between different degrees of merit is quite another. The former is the
essence of criticism; the latter, one of the most futile pastimes that
can readily be imagined. That each man should have his own preferences
is right enough. It would be a nerveless and unprofitable mind to which
such preferences were unknown. More than that, some rough
classification, some understanding with oneself as to what authors are
to be reckoned supreme masters of their craft, is hardly to be avoided.
The mere fact that the critic lays stress on certain writers and
dismisses others with scant notice or none at all, implies that in
some sense he has formed an estimate of their relative merits. But to
drag this process from the background--if we ought not rather to say,
from behind the scenes--to the very foot-lights, to publish it, to
insist upon it, is as irrelevant as it would be for the historian--
and he, too, must make his own perspective--to explain why he has
recorded some events and left others altogether unnoticed. All this
is work for the dark room; it should leave no trace, or as little as
may be, upon the finished picture. Criticism has suffered from few
things so much as from its incurable habit of granting degrees in
poetry with honours. "The highest art", it has been well said, "is the
region of equals."
It must be admitted that the Restoration critics had an immoderate
passion for classing authors according to their supposed rank in the
scale of literary desert. A glance at _The Battle of the Books_--a
faint reflection of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns--is
enough to place this beyond dispute. Dryden himself is probably as
guilty as any in this matter. His parallel between Juvenal and Horace,
his comparison of Homer with Virgil, are largely of the nature of an
attempt to show each poet to his proper place, to determine their due
order of precedence in the House of Fame. In the early days of criticism
this was perhaps to be expected. Men were feeling their way to the
principles; and the shortest road might naturally seem to lie through
a comparative table of the men. They were right in thinking that the
first step was to ascertain what qualities, and what modes of treatment,
give lasting pleasure in poetry; and, to do this, they could not but
turn to compare the works of individual poets. But they were wrong in
supposing that they could learn anything by striking the balance between
the merits of one poet, as a sum total, and the merits of another.
The fault was, no doubt, largely in the Restoration critics themselves;
and it is a fault which, so long as the competitive instinct holds
sway with men, will never be entirely unknown. But its hold on the men
of Dryden's day was in great measure due to the influence of the French
critics, and to the narrow lines which criticism had taken in France.
No one can read Boileau's _Art Poetique_, no one can compare it with
the corresponding _Essay_ of Pope, without feeling that the purely
personal element had eaten into the heart of French criticism to a
degree which could never have been natural in England, and which, even
in the darkest days of English literature, has seldom been approached.
But at the same time it will be felt that never has England come nearer
to a merely personal treatment of artistic questions than in the century
between Dryden and Johnson; and that it was here, rather than in the
adoption of any specific form of literature--rather, for instance,
than in the growth of the heroic drama--that the influence of France
is to be traced.
Side by side, however, with the baser sort of comparisons, we find in
the Restoration critics no small use of the kind that profits and
delights. Rymer's _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Former Age_ are an
instance of the comparative method, in its just sense, as employed by
a man of talent. The essays of Dryden abound in passages of this nature,
that could only have been written by a man of genius. They may have
a touch of the desire to set one form of art, or one particular poet,
in array against another. But, when all abatements have been made,
they remain unrivalled samples of the manner in which the comparative
vein can be worked by a master spirit. To the student of English
literature they have a further interest--notably, perhaps, the
comparison between Juvenal and Horace and the eulogy of Shakespeare--as
being among the most striking examples of that change from the Latinized
style of the early Stuart writers to the short, pointed sentence
commonly associated with French; the change that was inaugurated by
Hobbes, but only brought to completion by Dryden.
