historical method. It is true that his knowledge is no more at first
hand, and is set out with still less system than that of Dryden a
century before. But it is also true that he has a far keener sense of
the strength which art may draw from history than his great forerunner.
Dryden confines himself to the history of certain forms of art;
Goldsmith includes the history of nations also in his view. With Dryden
the past is little more than an antiquarian study; with Goldsmith it
is a living fountain of inspiration for the present. The art of the
past--the poetry, say, of Teutonic or Celtic antiquity--is to him an
undying record of the days when man still walked hand in hand with
nature. The history of the past is at once a storehouse of stirring
themes ready to the hand of the artist, and the surest safeguard against
both flatness and exaggeration in his work. [Footnote: See Essays
xiii., xiv., xx.; _Present State of Polite Learning_, in particular,
chap. xi.] It offers, moreover, the truest schooling of the heart, and
insensibly "enlists the passions on the side of humanity". "Poetry",
Byron said, "is the feeling of a former world, and future"; [Footnote:
Moore's _Life_, p. 483] and to the first half of the statement Goldsmith
would have heartily subscribed. For the historical method in his hands
is but another aspect of the counsel he gave to Gray: "Study the
people". It is an anticipation--vague, no doubt, but still
unmistakable--of the spirit which, both in France and England, gave
birth to the romantic movement a generation or two later.
That zeal for the literature of the past was in the air when Goldsmith
wrote is proved by works so different as those of Gray and Percy, of
Chatterton and MacPherson, of Mallet and Warton. [Footnote: Percy's
Reliques were published in 1765; Chatterton's _Rowley Poems_ written
in 1769; MacPherson's _Ossian_ (first instalment) in 1760; Mallet's
_Northern Antiquities_ in 1755; and Warton's _History of English
Poetry_--a book to the learning and importance of which scant justice
has been done--from 1772 to 1778. To these should be added a work,
whose fine scholarship and profound learning is now universally
admitted, Tyrwhitt's _Chaucer_ (1775-78). It will be noticed that all
these works fall within the space of twenty years, 1755-1775] But it
may be doubted whether any one of them, Gray excepted, saw the true
bearing of the movement more clearly than Goldsmith, or did more to
open fresh springs of thought and beauty for the poetry of the next
age, if not of his own. It would be unpardonable to turn from the
writers of the eighteenth century with no notice of a book which,
seldom now read, is nevertheless perhaps the most solid piece of work
that modern Europe had as yet to show in any branch of literary
criticism. This is Burke's treatise _On the Sublime and the Beautiful_.
Few will now be prepared to accept the material basis which Burke finds
for the ideas of the imagination. [Footnote: Burke traces our ideas
of the sublime to the sense of physical pain; our ideas of the beautiful
to that of physical pleasure; identifying the former with a contraction
or tension, and the latter with a relaxation of the muscles. Against
this theory two main objections may be urged: (1) As, on Burke's own
showing, the objects of the imagination, at least as far as poetry is
concerned, are, and must be, presented first to the _mind_, it is (in
the strictest sense of the term) preposterous to attribute their power
over us to a purely muscular operation (2) The argument, taken by
itself, is barely relevant to the matter in hand. Even where a physical
basis can be proved--as it can in the case of music, painting, and
sculpture (and of poetry, so far as rhythm and harmony are an essential
element of it) it is extravagant to maintain that the physiologist or
the "psycho physicist" can explain the whole, or even the greater part,
of what has to be explained Beyond the fraction of information that
purely physical facts can give us, a vast field must be left to
intellectual and imaginative association. And that is the province not
of physiology but of psychology, and of what the Germans call
_Aesthetik_ This province, however, is but seldom entered by Burke.
