous still. There are no doubt many instances where rigid
orthodoxy has proved baneful, even destructive, to a man's
critical powers, or at any rate to his catholic exertion of them :
but there are also many in which it has interfered little, if
at all. On the other hand, I can hardly think of a case in
which religious, and of very few in which political, heterodoxy
has not made its partisans more or less hopelessly uncritical
on those with whom they disagree. Nor could the peculiar
character of Thomson's education and profession fail to react
unfavourably on his criticism. It is hard to get rid of some
ill effects of schoolmastering in any case; it must be nearly
impossible, in the case of a proud and rather “ill-conditioned”
man, who has not enjoyed either full liberal education or gentle
breeding, and who is between the upper and nether millstone,
as Thomson seems to have been, or at least felt himself, while
he was a military schoolmaster. All these irons entered into
a critical soul which might have been a fair one and brave:
and we see the scars of them, and the cramp of them, too
often.1
A journalist for one-half of his working life, and a professor
--partly-of literature for the other, William Minto executed
William in both capacities a good deal of literary work: but
Minto. his most noteworthy contribution 2 to our subject
consisted in the two remarkable manuals of English literary
history which, as quite a young man, he drew up. To say
1 On men like Shelley and Blake, of Letters Series, is not to be overlooked.
course, Thomson was free from most 3 Manuul of English Prose Litera-
of his “Satans”: and he speaks well ture (Edinburgh, 1872); Characteristics
on them.
of English Poets, from Chaucer ta
2 His Defoe, in the English Men of Shirley (Edinburgh, 1874).
MINTO.
507
that these manuals were, at the time of their publication, by
far the best on the subject would be to say little: for there
were hardly any good ones. Their praise can be more of a
cheerfully positive, and less of a “rascally, comparative”
character. They were both, but especially the Poets from
Chaucer to Shirley, full of study, insight, originality, and grasp
—where the author chose to indulge his genius. Their defects
were defects which it requires genius indeed, or at
on English least a very considerable share of audacity, to keep
Prose and out of manuals of the kind. There is, perhaps, too
Poetry.
much biography and too much mere abstract of
contents—a-thing which will never serve the student in lieu
of reading, which will sometimes disastrously suggest to him
that he need not read, and which must always curtail the
space available for really useful guidance and critical illumina-
tion to him when he does. In the Prose there is something
else. The book is constructed as a sort of enlarged praxis on
a special pedagogic theory of style-teaching, that of the late
Professor Bain: and is elaborately scheduled for the illustration
of Qualities and Elements of Style, of Kinds of Composition.
There is no need to discuss how far the schedule itself is faulty
or free from fault; it is unavoidable that rigid adjustment to
it-or to any such--shall bring back those faults of the old
Rhetoric on which we have already commented, with others
more faulty than themselves. For classical literature was very
largely, if not wholly, constructed according to such schemes,
and might be analysed with an eye on them: English literature
had other inceptions and other issues. That Minto's excellent
critical qualities do not disappear altogether behind the lattice-
work of schedule-reference speaks not a little for them.
Few writers have lost more by the practice of anonymous
H. D. Traill."
. journalism than the late Mr Traill. He engaged
in it, and in periodical writing generally, from a
period dating back almost to the time of his leaving Oxford, and
1 V. Hist. Crit., vol. i.
2 I do not know whether he contrib
uted to anything before that remark-
able period The Dark Blue, which,
during its short life in the earliest
'Seventies, had a staff not easily sur.
passable, and almost reminding one
of the earlier English London Magazine
and of the French Globe.
508
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
t
he had to do with it, I believe, till his death, the extraordinary
quality of his work recommending him to any and every editor
who knew his business. It was impossible, in reading any
proof of his, be it on matters political, literary, or miscellaneous,
not to think of Thackeray's phrase about George Warrington's
articles, as to “the sense, the satire, and the scholarship”
which characterised them. In the rather wide knowledge,
which circumstances happened to give me, of writers for the
press during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, I
never knew his equal for combination of the three. “ For a
great many years, however, chance, or choice, or demand,
His critical directed him chiefly to the most important, as it
strength. is thought, and the most paying, but the most
exhausting and, as far as permanent results go, the most
utterly thankless and evanescent division of journalism-
political leader-writing, with actual attendance at “the House”
during the Session. And this curtailed both his literary
press-work and his opportunities of literary book-work. He
did, however, a great deal of the former: and the labours of
the much-abused but sometimes useful literary resurrection-
men, who dig contributions out of their newspaper graves, could
hardly be better bestowed than upon him. Fortunately, how-
ever, the literary side of his criticism–he was a critic of
letters and life alike, born and bred, in prose and in verse,
by temper and training, in heart and brain-remains in part
of The New Inician, in the admirable monographs on Sterne
and Coleridge, and in the collection of Essays 2 issued but a
year or two before his death.
In the three last-named volumes especially, his qualities
as a critic are patent to any one with eyes. The two mono-
On Sterne graphs are models of competence and grasp, but
and Cole- they are almost greater models of the combination
rage of vigour and sanity. Both subjects are of the
kind which used to tempt to cant, and which now tempts to
paradox. To the first sin Mr Traill had no temptation-
i Both in the English Men of Letters.
The Sterne appeared in 1882; the
Coleridge in 1884.
2 The New Fiction and other Essays
on Literary Subjects (London, 1897).
TRAILL.
509
whatever fault might have been found with him, neither Peck-
sniffery nor Podsnappery was in the faintest degree bis failing.
But he might have been thought likely to be tempted, as some
very clever men in our day have been, by the desire to fly
in the face of the Philistine, and to flout the Family Man.
There is no trace of any such beguilement—the moral currency
is as little tampered with as it could have been by Johnson
or by Southey, while there is no trace of the limitations of
the one or of the slight Pharisaism of the other. And yet
the literary judgment is entirely unaffected by this moral
rectitude: the two do not trespass on each other's provinces
by so much as a hair’s-breadth.
The title-paper of the collected Essays, “The New Fiction,"
connects itself with several other pieces in the volume, “The
Essays on Political Novel,” “Samuel Richardson,” “The Novel
Fiction of Manners,” and, to some extent, “The Future of
Humour.” Mr Traill was a particularly good critic of the most
characteristic product of the nineteenth century: I doubt
whether we have had a better. In poetry he seemed to me
to sin a little, in one direction (just as, I know, I seemed to
him to sin in the other), by insisting too much, in the antique
fashion, on a general unity and purpose. He shows this, I
think, here in the paper on “Matthew Arnold," who, indeed,
himself could hardly have objected, for they were theoretically
much at one on the point. But as to prose fiction he had no
illusions, and his criticism of it is consummate. We have not
a few instances of onslaughts upon corrupt developments of the
art by critics great and small; but I do not think I know one to
equal Mr Traill's demolition of the “grime-novel" of to-day or
yesterday. His highest achievement, however, in a single piece,
“The Future is undoubtedly “The Future of Humour," which
of Humour.” transcends mere reviewing, transcends the mere
causerie, and unites the merits of both with those of the best
kind of abstract critical discussion. One may say of it, without
hesitation, ça restera ; it may be lost in the mass, now and
then, but whenever a good critic comes across it he will restore
it to its place. It is about a day, but not of or for it: it moves,
and has its being, as do all masterpieces of art, small and great,
510
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
sub specie ceternitatis. If it were not so idle, one could only sigh.
at thinking how many a leading article, how much journey-
work in biography, one would give for Traill to be alive again,
and to write such criticism as this.
Others, great and small, we must once more sweep into the
numerus named, or unnamed. Mr Traill himself-for they were
both of St John's--may be said to have directly
Others :
Mansel,
inherited the mantle of Dean Mansel in respect of.
Venables, critical wit and sense, though the Dean had only
Stephen,
Lord
occasionally devoted these qualities, together with
Houghton, his great philosophical powers, and his admirable
de style, to pure literary criticism. Of the immense
Church, &c.
critical exercise of Mr George Venables, a little
lacking in flexibility, sympathy, and unction, but excellently
sound and strong, no salvage, I think, has ever been published:
and though a good deal is available from his yoke-fellow, Sir
James Fitzjames Stephen,2 this latter's tastes—as his father's
had done before, though in a different direction-led him away
from the purer literary criticism. Of three other persons,
eminent in their several ways, more substantive notice may
perhaps have been expected by many, and will certainly be
demanded by some. But Lord Houghton's Monographs, 3 ad-
mirably written and extremely interesting to read, hardly
present a sufficiently individual kind, or a sufficiently con-
siderable bulk of matter, for a separate paragraph. Mr Mark
Pattison's dealings with Milton and with Pope, as well as
with the great seventeenth-century scholars, may seem more,
and more imperatively, to knock for admission. As far as
scholarship, in almost every sense of the word, is concerned, no
critic can surpass him; but scholarship, though all but in-
dispensable as the critic's canvass, needs much working upon,
and over, to give the finished result. And Pattison's incurable
reticence and recalcitrance the temperament which requires
the French words réche and revêche, if not even rogue, to label it-
were rebel to the suppleness and morigeration which are required
from all but mere scholastic critics. The happier stars or com-
See his Letters, Lectures, and Re- 2 Especially in Horce Sabbatica.
views : London, 1873.
3 London, 1873.
PATMORE.
511
plexion of his near contemporary, Dean Church, enabled him to
do some admirable critical work on Dante, on Spenser, and on
not a few others, which will be found in the English Men of
Letters, in Mr Ward's Poets, in his own Collected Essays, and in
separate books. Dr Church combined, with an excellent style,
much scholarship and a judgment as sane as it was mild, nor
did he allow the natural drift of his mind towards ethical and
religious, rather than purely literary, considerations to draw
him too much away from the latter.
Mr Coventry Patmore has been extolled to the skies by a
coterie. But to the cool outsider his criticism, like his poetry,
has somewhat too much the character of "diamondi-
Patmore.
ore ferous rubbish,”—a phrase which, when applied to
the poetry itself, did not, I am told, displease him. For
though, in Principle in Arti and Religio Poetce,2 there may
be a few things rich and rare, there is a very large sur-
plusage of the other constituents of the mixture. The short
articles of the first volume consist almost wholly of it, and
might have been left in the columns of the daily paper in
which they appeared with a great deal of advantage. Indeed
those on Keats, Shelley, Blake, and Rossetti, which unfortun-
ately, follow each other, make a four-in-hand good only for the
knacker. Mr Patmore, when he wrote them, was too old to
take the benefit of no-clergy, to be allowed the use of under-
graduate paradox. And as, unfortunately, he was a crafts-
fellow, and a craftsfellow not very popular or highly valued
with most people, his denigration is all the more awkward.
A man who says that The Burden of Nineveh“ might have been
written by Southey” (and I do not undervalue Southey), must
have an insensible spot somewhere in his critical body. A man
who says that Blake's poetry,“ with the exception of four or
five pieces and a gleam here and there," is mere drivel, must be
suffering from critical hemiplegia. There are better things in
the other volume, and its worst faults are excesses of praise,
i London, 1889.
2 London, 1893.
3 I do not mean that they were rub-
bish there. Rubbish is only “matter
in the wrong place," and what is rubbish
in a book need by no means be rubbish
in a newspaper.
512
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
always less disgusting, though not always less uncritical, than
those of blame. But I am not here giving a full examination
to Mr Patmore's criticism, I am only indicating why I do not
here examine it, as I am perfectly ready to do at any moment
in a proper place.
There were, I think, few English writers of the last quarter of
the nineteenth century who showed more of the true critical ethos
Edmund than the late Mr Edmund Gurney. I did not know
Gurney. Mr Gurney myself, but most of my friends did; a
situation in which there is special danger (when the friends are
complimentary) of the fate of Aristides for the other person.
But the good things which were told me of Mr Gurney I find
to be very much more than confirmed by his books, though, of
course, I also find plenty to disagree with. The earlier of them,
The Power of Sound, is in the main musical; and I have
generally found (though there are some capital exceptions) that
critics of poetry, or of literature generally, who start from much
musical knowledge, are profoundly unsatisfactory, inasmuch as
they rarely appreciate the radical difference between musical
music and poetical music. Even Mitford fails here. But Mr
Gurney does not. He was the first, or one of the first, I think,
in English to enunciate formally the great truth that.“the
setting includes a new substance"-meaning not merely the
technical music-setting of the composer, but that “sound ac-
companiment” which, in all poetry more or less, and in
English poetry of the nineteenth century especially, gives
a bonus, adds a panache, to the meaning.
He was right too, I have not the slightest doubt, in laying it
down that “metrical rhythm is imposed upon, not latent in,
The Power speech”; and he went right, where too many scholars
of sound. of high repute have gone wrong, in seeing that the
much-decried English scansion-pronunciation of Latin almost
certainly brings out to an English ear the effect on a Latin one,
better than any conjectured attempt to mimic what might have
been the Latin pronunciation itself. I was delighted to find that
he, too, had fixed upon Tennyson’s “Fair is her cottage” (his is
not quite my view, and perhaps we were both guided by a re-
1 London, 1880.
GURNEY.
-513
ported speech of Mr Spedding's) as almost the ne plus ultra of
“superadded” audible and visual effect combined. And he
is well worth reading on certain “illusions” of Lessing's.
