[Sidenote: _Edward Phillips._] Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, was by
all accounts a most respectable person; and considering the prevalence
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_[524] appeared in the winter of 1674-75, but the dignity of the
opening “Discourse of 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-corner poet who comes squirting out an
Elegy.” [Sidenote: _His_ Theatrum Poetarum.] The piece is creditable as
a whole, and ends with a hesitating 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 _prænomina_ or Christian names when Phillips knows
these, and by others when he does not—is much less important. Here again
the nephew has been robbed to give to the uncle the notices of Marlowe
and Shakespeare, in both of which the most noticeable expressions,
“Clean and unsophisticated wit” and “unvulgar style,” apply to
Shakespeare 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.
-----
Footnote 523:
It is well known that Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, had planned, if
he did not actually execute, a _Lives of the Poets_ very much earlier,
and some sanguine souls have hoped that it may yet turn up. But the
famous passage about poets’ nicknames, as well as the whole cast of
Heywood’s work, suggests that, though biography may have lost
something, criticism has not lost much.
Footnote 524:
London 12mo.
-----
William Winstanley (who brought out his _Lives of the Most Famous
English Poets_[525] some dozen years later, and levied contributions on
Phillips himself in the most nonchalant manner) was a mere bookmaker, to
whom is assigned the post of manufacturer for years of “Poor Robin’s
Almanack,” and who did other hack-work. [Sidenote: _Winstanley’s_
Lives.] 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.
-----
Footnote 525:
8vo, London, 1686.
-----
In connection with Phillips and Winstanley (whom he avowedly follows and
acridly comments, accusing them at the same time of having stolen his
thunder from a previously published _Catalogue_) it may be well to
notice Gerard Langbaine, the somewhat famous author of the _Account of
the English Dramatic Poets_.[526] [Sidenote: _Langbaine’s_ 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[527] 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 quoting at great length Dryden’s
cavillings at the men of the last age, huddling off as “some praises”
the magnificent and immortal eulogies[528] 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.
-----
Footnote 526:
1691: but pirated earlier.
Footnote 527:
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 Mr Sidney Lee finds (_D. N. B._) “no malice” in
Langbaine.
Footnote 528:
This is the odder, and the more discreditable, because one of the few
things to be counted to Langbaine for righteousness is a distinct
admiration of Shakespeare.
-----
The only too notable 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 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. [Sidenote: _Temple._]
Nor need the earlier protagonists, 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_[529] which are
devoted to literature, invited the exercise of Macaulay’s favourite
methods by the enormity of their ignorance, 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.
-----
Footnote 529:
Ed. 1757, vol. iii., pp. 394-501, containing the _Poetry_, the
_Ancient and Modern Learning_, and the _Thoughts upon Reviewing that
Essay_. Some have charitably found in Temple better knowledge of the
Moderns, whom he scorned, than of the Ancients, whom he championed, on
the strength of his references to “Runes” and “Gothic Dithyrambics.” I
cannot be so amiable. It is all a mere parade of pretentious sciolism
varnished by style.
-----
This could not be said of Bentley, and the _Phalaris_ Dissertation has
been not undeservedly ranked as one of the representative pieces of
critical literature. [Sidenote: _Bentley._] It is only unfortunate that
Bentley has meddled so little with the purely literary side of the
matter; and the sense of this misfortune may be tempered by remembrance
of his dealings with Milton. He is, however, perfectly right in at least
hinting[530] 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.
-----
Footnote 530:
_Diss._, § xvi. My copy is the London ed. of 1817.
-----
From any point of critical consideration Collier’s famous book[531] must
be a most important document in the History of Criticism; and though
from some such points it may be of even greater importance than it is to
us, we can in no wise omit it. [Sidenote: _Collier’s_ Short View.] 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 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 axiom,
“To copy Nature is to copy _them_,”
“dissertations on the Greek and Latin Drama” were not otiose at all,
they were absolutely necessary.
-----
Footnote 531:
_A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage._
London, 1698. The great popularity of the book caused it to be quickly
reprinted: my copy, though of the first year, is the third edition.
Collier’s rejoinder to his victims next year contains good things, but
is of less importance. And it does not matter much to us whether he
originally drew anything from the Prince de Conti’s pietist _Traité
Sur la Comédie_ (1667). The Ancients, and the Fathers, and the
Puritans were in any case quite sufficient sources.
-----
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-writing 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
criticism, 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 of view) at p. 148, “Poets are not
always exactly in rule.” He might have developed his views on the Chorus
(p. 150) interestingly. 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_,[532] where, out of more than
five hundred pages, exactly four are devoted to literature, and these
give us nothing but generalities.
