remained a very simple thing. When judgment had once been passed, for
good or evil, on an individual work or an individual writer, the critic
was apt to suppose that nothing further could reasonably be expected
of him. The comparative method, foreshadowed but only foreshadowed by
Dryden, had not been carried perceptibly further by Dryden's successors.
The historical method was still more clearly in its infancy. The
connection between the two, the unity of purpose which alone gives
significance to either, was hardly as yet suspected.
It may be said--an English critic of the eighteenth century would
undoubtedly have said--that these, after all, are but methods; better,
possibly, than other methods; but still no more than means to an end--
the eternal end of criticism, which is to appraise and to classify.
The view is disputable enough. It leaves out of sight all that
criticism--the criticism of literature and art--has done to throw light
upon the dark places of human thought and history, upon the growth and
subtle transformations of spiritual belief, upon the power of reason
and imagination to mould the shape of outward institutions. All these
things are included in the scope of the historical and comparative
methods; and all of them stand entirely apart from the need to judge
or classify the works of individual poets.
But, for the moment, such wider considerations may be put aside, and
the objection weighed on its own merits. It must then be answered that,
without comparison and without the appeal to history, even to judge
and classify reasonably would be impossible; and hence that, however
much we narrow the scope of criticism, these two methods--or rather,
two aspects of the same method--must still find place within its range.
For, failing them, the critic in search of a standard--and without
some standard or criterion there can be no such thing as criticism--is
left with but two possible alternatives. He must either appeal to some
absolute standard--the rules drawn from the "classical writers", in
a sense wider or narrower, as the case may be; or he must decide
everything by his own impression of the moment, eked out by the "appeal
to Moliere's maid". The latter is the negation of all criticism. The
former, spite of itself, is the historical method, but the historical
method applied in an utterly arbitrary and irrational way. The former
was the method of Johnson; the latter, of the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Quarterly_. Each in turn, as we have seen, had ludicrously broken
down.
In the light of recent inventions, it might have been expected that
some attempt would be made to limit the task of the critic to a mere
record of his individual impressions. This, in fact, would only have
been to avow, and to give the theory of what the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Quarterly_ had already reduced to practice. But the truth is that the
men of that day were not strong in such fine-spun speculations. It was
a refinement from which even Lamb, who loved a paradox as well as any
man, would have shrunk with playful indignation.
It was in another direction that Coleridge and his contemporaries
sought escape from the discredit with which criticism was threatened.
This was by changing the issue on which the discussion was to be fought.
In its most general form, the problem of criticism amounts to this:
What is the nature of the standard to be employed in literary judgments?
Hitherto--at least to the Reviewers--the question may be said to have
presented itself in the following shape: Is the standard to be sought
within or without the mind of the critic? Is it by his own impression,
or by the code handed down from previous critics, that in the last
resort the critic should be guided? In the hands of Coleridge and
others, this was replaced by the question: Is the touchstone of
excellence to be found within the work of the poet, or outside of it?
Are we to judge of a given work merely by asking: Is it clearly
conceived and consistently carried out? Or are we bound to consider
the further question: Is the original conception just, and capable of
artistic treatment; and is the workmanship true to the vital principles
of poetry? The change is significant. It makes the poet, not the critic,
master of the situation. It implies that the critic is no longer to
give the law to the poet; but that, in some sense more or less complete,
he must begin, if not by putting himself in the place of the individual
writer as he was when at work on the individual poem, at least by
taking upon himself--by making his own, as far as may be--what he may
conceive to be the essential temperament of the poet.
This, indeed, is one of the first things to strike us in passing from
the old criticism to the new. The _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_ plunge
straight into the business of the moment. From the first instant--with
"This will never do"--the Reviewer poses as the critic, or rather as
the accuser. Not so Coleridge and Hazlitt. Like the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_, they undertake to discourse on individual poets. Unlike
them, each opens his enquiry with the previous question-a question
that seems to have found no lodgment in the mind of the Reviewers--What
is poetry? Further than this. Hazlitt, in a passage of incomparably
greater force than any recorded utterance of Coleridge, makes it his
task to trace poetry to the deepest and most universal springs of human
nature; asserts boldly that it is poetry which, in the strictest sense,
is "the life of all of us"; and calls on each one of us to assert his
birthright by enjoying it. It is in virtue of the poet latent in him,
that the plain man has the power to become a critic.