Once again. As Dryden was among the earliest to give the comparative
method its due place in English criticism, so he was the first to make
systematic use of the historical method. Daniel, indeed, in a remarkable
essay belonging to the early years of the century, had employed that
method in a vague and partial manner. [Footnote: _A Defence of Ryme_
(1603). It was written in answer to a pamphlet by Campion (1602), of
which the second chapter "declares the unaptness of Rime in
Poesie".--Ancient Critical Essays, ii. t64, &c.] He had defended rhyme
on the score of its popularity with all ages and all nations. Celts,
Slavs, and Huns--Parthians and Medes and Elamites--are all pressed
into the service. [Footnote: "The Turks, Slavonians, Arabians,
Muscovites, Polacks, Hungarians ... use no other harmony of words. The
Irish, Britons, Scots, Danes, Saxons, English, and all the inhabiters
of this island either have hither brought, or here found the same in
use."--Ib. p. 198.] That is, perhaps, the first instance in which
English criticism can be said to have attempted tracing a literary
form through the various stages of its growth. But Daniel wrote without
system and without accuracy. It was reserved for Dryden--avowedly
following in the steps of the French critic Dacier--to introduce the
order and the fulness of knowledge--in Dryden's case, it must be
admitted, a knowledge at second hand--which are indispensable to a
fruitful use of the historical method. In this sense, too--as in his
use of the comparative method, as in the singular grace and aptness
of his style--Dryden was a pioneer in the field of English criticism.
III. Over the century that parts Dryden from Johnson it is not well
to linger. During that time criticism must be said, on the whole, to
have gone back rather than to have advanced. With some reservations
to be noticed later, the critics of the eighteenth century are a
depressing study. Their conception of the art they professed was barren;
their judgments of men and things were lamentably narrow. The more
valuable elements traceable in the work of Dryden--the comparative and
the historical treatment--disappear or fall into the background. We
are left with little but the futile exaltation of one poet at the
expense of his rivals, or the still more futile insistence upon faults,
shortcomings, and absurdities. The _Dunciad_, the most marked critical
work of the period, may be defended on the ground that it _is_ the
Dunciad; a war waged by genius upon the fool, the pedant, and the
fribble. But, none the less, it had a disastrous influence upon English
criticism and English taste. It gave sanction to the habit of
indiscriminate abuse; it encouraged the purely personal treatment of
critical discussions. Its effects may be traced on writers even of
such force as Smollett; of such genius and natural kindliness as
Goldsmith. But it was on Johnson that Pope's influence made itself
most keenly felt. And _The Lives of the Poets_, though not written
till the movement that gave it birth had spent its force, is the most
complete and the most typical record of the tendencies that shaped
English literature and gave the law to English taste from the
Restoration to the French Revolution: a notable instance of the fact
so often observed, and by some raised to the dignity of a general law,
that both in philosophy and in art, the work of the critic does not
commonly begin till the creative impulse of a given period is exhausted.
What, then, was Johnson's method? and what its practical application?
The method is nothing if not magisterial. It takes for granted certain
fixed laws--whether the laws formulated by Aristotle, or by Horace,
or the French critics, is for the moment beside the question--and
passes sentence on every work of art according as it conforms to the
critical decalogue or transgresses it. The fault of this method is
not, as is sometimes supposed, that it assumes principles in a subject
where none are to be sought; but that its principles are built on a
miserably narrow and perverted basis. That there are principles of
criticism, that the artist's search for beauty must be guided by some
idea, is obvious enough. It can be questioned only by those who are
prepared to deny the very possibility of criticism; who would reduce
the task both of critic and of artist to a mere record of individual
impressions. It need hardly be said that the very men who are most
ready to profess such a doctrine with their lips, persistently, and
rightly, give the lie to it in their deeds. No creative work, no
critical judgment, either is or can be put forward as a mere impression;
it is the impression of a trained mind--that is, of a mind which,
instinctively or as a conscious process, is guided by principles or
ideas.
So far, then, as he may be held to have borne witness to the need of
ideas, Johnson was clearly in the right. It was when he came to ask,
What is the nature of those ideas, and how does the artist or the
critic arrive at them? that he began to go astray. Throughout he assumes
that the principles of art--and that, not only in their general bearing
(proportion, harmony, and the like), but in their minuter details-are
fixed and invariable. To him they form a kind of case-law, which is
to be extracted by the learned from the works of a certain number of
"correct writers", ancient and modern; and which, once established,
is binding for all time both on the critic and on those he summons to
his bar. In effect, this was to declare that beauty can be conceived
in no other way than as it presented itself, say, to Virgil or to Pope.