The literary part of The Power of Sound is, however, if not
accidental, incidental mainly: not a few of the papers in the
Tertium second volume of Tertium Quid 1 deal with litera-
Quid. ture pure and simple. They are to some extent
injured by the fact that many, if not most of them, are merely
strokes, or parries, or ripostes, in particular duels or mêlées on
dependences of the moment. And, as I have pointed out
in reference to certain famous altercations of the past, these
critical squabbles seem to me almost invariably to darken
counsel-first, by leading the disputants away from the true
points, and secondly, by inducing them to mix in their plead-
ings all sorts of flimsy, ephemeral, and worthless matter. Not
the point, but what Jones or Brown has said about the point,
becomes the object of the writer's attention; he wants to score
off Brown or Jones, not to score for the truth. So when Mr
Gurney contended with the late Mr Hueffer-another literary-
musical critic, who did not, as Mr Gurney did, escape the
dangers of the double employ–when he contributed not so
Arnold, Mr Austin, Mr Swinburne about Byron-he did not
always say what is still worth reading. And he makes one
or two odd blunders, such as that the French are blind to
Wordsworth, whereas Wordsworth's influence on Sainte-Beuve,
to name nobody else, was very great. But he is always
sensible, and he always has that double soundness on the
passionate side of poetry and on the peculiar appeal of its
form, which is so rare and so distinctive of the good critic.
These qualities should, of course, appear in his essay on
perhaps well to note that, while quite sound on the point
that there is a right as well as a wrong comparison, he, like
12 vols., London, 1887.
Quid” or “cross-bench" mind. It is
. Such as even Gautier.
equally indubitable that it most com-
3 This sensibleness, no doubt, ought monly does not.
always to characterise the “Tertium 4 T. Q., vol. ii.
2 K
514
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
others, hardly escapes the further danger of “confusing the
confusion "—of taking what is really the right comparison for
what is really the wrong. The comparison which disapproves
one thing because it is unlike another is wrong, not the com-
parison which is used to bring out a fault, though the unlike-
ness is not assigned as the reason of the fault at all. But I
am here slipping from history to doctrine on this particular
point. I think Mr Gurney, right in the main, might have
been still righter : but in general I am sure that he had ad-
mirable critical qualities, and I only wish he had chosen, or
had been forced, to use them more fully and frequently.1
1 I do not take special notice of R.
L. Stevenson here, because his criti.
cism, in any formal shape, belongs
mainly to the earlier and tentative
stage of his work, and never, to my
fancy, had much fixity or grip, interest-
ing and stimulating as it is. I ven-
tured to tell him, when I met him
first, after the appearance of The New
Arabian Nights in London, that here
was Apollo waiting for him, not there:
and I hold to the view. Others, such
as Mr Henley (with whom also I rowed
in that galley—a tight and saucy one,
if not exactly a galère capitaine), Mr
Robert Buchanan, Sir Leslie Stephen,
Prof. Bain, have passed away too re-
cently ; and yet others must fall into
the numerus.
515
CONCLUSION.
THERE is no need of elaborate summary of the stages of English
Criticism as they have been given here. The tale divides itself
into three pretty plain parts—the initial stage of Elizabethan
Criticism, tentative, hesitating, and scattered; the Neo-Classic
period, starting after something of an interval with Dryden and
continuing, though by no means without protest, to and almost
beyond the beginning of the nineteenth century; and lastly,
the season, not entirely unruffled by dissent, of the discrediting
of Rules and the more or less free appreciation of Results. We
have seen how idle it is to speak with bated breath of a roll
and record which contains greater names, like those from Ben
Jonson to Pater, and lesser, like those from Gascoigne and
Sidney to Gurney and Traill. The record stands, and (when
once set forth) can stand by itself, without final flourish of
trumpet and waving of flag.
The blunder of belittling English Criticism as it stands is con-
nected with another blunder, that of regarding it as, whether good
or bad, mainly unoriginal. Except in so far as the Elizabethans
are concerned—and everything must have its “pupillary" state
--this is far from being justified. Dryden, it is true, looks and
even speaks as if he were largely indebted to the French, but,
as has been shown, everything that is good in him is almost
wholly original, and when he follows he is almost always
wrong. So again with Johnson—his mistakes are traditional,
his achievements (and they were neither few nor small) are his
own. The indebtedness of Coleridge to the Germans—in the
way of general suggestion and of subjection to an atmosphere
516
CONCLUSION.
of stimulating quality at a susceptible time—is probably real,
but it goes no further, and, in the sense in which it has some-
times been interpreted, may be said not to exist. From the
most original and germinal French writer of the eighteenth
century-Diderot it would be difficult to trace any influence
on English Criticism till quite recent times, and Diderot him-
self had owed much of his own attitude to English literature.
The influence of Sainte-Beuve on Matthew Arnold was indeed
immense--those familiar with the mighty forest of the Causeries
will find its wood. constantly furnishing the Arnoldian arrows.
But Mr Arnold's principles were not Sainte-Beuvian: they
were, as has been said, neotato-classic-a novel and rather
capricious selection and propagation of Aristotelian doctrine.
We may alter the old boast and make it something less modest.
Our critical glass is not small, and not a few of us at least
have drunk out of it.
But something about the general nature and progress of
Criticism itself should perhaps be added.
The difficulty of keeping a steady, achromatic, comparative
estimate is not a small one, nor one easily got over. We have
seen how, at one time, Criticism has been entirely bewitched
by the idea of a Golden Age, when all poets were sacred and
all critics gave just judgment: how, at another, a confidence,
bland or pert as the case might be, has existed (and exists)
that we are much wiser than our fathers. Above all, we have
seen repeatedly that constant and most dangerous delusion
that the fashion which has just ceased to be fashionable is
a specially bad and foolish one, with its concomitant and
equally unreasonable but rather less dangerous opposite, that
the fashion that is in is the foolishest and feeblest of all
fashions. Against all other fallacies watch and ward has
to be kept.
From these same dangers, however, the very fact of having
steadily worked through the history from the beginning, even
from so late a one as that of English Criticism proper, yet with
a fair retrospect of the past and a clear comprehension of the
present, should be something of a safeguard for writer and
reader alike. We have seen how justly Mr Rigmarole might
THE PRESENT STATE OF CRITICISMNATA
517
.
pronounce all times "pretty much like our own” in respect of
incline to that danger and that to this. If one-even one-
lesson has emerged, it must have been that to select the
favourite critical fancy of any time as the unum necessarium
is fatal-or redeemed only by the completeness with which
such a selection, when faithfully carried out, demonstrates its
own futility. Yet we have seen also that the criticism of no
time is wholly idle or wholly negligible--that the older periods
and the older men are no “shadows,” but almost more real,
because more original, than the newer—that each and all have
lessons, from the times of prim and strictly limited knowledge
to the times of swaggering and nearly unlimited ignorance.
In the last two chapters we have surveyed, in most cases
virtually and in some actually, to the end of the Nineteenth
century, the latest stage or stages of that modified and modern-
ised criticism, the rise of which and its victorious establishment
were traced earlier. We have seen how-owing partly, no
doubt, to the mere general law of flux and reflux, but partly,
and perhaps mainly, to the enlarged study of literature, and
the breaking down, in connection with this, of the Neo-classic
standards and methods,-judging a posteriori, or, as Johnson,
prophesying and protesting, called it, "by the event,” came to
take the place of judging a priori, or by the rule. That in many
cases the new critics would not themselves have admitted this
description of their innovations we have not attempted to deny
or disguise : but we have not been able to agree with them.
We have, however, seen also that to satisfy the craving for
generalities and for “pushing ignorance further back," new
preceptist systems, in no small number, and sometimes of great
pretensions and no small complexity, have been advanced, and
that the new subject of “Æsthetics "—in itself little more than
a somewhat disorderly generic name for these systems—has
obtained considerable recognition. But no one of these has, nor
have all of them together, attained anything like that position
of acknowledgment, “establishment,” and authority which was
enjoyed by the Neo-classic faith: and we have seen that some
of the straitest doctrinaires have condescended, while the
518
CONCLUSION.
general herd of critics have frankly preferred, to judge authors
as they found them.
That the results have been in many ways satisfactory, it
seems impossible for any one but the extremest of partisans to
deny. The last and worst fault of any state, political or other,
that of " decreeing injustice by a law," has been almost entirely
removed (at least as a general reproach) from the state of
Criticism. That a work of art is entitled to be judged on its
own merits or demerits, and not according as its specification
does or does not happen to be previously entered and approved
in an official schedule-this surely cannot but seem a gain
to every one not absolutely blinded by prejudice. Nor is it
the only point which ought to unite all reasonable suffrages.
By the almost necessary working of the new system, the per-
sonnel of Criticism has been enlarged, improved, strengthened
in a most remarkable degree. The old opposition of the poet
and the critic has ceased to exist. It is true indeed that, as
a prevailing one, and it deprived criticism of some of its most
qualified recruits, or made them, if they joined, inconsistent,
now like Dryden, now like Johnson. Nay, Coleridge himself
could hardly have been the critic he was under the older dis-
pensation, much less those other poets, of our own and other
countries, who have enriched the treasury of a Goddess once
thought to be the poet's deadliest foe.
Yet, again, putting the contributions of poets, as poets, on one
side, the general literary harvest of the kind has been un-
doubtedly more abundant, and in its choicer growths more
varied, more delightful, even more instructive. A collection
of the best critical results of the last century only, and only
be compiled from the records of any other period, even of much
greater length. From the early triumphs of Coleridge and
Hazlitt, through the whole critical production of Matthew
Arnold, to the work of writers unnecessary to enumerate, because
all possible enumeration would almost necessarily be an in-
justice, you might collect-not a volume, not half a dozen, but
a small, and not so very small, library, of which you could not
THE PRESENT STATE OF CRITICISM.
519
ST
merely say “Here be truths,” but “Here is reading which any
person of ordinary intelligence and education will find nearly,
if not quite, as delightful as he can find in any other depart-
ment of belles lettres, except the very highest triumphs of prose
and poetic Fiction itself.”
Now, the removal of the reproach of injustice, the removal
of the reproach of dulness, these are surely good and even great
things: while better, and greater still, is the at least possible
institution of a new Priesthood of Literature, disinterested,
teaching the world really to read, enabling it to understand
and enjoy, justifying the God and the Muse to Men.
This is a fair vision; so fair, perhaps, that it may seem to be,
like others, made of nothing more solid than “golden air."
That would be perhaps excessive, for, as has been pointed out
above, the positive gains under this New Dispensation, both of
good criticism produced and of good literature freed from
arbitrary persecution, have been very great. But, as we fore-
shadowed in Interchapter III., there is another side to the
account, a side not to be ignored. If Buddha and Mr Arnold
be right, and if “Fixity” be “a sign of the Law”—then
most assuredly Modern Criticism is not merely lawless, but
frankly and wilfully antinomian. It is rare to find two
critics of competence liking just the same things; it is rarer
still to find them liking the same things for the same
reason. And so it happens that the catholic ideal which
this New Criticism seemed likely to establish is just as far
off, and just as frequently neglected or even outraged, as
in the old days of strict sectarianism, and without the same
excuse. The eighteenth-century critic could render a reason,
pro tanto valid, for patronising Chaucer, and taking exceptions
even to Milton, because neither was like Dryden. But the
critic of to-day who belittles Dryden because he is not like
Chaucer or Milton is utterly without excuse :-and yet he is
to be found, and found in high places. If (as in another case)
critics were to be for a single day what they ought to be, the
world would no doubt be converted; but there certainly does
not appear to be much more chance of this in the one case
than in the other.
520
CONCLUSION,
And so the enemy—who is sometimes a friendly enemy
enough — has not the slightest difficulty in blaspheming -
in asking whether the criterion of pleasure does not leave the
fatal difficulty: “Yes: but pleasure to whom?”; in demanding
some test which the simple can apply; in reproaching
“Romantic” critics with faction and will-worship, with in-
* consistency and anarchy. Nor perhaps is there any better
shift than the old Pantagruelian one-to passer oultre. There
are these objections to the modern way of criticism : and
probably they can never be got rid of or validly gainsaid.
But there is something beyond them, which can be reached
in spite of them, and which is worth the reaching
This something is the comprehensive and catholic posses-
sion of literature-all literature and all that is good in all-
which has for the first time become possible and legitimate.
From Aristotle to La Harpe—even to one of the two Matthew
Arnolds the covenant of criticism was strictly similar to
that of the Jewish Law,- it was a perpetual “Thou shalt
not do this,” or “Thou shalt do this only in such and such
a specified way." There might be some reason for all the
commandments, and excellent reason for some; but these
reasons were never in themselves immortal, and they con-
stantly tended to constitute a mortal and mortifying Letter.
The mischief of this has been shown in the larger History
generally, here as regards English, and there is no need to
spend more time on it. Nor is it necessary even to argue
that in the region of Art such a Law entirely lacks the
justification which it may have in the region of Morals.
But it may fairly be asked, How do you propose to define
any principles for your New Critic? And the answers are
ready, one in Hellenic, one in Hebraic phraseology. The
definition shall be couched as the man of understanding would
define it: and if any will do the works of the New Criticism
he shall know the doctrine thereof. Nor are the works
themselves hard to set forth. He must read, and, as far
as possible, read everything—that is the first and great com-
mandment. If he omits one period of a literature, even one
author of some real, if ever so little, importance in a period,
THE PRESENT STATE OF CRITICISM.