Starting then from the question as just stated: Is it within the mind
of the individual poet, or without it, that the standard of judgment
should be sought?--neither Coleridge nor Hazlitt could have any doubt
as to the answer. It is not, they would tell us, in the individual
work but in the nature of poetry--of poetry as written large in the
common instincts of all men no less than in the particular achievement
of exceptional artists--that the test of poetic beauty must be
discovered. The opposite view, doubtless, finds some countenance in
the precepts, if not the example, of Goethe. But, when pressed to
extremes, it is neither more nor less than the impressionist conception
of criticism transferred to the creative faculty; and, like its
counterpart, is liable to the objection that the impression of one
poet, so long as it is sincerely rendered, is as good as the impression
of another. It is the abdication of art, as the other is the abdication
of criticism.
Yet Hazlitt also--for, leaving Coleridge, we may now confine ourselves
to him--is open to attack. His fine critical powers were marred by the
strain of bitterness in his nature. And the result is that his judgment
on many poets, and notably the poets of his own day, too often sounds
like an intelligent version of the _Edinburgh_ or the _Quarterly_. Or,
to speak more accurately, he betrays some tendency to return to
principles which, though assuredly applied in a more generous spirit,
are at bottom hardly to be distinguished from the principles of Johnson.
He too has his "indispensable laws", or something very like them. He
too has his bills of exclusion and his list of proscriptions. The
poetry of earth, he more than suspects, is for ever dead; after Milton,
no claimant is admitted to anything more substantial than a courtesy
title. This, no doubt, was in part due to his morose temper; but it
was partly also the result of the imperfect method with which he
started.
The fault of his conception--and it was that which determined his
method--is to be too absolute. It allows too much room to poetry in
the abstract; too little to the ever-varying temperament of the
individual poet. And even that is perhaps too favourable a statement
of the case. His idea of poetry may in part be drawn--and its strength
is to have been partly drawn--direct from life and nature. But it is
also taken, as from the nature of the case it must be with all of us,
from the works of particular poets. And, in spite of his appeal to
Dante and the Bible, it is clear that, in framing it, he was guided
too exclusively by his loving study of the earlier English writers,
from Chaucer to Milton. The model, so framed, is laid with heavy hand
upon all other writers, who naturally fare ill in the comparison. Is
it possible to account otherwise for his disparagement of Moliere, or
his grudging praise of Wordsworth and of Coleridge?
It was here that Carlyle came in to redress the balance. From interests,
in their origin perhaps less purely literary than have moved any man
who has exercised a profound influence on literature, Carlyle was led
to quicken the sense of poetic beauty, and by consequence to widen the
scope of criticism, more than any writer of his day. He may have sought
German literature more for its matter than for its artistic
beauty--here, too, he brought a new, if in some ways a dangerous,
element into criticism--but neither he nor his readers could study it,
least of all could they study the work of Goethe, without awakening
to a whole world of imagination and beauty, to which England had
hitherto been dead. With all its shortcomings, the discovery of German
literature was a greater revelation than any made to Europe since the
classical Renaissance.
The shock--for it was nothing less--came at a singularly happy moment.
The blow, given by Carlyle as critic, was closely followed up by the
French _Romantiques_, as creative artists. Nothing could well have
been more alien to English taste, as understood by the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_, than the early works, or indeed any works, of Hugo and
those who owned him for chief--if it were not the works of Goethe and
the countrymen of Goethe. Different as these were from each other,
they held common ground in uniting the most opposite prejudices of
Englishmen against them. The sarcasms of Thackeray on the French writers
speak to this no less eloquently than the fluent flippancies of De
Quincey upon the Germans. [Footnote: See Thackeray's _Paris Sketch
Book_, especially the chapters on _Madame Sand and the New Apocalypse_
and _French Dramas and Melodramas_. See also De Quincey's Review of
Carlyle's translation of _Wilhelm Meister_. Works, vol. xii.] Yet, in
the one case as in the other--thanks, in no small measure, to Matthew
Arnold and Mr. Swinburne--genius, in the long run, carried the day.
And the same history has been repeated, as the literatures of Russia
and of Scandinavia have each in turn been brought within our ken.
These discoveries have all fallen within little more than half a century
since Carlyle, by the irony of fate, reviewed Richter and the _State
of German Literature_ in the pages of the _Edinburgh_. And their result
has been to modify the standards of taste and criticism in a thousand
ways. They have opened our eyes to aspects of poetry that we should
never otherwise have suspected, and unveiled to us fields of thought,
as well as methods of artistic treatment which, save by our own fault,
must both have widened and deepened our conception of poetry. That is
the true meaning of the historical method. The more we broaden our
vision, the less is our danger of confounding poetry, which is the
divine genius of the whole world, with the imperfect, if not misshapen
idols of the tribe, the market-place and the cave.
Of this conquest Carlyle must in justice be reckoned as the pioneer.
For many years he stood almost single-handed as the champion of German
thought and German art against the scorn or neglect of his countrymen.