What, then, was it that drove Burke to a position so markedly at
variance with the idealism of his later years? In all probability it
was his rooted suspicion of reasoning as a deliberate and conscious
process. Other writers of the century--Addison, for instance--had
spoken as if men reasoned from certain abstract ideas (proportion,
fitness, and the like) to individual instances of beauty, deciding a
thing to have beauty or no, according as it squared or failed to square
with the general notion This, as Burke points out, is more than
questionable in itself, and it was certain to affront a man who, even
thus early, had shown an almost morbid hatred of abstractions. In his
later years, as is well known, he sought refuge from them in instinct,
in "prejudice", in the unconscious working of the "permanent reason
of man". In earlier days--he was still well under thirty--he found
escape by the grosser aid of a materialist explanation (Burke's treatise
was published in 1756 The _Laocoon_ of Lessing, a work which may be
compared with that of Burke and which was very probably suggested by
it, appeared in 1766.)] But none can deny the skill with which he works
out his theory, nor the easy mastery with which each part is fitted
into its place. The speculative power of the book and the light it
throws on the deeper springs of the imagination are alike memorable.
The first is not unworthy of the _Reflections_ or the _Appeal from the
New to the Old Whigs_; the second shows that fruitful study of the
Bible and the poets, English and classical, to which his later writings
and speeches bear witness on every page.
If the originality and depth of Burke's treatise is to be justly
measured, it should be set side by side with those papers of Addison
which Akenside expanded in his dismal _Pleasures of the Imagination_.
The performance of Addison, grateful though one must be to him for
attempting it, is thin and lifeless. That of Burke is massive and full
of suggestion. At every turn it betrays the hand of the craftsman who
works with his eye upon his tools. The speculative side of criticism
has never been a popular study with Englishmen, and it is no accident
that one of the few attempts to deal seriously with it should have
been made at the only time when philosophy was a living power among
us, and when the desire to get behind the outward shows of things was
keener than it has ever been before or since. But for Burke's treatise,
a wide gap would have been left both in the philosophy and the criticism
of the eighteenth century; and it is to be wished that later times had
done more to work the vein which he so skilfully explored. As it is,
the writers both of France and Germany--above all, Hegel in his
_Aesthetik_--have laboured with incomparably more effect than his own
countrymen, Mr. Ruskin excepted, upon the foundations that he laid.
IV. Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_ was the last word of the school
which the Restoration had enthroned; the final verdict of the supreme
court which gave the law to English letters from the accession of Anne
to the French Revolution. Save in the splenetic outbursts of Byron--and
they are not to be taken too seriously--the indispensable laws of
Aristotelian criticism fell silent at Johnson's death. A time of anarchy
followed; anarchy _plus_ the policeman's truncheon of the _Edinburgh_
and the _Quarterly_. [Footnote: The first number of the _Edinburgh_
appeared in 1802; the _Quarterly_ was started in a counterblast in
1809.]
The ill-fame of these Reviews, as they were in their pride of youth,
is now so great that doubts may sometimes suggest themselves whether
it can possibly be deserved. No one who feels such doubts can do better
than turn to the earlier numbers; he will be forced to the conclusion
that, whatever their services as the journeymen of letters and of party
politics, few critics could have been so incompetent to judge of genius
as the men who enlisted under the standard of Jeffrey or of Gifford.
There is not, doubtless, in either Review the same iron wall of reasoned
prejudice that has been noted in Johnson, but there is a plentiful
lack of the clear vision and the openness to new impressions which are
the first necessity of the critic. What Carlyle says of Jeffrey and
the _Edinburgh_ may be taken as the substantial truth also about Gifford
and the _Quarterly_, and it is the most pregnant judgment that has yet
been passed upon them.
"Jeffrey may be said to have begun the rash, reckless style of
criticising everything in heaven and earth by appeal to Moliere's maid:
'Do _you_ like it?' '_Don't_ you like it?' a style which, in hands
more and more inferior to that sound-hearted old lady and him, has
since grown gradually to such immeasurable length among us; and he
himself is one of the first that suffers by it. If praise and blame
are to be perfected, not in the mouth of Moliere's maid only but in
that of mischievous, precocious babes and sucklings, you will arrive
at singular judgments by degrees." [Footnote: Carlyle, _Reminiscences_
n 63, 64 ]
Carlyle has much here to say of Jeffrey's "recklessness", his defiance
of all rules, his appeal to the chance taste of the man in the crowd.