521
he runs the risk of putting his view of the rest out of focus;
if he fails to take at least some account of other literatures
as well, his state will be nearly as perilous. Secondly, he
must constantly compare books, authors, literatures indeed,
to see in what each differs from each, but never in order to
dislike one because it is not the other. Thirdly, he must,
as far as he possibly can, divest himself of any idea of what
a book ought to be, until he has seen what it is. In other
words, and to revert to the old simile, the plate to which he
exposes the object cannot be too carefully prepared and sensi-
tised, so that it may take the exactest possible reflection: but
it cannot also be too carefully protected from even the min-
utest line, shadow, dót, that may affect or predetermine the
impression in the very slightest degree.
To carry this out is, of course, difficult; to carry it out in
perfection is, no doubt, impossible. But I believe that it can
be done in some measure, and could be done, if men would
take criticism both seriously and faithfully, better and better
.-- by those, at least, who start with a certain favourable
disposition and talent for the exercise, and who submit this
disposition to a suitable training in ancient and modern litera-
ture. And by such endeavours, some nearer approach to the
“Fair Vision" must surely be probable than was even possible
by the older system of schedule and precept, under which
even a new masterpiece of genius, which somehow or other
“ forced the consign” and established itself, became a mischief,
because it introduced a new prohibitive and exclusive pattern.
I have said more than once that, according to the common
law of flux and reflux—the Revolution which those may accept
who are profoundly sceptical of Evolution-some return, not
to the old Neo-classicism, but to some more dogmatic and less
æsthetic criticism than we have seen for the last three
generations, may be expected, and that there have been
not a few signs of its arrival. But this is a History, not a
Prophecy, and sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.
Perhaps even the good is not quite so insufficient as the day
itself, “chagrined at whatsoe'er it is," may be apt to suppose.
“The Whole man idly boasts to find," no doubt. Not many
IL
522
CONCLUSION.
have even attempted to do it; few who have attempted it
have succeeded in that comparatively initial and rudimentary
adventure which consists in justly finding the parts. But
Criticism is, after all, an attempt, however faulty and failing,
however wandering and purblind, to do both the one and the
other. No Muse, or handmaid of the Muses (let it be freely
confessed) has been less often justified of her children: none
has had so many good-for-nothings for sons. Of hardly any
have some children had such disgusting, such patent, such
intolerable faults. The purblind theorist who mistakes the
passport for the person, and who will not admit without pass-
port the veriest angel; the acrid pedant who will allow no
one whom he dislikes to write well, and no one at all to
write on any subject that he himself has written on, or
would like to write on, who dwells on dates and commas,
who garbles out and foists in, whose learning may be easily
exaggerated but whose taste and judgment cannot be, because
they do not exist;—these are the too often justified patterns
of the critic to many minds. The whole record of critical
result, which we have so laboriously arranged and developed,
is a record of mistake and of misdoing, of half-truths and
nearly whole errors.
So say they, and so let them say: things have been said
less truly. But, once more, all this is no more Criticism
itself than the crimes and the faults of men are Humanity
in its true and eternal idea. Criticism is the endeavour to
find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best,
but all the good, that has been known and thought and written
in the world. If its corruption be specially detestable, its
perfection is only the more amiable and consummate. And
the record of the quest, while it is not quite the record of
the quest for other Eldorados—while it has some gains to -
yield, some moments of adeption, some instances of those
who did not fail-should surely have some interest even for
the general: it should more surely have much for those few
but not unworthy, faint yet pursuing, who would rather per-
severe in the search for the unattainable than rust in ac-
quiescence and defeat.
OF THE WHOLE MATTER,
523
For to him who has once attained, who has once even
comprehended, the ethos of true criticism, and perhaps to
him only, the curse which Mr Browning has put in one
of his noblest and most poetic passages does not apply. To
him the “one fair, good, wise thing” that he has once grasped
remains for ever as he has grasped it—if he has grasped
it at first. Not twenty, not forty years, make any difference.
What has been, has been and remains. If it is not so, if
there is palling and blunting, then it is quite certain either
that the object was unworthy or that the subject did not
really, truly, critically embrace it — that he was following
some will-o'-the-wisp of fancy on the one hand, some baffling
wind of doctrine on the other, and was not wholly, in brain
and soul, under the real inspiration of the Muse. That this
adeption and fruition of literature is to a certain extent
innate may be true: that it is both idle and flagitious to
simulate it if it does not exist, is true. But it can certainly
be cultivated where it exists, and it probably in all cases
requires cultivation in order that it may be perfect. In any
fair state of development it is its own exceeding great re-
ward,-a possession of the most precious that man can have.
And the practical value of the Art of Criticism, and of the
History of Criticism (which, as in other cases, is merely the
exposition of the art in practice), is that it can and does
assist this development; that by pointing out past errors it
prevents interference with enjoyment; that it shows how to
grasp and how to enjoy; that it helps the ear to listen when
the horns of Elfland blow.
APPENDIX,
THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
THE HOLDERS—EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MINORS-LOWTH-HURDIS—THE RALLY :
COPLESTON — CONYBEARE — MILMAN - KEBLE -- THE OCCASIONAL (ENGLISH)
PAPERS ' --THE 'PRÆLECTIONS' - GARBETT --CLAUGHTON - DOYLE — SHAIRP-
PALGRAVE—“SALUTANTUR VIVI.”
(I have thought this sketch worth giving, partly as an example of the kind of
excursus which might be appended, perhaps not without some advantage, and
certainly in some numbers, to this History. But I give it also because it
illustrates in a manner which cannot be elsewhere paralleled at all in our
own country, and to which I know no Continental parallel-by a continu-
ous and unbroken chain of instances and applications, the course of Euro-
pean as well as English theory, practice, and taste in Criticism, from a
period when the Neo-classic creed was still in at least apparently fullest
flourishing, through nearly two whole centuries, to what, in the eye of history,
is the present moment. The enforced vacation of the Chair after a single
decade at most, and its filling by popular election, and not by the choice
of an individual or a board, add to its representative character: and the usual
publication of at least some of the results, in each case, makes that character
almost uniquely discoverable in its continuity, while even the change of
vehicles from Latin to English is not without its importance. There is no
room here--and it would perhaps be unnecessary in any, caseto anticipate
the easy labour of summarising its lessons. But I think they may be said
to emphasise the warning-frequently given og hinted already—that the
result of the altered conditions and laws of criticism is not clear gain. No
part of Mr Arnold's best critical work was, I think, done for the Chair ;
and 1 should myself be inclined to select, as the best work actually done
for it, that of Keble, who represents the combination of the old Classical-
Preceptist tradition, with something of the new comparison and free ex-
patiation, as well as very much of the purely appreciative tendency.)
This Chair-founded by Henry Birkhead, D.C.L., a Trinity man,
a Fellow of All Souls, and a member of the Inner Temple-began
how its operations in 1708, the conditions of its tenure
* (which have only recently been altered) providing for a
first holding of five years, a single renewal for the same period, and a
sort of rotation, in the sense that the same college could not supply
two successive occupants. The actual incumbents have been : 1708-
18, Trapp; 1718-28, Thomas Warton the elder; 1728-38, Spence;
1738-41, John Whitf(i)eld; 1741-51 (the most distinguished name
526
THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
dra, apo the classics, anetitus. His fathe the
as yet), Lowth ; 1751-56, William Hawkins ; 1756-66, Thomas
Warton the younger; 1766-76, Benjamin Wheeler; 1776-83,
Randolph ; 1783-93, Holmes; 1793 to 1802, Hurdis. With the
nineteenth century a brighter order begins, all but one or two
of the Professors having made their mark out of the Chair as well
as in it. They were : Copleston, 1802-12; Conybeare, 1812-21;
Milman, 1821-31; Keble, 1831-42; Garbett (the dark star of this
group, but, as we shall see, not quite lightless), 1842-52 ; Claughton,
1852-57; Matthew Arnold, 1857-67; Sir Francis Doyle, 1867-77;
Principal Shairp, 1877-87; Mr Palgrave, 1887-95; while of living
occupants Mr Courthope resigned the Chair after a single tenure;-
and his successors have undergone a statutory limitation to this term.
Of these, Trapp, Spence, the younger Warton, and Arnold have
received notice in the text, which would have been theirs had they
never held the Chair. The lucubrations of the first
Eighteenth held for some time an honourable place as an accepted
century
minors.
handbook on the subject. Spence, profiting by the
almost Elysian tolerance of his sensible century, and
finding that neither residence nor lecturing was insisted on, seems
to have resided very little, and to have lectured hardly or not at
all. Tom Warton the younger, whose History would have dignified
any cathedra, appears to have devoted himself during his actual
tenure entirely to the classics, and never to have published any of
his lectures except one on Theocritus. His father, in the interval
between the respectable labours of Trapp and the philosophical
silence of Spence, had earned no golden opinions, and though the
repeated attacks of Amherst in Terroe Filius may have been due
partly to political rancour, and partly to that ingenious and unlucky
person's incorrigible Ishmaelitism, it seems to have been admitted
that the Professor's understanding and erudition lay very open to
criticism, and that his elocution and manner were not such as could
shield them. Of Whitfield, Hawkins, Wheeler, Randolph, and
Holmes, what I have been able to gather may best be set in a
note. The first person to make any real figure in and for the Chair
i Of Whitfield (or Whitfeld, as some holding several other professorships
write) I have found nothing but that at Oxford, attained to eminence in the
he wrote some Latin verses on William Church, and died Bishop of London in
the Third. The second volume of 1813. They are very sober and re-
William Hawkins's Tracts (1758) con- spectable. There is in poetry a nor
tains, besides a ridiculous tragedy, contemnenda proprietas quod imitando
Henry and Rosamond, an Essay on prcecipiat; and the warning, non
Drama, principally occupied by carp aliunde artis suce rudimenta desumet
ings at Mason's Elfrida, and some Criticus nisi ex sance Logices prceceptis,
Letters on Pope's Commentary on might with advantage have been ob-
Homer—both very small critical beer. served oftener than it has been. But
About Wheeler I find less even than Randolph sticks in the bark and the
about Whitfield. The piety of his son letter. Holmes, a poet after a fashion,
published-long after date and in our a theologian, and what not, seems to
own times—1870—the Praelections of have written more freely on anything
John Randolph, a man who, besides than on criticism.
LOWTH-HURDIS.
527
sm.
Now this, chief and principal en of old, it is th
was the author of De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum, which at once at-
tained not merely an English but a European reputation.
To discuss the Hebrew scholarship of this famous book (which
was first published in 1753, and repeatedly reprinted, revised,
translated, attacked, defended) would be wholly out of
"e place here, even if the writer had not almost wholly for-
gotten the little Hebrew he learnt at school. It is still, I believe
-even by specialists with no general knowledge of literature-
admitted to have been epoch-making in its insistence on the
parallelism of Hebrew poetry. But to those who take the historical
view of literature and of criticism its place is secure quite apart
from this. Not merely in the Renaissance, but in the Middle and
even the Dark Ages, the matter of the Bible had been used to
parallel and illustrate rhetorical and literary doctrines and rules.
But Lowth was almost the first to treat its poetical forns from
something like the standpoint of sound comparative literary criti-
cism. Now this, as the whole tenor of our book has gone to
contend, was the chief and principal thing that had to be done.
If we have any advantage over the men of old, it is that we (or
some of us) have at last mastered the fact that one literature or
one language cannot prescribe anything to another, but that it may
teuch much. And this new instance of a literature-unique in
special claims to reverence, unique likewise in the fact that in its
best examples it could owe nothing to those Greeks and Romans
who have so beneficently but so tyrannously influenced all the
modern tongues-was invaluable in its quality and almost incalcul-
able in its moment. That Lowth's exposition resulted directly or
indirectly in not a little maladroit imitation of Hebrew poetry was
not his fault; his critical lesson was wholly good.
Hurdis, a person now very much forgotten, had his day of interest
and of something like position. He is not unfrequently quoted by
Hurdis.
2 writers, especially by Southey, of the great period of
1800-1830, which he a little preceded, and he has the
honour-rare for so recent a writer-of a whole article 2 on his
poems in the Retrospective Review. As a poet he was mainly an imi-
tator of his friend Cowper—a fact which, with the title of his chief
work, The Village Curute, will give intending or declining readers a
sufficiently exact idea of what they are undertaking or relinquishing.
Easy blank verse, abundant and often not infelicitous description,
and unexceptionable though slightly copybook sentiments, form his
1 He complies with the requirements 3 Southey, himself a proper moral
of method and fashion by dealing gener. man in all conscience, but a sensible
ally with the End and Usefulness of one withal, somewhere remarks, "said
Poetry, its Kinds and so forth. But all well but not wisely” on Hurdis's
this we have had a thousand times.
"Give me the steed
What we have here specially is a com Whose generous efforts bore the prize away,
parison, and a new comparison.
I care not for his grandsire or his dam"
2 Vol. i. p. 57 sq.
A mild echo of the revolutionary period !