It was to lay the dead hand of the past upon the present and the future.
More than this. The models that lent themselves to be models, after
the kind desired by Johnson, were inevitably just those it was most
cramping and least inspiring to follow. They were the men who themselves
wrote, to some degree, by rule; in whom "correctness" was stronger
than inspiration; who, however admirable in their own achievement,
were lacking in the nobler and subtler qualities of the poet. They
were not the Greeks; not even, at first hand, the Latins; though the
names both of Greek and Latin were often on Johnson's lips. They were
rather the Latins as filtered through the English poets of the preceding
century; the Latins in so far as they had appealed to the writers of
the "Augustan age", but no further; the Latins, as masters of satire,
of declamation, and of the lighter kinds of verse. It was Latin poetry
without Lucretius and Catullus, without the odes of Horace, without
the higher strain of the genius of Virgil. In other words, it was
poetry as conceived by Boileau or Addison-or Mr. Smith. [Footnote: See
Johnson's extravagant eulogy of this obscure writer in the Lives of
the Poets. Works, x. i.]
Yet again. In the hands of Johnson--and it was a necessary consequence
of his critical method--poetry becomes more and more a mere matter of
mechanism. Once admit that the greatness of a poet depends upon his
success in following certain models, and it is but a short step--if
indeed it be a step--further to say that he must attempt no task that
has not been set him by the example of his forerunners. It is doubtless
true that Johnson did not, in so many words, commit himself to this
absurdity. But it is equally true that any poet, who overstepped the
bounds laid down by previous writers, was likely to meet with but
little mercy at his hands. Milton, Cowley, Gray--for all had the
audacity to take an untrodden path in poetry-one after another are
dragged up for execution. It is clear that by example, if not by
precept, Johnson was prepared to "make poetry a mere mechanic art";
and Cowper was right in saying that it had become so with Pope's
successors. Indeed John--son himself, in closing his estimate of Pope,
seems half regretfully to anticipate Cowper's verdict. "By perusing
the works of Dryden, he discovered the most perfect fabrick of English
verse, and habituated himself to that only which he found the best.
... New sentiments and new images others may produce; but to attempt
any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and
diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be
the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity". [Footnote: _Life
of Pope_. Johnson's Works, xi. pp 194, 195.] But Johnson failed to see
that his own view of poetry led inevitably to this lame and impotent
conclusion.
To adopt Johnson's method is, in truth, to misconceive the whole nature
of poetry and of poetic imagination. The ideas that have shaped the
work of one poet may act as guide and spur, but can never be a rule--far
less a law--to the imagination of another. The idea, as it comes to
an artist, is not a law imposing itself from without; it is a seed of
life and energy springing from within. This, however, was a truth
entirely hidden from the eyes of Johnson and the Augustan critics. To
assert it both by word and deed, both as critics and as poets, was the
task of Coleridge, and of those who joined hands with Coleridge, in
the succeeding generation. Apart from the undying beauty of their work
as artists, this was the memorable service they rendered to poetry in
England.
It remains to illustrate the method of Johnson by its practical
application. As has already been said, Johnson is nothing if not a
hanging judge; and it is just where originality is most striking that
his sentences are the most severe. If there was one writer who might
have been expected to win his favour, it was Pope; and if there is any
work that bears witness to the originality of Pope's genius, it is the
imitations of Horace. These are dismissed in a disparaging sentence.
There is no adequate recognition of Congreve's brilliance as a
dramatist; none of Swift's amazing powers as a satirist. Yet all these
were men who lived more or less within the range of ideas and tendencies
by which Johnson's own mind was moulded and inspired.
The case is still worse when we turn to writers of a different school.