But he knew that he was right, and was fully conscious whither the
path he had chosen was to lead. Aware that much in the work of Goethe
would seem "faulty" to many, he forestalls the objection at the outset.
"To see rightly into this matter, to determine with any infallibility
whether what we call a fault _is_ in very deed a fault, we must
previously have settled two points, neither of which may be so readily
settled. First, we must have made plain to ourselves what the poet's
aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his
own eye, and how far, with such means as it afforded him, he has
fulfilled it. Secondly, we must have decided whether and how far this
aim, this task of his accorded--not with _us_ and our individual
crotchets, and the crotchets of our little senate where we give or
take the law--but with human nature and the nature of things at large;
with the universal principles of poetic beauty, not as they stand
written in our text-books, but in the hearts and imaginations of all
men. Does the answer in either case come out unfavourable; was there
an inconsistency between the means and the end, a discordance between
the end and the truth, there is a fault; was there not, there is no
fault." [Footnote: Carlyle on Goethe: _Miscellanies_, i. 295]
Nothing could ring clearer than this. No man could draw the line more
accurately between the tendency to dispense with principles and the
tendency to stereotype them, which are the twin dangers of the critic.
But it is specially important to note Carlyle's relation, in this
matter, to Hazlitt He insists with as much force as Hazlitt upon the
need of basing all poetry on "human nature and the nature of things
at large"; upon the fact that its principles are written "in the hearts
and imaginations of all men". But, unlike Hazlitt, he bids us also
consider what the aim of the individual poet was, and how far he has
taken the most fitting means to reach it. In other words, he allows,
as Hazlitt did not allow, for the many-sidedness of poetry, and the
infinite variety of poetic genius. And, just because he does so, he
is able to give a deeper meaning to "nature" and the universal
principles of imagination than Hazlitt, with all his critical and
reflective brilliance, was in a position to do. Hazlitt is too apt to
confine "nature" to the nature of Englishmen in general and, in his
weaker moments, of Hazlitt in particular. Carlyle makes an honest
attempt to bound it only by the universal instincts of man, and the
"everlasting reason" of the world. Thus, in Carlyle's conception, "it
is the essence of the poet to be new"; it is his mission "to wrench
us from our old fixtures"; [Footnote: Carlyle on Goethe: _Miscellanies_,
i. 291.] for it is only by so doing that he can show us some aspect
of nature or of man's heart that was hidden from us before. The
originality of the poet, the impossibility of binding him by the example
of his forerunners, is the necessary consequence of the infinity of
truth.
That Carlyle saw this, and saw it so clearly, is no doubt partly due
to a cause, of which more must be said directly; to his craving for
ideas. [Footnote: See p. xciv.] But it was in part owing to his hearty
acceptance of the historical method. Both as critic and as historian,
he knew--at that time, no man so well--that each nation has its own
genius; and justly pronounced the conduct of that nation which "isolates
itself from foreign influence, regards its own modes as so many laws
of nature, and rejects all that is different as unworthy even of
examination", to be "pedantry". [Footnote: _Miscellanies_, i. 37, 38.]
This was the first, and perhaps the most fruitful consequence that he
drew from the application of historical ideas to literature. They
enlarged his field of comparison; and, by so doing, they gave both
width and precision to his definition of criticism.
But there is another--and a more usual, if a narrower--sense of the
historical method; and here, too, Carlyle was a pioneer. He was among
the first in our country to grasp the importance of studying the
literature of a nation, as a whole, and from its earliest monuments,
its mythological and heroic legends, downwards to the present. The
year 1831--a turning-point in the mental history of Carlyle, for it
was also the year in which _Sartor Resartus_ took shape "among the
mountain solitudes"--was largely devoted to Essays on the history of
German literature, of which one, that on the _Nibelungenlied_, is
specially memorable. And some ten years later (1840) he again took up
the theme in the first of his lectures on Heroes, which still remains
the most enlightening, because the most poetic, account of the primitive
Norse faith, or rather successive layers of faith, in our language.
[Footnote: See _Lectures on Heroes_, p. 20; compare _Corpus Poeticum
Borealt_, i. p. ci. ] But what mainly concerns us here is that Carlyle,
in this matter as in others, had clearly realized and as clearly defines
the goal which the student, in this case the student of literary
history, should set before his eyes.
"A History ... of any national Poetry would form, taken in its complete
sense, one of the most arduous enterprises any writer could engage in.