He has much also to say of his acuteness, and the unrivalled authority
of his decrees. [Footnote: "Jeffrey was by no means the supreme in
criticism or in anything else, but it is certain there has no critic
appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him and his
influence for good and for evil in literature and otherwise has been
very great. Nothing in my time has so forwarded all this--the 'gradual
uprise and rule in all things of roaring, million headed &c Demos'--
"as Jeffrey and his once famous _Edinburgh Review_'--Ib ] But he is
discreetly silent on their severity and short-sightedness. [Footnote:
"You know", Byron wrote in 1808 "the system of the Edinburgh gentlemen
is universal attack. They praise none, and neither the public nor the
author expects praise from them."--Moore's _Life_, p 67.]
Yet this is the unpardonable sin of both Reviews: that mediocrity was
applauded, but that, whenever a man of genius came before them, the
chances were ten to one that he would be held up to ridicule and
contempt. The very first number of the _Edinburgh_ lays this down as
an article of faith. Taking post on the recent appearance of _Thalaba_,
the reviewer opens fire by a laboured parallel between poetry and
religion. [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_, No. 1, pp 63, &c ] With an
alteration of names it might have been written by a member of the
English Church Union, or of the Holy Inquisition.
"The standards of poetry have been fixed long ago by certain inspired
writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.
Many profess to be entirely devoted to poetry, who have no _good works_
to produce in support of their pretensions. The Catholic poetical
Church too . . . has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies
and errors, the followers of which have hated and persecuted each other
as heartily as other bigots."
Then, turning to business, the writer proceeds to apply his creed to
Southey and all his works, not forgetting the works also of his friends.
"The author belongs to a sect of poets that has established itself in
this country within these ten or twelve years"--it would be hard to
say for whose benefit in particular this date was taken--"and is looked
upon as one of its chief champions and apostles". "The doctrines of
this sect"--the Reviewer continues, with an eye upon the Alien Act--"are
of German origin, or borrowed from the great apostle of Geneva".
Rousseau is then "named" for expulsion, together with a miscellaneous
selection of his following: Schiller and Kotzebue (the next number
includes Kant under the anathema), Quarles and Donne, Ambrose Phillips
and Cowper--perhaps the most motley crew that was ever brought together
for excommunication. It is not, however, till the end of the essay
that the true root of bitterness between the critic and his victims
is suffered fully to appear. "A splenetic and idle discontent with the
existing institutions of society seems to be at the bottom of all their
serious and peculiar sentiments." In other words, the _Edinburgh_ takes
up the work of the _Anti-Jacobin_; with no very good grace Jeffrey
affects to sit in the seat of Canning and of Frere.
So much for the "principles" of the new venture; principles, it will
be seen, which appear to rest rather upon a hatred of innovation in
general than upon any reasoned code, such as that of Johnson or the
"Aristotelian laws", in particular. On that point, it must be clearly
realized, Carlyle was in the right. It is that which marks the essential
difference of the Reviewers--we can hardly say their advance--as against
Johnson.
We may now turn to watch the Reviewers, knife in hand, at the
dissecting-table. For the twenty-five years that followed the foundation
of the _Edinburgh_, England was more full of literary genius than it
had been at any time since the age of Elizabeth. And it is not too
much to say that during that period there was not one of the men, now
accepted as among the chief glories of English literature, who did not
fall under the lash of one, or both, of the Reviews. The leading cases
will suffice.
And first, the famous attack--not altogether undeserved, it must be
allowed--of the _Edinburgh_ upon Byron. "The poetry of this young lord
belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit",
and so on for two or three pages of rather vulgar and heartless
merriment at the young lord's expense. [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_,
xi. 285. It is uncommonly hard to find any trace of poetic power, even
of the imitative kind, in the _Hours of Idleness_. It is significant
that the best pieces are those in the heroic couplet; an indication--to
be confirmed by _English Bards_--of Byron's leaning towards the past.]
The answer to the sneer, as all the world knows, was _English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers_. The author of the article had reason to be proud
of his feat. Never before did pertness succeed in striking such
unexpected fire from genius. And it is only fair to say that the Review
took its beating like a gentleman. A few years later, and the
_Edinburgh_ was among the warmest champions of the "English Bard".