Take the poets from the Restoration to the closing years of the American
war; and it is not too much to say that, with the exception of
Thomson--saved perhaps by his "glossy, unfeeling diction"--there is
not one of them who overstepped the bounds marked out for literary
effort by the prevailing taste of the Augustan age, in its narrowest
sense, without paying the price for his temerity in the sneers or
reprobation of Johnson. Collins, it is true, escapes more lightly than
the rest; but that is probably due to the affection and pity of his
critic. Yet even Collins, perhaps the most truly poetic spirit of the
century between Milton and Burns, is blamed for a "diction often harsh,
unskillfully laboured, and injudiciously selected"; for "lines commonly
of slow motion"; for "poetry that may sometimes extort praise, when
it gives little pleasure". [Footnote: Johnson's Works, xi. 270.]The
poems of Gray--an exception must be made, to Johnson's honour, in
favour of the _Elegy_ [Footnote: In the bosom of "the Club" the
exception dwindled to two stanzas (Boswell's Life, ii. 300).] are
slaughtered in detail; [Footnote: Johnson's Works, xi. 372-378. Johnson
is peculiarly sarcastic on the _Bard_ and the _Progress of Poetry_.]
the man himself is given dog's burial with the compendious epitaph:
"A dull fellow, sir; dull in company, dull in his closet, dull
everywhere". [Footnote: Boswell's _Life_, ii. 300. Comp. in. 435.]
But most astonishing of all, as is well known, is the treatment bestowed
on Milton. Of all Milton's works, _Paradise Lost_ seems to have been
the only one that Johnson genuinely admired. That he praises with as
little of reservation as was in the nature of so stern a critic. On
_Paradise Regained_ he is more guarded; on _Samson_, more guarded yet.
[Footnote: The two papers devoted to _Samson_ in the _Rambler_ are
"not entitled even to this slender commendation". "This is the tragedy
that ignorance has admired and bigotry applauded" (Johnson's Works,
v. 436).] But it is in speaking of the earlier poems that Johnson shows
his hand most plainly. _Comus_ "is a drama in the epic style,
inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive". [Footnote: Johnson's
Works, ix. 153.] Of _Lycidas_ "the diction is harsh, the rhymes
uncertain, and the numbers un-pleasing" [Footnote: Ib. 159.] As for
the sonnets, "they deserve not any particular criticism. For of the
best it can only be said that they are not bad; and perhaps only the
eighth and twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender
commendation.... These little pieces may be dismissed without much
anxiety". [Footnote: Ib. 160. The two sonnets are those written _When
the assault was intended to the City_, and _On his Blindness_.]
It would be hardly worth while to record these ill-tempered judgments
if they were not the natural outcome of a method which held unquestioned
sway over English taste for a full century--in France for nearly
two--and which, during that time, if we except Gray and his friends,
was not seriously disputed by a single man of mark. The one author in
whose favour the rules of "correct writing" were commonly set aside
was Shakespeare; and perhaps there is no testimony to his greatness
so convincing as the unwilling homage it extorted from the
contemporaries of Pope, of Johnson, and of Hume. Johnson's own notes
and introductions to the separate plays are at times trifling enough;
[Footnote: Compare the assault on the "mean expressions" of Shakespeare
(Rambler, No. 168).] but his general preface is a solid and manly piece
of work. It contrasts strangely not only with the verdicts given above,
but with his jeers at _Chevy Chase_ [Footnote: Ib. x. 139.]--a "dull
and lifeless imbecility"--at the _Nonne Prestes Tale_, and at the
_Knightes Tale_ [Footnote: Ib. ix. 432.]
One more instance, and we may leave this depressing study in critical
perversity. Among the great writers of Johnson's day there was none
who showed a truer originality than Fielding; no man who broke more
markedly with the literary superstitions of the time; none who took
his own road with more sturdiness and self-reliance. This was enough
for Johnson, who persistently depreciated both the man and his work.
Something of this should doubtless be set down to disapproval of the
free speech and readiness to allow for human frailty, which could not
but give offence to a moralist so unbending as Johnson. But that will
hardly account for the assertion that "Harry Fielding knew nothing but
the outer shell of life"; still less for the petulant ruling that he
"was a barren rascal". [Footnote: Boswell's _Life_, ii. 169. Diary and
Letters of Madame D'Arblay, i. 91] The truth is--and Johnson felt it
instinctively--that the novel, as conceived by Fielding--the novel
that gloried in painting all sides of life, and above all in drawing
out the humour of its "lower spheres"--dealt a fatal blow not only at
the pompous canons which the _Rambler_ was pleased to call "the
indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism", [Footnote: Johnson's
Works, v. 431.] but also at the view which found "human life to be
a state where much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed". It would
be hard to say whether Johnson found more in Fielding to affront him,
as pessimist or as critic. And it would be equally hard to say in which
of the two characters lay the greater barrier to literary insight.