528
THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
poetic or versifying staple. As a critic I regret to find that my note
on him is “ Chatter”: and I do not know anything of his that makes
me, on reflection, think this unjust.
I should be half afraid that the interest which I feel in the next
set of Prælections, those of Edward Copleston,—"the Provost," as
.,, he anticipated Hawkins in being to Oxford men, even
Copleston.
not of his own college of Oriel, might be set down to
that boulimia or morbid appetite for critical writings of
which I have been accused, if I had not at hand a very potent
compurgator. Keble, it is true, was a personal friend of Copleston's.
But he was not at all the man to let personal friendship, any more
than personal enmity, bias his judgment; and he was admirably
qualified to judge. Yet he says deliberately 1 that the book “is by
far the most distinct, and the richest in matter, of any which it has
fallen to our lot to read on the subject." I cannot myself go quite
so far as that, and I doubt whether Keble himself would have gone
so far when, twenty years later, he wrote his own exquisite Lectures ;
but I can go a long way towards it.
The future Provost and Bishop has, indeed, other critical proofs on.
which to rely, 2—the famous and excellent “ Advice to a Young Re-
viewer,” which I fear is just as much needed, and just as little
heeded, as it was a hundred years ago, the admirable smashing of
the Edinburgh's attack on Oxford, and other matters,—but the Pre-
lections 3 are the chief and principal thing. Keble insisted that they
ought to be Englished, but I am not so sure. They form one of
the severest critical treatises with which I am acquainted; and some
of the features of this severity would, I think, appear positively
uninviting in English dress, while they consistently and perfectly suit
the toga and the sandal. But I must explain a little more fully in
what this "severity” consists ; for the word is ambiguous. I do not
mean that Copleston rejects Pleasure as the end of Poetry; for, on
the contrary, he writes Delectare boldly on his shield, and omits
prodesse save as an indirect consequence. I do not mean that he is
a very Draconic critic of particulars, though he can speak his mind
trenchantly enough.4 Nor do I mean that he is a very abstract
writer; for every page is strewn with concrete illustrations, very
well selected, and, for the most part, un-hackneyed.
His severity is rather of the ascetic and "methodist” kind; he
resembles nothing so much as a preceptist of the school of Her-
mogenes, who should have discarded triviality, and risen to very
nearly the weight and substance of Aristotle. At the very begin-
i In a review in the British Critic 3 First published at the end of his
(1814), reprinted in Papers and Re- tenure in 1813. My copy is the 2nd ed.,
views, Oxford and London, 1877. Oxford, 1828.
2 See the Remains, edited by his son. 4 See remarks on Trapp, pp. 6 and 7,
London, 1871.
ed. cit.
THE RALLY-COPLESTON.
529
only, to bace his mer lesson
foncient and ns. His distributer
ning he makes a statute for himself, to cite no literature but Greek
and Latin, and to use no language but these. And he never breaks
either rule; for though, on rare occasions, he refers to English writers
-Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Burke, Reynoldst—it is a reference
only, to books, or poems, or passages, never a citation. And in the
second place his method is throughout--constant as is his use of the
actual poetic object-lesson—to proceed by general categories, not of
poetic kinds (he shuns that ancient and now well-beaconed quick-
sand 2) but of qualities, constituents, means. His whole book, after
a brief definition or apology for not defining, is distributed under
four parts, -- Of Imitation, Of the Emotions, Of Imagination
(Phantasia), and Of Judgment, - though he never reached the
fourth,% owing to his tenure of the Chair coming to an end. After
a pretty full discussion of the nature and subject of Imitation, he
makes his link with his next subject by dwelling on the Imitatio
morum, and so of the Passions themselves. In this part a very large
share is given to the subject of Sententice "sentiments," as Keble
translates it, though, as I have pointed out formerly, no single trans-
lation of the word is at all satisfactory. The section on Imagination
is very interesting. Copleston is at a sort of middle stage between
the restricted Addisonian and the wide Philostratean-Shakespearean-
Coleridgean interpretation of the word. He expressly admits that
other senses besides sight can supply the material of Phantasia ;
but his examples are mainly drawn from material which is furnished
by the sight, and his inclusions of Allegory, Mythology, &c., with
other things, sometimes smack of an insufficient discrimination
between Imagination and Fancy. Indeed the fact that he is Præ-
Coleridgean helps to give him his interest.
Keble mildly complains that Copleston does not make use of that
doctrine of Association which he himself, writing so early, had
perhaps adopted, not from Coleridge but direct from Hartley. We
have, in our day, seen this doctrine worked to death and sent to
the knacker's in philosophy generally; but there is no doubt that
it can never be neglected in poetry, being, perhaps, the most universal
(though by no means the universal) means of approach to the sources
of the poetic pleasure. It does not, however, seem to me that
Copleston intended to mount so high, or go so far back : his aim
was, I think, more rhetorical, according to a special fashion, than
metacritical. But his mediate axioms are numerous and often very
informing: and his illustrations, as has been said, abundant, really
illustrative, and singularly recreative. He lays most Latin and
1 V. pp. 187, 197, 390, 229, 177. that his definition of Judicium in Prcel.
? Keble, however, was right in specify. 2 seems to promise nothing less than an
ing the chief exception-the admirable inquiry into the critical and apprecia.
prælection on Epitaphs (No. 27, p. 340). tive faculty as regards Poetry.
8 This is all the more tantalising in Hist. Crit., vol. i.
2 L
530
OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
1
THE duced, etoriopegular in the century book
many Greek poets under contribution; but some of his most effective
examples are drawn from a poet whom he does not critically over-
value, but who has no doubt been, as a rule, critically undervalued,
and for whom he himself evidently had a discriminating affection-
that is to say, Claudian.
On the whole, the appearance of a book of this scope and scheme,
at the very junction of the centuries and the 'isms, Classic and
Romantic, is of singular interest. Until intelligent study of the
Higher Rhetoric-reformed, adjusted, and extended—has been re-
introduced, such another will not come. But such another might
come with very great advantage, and would supply a very important-
tertium quid to the mere Æsthetics and to the sheer Impressionism
between which Criticism has too often divided itself.
There is almost as much significance in Copleston's successor,
though it is a significance of a different kind. For J. J. Cony beare
Conybeare.
was the first Professor of Poetry to bestow attention on
". Anglo-Saxon (Warton, even in his History, had not gone,
with any knowledge, beyond Middle English), and so to complete
the survey of all English Literature. Before his appointment he had
held, as its first occupant, the chair of Anglo-Saxon itself; and while
Professor of Poetry he was a country parson. He died suddenly and
comparatively young, and his remarkable Illustrations of Anglo-
Sacon Poetry 1 were published after his death by his brother, who is
actually responsible for a good part of its matter, so that the book
is a composite one. It is thus mainly in its general significance-
for Conybeare's Prælections as Professor were not, so far as I know,
published—that it is valuable for us. But the value thus given is
unmistakable. Cony beare's individual judgments and aperçus are
always interesting, and often acute; but his real importance lies
in the fact that he was almost the first-though Mitford, after Ellis,
had attempted the thing as an outsider—to move back the focussing-
point sufficiently to get all English Literature under view. Nothing
could serve more effectually to break up the false standing-ground of
the eighteenth century.
A curious but perhaps not surprising thing about Milman's. Pro-
fessorship is that it aroused the ire of an undergraduate poet of
... the rarest though of the most eccentric type—namely,
condere Beddoes. If Milman really did “denounce” Death's
Jest-Book, 2 it is a pity that his lectures were (so far as I know)
i London, 1826.
I was much tempted to give them a
2 See Beddoes' Letters (ed. Gosse, place in the text as illustrating the
London, 1894), p. 68: “Mr Milman critical opinions of a person in whom
(our poetry professor) has made me great wits and madness were rather
quite unfashionable here by denounc blended than allied ; in the transition
ing me as one of a 'villainous school.'” generation-the mezzanine floor -- of
These Letters are crammed with 1800-1830.
matter of literary and critical interest.
Milman.
MILMAN-KEBLE.
531
never printed, or at least collected, for there might have been more
such things of the fatally interesting kind which establishes the rule
that Professors should not deal, in their lectures, with contemporary
literature. It was certainly unlucky for a man to begin by objecting
in one official capacity to Death's Jest-Book, and to end by objecting
in another to Stevens's Wellington Monument. And that Milman
had generally the character of a harsh and donnish critic is obvious,
from Byron's well-known suggestion of him as a possible candidate
for the authorship of the Quarterly article on Keats, though the
rhyme of “kill man” may have had something to do with this. If
he wrote much literary criticism we have little of it in the volume
of Essays which his son published, after his death, in 1870. Even
on Erasmus—surely a tempting subject~he manages to be as little
literary as is possible, and rather less than one might have though
to be; and his much better-known Histories are not more so.
Ignorance may sneer, but Knowledge will not even smile, at the
dictum that not the least critical genius that ever adorned the Oxford
12 Chair was possessed by John Keble. There is some faint
excuse for Ignorance. The actual Prcelections 1 of the
author of The Christian Year, being Latin, are not read : his chief
English critical works, though collected not so very long ago, were
collected too late to catch that flood-tide, in their own sense, which
is unfortunately, as a rule, needed to land critical works out of
reach of the ordinary ebb. Moreover, there is no question but
Keble requires "allowance"; and the allowance which he requires
is too often of the kind least freely granted in the present day.
If we have anywhere (I hope we have) a man as holy as Keble, and
as learned, and as acute, he will hardly express the horror at Scott's
occasional use of strong language which Keble expresses. Our
historic sense, and our illegitimate advantage of perspective, have
at least taught us that to quarrel with Scott again, for not being
“Catholic” enough, is almost to quarrel with Moses for not having
actually led the children of Israel into Palestine. And no man,
as honest as Keble was, would now echo that other accusation
against the great magician (whom, remember, Keble almost adored,
and of whom he thought far more highly as a poet than many good
men do now) of tolerating intemperance; though some might feign
it to suit a popular cant.
But in all these respects it is perfectly easy for those who have
once schooled themselves to this apparently but not really difficult
matter, to make the necessary allowance. And then, even in the
1 Prcelectiones Academicce Oxonii 1877.
habitce annis 1832-41. Oxford, 1844. 3 Occ. Pap., p. 62.
2 vols., but continuously paged.
The place most perilously aleatory
2 Occasional Papers and Reviews, by is the fling in Occ. Pap., p. 87, at "Mr
John Keble, M.A. Oxford and London, Leigh Hunt and his miserable followers.'
as honested the children of to quarrel with Mosain,
532
• THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
English critical Essays — the “Scott," the “Sacred Pretry," the
“ Unpublished Letters of Warburton," and the “Copleston”-verus.
incessu patet criticus.
His general attitude to poetic criticism (he meddled little with
any other) is extremely interesting. His classical training impelled
When him towards the “subject” theory, and the fact that his
casional two great idols in modern English poetry were Scott and
[English] Wordsworth was not likely to hold him back. He has
Fapers. even drifted towards a weir, pretty clearly, one would
think, marked "Danger !” by asking whether readers do not feel
the attraction of Scott's novels to be as great as, and practically
identical with, that of his poems. But no "classic" could possibly
have framed the definition of poetry which he puts at the outset 1.of
the Scott Essay as “The indirect expression in words, most appro-
priately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling
taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed.”
Everybody will see what this owes to Wordsworth; everybody should
see how it is glossed and amplified-in a non-Wordsworthian or an
extra-Wordsworthian sense. We meet the pure critical Keble again,
in his enthusiastic adoption of Copleston's preference for “Delight"
(putting Instruction politely in the pocket) as the poetic criterion.2
And his defence of Sacred Poetry, however interested it may seem
to be, coming from him, is one of the capital essays of English
criticism. He makes mince-meat of Johnson, and he takes by
anticipation a good deal of the brilliancy out of his brilliant
successor, Mr Arnold, on this subject. The passage, short but
substantial, on Spenser in this is one of the very best to be
found on that critic of critics (as by an easily intelligible play he
might be said to be) as well as poet of poets. Spenser always finds
out a bad critic-he tries good ones at their highest.
Still the Praelections themselves must, of course, always be Keble's
own touchstone, or rather his ground and matter of assay. And he
comes out well. The dedication (a model of stately en-
The Præ-
lections.
thusiasm) to Wordsworth as non solum dulcissimae poeseos
verum etiam divince veritatis antistes, strikes the key-
note of the whole. But it may be surprising to some to find how
“broad” Keble is, in spite of his inflexible morality and his uncom-
promising churchmanship. He was kept right partly, no doubt, by.
holding fast as a matter of theory to the “Delight” test-pure and
virtuous delight, of course, but still delight, first of all and most of
all. But mere theory would have availed him little without the
poetic spirit, which everywhere in him translates itself into the
critical, and almost as little without the wide and (whether de-
liberately so or not) comparative reading of ancient and modern verse
i Occ. Pap., p. 6.
2 Ibid., p. 150. 3 Ibid., pp. 98-102.
THE PRÆLECTIONS.
533
which he displays. His general definition of Poetry here is slightly
different from that given above, as was indeed required by his sub-
ject and object. He presents it-at once refining and enlarging
upon part of the Aristotelian one of Tragedy, and neutralising the
vinum daemonum notion at once,-as subsidium benigni numinis, the
medicinal aid given by God to subdue, soften, and sanctify Passion.