[Footnote: See the article on _The Corsair_ and _Bride of Abydos_, Ib.
xxiii. 198. After speaking of the "beauty of his diction and
versification, and the splendour of his description", the reviewer
continues: "But it is to his pictures of the stronger passions that
he is indebted for the fulness of his fame. He has delineated with
unequalled force and fidelity the workings of those deep and powerful
emotions.... We would humbly suggest to him to do away with the reproach
of the age by producing a tragic drama of the old English school of
poetry and pathos." The _amende honorable_ with a vengeance. The review
of _The Giaour_, Byron thought, was "so very mild and sentimental that
it must be written by Jeffrey in _love_".--Moore's _Life_, p. 191.]
It was reserved for Southey, a pillar of the _Quarterly_, to rank him
as the "Goliath" of the "Satanic school".
Let us now turn to the _Quarterly_ upon Keats. _Endymion_, in spite
of the noble self-criticism of its preface, is denounced as "Cockney
poetry" [Footnote: The phrase was also employed by _Blackwood_, vol.
iii. 519-524.]--a stupid and pointless vulgarism--and is branded as
clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language".
The author is dismissed with the following amenities: "Being bitten
by Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, he more than rivals the insanity of
his poetry"; and we are half-surprised not to find him told, as he was
by _Blackwood_, to "go back to the shop, Mr. John; back to the plasters,
pills, and ointment-boxes". [Footnote: _Quarterly Review_, xix. 204.
See _Blackwood_, vol. iii. 524; where the Reviewer sneers at "the calm,
settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of _Endymion_".]
With this insolence it is satisfactory to contrast the verdict of the
_Edinburgh_: "We have been exceedingly struck with the genius these
poems--_Endymion_, _Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St. Agnes_,
&c.--display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their
extravagance. . . . They are at least as full of genius as absurdity."
Of _Hyperion_ the Reviewer says: "An original character and distinct
individuality is bestowed upon the poet's mythological persons. . . .
We cannot advise its completion. For, though there are passages of
some force and grandeur, it is sufficiently obvious that the subject
is too far removed from all the sources of human interest to be
successfully treated by any modern author". [Footnote: Edinburgh Review,
xxxiv. 203.] A blundering criticism, which, however, may be pardoned
in virtue of the discernment, not to say the generosity, of the
foregoing estimate.
It would have been well had the _Edinburgh_ always written in this
vein. But Wordsworth was a sure stumbling-block to the sagacity of his
critics, and he certainly never failed to call forth the insolence and
flippancy of Jeffrey. Two articles upon him remain as monuments to the
incompetence of the _Edinburgh_; the first prompted by the Poems of
1807, the second by the _Excursion_.
The former pronounces sentence roundly at the very start: "Mr.
Wordsworth's diction has nowhere any pretence to elegance or dignity,
and he has scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness
or dignity to his versification". From this sweeping condemnation four
poems--_Brougham Castle_, and the sonnets on Venice, Milton, and
Bonaparte--are generously excepted. But, as though astonished at his
own moderation, the reviewer quickly proceeds to deal slaughter among
the rest. Of the closing lines of _Resolution and Independence_ he
writes: "We defy Mr. Wordsworth's bitterest enemy to produce anything
at all parallel to this from any collection of English poetry, or even
from the specimens of his friend, Mr. Southey". Of the stanzas to the
sons of Burns, "never was anything more miserable". _Alice Fell_ is
"trash"; _Yarrow Unvisited_, "tedious and affected". The lines from
the _Ode to Duty_.
"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong,"
are "utterly without meaning". The poem on the _Cuckoo_ is "absurd".
The _Ode on Immortality_ is "the most illegible and unintelligible
part of the whole publication". "We venture to hope that there is now
an end of this folly." [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_, xi. 217, &c.]
But the hope is doomed to disappointment. The publication of the
_Excursion_ a few years later finds the reviewer still equal to his
task. "This will never do", he begins in a fury; "the case of Mr.
Wordsworth is now manifestly hopeless. We give him up as altogether
incurable and beyond the power of criticism." The story of Margaret,
indeed, though "it abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment and
details of preposterous minuteness, has considerable pathos". But the
other passage which one would have thought must have gone home to every
heart--that which describes the communing of the wanderer with nature
[Footnote: _Excursion_, book i.]--is singled out for ridicule; while
the whole poem is judged to display "a puerile ambition of singularity,
grafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms". [Footnote: _Edinburgh
Review_, xxiv. I, &c. It is but just to add that in the remainder of
the essay the Reviewer takes back--so far as such things can ever be
taken back--a considerable part of his abuse.]