Even Richardson--no less revolutionary, though in a different way,
than Fielding--was only saved so as by fire; by the undying hatred
which he shared with Johnson for his terrible rival. It was rather as
moralist than as artist, rather for "the sentiment" than for the tragic
force of his work, that Richardson seems to have won his way to
Johnson's heart. [Footnote: See the passage referred to in the preceding
note.]
Is not the evidence conclusive? Is it a harsh judgment to say that no
critic so narrow, so mechanical, so hostile to originality as Johnson
has ever achieved the dictatorship of English letters?
The supremacy of Johnson would have been impossible, had not the way
been smoothed for it by a long succession of critics like-minded with
himself. Such a succession may be traced from Swift to Addison, from
Addison to Pope, and--with marked reservations--from Pope to Goldsmith.
It would be unjust to charge all, or indeed any, of these with the
narrowness of view betrayed in Johnson's verdicts on individual writers.
To arrive at this perfection of sourness was a work of time; and the
nature of Addison and Goldsmith at least was too genial to allow of
any approach to it. But, with all their difference of temperament, the
method of the earlier critics is hardly to be distinguished from that
of Johnson. There is the same orderliness of treatment--first the
fable, then the characters, lastly the sentiment and the diction; the
same persistency in applying general rules to a matter which, above
all others, is a law to itself; the same invincible faith in "the
indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism". It is this that, in
spite of its readiness to admire, makes Addison's criticism of _Paradise
Lost_ so dreary a study; and this that, in an evil hour, prompted
Goldsmith to treat the soliloquy of Hamlet as though it were a
schoolboy's exercise in rhetoric and logic. [Footnote: Goldsmith, Essay
xvi. The next essay contains a like attack on Mercutio's description
of Queen Mab.]
And yet it is with Goldsmith that we come to the first dawn of better
things. The carping strain and the stiffness of method, that we cannot
overlook in him, were the note of his generation. The openness to new
ideas, the sense of nature, the fruitful use of the historical method,
are entirely his own. There had been nothing like them in our literature
since Dryden. In criticism, as in creative work, Goldsmith marks the
transition from the old order to the new.
Perhaps the clearest indication of this is to be found in his constant
appeal to nature. In itself, as we have seen, this may mean much or
little. "Nature" is a vague word; it was the battle-cry of Wordsworth,
but it was also the battle-cry of Boileau. And, at first sight, it
might seem to be used by Goldsmith in the narrower rather than in the
wider sense. "It is the business of art", he writes, "to imitate nature,
but not with a servile pencil; and to choose those attitudes and
dispositions only which are beautiful and engaging." [Footnote:
Goldsmith, Essay xiii.] But a glance at the context will show that
what Goldsmith had in mind was not "nature to advantage dressed", not
nature with any adornments added by man; but nature stripped of all
that to man has degrading associations; nature, to adopt the words
used by Wordsworth on a kindred subject, "purified from all lasting
or rational causes of dislike or disgust". It may well be that Goldsmith
gave undue weight to this reservation. It may well be that he did not
throw himself on nature with the unwavering constancy of Wordsworth.
But, none the less, we have here--and we have it worked out in detail
[Footnote: As to oratory, poetry, the drama, and acting, Ib., Essays
iv., xii., xiii.; _The Bee_, no. ii.]--the germ of the principle which,
in bolder hands, gave England the Lyrical Ballads and the Essays of
Lamb.
In an essay not commonly reprinted, Goldsmith, laying his finger on
the one weak spot in the genius of Gray, gives the poet the memorable
advice--to "study the people". And throughout his own critical work,
as in his novel, his comedies, and his poems, there is an abiding sense
that, without this, there is no salvation for poetry. That in itself
is enough to fix an impassable barrier between Goldsmith and the
official criticism of his day.