But his working out-necessarily, in its main lines, obvious but
interesting to contrast with his successor Mr Arnold's undogmatised -
and secularised application of the same idea-is less interesting to
us in itself than the aperçus on different poets, ancient and modern,
to which it gives rise. Few pages deserve to be skipped by the
student: even technical discussion of the tenuis et arguta kind, as he
modestly calls it, becomes alive under his hand on such subjects as
the connection of Poetry and Irony (Præl. v.) But there is a still
higher interest in such things as the contrast, in the same Prælection,
of the undeviating self-consistency of Spenser in all his work, the
bewildering apparent lack of central unity in Shakespeare with its
resolution, and the actual inconsistency of Dryden. All the Homeric
studies deserve reading, the discussion of the Odyssey in Præl. xi.
being especially noteworthy, with its culmination in a delightful
phrasel about Nausicaa which ought to be generally known.
Particularly wise and particularly interesting is the treatment of
“Imitation” (the lower imitation) in Præl. xvi., where those who
are of our mystery will not fail to compare the passage with Vida.
How comfortable is it to find a poet-critic, so uncompromising on
dignity of subject, who can yet admit, and that with not the faintest
grudging, that it “is incredible how mightily the hidden fire is
roused by single words or clauses ——nay, by the sound of mere
syllables, that strike the ear at a happy nick of time."2 This is
almost “the doctrine of the Poetic Moment" itself, though we must
not urge it too far, and though it is brought in apropos of the sug-
gestiveness to poets of antecedent poetic work. It is still sovereign
against a still prevailing heresy. The abundant treatment of
Æschylus 3 is also to be carefully noted; for, as we have observed, that
mighty poet had been almost neglected during the Neo-classic period.
The second score of Lectures is still technically devoted to the
ancients, especially Pindar, the second and third Tragedians, Theo-
critus, Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace; but references to the moderns,
not very rare in the first volume, become still more frequent here,
and are sometimes, as those to Spenser and Bunyan in the matter
of allegory,4 and the contrast of Jason and Macduff as bewailing
CO
1 Rapin accused her of "forgetting
her: modesty." Keble says of her:
“ Cujus persona nihil usquam aut
venustius habet aut pudentius veter-
um Poesis” (i. 195).
? Prcel. Ac., p. 281.
3 It occupies seven Prælections
(xvii. xxiii.) and some 200 pages.
4 ii. 415.
534
THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
their children,1 very notable. On his narrower subject, the judge
ment of Sophocles in Præl. xxviii. is singularly weighty; and I
should like to have heard Mr Matthew Arnold answer on behalf
of his favourite. The comparative tameness, and the want of
variety and range, which some (not all, of course) feel in the
“singer and child of sweet Colonos” are here put with authority
by one whom no one could accuse of Sturm und Drang preferences,
or of an undisciplined thirst for novelty. Only on Theocritus,
perhaps, does Morality sit in banco with Taste to a rather disastrous
effect, and the fact is curiously explicable. His disapproval of .
Scott's strong language, and his want of ecclesiastical-mindedness,
and his lenity to liquor, had not blinded Keble in the least to Scott's
poetry; he had admitted the charitable and comfortable old plea
of “time, not man," in favour of certain peccadilloes of Shake-
speare; he is, in fact, nowhere squeamish to silliness. But he
cannot pardon Theocritus for the Oaristys and such things, simply
because the new Wordsworthian nature-worship in him is wounded
and shocked insanabiliter. “Like Aristophanes," he says, “like
Catullus, like Horace, Theocritus betakes himself to the streams
and the woods, not to seek rest for a weary mind, but as provoc-
atives for a lustful one."2 This new "sin against the Spirit ”
is most interesting.
On the other hand, this very nature-worship keeps his balance,
where we might have thought he would lose it, on the subject of
Lucretius. He contrasts the comparative triviality and childishness
of Virgil, agreeable enough as it is, in regard to nature, with the
mystic majesty of his great predecessor. The charges of atheism
and indecency trouble him very little :3 the intense earnestness,
the lofty delight in clouds and forests and the vague, the likeness
to Æschylus and Dante-all these things he fixes on, and delights
in. I wish he had written more on Dante himself; what he has 4
is admirable.
As to Virgil in person, though sensible enough of his merits, he
says things which would have elicited the choicest combinations of
Scaligerian Billingsgate ; and brings out, in a way striking and I
think rather novel, the permolestum, the "serious irritation” caused
by the fact that Virgil either could not or would not give Æneas
any character at all, and that you feel sometimes inclined to think
that he never himself had any clear idea what sort of a real man
his hero was. This exaltation of the Character above the Action
is very noteworthy.
i ii. 586.
with Lucretius.
2 ii. 641. He has a liking for Hor. 3 He allows him, as well as Byron
ace; but objects to him (not quite un and Shelley, the plea of vix compos
reasonably) as sordidior quidem in his in certain respects.
Epicureanism, when you compare him 4 ii. 678 sq. and elsewhere.
THE PRÆLECTIONS-GARBETT.
535
But, in fact, Keble always is noteworthy, and more. Mere moderns
may dismiss him, with or without a reading, as a mill-horse treader of
academic rounds. He is nothing so little. He is, in fact, almost the
first representative of the Romantic movement who has applied its
spirit to the consecrated subjects of study; and he has shown, unfor-
tunately to too limited à circle, how fresh, how interesting, how
inspiring the results of this and of the true comparison of ancient
and modern may be.? Literary criticism-indeed literature itself
as such-was with him, it is true, only a by-work, hardly more than
a pastime. But had it been otherwise, he would, I think, twenty
years before Arnold, have given us the results of a more thorough
scholarship, a reading certainly not less wide, a taste nearly as
delicate and catholic, a broader theory, and a much greater freedom
from mere crotchet and caprice.
I am not quite so well acquainted with the whole work of Keble's
successor Garbett.2 Elected as he was, by the anti-Tractarian re-
c are action, against the apparently far superior claims of
Isaac Williams, his appointment has generally been
regarded as a job; and I had to divest myself of prejudice in
reading him. He has indeed nothing of his predecessor's serene
scholarship, and little of his clear and clean taste. His form puts
him at a special disadvantage. Instead of Keble's pure and flowing
Latinity, you find an awkward dialect, peppered after the fashion
of Cicero's letters with Greek words, peppered still more highly
with notes of exclamation, and, worst of all, full of words, and
clauses, and even whole sentences, in capitals, to the destruction of
all repose and dignity. He seems to have simply printed each
Prælection as he gave it (the pagings are independent), and then
to have batched them together without revision in volume form.3
But one cannot read far or fairly without perceiving that, either
before his election or after it, Garbett had taken the pains to qualify
by a serious study of antecedent criticism—a study, it may be
added, of which there is hardly any trace in Keble. Garbett devotes
especial attention to Longinus and Dryden ; and though I do not
(as I have formerly hinted) 4 agree with him in regard to either,5
1 I pass, as peedless to dwell on at 8 It is particularly unfortunate that
length, the excellence of his style and he has endeavoured to construct a
expression in these lectures. “So theory of Longinus as a statesman-
acute in remark, so beautiful in lan critic, comparing him with Burke. I
guage," as Newman says in the letter have already said that I do not think
printed in Occ. Pap., p. xii sq.
the identification of the author of the
. ? My only possession is De Re Critica book with Zenobia's prime minister
Prcelectiones. Oxford, 1847.
in the least disproved or (with the
3 My copy, which is “from the materials at present at disposal) dis-
author" to some one unknown, has provable: but it certainly is not proved
not a few pen-corrections, apparently to the point of serving as basis to
in his own hand.
such a theory.
4 V. sup., p. 112.
536
THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
it is beyond all doubt that he had made a distinct and original
attempt to grasp both as critics. He deals with Horace, of course;
but it is noteworthy that he has again aimed at a systernatic and
fresh view, taking Horace as the master of “ Art Poetic," and
comparing Boileau, &c. He has an abundant discussion of Scaliger,
whom he takes as third type and (rightly) as the father of classical
French criticism, while Dryden gives him his fourth. He knows
the Germans--not merely Lessing and Goethe, but Kant; and
whatever the failures in his execution, he can “satisfy the exam-
iners” not merely from the point of view of those who demand
acquaintance with the history and literature of the subject, but
from that of those who postpone everything to what they think
philosophy. He refers to the climatic view of literature, constantly
combines historical and literary considerations, and is altogether a
“modern." As has been said, I disagree with him more often than
I agree; but I do not think there can be any serious denial of the
fact that he was worthy of the Chair and of a place here.
The tenure of his successor Claughton, afterwards Bishop, was
but for a single term; and he seems to have left little memorial
of it except a remarkably elegant Latin address on the
Claughton.
appointment of Lord Derby as Chancellor. Elegance,
indeed, was Claughton's characteristic as an orator,2 but I should
not imagine that he had much strength or very wide or keen
literary knowledge and enthusiasm Of Mr Arnold we have
spoken.
There were foolish folk, not without some excuse of ignorance
(if that ever be an excuse) for their foolishness, who grumbled or
scoffed when he was followed by Sir Francis Dovle.
Doyle.
* There had been some hopes of Browning, which had
been foiled-if by nothing else—by the discovery that an Honorary
M.A. degree was not a qualification; and it must be owned that
curiosity to see what Browning would do in prose on poetry was highly
legitimate. Moreover, the younger generation was busy with
Mr Swinburne and Mr Morris, who had not turned Tennyson and
Browning himself out, and they knew little of Sir Francis. Better
informed persons, however, reported of him as of an Oxford man
of the best old type of “scholar and gentleman," a person of very.
shrewd wits, of probably greater practical experience than any Pro-
fessor of Poetry had ever had, and the author of certain things like
“The Red Thread of Honour” and “The Private of the Buffs," which,
i With reference to Schlegel and and Wilberforce, and even with the,
Madame de Staël.
in both senses, rare discourses of Man-
? His sermons have been disrespect. sel. In vigour and body they were
fully spoken of; but I think unjustly. nowhere beside any of these; but
I heard them myself in pretty close they could fairly hold their own in the
juxtaposition with those of Pusey softer ways of style.
DOYLE-SHAIRP.
537
the they deserve, I go or slovenigh. They awhich Matthemacularis-
really hapihi Their cabink, no meara guite conversatush not fireblad
in their own peculiar style and division, were poetry sans phrase.
The report was justified by the new Professor's Lectures. They
are frankly exoteric; but they are saved by scholarship from the
charge of ever being popular in the bad sense. They adopt as
frankly, and carry a little farther, that plan of making the lectures,
if not exactly reviews of particular books new and old, at any rate
causeries hung on particular texts and pegs, which the vernacularis-
ation of the Chair had made inevitable, and to which Matthew Arnold
himself had inclined gladly enough. They are, though not in the
least degree slipshod or slovenly, quite conversational in style.
But they deserve, I think, no mean place among the documents of
the Chair. Their easy, well-bred common-sense, kept from being
really Philistine (which epithet Sir Francis good - humouredly
accepted), not merely by their good breeding, but by the aforesaid
scholarship, by natural acuteness, and by an intense unaffected love
for poetry, might not be a good staple. But if the electors could
manage to let it come round again, as an exception, once in a genera-
tion or so, it would be well, and better than well.
Of Principal Shairp so many good men have said so many good
things that it is almost unnecessary to add, in this special place
ion and context, the praise (which can be given ungrudgingly)
decide that he has always, in his critical work, had before him
good intentions and high ideals. Much further addition, I fear,
cannot be made. When I read his question, “Did not Shakespeare
hate and despise Iago and Edmund ?” 2 when I remember how
Shakespeare himself put in the mouth of the onem
“I bleed, sir, but not killed”;
in the mouth of the other-
“The wheel is come full circle ; I am here";
and-
“Yet Edmund was beloved,"
I own I sympathise with an unconventional and unsophisticated
soul who, once reading this same utterance of Mr Shairp's, rose,
strode about the room, and sitting down, ejaculated, “What are
you to do? What are you to say? Where are you to go ? when
a Professor of Poetry, uttering such things in Oxford, is not taken
out, and stoned or burnt forthwith, between Balliol and the
Rudolph?” And there is an only less dreadful passage 3 of mis-
comprehension on the magnificent close of Tennyson's “Love and
i First Series (comprising the “In-
augural," with two others on "Pro-
vincial Poetry” and The Dream of
Gerontius), London, 1869. A second
appeared in 1877.
? Aspects of Poetry (London, 1881),
p. 30.
8 Ibid., p. 157.
538
THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
Duty"-one of the greatest examples of the difficult “Versöhnung
close," the reconciliation of art, the relapse into peace.