It would be idle to maintain that in some of these slashing verdicts--
criticisms they cannot be called--the reviewer does not fairly hit the
mark. But these are chance strokes; and they are dealt, as the whole
attack is conceived, in the worst style of the professional swash-
buckler. Yet, low as is the deep they sound, a lower deep is opened
by the _Quarterly_ in its article on Shelley; an article which bears
unmistakable marks of having been written under the inspiration, if
not by the hand, of Southey.
It is impossible to know anything about Southey without feeling that,
both in character and in intellect, he had many of the qualities that
go to make an enlightened critic. But his fine nature was warped by
a strain of bigotry; and he had what, even in a man who otherwise gave
conclusive proof of sincerity and whole-heartedness, must be set down
as a strong touch of the Pharisee. After every allowance has been made,
no feeling other than indignation is possible at the tone which he
thought fit to adopt towards Shelley.
He opens the assault, and it is well that he does so, by an
acknowledgment that the versification of the _Revolt of Islam_, the
_corpus delicti_ at that moment under the scalpel, is "smooth and
harmonious", and that the poem is "not without beautiful passages,
free from errors of taste". But the "voice of warning", as he himself
would too generously have called it, is not long in making itself
heard. "Mr. Shelley, with perfect deliberation and the steadiest
perseverance, perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all the
injury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him to
perpetrate. . . .He draws largely on the rich stores of another mountain
poet, to whose religious mind it must be matter of perpetual sorrow
to see the philosophy, which comes pure and holy from his pen, degraded
and perverted by this miserable crew of atheists and pantheists."
So far, perhaps, the writer may claim not to have outstepped the
traditional limits of theological hatred. For what follows there is
not even that poor excuse. "If we might withdraw the veil of his private
life and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a
disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an
unanswerable comment on our text. . .Mr. Shelley is too young, too
ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of
reforming any world but the little world within his own breast."
[Footnote: Quarterly Review, xxi. 460, &c.] For the credit of both
Reviews it must be said that it would be difficult to find another
instance of so foul a blow as this: [Footnote: Except in the infamous
insinuations, also a crime of the _Quarterly_,]
Non ragioniam di _lui_, ma guarda e passa.
[Footnote: against the character of Currer Bell. See also the scurrilous
attack on the character of Leigh Hunt in _Blackwood_, vol III 453]
Apart from their truculence, the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_ are memorable for two reasons in the history of English
literature. They mark the downfall of the absolute standard assumed
by Johnson and others to hold good in criticism. And they led the way,
slowly indeed but surely, to the formation of a general interest in
literature, which, sooner or later, could not but be fatal to their
own haphazard dogmatism. By their very nature they were an appeal to
the people; and, like other appeals of the kind, they ended in a
revolution.
Of the men who fixed the lines on which this revolution was to run,
four stand out taller from the shoulders upwards than their fellows.
These are Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. The critical work of
all four belongs to the first thirty years or so of the present century;
[Footnote: Some of the dates are as follows Lamb's _Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets_ was published in 1808, his _Essays of Elia_ began to
appear in the _London Magazine_, 1820, Coleridge's first Course of
Lectures (on English poets) was delivered in 1808, his second Course,
in 1811-12, his _Biographia Literana_ in 1817 Hazlitt's _Characters
of Shakespeare's Plays_ was published in 1817, his _Lectures on the
English Poets_ in 1818, and on _The English Comic Writers_ in 1819
Carlyle's Essays began to appear (in the _Edinburgh_ and other Reviews)
in 1827, that on Diderot--the last notable essay of a literary cast--in
1833 Hazlitt died in 1830, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834 By that time
Carlyle had turned to history and kindred subjects] and of the four
it is probable that Carlyle, by nature certainly the least critical,
had the greatest influence in changing the current of critical ideas.
Space forbids any attempt to treat their work in detail. All that can
be done is to indicate what were the shortcomings of English criticism
as it came into their hands, and how far and in what manner they
modified its methods and its aims.