Poetry, were it the rudest, so it be sincere, is the attempt which man
makes to render his existence harmonious, the utmost he can do for
that end; it springs, therefore, from his whole feelings, opinions,
activity, and takes its character from these. It may be called the
music of his whole manner of being; and, historically considered, is
the test how far Music, or Freedom, existed therein; how the feeling
of Love, of Beauty, and Dignity, could be elicited from that peculiar
situation of his, and from the views he there had of Life and Nature,
of the Universe, internal and external. Hence, in any measure to
understand the Poetry, to estimate its worth and historical meaning,
we ask, as a quite fundamental inquiry: What that situation was? Thus
the History of a nation's Poetry is the essence of its History,
political, economic, scientific, religious. With all these the complete
Historian of a national Poetry will be familiar; the national
physiognomy, in its finest traits and through its successive stages
of growth, will be dear to him: he will discern the grand spiritual
Tendency of each period, what was the highest Aim and Enthusiasm of
mankind in each, and how one epoch naturally evolved itself from the
other. He has to record the highest Aim of a nation, in its successive
directions and developments; for by this the Poetry of the nation
modulates itself; this _is_ the Poetry of the nation." [Footnote:
Carlyle, _Miscellanies_, iii. 292, 293.]
Never has the task of the literary historian been more accurately
defined than in this passage; and never do we feel so bitterly the
gulf between the ideal and the actual performance, at which more than
one man of talent has since tried his hand, as when we read it. It
strikes perhaps the first note of Carlyle's lifelong war against
"Dryasdust". But it contains at least two other points on which it is
well for us to pause.
The first is the inseparable bond which Carlyle saw to exist between
the poetry of a nation and its history; the connection which inevitably
follows from the fact that both one and the other are the expression
of its character. This is a vein of thought that was first struck by
Vico and by Montesquieu; but it was left for the German philosophers,
in particular Fichte and Hegel, to see its full significance; and
Carlyle was the earliest writer in this country to make it his own.
It is manifest that the connection between the literature and the
history of a nation may be taken from either side. We may illustrate
its literature from its history, or its history from its literature.
It is on the necessity of the former study that Carlyle dwells in the
above. And in the light of later exaggerations, notably those of Taine,
it is well to remember, what Carlyle himself would have been the last
man to forget, that no man of genius is the creature of his time or
his surroundings; and, consequently, that when we have mastered all
the circumstances, in Carlyle's phrase the whole "situation", of the
poet, we are still only at the beginning of our task. We have still
to learn what his genius made out of its surroundings, and what the
eye of the poet discovered in the world of traditional belief; in other
words, what it was that made him a poet, what it was that he saw and
to which all the rest were blind. We have studied the soil; we have
yet to study the tree that grew from it and overshadows it. [Footnote:
Perhaps the most striking instances of this kind of criticism, both
on its strong and its weak side, are to be found in the writings of
Mazzini. See _Opere_, ii. and iv.]
In reversing the relation, in reading history by the light of
literature, the danger is not so great. The man of genius may, and
does, see deeper than his contemporaries; but, for that very reason,
he is a surer guide to the tendencies of his time than they. He is
above and beyond his time; but, just in so far as he is so, he sees
over it and through it. As Shakespeare defined it, his "end, both at
the first and now, was and is... to show the very age and body of the
time his form and pressure". Some allowance must doubtless be made for
the individuality of the poet; for the qualities in which he stands
aloof from his time, and in which, therefore, he must not be taken to
reflect it. But to make such allowance is a task not beyond the skill
of the practised critic; and many instances suggest themselves in which
it has, more or less successfully, been done. Witness not a few passages
in Michelet's _Histoire de France_, and some to be found in the various
works of Ranke. [Footnote: As instances may be cited, Michelet's remarks
on Rabelais (tome viii. 428-440) and on Moliere (tome xiii. 51-85):
or again Ranke's _Papste_, i. 486-503 (on Tasso and the artistic
tendencies of the middle of the sixteenth century): _Franzosische
Geschichte_, iii. 345-368 (the age of Louis XIV.).] Witness, again,
Hegel's illustration of the Greek conception of the family from the
_Antigone_ and the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles; or, if we may pass to a
somewhat different field, his "construction" of the French Revolution
from the religious and metaphysical ideas of Rousseau. [Footnote:
Hegel, _Phanomenologie des Geistes_, pp. 323-348, and pp. 426-436.]
So far as it employs literature to give the key to the outward history
of a nation or to the growth of its spiritual faith, it is clear that
the historical method ceases to be, in the strict sense of the word,
a literary instrument. It implies certainly that a literary judgment
has been passed; but, once passed, that judgment is used for ends that
lie altogether apart from the interests of literature. But it is idle
to consider that literature loses caste by lending itself to such a
purpose. It would be wiser to say that it gains by anything that may
add to its fruitfulness and instructiveness. In any case, and whether
it pleases us or no, this is one of the things that the historical
method has done for literature; and neither Carlyle, nor any other
thinker of the century, would have been minded to disavow it.