But the lesson of criticism is a lesson of tolerance. A complete
and careful perusal of Mr Shairp's Aspects of Poetry, and of his
other books, will indeed show that the apices of criticism,
whether historical, or appreciative, or even philosophical, were be-
yond his climb. He shows that constant necessity or temptation of
engaging in comment-eulogistic or controversial-upon the ephem-
era critica of the time, which has been one of the worst results of
the change of the lectures from Latin to English. You could not,
in the stately old vehicle, do more than occasionally decline upon
such a lower level as this. Mr Shairp is always citing and fencing
with (or extolling reviewer-fashion) Arnold or Bagehot, Hutton
or Myers. Quotidiana quotidie moriuntur ; and, though no doubt
it saves much trouble to Professors if they can take out of a news-
paper or a review, or even a recent book, on their way to Oxford,
a text for an hour's sermon, their state sub specie aeternitatis is
far from the more gracious. Oxford is constantly making new
statutes now; I think one forbidding any citation from this Chair
of critical or creative literature less than thirty years old would
not be bad.
More happy, if not always more critical, were his dealings with
things Scottish, where sympathy lifted him out of the peddling,
and transformed the parochial On Burns (even though there
must have been searchings of heart there) he could some-
times, though by no means always, speak excellently; on Scott
superexcellently; on Wordsworth almost as well; on the Highland
poets (if we do not forget our salt-cellar) best of all, because he
spoke with knowledge and not as Mr Arnold. His work is always
amiable, often admirable : I wish I could say that it is always
or often critical.
The great achievement of Mr Shairp's successor, Francis Turner
Palgrave, in regard to literary criticism, is an indirect one, and had
Daz... been mostly done years and decades before he was
voce elected to the Chair. Little indeed, though something,
was given to the world as the direct result of his professorial work.1
As an actual critic or reviewer, Palgrave was no doubt distinguished
not over-favourably by that tendency to "splash" and tapage of
inanner which he shared with Kinglake and some other writers of
the mid-nineteenth century, and which has been recently revived.
But his real taste was in a manner warranted by his friendships;
and his friendships must almost have kept him right if he had
had less taste. He may have profited largely by these friendships
1 Landscape in Poetry (1897) was
unless I mistake, the chief, if not the
only, collection of lectures.
PALGRAVE-SALUTANTUR VIVI.
539
in the composition of the two parts of that really Golden Treasury,
which, if it does not achieve the impossible in giving everybody
what he wants, all that he wants, and nothing that he does not
want, is by general confession the most successful attempt in a
quite appallingly difficult kind. The second part, which has of
course: been the most criticised, seems to me even more remarkable
than the first, as showing an almost complete freedom from one
easily besetting sin, the tendency not to relish styles that have come
in since the critic “commenced” in criticism.
Of Mr Courthope and his successors in the Chair we
Salutantur
are happily precluded from speaking critically. May
vivi.
the bar not soon be lifted !
INDEX.
(Dates in the following entries are only given in the case of critical writer's actually belonging to
the period dealt with in the volume. To economise space, also, the Icind of writing practised is only
indicated where confusion is possible.)
Account of the English Dramatic André, Yves Marc de l'Isle, Père
Poets, 140, 141.
(1675-1764), 303 note.
— of the greatest English Poets, Andromeda, 44.
171, 172.
Anecdotes, Spence's, 187.
Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), 152 An Evening's Love, Preface to, 123.
note, 165 sq., 170-181, 196, 236, Anima Poetce, 328 sq., 337 sq.
243, 247, 251, 265 sq., 299, 305, Annus Mirabilis, Preface to, 115.
337 note, 341.
Antigone, the, 165.
Adolphus, John Leycester (1795- Anti-Jacobin, The, 396 sq.
1862), 382 note.'
Antiquity of the English I'ongue, The,
Advancement and Reformation of 185.
Modern Poetry, 166 sq.
Apollo, The British, 146.
of Learning, 74 sq.
Apollonius Rhodius, 133.
Adventurer, The, 260 sq.
Apology of Heroic Poetry, '124.
Advice to an Author, 282.
- for Poetry, 54 sq.
to a Young Poet, 185.
for Smectymnuus, 106.
Æschylus, 335, 336.
Appreciations, 501 sq.
Ainger, Canon, 367 sq.
Arbuthnot, 183 sq.
Akenside, 250.
Arcadian Rhetoric, 69 note.
A King and No King, Rymer on, Ariosto, 133, 262, 270, 285, 299.
134.
Aristophanes, 34, 362.
Alexander, Sir William, Earl of Stir Aristotle, 2, 4 sq., 94, 96, 152, 187
ling (1567 ?-1640), 79, 80.
and passim.
Alice Fell, 326 note.
Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), 27-29,
Alison, Archibald (1757-1839), 288 170, 222, 226 sq., 248, 250, 328,
291, 401 note.
332, 340, 355, 396, 405, 416, 435,
All for Love, Preface to, 124.
458 note, 468-490, 516, 518, 533,
Anacrisis, 79, 80.
Ars Poetica, see Epistle to the Pisos.
Ancient Mariner, The, 230, 329 note. Art of English Poesy, Puttenham's,
“ Ancients and Moderns," 2, 103, 59 sq.
141, 150 sq., 190.
- of Poetry, Bysshe's, 159 sq.
542
INDEX
drt of Poetry, Gildon's, 162 sq. Bolton, Edmund (1573 ? - 1633),
of Rhetoric, Wilson's, 31-34. 70.
Ascham, Roger (1515-68), 31-45, 76, Bon Gaultier Ballads, The, 399.
98 sq.
Borrow, George, 393 note.
Ashe, Thomas (1836-1889), 330 note. Bosanquet, Mr, 292, 293 note, 294
Athenian Mercury, The, 146.
note.
- Oracle, The, 146.
Boswell, 207.
Sport, 146.
Bouhours, Dominique, Abbé (1628-
Atterbury, Francis, Bishop of Roches 1702), 154.
ter (1672-1732), 182.
Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850),
Aubignac, F. Hédelin, Abbé d' (1604 328, 339, 389-391.
76), 103, 109 note.
Boyer (Bоwyer], 328.
Aurengzebe, Prologue to, 124.
Bradley, Prof., 526, 539.
Bridges, Robert, 317 note.
Bacon, 299, 342.
Brimley, George (1819 - 57), 457-
Sir Francis, Lord Verulam 461.
(1561-1626), 74-79, 89.
British Muse, The, 298 note.
Bacon - Shakespeare theory, 90 note, Brown, John (1715-66), 209, 210.
219.
Browne, Sir T., 407.
Bagehot, Walter (1826-1877), 495, Browning, Mr, 144 note.
496.
Mrs, 467 note.
Barbauld, Mrs, 230 note.
Bruttezza, Tassoni on, 154, 155.
Bartas, Du, 82.
Brydges, Sir Samuel Egerton (1762-
Basil, St, 491 note.
1837), 393, 394.
Battle of the Books, The, 183.
Buchanan, Robert, 514 note.
Baviad and Mæviad, The, 396 sq. Buckhurst, see Dorset.
Beattie, 250.
Buffon, Jean Louis Leclerc, Comte de
Beaumont, Sir George, 315.
(1707-88), 85.
Beaumont and Fletcher, 118 sq., 133 Bunyan, 285, 287.
Burke, Edmund, (1729 - 97), 286-
Beddoes, 530, 531.
288, 339.
Bee, The, 231.
Butler, Samuel (1612-80), 241 sq.
Beers, H. A., 262 note.
Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788-
Behn, Afra, 159.
1824), 338, 344, 390-392.
Bellay, see Du Bellay.
Bysshe, Edward (f. c. 1700), 159-
Bembo, Pietro (1470-1547), 188.
162.
Ben, see Jonson.
Bentley, Richard (1662-1742), 132, Cæsar, 35.
140, 141, 183, 184.
Callières, François de (1645-1717),
Benlowes, Edward (1603-76), 242 sq. 183.
Bertram, Coleridge's critique on, 323 Camoens, 230 note.
note, 329 note.
Campbell, George (1709 - 96), 203-
Biographia Literaria, 311 sq.
206.
Blackwood's Magazine, 455-457. See - Dykes, 329 note, 331 note.
also De Quincey, Lockhart, Maginn, Thomas (1777-1844), 342, 382-
Wilson.
Blair, Hugh (1718-1800), 195-198, Campion, Thomas (?- 1619), 70-72,
287 note, 290 note.
82, 106.
Blake, 131 note, 159.
Canning, 398 sq.
- William (1757-1827), 342, 346, Canours of Criticism, the, 230 note.
354, 376-379.
Capell, Edward (1713 - 81), 298
Blount, Sir Thomas Pope (1649-97), note.
144, 146.
“ Car of Cambridge" - i.e., Carr,
Boileau, Nicolas B. Despréaux (1636. Nicholas (1524 - 68), Greek Pro-
1711), 103, 129, 130, 188 sq., 240. fessor ? 76.
89.
384.
INDEX.
543
sq.
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 490 sq. Comical Gallant, the, 167.
Castellain, M., 80 note, 87 note. Comus, 223.
Castle of Indolence, the, 228..
Congreve, 143, 349.
Catiline, Rymer on, 136.
Conti, Armand de Bourbon," Prince
Catullus, 387.
de (1629-66), 142 note.
Caxton, William (1442 ? - 91 ?), 25 Conversations with Drummond, 81
note, 28.
Censura Literaria, 392, 393 note. Conybeare, John Josias (1779-1824),
Cervantes, 283, 299.
530.
Chapelain, Jean (1595 - 1674), 127 Cooper's Hill, 233.
note, 133, 154.
Copleston, Edward, Bishop of Llan-
Chapman, 82, 124, 127.
daff (1776-1849), 528-530.
Character of Saint Evremond, 125 Corneille, 285.
note,
Courthope, Mr, 182 note, 186 note,
Characteristics, 282, 283.
526, 539.
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Cowley, Abraham (1618 - 67), 106,
368, 369.
: 107, 133, 144, 171, 172, 183, 214,
Chaucer, 25, 29 sq., 33, 41 sq., 62 sq., 221 sq.
128, 130, 133, 171, 236, 264, 270, Cowper, 209 note, 314, 338.
366, 368, 383.
Coxe, Leonard, 31 note.
Cheke, Sir John (1514-57), 31, 34-36. Craik, Sir Henry, 138 note.
hope (1694-1773), 209 note, 457 Creed, attempted summary of the
note.
Neo-Classic, 94, 95.
Chevy Chase, 56, 176.
-- The Romantic, 410, 411.
Choice, the, 221.
Critical Review, the, 230.
Christopher North. See Wilson, “ Criticism of Life," 484 sq.
John.
Croce, Signor Benedetto, 293 note,
Church, Richard William (1815-90), 294 note.
511.
Croker, John Wilson (1780 - 1857),
.Cicero, 204.
437, 447, 462.
Ciceronianus, 76.
Cynthia's Revels, 81 note.
Cinna, 119.
Citizen of the World, the, 231. . . Dallas, Eneas Sweetland (1828-79),
" Classical Metres," 40 sq.
299, 464-466.
Claudian, 124, 145, 392.
Daniel, Samuel (1562-1619), 72-74,
Claughton, Thomas Legh, Bishop of 82, 100, 106.
Rochester (1808-92), 536.
Dante, 21 sq., 43, 109, 112, 113, 145,-
Cleveland, 117, 127, 157.
299, 320 note, 324-326, 338, 357
Coelius Rhodiginus, 145.
358, 366, 487 sq.
Coleridge, Ernest, 328, 337.
Davenant, Sir William (1606 - 68), -
- Hartley (1796-1849), 393 note, 105, 107, 111.
438-440.
Davideis, 107 note.
- Samuel Taylor (1772 - 1834), De Augmentis, 75 note.
28, 85, 292, 310-343, 346, 349, De Interpretatione, the, 7.
353, 359, 360, 366, 368, 388, 398, Dedication of the Æneis, 125.
401 note, 412 sq., 425, 431, 437, of the Spanish Friar, 124.
440 note, 442, 489, 494, 501, 515, Defence of Poesy, 53 sq.
518.
Collier, J. P., 319 note.
385.
-- Jeremy (1650 - 1726), 132, 142- --- of Rhyme, 72-74.
144, 166 sq., 184, 367.
-- of the Epilogue (to Conquest of
Collins (the poet), 223 sq., 251.
Granada), 123.
Comic Writer's, The English, 366, Defoe, 352.
367.
Denham, 172. .
544
INDEX.
Dennis, John (1657-1734), 127 note, E. K., 63, 97.
164-170, 233 note, 396.
Elements of Criticism, the, 198-203
De Quincey, Thomas (1785 - 1859), Elia, 347 sq.
274, 413, 431-435.
Elwin, Whitwell (1816-1900), 463.
Derby, Lord, 166.
Elyot, Sir Thomas, 65 note.
Desmarets de Saint - Sorlin, Jean English Metrists, 276 note.
(1595-1676), 109.
- Parnassus, the, 159 note.
Desportes, Philippe (1546-1601), 106 — Rhythms, 345 note.
note, 183.
Ephemerides of Phialo, 52 note.
“ Despréaux," 183, and see Boileau. Epistle to Augustus, Pope's, 186 sq.
De Vulgari Eloquio, 21, 22 sq., 43, to the Pisos, 3, 8, 13, 14 sq.,
311, 320, 325, 326.
22, 65, 93.
Diderot, Denis (1713-84), 327. Epistles, Ovid's, Dryden's Preface to,
Dies Boreales, 426 sq.
124.
Dionysius, 8.
. Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 406.
Discourse of English Poesy, 59 sq. Erasmus, Desiderius (1467 - 1536),
on Medals, 172.
76.
- on Music, Painting, and Poetry, “Esemplastic," 1999
206 sq.
“ Esenoplastic » 338.
on Satire, 125.
Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 116-122.
on the Grounds of Criticism in - of Heroic Plays, 123.
Tragedy, 124.
- on Criticism, 186 sq.
Discoveries, Jonson's, 81 sq.
- on Genius, 288 note.
Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848), 394.
- on Modern Education, 185.
Dissertation on Ossian, 197.
- on a New Species of Writing,
- on Phalaris, 141, 142.
230 note.
-- on the Rise of Poetry and Music, -- on Pope, 259.
207.
on Poetry (Temple’s), 141.
Dobell, Sydney, 467 note.
- on Taste, Alison's, 288-291.
Doctor, T'he, 345 sq.
Gerard's, 288 note.
Donne, 82, 222.
- Jeffrey's, 288, 401 note.
Dorset, Earl of, 116 sq., 172.
or the Genius of Shakespeare,
Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings Charles 167.
(1810-88), 536, 537.
- on Translated Verse, 144.
Drant, Thomas (d. 1578 ?), 45 sq.
upon Poetry and Painting, 230
Drayton, 82, 231.
note.
Drummond (of Hawthornden), 81 sq., Essays, Collier's, 144.
139.
-:- Critical (Scott's), 233.
Dryden, John (1631-1700), 27, 109, in Criticism, 474 sq.
111-131, 133, 143, 150 note, 151, -- Moral and Literary, 232.
153, 154, 158 sq., 165, 171, 172, -- Moral, Political, and Literary,
182, 187, 205 note, 218, 222 sq., 284.
244, 247, 248, 264, 283, 310, 332, on Men and Manners, 256.
339, 359, 457, 466 note, 473, 515. Estimate of the Manners and Prin.
Du Bartas, 109.
ciples of the Times, 209.
Du Bellay, Joachim (1524-60), 24 Etherege, 196.
note, 97, 109, 310.
Euphuism, 99 sq.
Dunton, John (1659-1733), 146. Euripides, 310.
Dyer, Sir Edward, 48.
Evening's Love, An, Preface to, 123.
John, 157, 211, 251.
Excursion, The, 323.
2
Edinburgh Review, The, 323 note, 396, Fables, Dryden's, Preface to, 126.
400.
Fabricius, Georgius (1515-71), 64.
Edwards, Thomas (1699-1757), 230 Faerie Queene, the, 51.
nole.
Farmer, Dr, 441.
INDEX.
545
See
492."
Felltham, Owen, 407 note.
Gray, Thomas (1716-71), 194, 211,
Fielding, 299.
212, 220, 224 sq., 233, 243, 246,
Fingal, 197.
256, 274, 299, 308, 313, 322,
Finlay, F. G., 255 note.
327.
Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), 338, Grongar Hill, 221, 233.
498.
Grosart, Dr, 72 note, 79 note.
Flecknoe, 117.
Guarini, Battista (1537-1612), poet,
Fletcher, 118 sq.
82.
Floriant et Florete, 134 note.
Guest, Edwin (1800-1880), 345 note.
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de -- Dr, 61, 71.
(1657-1757), 153, 249, 340.
Gurney, Edmund (1847 - 88), 512-
Fool of Quality, The, 492.
514.
Forman, Buxton, 426 note.
Foster, John (1731-74), 276.
Habington, 218.
- (1770-1843), 466.
Hallam, Arthur Henry (1811 - 37),
Fox, W. J. (1786-1864), 466.
466 note.
Fraunce, Abraham (A. c. 1590), 69 - Henry (1777 - 1859), 403-408,
note, 82.
427.
Friend, The, 329.
Hamelius, Herr, 158 note, 165 note,
Froude, James Anthony (1818-94), 185 note.
Hannay, James (1827-73), 464.
Fulgentius, 137.
Harington, Sir John (1561-1612), 66
Fuller, Margaret (1810-50), 288. note, 69, 82.
"Furor Poeticus," 150, 157.
Harris, James (1709-80), 206-209...
Harvey, Gabriel (1545-1630), 31, 48
“Gallo-Classic," the term, 150.
sq.
Garbett, James (1802-1879), 535, 536. Hawes, Stephen (?-1523 ?), 29, 30.
-- Rev. J., 112 note.
Hawkins, William (1722-1801), 526
Gascoigne, George (1525?-77), 45 sq., note.
60, 99, 100, 162.
Hayward, Abraham (1801-94), 462.
Gautier, Théophile (1811-72), 428 - Thomas (d. 1779 ?), 298 note.
note.
Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 28, 112
Gay Science, The, 465 sq.
note, 229, 334, 339, 342, 344, 348,
Gayley and Scott, Professors, 78 note. 349, 354, 357, 358, 361-376, 383,
Gentleman's Magazine, the, 230.
390, 413 sq.
Gerard, Alexander (1728-95), 289 Heads of an Answer to Rymer, 113
note, 401 note.
note, 137 note.
Gibbon, 281 note.
Hédelin, see Aubignac.
Gifford, William (1756 - 1826), 81 Hegel, G. W. F. (1776-1831), 304.:
note, 342, 352, 363, 396 sq., 399 Helps, Sir Arthur (1813-75), 462,
note.
463.
Gildon, Charles (1665-1724), 162, 163. Henley, W. E., 514 note.
Gilpin, 276.
Hennequin, Emile (1859 - 88),
Giraldus, Lilius, see Lilius.
332.
Godwin, 353, 363, 373, 380 note. Henry the Fourth, Dennis on, 167.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749 Herford, Prof., 21 note, 324.
1832), 112, 292, 333 note, 361. Hermes, 206.
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-74), 162, 231. “ Heroic Play," the, 107 sq.
Gondibert, Preface to, 105, 107-111. - Heroic Poem,” the, 107 sq.
Gorboduc, 56, 89, 114.
Heywood, Thomas, 138 note, 349.'
Gosse, Edmund, 56 note, 499 note. History of English Poetry (Warton's),
Gosson, Stephen (1555-1624), 52-54. 263 sq.
Gower, 29 sq., 62 sq.
-- of the Rise and Progress dif
“Grand style," the, 475 sq.
Poetry, 209.
Gravina, 249.
of the Royal Society, 138.
. 2 M
546
INDEX.
ill.
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 107- 80-92, 87 note, 88 note, 92 note, 93,
100 sq., 107, 108, 110 sq., 133 sq.,
Holmes, Robert (1748-1805), 526 note. 219 note.
Home, Henry, see Kames.
Joubert, Joseph (1754-1824), 374
Homer, 286, 474 sq.
note.
Horace, 8, 266 sq.
Julius Cæsar, Rymer on, 136.
Horne, Richard Hengist (1803 - 84), - Dennis on, 167.
373 note, 467 note.
Juvenal, Dryden's Preface to, 125.
Houghton, Lord (Milnes, Richard
Monckton), (1809-85), 510. Kames, Henry Home, Lord (1696-
Howard, Edward, 107 note.
1782), 198-203.
- Henry, see Surrey, Earl of. Keats, John (1795-1821), 218, 248,
J., 107 notes
385 note.
- Sir Robert (d. 1698: his birth- Keble, John (1792-1866), 112 note,
date and those of his brothers E. 531-535.
and J. are very uncertain), 116 sq. Ker, W. P., 113 sq.
Howell's Letters, 111 note.
Kingsley, Charles (1819-75), 44, 491,
Hueffer, Mr, 513.
492.
Hughes (editor of Spenser), 296. Kirke-White, 344.
Hugo, Victor F. M. (1802-85), 302. Klein, Dr David, 81 note.
Hume, Alexander, 92 note.
Knight's Quarterly, 443 sq.
- David (1711-76), 195, 283-286, Knox, Vicesimus (1752-1821), 232.
305 note.
Hunt, James Henry Leigh (1784- La Casa, 50 note.
1869), 112 note, 342, 344, 349, 356 La Croze, J. Cornand de (not to be
361, 367, 413 sq.
confused with his contemporary,
Hurd, Richard (1720-1808), Bishop M. Veyssière de la Croze, a learned
of Worcester, 202, 246, 265-273, but fantastic philologist and anti-
302, 305 note, 307, 383.
quary], 146 note.
Hurdis, James (1763-1801), 527, 528. La Harpe, Jean François de (1730-
Hutton, Richard Holt (1826-97), 496, 1803), 239, 399, 406.
497.
Lamb, Charles (1775 - 1834), 28,
229, 342, 344, 346-356, 367, 413
Iago, Rymer on, 135, 136.
sq.
Idler, the, 217.
Lamotte, Charles (? - ?), Irish divine
Imagination and Fancy, 358.
and critic, 230 note.
- Imagination," Addison on, 176-181. Lancaster, Henry Hill (1829 - 75),
" Imlac," 217, 218.
464.
Impartial Critic, The, 165.
Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864),
Indian Emperor, The, Preface to, 386-389.
Langbaine, Gerard (1656-92), 140,
Inner Life of Art, The, 495.
141, 163.
Inquiry into the Principles of Har- Langhorne, 182, 486.
mony in Language, 278, 279. Langland, 62 sq.
- into the Present State of Polite Latimer, 33.
Learning in Europe, 231.
Latter-Day Pamphlets, 451.
Leibnitz, 338.
James the First (1566-1625), 60, 61. Lectures, Coleridge's, 330 sq.
Jeffrey, Francis (1773-1850), 342, -- on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,
384 note, 399-403.
195 sq.
Johnson, Samuel (1709-84), 28, 115, on the Age of Elizabeth, 367,
162, 167, 191, 198, 207, 210-229, 1 368.
268, 278, 307, 327, 332, 389, 515, --— on the English Poets, 362 sq.
517, 518.
Lee, Sidney, 140 note.
Jonson, Ben (1573-1637), 27, 39, 68, L'Estrange, 132, 184.
S
122.

INDEX.
547
167.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-81), Marginalia, Coleridge's, 330 sq.
149, 287 note, 299, 304, 324, 332, Marinism and Marino, 133.
359, 498.
Mariùs the Epicurean, 499.
Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, Marlowe, 88, 139.
311 note.
Martinus Scriblerus, 185.
to a Young Clergyman, 185. Mason, John (1706-63), 272-275.
to John Murray, 390.
- William, 250 sy.
Letters on Chivalry, 202.
Masson, Prof., 78 note, 431 note,
on Chivalry and Romance, 433.
268 sq.
Meditation on a Broomstick, 184.
Pope's, 186.
Meres, Francis (1565-1647), 70.
Lewes, George Henry (1812 - 78), Merry Wives of Windsor, Dennis on,
493-495.
Lilius Gregorius Giraldus (1478-1552), Mickle, 182.
151.
Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 467.
Lives of the Poets, Heywood's, 138 Millar, J. H., 219 note.
note.
Milman, Henry Hart (1791-1868),
Johnson's, 213 sq., 219 sq.
462, 530, 531.
-- Winstanley's, 140.
Milnes, see Houghton.
Locke, John (1632-1704), 179 sq., Milton, John (1608-74), 105, 138,
201, 299.
139, 142, 150 note, 168 sq., 172,
Lockhart, John Gibson (1794-1854), 176 sq., 192, 200, 213 sq., 235,
414, 432-438.
254, 299, 322, 339, 389, 476 sq.
Lodge, Thomas (1558 ? - 1625), 53, “Minim, Dick,” 217.
54.
Minto, William (1845 - 93), 506,
London, 514 note.
507.
London Magazine, The, 507 note. Miscellanies, Dryden's Preface to,
Longinus, 2, 10 sq., 89, 96, 113, 163, 124 sq.
168.
Æsthetic and Literary, 335.
Lope de Vega Carpio, Felix (1562- Mitford, William (1744-1827), 47-
1635), 120 note.
note, 276-279, 444.
Love's Labour's Lost, Collier on, 143. Molière, 119 sq.
Lowell, James Russell (1819 - 91), Montagu (Lord Halifax), 172.
396.
- Mrs (Elizabeth Robinson)(1720-
Lowth, Robert Bishop of London 1810), 296 note.
(1710-87), 527.
Montaigne, Michel de (1533 - 92),
Lucan, 82.
Lucian, 142, 164, 362.
Montgomery, Robert, 493.
Lucretius, 283, 285, 310.
Monthly Review, the, 230.
Lycidas, 223, 233.
Morley, Prof. H., 45 note.
Lydgate, 29 sq., 62 sq., 254 sq. Morte d'Arthur, the, 38.
- Gray on, 254, 255.
Mulcaster, Richard (1530 ?-1611), 92
Lyrical Ballads, Preface to, 311 sq. note.
Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of,
Macaulay, Thomas B. (1800 - 59), later Duke of Buckinghamshire
131 sq., 141 sq., 225, 231, 367, (1649-1721), 142.
382, 407, 442-448.
Myers, Frederic William Henry,
“ Machines ” and “ Machinery," 109 (1843-1901), 505 note.
sq., 168.
Macpherson (Ossian), 197.
New World Discovered in the Moon,
Maginn, William (1793-1842), 290. the, 81 note.
Maid of the Mill, the, 334.
Nicolas, Sir N. Harris (1799-1848),
Malory, Sir Thomas, 38.
393, 394.
Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820. Noctes Ambrosiance, 425 sq.
71), 510.
Notes of Instruction, 45 sq.
88.
548
INDEX.
38.
Observations on Poetry, 276 note. Philosophical Arrangements, 206.
on Spenser, 261 sq.
Philosophy of Rhetoric, 203-206.
Of Studies (Bacon's), 75.
Philostratus, 385 note.
Oldys, William (1696 - 1761), 190, Photius, 13.
247, 297, 298 and note.
Pindar, Peter, see Wolcot.
Omniana, 335.
Pigna, Giovanbattista (f. c. 1550),
Omond, T. S., 276 note.
On Translating Homer, 474 sq. Plain Speaker, The, 369, 370.
Opitz, 408 notes.
Plato, 2, 3, 37, 384.
Orientales, Preface to the, 278.
Pléiade, the, 24, 97, 103.
Ossian, 59, 197 sq., 299.
Plutarch, 9, 37.
Othello, Rymer on, 135.
Poetaster, the, 81.
Ovid, 124.
“Poetic Moment, The," 485 sq.
Politian (Angelo Ambrogini, sur-
Paculford, Prof., 491 12ote.
named Poliziano) (1557-94), 142,
Palgrave, Francis Turner (1824-97), 188, 387, 406.
538, 539.
Polyeucte, 119.
Paradise Lost, 176 sq.
Pomfret, John, 221, 228.
Parallel of Poetry and Painting, 125. Pompée, 119.
Parnassus, The English, 159 note. Poole, Joshua (A. c. 1650), 159
Pater, Walter Horatio (1839 - 94), note.
497, 504.
Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 151,
Patmore, Coventry K. D. (1823-90), 153, 157, 162, 165 sq., 171 note,
511, 512.
185-194, 223 sq., 236, 259, 260,
Patrizzi, Francesco (1529-97) [not to 285, 299, 310, 383, 389-392.
be confused with the Siennese Bp. Power of Sound, The, 512.
of Gaeta, in the generation before, - of Numbers, The, in Prose and
who wrote on politics, &c.], anti- Poetry, 273-275.
Peripatetic philosopher and critic, Prcelectiones Academicae, Garbett's,
23 sq., 151.
112 note.
Pattison, Mark (1813-84), 510.
- Keble's, 112 note.
Paul, Kegan, 491.
- Trapp's, 195.
Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866), - See Coplestone, Keble, &c.
317 note, 384, 490.
Preface to Lyrical Ballads, &c., 310
Peacham, Henry (1576 ?-1643 ?), 70. sq.
Pecock, Reginald (1395-1460), 34. - to Mr Arnold's Poems, 470 sq.
Pemberton, Henry (1694-1771), 276 Prior, 152, 161, 162, 296.
note.
Principles of Success in Literature,
Pepys, 117 note.
The, 493 sq.
Percy, Thomas (1729-1811), Bishop Promos and Cassandra, Preface to,
of Dromore, 212, 246, 257-259, 69 note.
307.
Proposal for Correcting the English
Perceforest, 43.
T'ongue, 185.
Peri Bathous, 185.
Pursuits of Literature, The, 397 sq.
“Person of Quality," the (who re- Puttenham, George, (A. C. 1580),
wrote Spenser), 154 note.
65-69.
Petrarch, 82.
Pye, 276.
Petronius, 17, 84 note, 319 note.
Phalaris, the Pseudo-, 141, 142. Quarterly Review, The, 323 note.
Pharonnida, 383, 400.
Quintilian, 17 sq., 34 note, 81 sq.,
Philips, Ambrose (1675 ?-1749), 247 188, 204, and passim, 332, 338
nole.
note.
Phillips, Edward (1630-96), 138, 139,
354.
Rabelais, François (1495-1553), 33,
Philological Enquiries, 206 sq.
188, 335.
INDEX.
Racine, 285.
Satyrane's Letters, 328 note, 329 note.
Radcliffe, Mrs, 363.
Savonarola, Girolamo (1452-98), 56,
Raleigh, Prof., 312 note, 322 nol.e, 326 94.“
note.
Scaliger, Julius Cæsar (1484-1555),
Ralph, James (1605 ?-62), 163 note. 115, 145, 262, 332.
Rambler, The, 213 sq.
Schelling, Prof., 27 note, 83 note and
Ramsay, Allan, 190, 247.
sq., 87 note.
Randolph, John (1749-1813), Bishop Schiller, Joh. Chr. Friedrich (1559-
of London, 526 note.
1805), 335, 339.
Rapin, Rymer's Preface to, 132 sq. Schlegels, the, 331 note, 332, 383.
Rasselas, 213 sq.
Schoolmaster, The, 35 sq.
Recreations of Christopher North, 425 School of Abuse, the, 52-54.
sq.
Scott, John, of Amwell (1739 -83),
Rehearsal, The, 152 note.
232, 233.
Rejected Addresses, 399.
Sir Walter (1771-1832), 182
Relapse, The, Collier on, 196.
note, 342, 357, 363, 370, 373, 380-
Reliques, Percy's, 258 sq.
382, 400, 486 note, 492, 499.
Remarks on Italy, 172.
Sedley, Sir C., 116 sq.
on the Rape of the Lock, 168. Selecta Poemata Italorum, 187 note.
Repplier, Miss Agnes, 329 note. Seneca (L. Annæus ?), the tragedian,
Retrospective Review, The, 393, 396. 166.
Reulis and Cautelis, King James's, 59 Senior, N. W. (1790-1864), 462.
sq.
Sévigné, Mme. de, 245 note.
Reynolds, Sir J., 476.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,
Rhadamanthus, 344 note.
Earl of (1671-1713), 281-283.
Rhetoric, De Quincey on, 434 sq. Shairp, John Campbell (1819 - 85),
Rhys, E., 311 note, 389 note, 390 537, 538.
note.
Shakespeare, 60, 82 sq., 89 sq., 101
Richardson, 366, 367.
note, 115, 118 sq., 133 sq., 139, 149
Rigault, M. H., 128 note.
note, 167, 187, 197, 213 sq., 218 sq.;
Ritson, 258.
235, 245 note, 294, 295, 296, 299,
Rival Ladies, Preface to, 114,
304, 330 sq., 335, 351 sq., 368, 369,
Rivarol, 397.
Rolliad, the, 398 note.
Pope's Preface to, 186, 187.
Rollo (B. and F.'s), Rymer on, i 34. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822),
Roman de la Rose, 43 note.
159, 342, 354, 370, 384, 385,
Ronsard, Pierre de (1524-85), 24 note, 460.
45 note, 97, 408 note.
Shenstone, William (1714-63), 211,
Roscoe, W. C., 467 note.
246, 256, 257, 297, 312.
Roscommon, W. Dillon, Earl of Shepherd's Kalendar, 56.
(1633-85), 144, 172.
Sheringham, Robert (1602-78), 132
Ruskin, John (1819 - 1900), 338, note.
492, 493, 496.
Short View of the Profaneness and Im-
Rymer, Thomas (1646-1713), 131-137, morality of the English Staye, A,
145, 165 sq., 241, 357, 407.
142-144.
- View of Tragedy, A, 132 sq.
Sadolet, 188.
Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86), 54, 59,
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (1804 82, 99 sq., 1.15, 149, 339, 363, 367.
69), 332, 340, 416, 466 note. Silent Woman, The, 120.
Sainte-Palaye, 295.
Simylus, 86 note.
Sallust, Cheke on, 35.
«Skroddles," 252.
Saud, George, 370 note.
Smart, Christopher, 237.
Sannazaro, Jacopo (1458-1530), 56, Smeaton, Oliver, 79 note.
94.
- Sydney, 462.
550
INDEX
nzole.
8
1
U
Smeaton, William H.. (1808-72), 455, Table Talk, Coleridge's, 334 sq.
--- Hazlitt's, 371.
Smith, Prof. Adam, 195, 281 note. Tale of a Tub, A, 184.
Gregory, 27 note, 59 note, Talfourd, 393 note.
65 note, 70 note, 72 note, 132 note, Tanneguy le Fèvre, 145.
159 note, 175 note, 276 note. Tasso, Torquato (1544-95), 109, 133,
- Nichol, 158 note, 261 note, 296 269.
note, 401 note.
Tassoni, Alessandro (1565 - 1635),
Sophocles, 285, 286.
154.
Southern, Henry (1799-1853), 393. Tatler, the, 172 sq., 183.
Southey, Robert (1774 - 1843), 328 Taylor (the Water-Poet), 84 note.
note, 335, 339, 342-347, 353, 354, -- William, “ of Norwich " (1765.
382, 527 note.
1836), 450.
Specimens, Campbell's, 382.
l'emora, 197.
- Lamb's, 350.
Temple, Sir William (1628-99), 141,
- of British Critics, 426 sq.
171 note, 183.
Spence, Joseph (1698-1768), 153, 171 Tennyson, 218, 235, 437, 455-460.
note, 187, 188, 526.
Terence (Diderot on), 285.
Spenser, Edmund (1552-99), 48-52, Tertium Quid, 512 sq.
84 sq., 109, 133, 139, 154, 171-181, Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811.
215 sq., 257, 261 sq., 264, 269 sq., 63), 373, 452-455, 508.
296, 297, 335, 359, 366, 383, 411, Theatrum Poetarum, 138, 139.
426 sq.
Theobald, 81 note.
Spenser Redivivus, 154 nole.
Theocritus, 387.
Spirit of the Age, The, 372, 373. Theophrastus, 7.
Sprat, Thomas, Bishop of Rochester Thomson, James (I.), 211, 299.
(1635-1713), 138, 145, 189.
- James (II.) (1834 - 82), 505,
Staël, A. L. Germaine Necker, Mme. 506.
de (1766-1817), 401 sq.
Tickell, 251.
Stany hurst, 50 note.
Tory, Geoffrey (1480-1538), 33.
Stapfer, M. Paul, 404 note.
Toxophilus, 36 sq.
Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729), 181. Tragedies of the Last Age, the, 132
Stephen, Sir James (1789-1859), 467. sq.
— Sir J. Fitzjames (1829 - 94), Traill, Henry Duff (1842-1900), 341,
510.
342, 507-510.
- Sir Leslie, 514 note.
Trapp, Joseph (1679-1747), 195, 526.
Sterne, Laurence (1713 - 68), 88, Tristram Shandy, 279.
279-281, 299.
Tritical Essay, A, 184.
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-94),
361, 447 note, 514 note.
Underhill, Mr, 146 note, 187 note.
Studies in the History of the Renais- Unities, the Three. See especially
sance, 497 sq.
Scaliger, Dryden, Johnson.
Study of Celtic Literature, The, 474 Usefulness of the Stage, the, 166.
sq.
Sturm, Johann (1507 - 89), 36 sq., Vanbrugh, 143.
notes.
Vaughan, Prof., 384 note, 452.
Style, Lecture on, Coleridge's, 336 sq. - Sir W. (1577-1648), 70.
- De Quincey on, 434 sq.
Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, Jean (1535-
Suckling, 196.
1607), 79.
Surrey, Earl of (1517 ?-47), 42 sq. Venables, George Stovin (1810-88),
Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 182. 510.
185, 299, 339.
Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 377
Swinburne, Mr, 159 note.
note, 452 note.
Symonds, John Addington (1840. Vida, Marco Girolamo, Bishop of
93), 504, 505.
Alba (1480-1546), 86, 188 sq.
INDEX.
551
Virgil, 153, 215, 338, 387.
Whitfield, John, 526.
Dryden's Preface to, 125. Wild, 117.
Voltaire, 77, 299, 305 note.
Wilson, John, “ Christopher North "
(1785-1854), 229, 414, 431, 439.
Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths (1794 - [Sir] Thomas (?-1581), 31-34.
1852), 376 note..
Wiachelsea, Lady, 157, 211, 218.
Waller, 115 sq., 172, 182.
· Winstanley, William (1628 ? -90 ?),
Walpole, Horace, 212, 245 note.
139, 140.
Ward, Humphrey, bis English Wither, 117, 139, 352.
Poets, 484 sq.
Wolcot, John, “ Peter Pindar" (1738-
Warton, Joseph (1722 - 1800), 246, 1819), 396 sq.
259, 261, 389.
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850),
- Thomas, the elder (1688 ?-1745), 85, 310-328, 339, 353, 359, 378,
62 note, 212, 526. .
400, 532 sq.
- Thomas, the younger (1728- Works of the Learned, the, 146
90), 246, 261-265, 307, 526.
note.
Watson, James (King's printer in Worsfold, Mr, 78 note, 170 sq.
Scotland, 1711-22), 190, 247. Wotton, 183.
- Thomas, Bishop of Lincoln, 44. Wrangham, Archdeacon, 311.
Webbe, William (A. c. 1580), 61-65. Wright, Thomas (1810- 77), 393
Webster, John, 70.
note.
Welsted, Leonard (1688-1742); 163, Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503-42), 42 sq.
164.
Wynn, C. W., 344.
Wesley, Samuel, 146.
West, Gilbert, 215 note.
Yalden, 228.
Whately, 203.
Young, 299.
Wheeler, Benjamin, 526.
Whetstone, George (A. c. 1580), 69 Zoilus, 137.
note.
Zürich School, the, 249.
THE END.
MAY 25 1920
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.

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