-----
Footnote 532:
_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 description of Shakespeare,
which Mr Browning has maliciously chosen, as a motto for _Ferishtah’s
Fancies_, from the _Historical Dictionary_: “His genius was jocular,
but, when disposed, he could be very serious.”
-----
That Collier’s victory was very mainly due to the fact that he struck in
at the right moment, as spokesman of an already formed popular opinion,
would be a matter of reasonable certainty in any case; but the certainty
is here historical. [Sidenote: _Sir T. P. Blount._] One of many proofs
at hand is in the curious lighterfull 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,[533] 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.”[534]
-----
Footnote 533:
_De Re Poetica_, or _Remarks upon Poetry_, &c., 4to, London, 1694. It
is even said to have first appeared in 1690.
Footnote 534:
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 in the
last volume, but which cannot receive detailed treatment in this.
-----
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. 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 Cœlius Rhodiginus was good enough to find that
same Dantes Aligerus, who displeased others, a “poet not
contemptible.”[535] 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 his handy quarto; yet perhaps it would be
excessive to call him a great critic. What he does, besides providing
this _gazophylacium_ for the connoisseur, is to show how wide the
interest in criticism was.
-----
Footnote 535:
The remark may with more proportion be made of Cœlius himself, a very
worthy Humanist, whom Lilius Giraldus pronounces to be _multifariam
eruditus, parum tamen in pangendis versibus versatus_.
-----
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 and Censures_) of an
answer to the question, “Whether Milton and Waller were not the best
English poets, and which was the better of the two?” from _The Athenian
Mercury_, vol. v., No. 4. [Sidenote: _Periodicals_: The Athenian
Mercury, _&c._] 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_,[536] _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.[537]
-----
Footnote 536:
The _Athenian Mercury_ (1690-97) ran to twenty volumes. The _Oracle_,
from which the late Mr Underhill made his interesting selection
(London, n. d.), was issued in _four_. I have _one_ (London, 1703),
which calls itself an “Entire Collection,” as well as _Athenian Sport_
(London, 1707), and _The British Apollo_, (3rd ed., London, 1718).
Footnote 537:
An exception may perhaps be made in favour of J. [Cornand] de La
Croze’s _Works of the Learned_, which, translated wholly or mainly by
its author from the French, began to appear monthly in August 1691,
and was collected before long in a thin quarto volume. Its contents
are real reviews in almost every point—down to some sharp remarks by
the editor-reviewer on plagiarisms by the _Athenian Mercury_, and
complaints of the absence of indices to lessen the labour of
reviewing. The books reviewed are, as a rule, of no great interest;
but the summaries of their contents are generally good, and the views
advanced are at least sometimes made the subject of passably
argumentative discussion.
-----
INTERCHAPTER V.
In the present Interchapter we come to a sort of Omphalos of the whole
projected 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 difficult 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 century which—or
rather a certain aspect of it—will furnish us with the subject of the
last Book of the present volume, 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 that which, with the permission of the fates,
will, with the Dissidents of the Eighteenth, give the subject of the
next volume, there is no parallel consensus even of a prevailing 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 seventy or eighty—years, and the result would be a Babel. If
any two of the utterances did not betray direct contradiction, it would
probably be because the speakers began at entirely different facets of
the subject.
Whether this literary unanimity—which resembles the ecclesiastical
unanimity, on the ruins of which it grew, not least in being a little
unreal—was a good thing or a bad thing in itself, is one of those larger
questions which we do not purpose to argue out here. The point for us is
that it existed. It was compatible, as in the other case, with a good
deal of minor difference: there might be literary Scotists and Thomists;
there might even (as in the Ancient and Modern case) be a Great Schism
of the most apparently important kind. But this was as a rule mere
jangling; and the more serious of the Moderns generally tried to make
out little more than that their favourites could claim as much, or more,
of the graces which both esteemed, as the other people’s favourites
possessed.
We have seen in the last Interchapter how something like this creed had
been achieved—though not without a good deal of opposition, and hardly,
in any case, with the result of authoritative 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 Castelvetros. 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—if luckily, as, for instance, in England, 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.
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,”[538] or what not.
-----
Footnote 538:
It may be doubted whether there is anything more wonderful in
Shakespeare than the way in which this Polonian speech, at one slight
side-blow, impales sixteenth-seventeenth-century criticism, with the
due pin, on the due piece of cork, for ever.
-----
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. As we
have seen, Ogier, in the last named country, at the very moment of
striking a blow for Romantic drama, admits that the critics are against
him; and we have also seen how they were. In England, Sidney, at the
beginning of the great Elizabethan period, holds out hands to Jonson at
the end. The very Spanish Romantics, when they come to consider the
matter critically, make an unblushing transaction between conscientious
theory and popular practice: and such an Italian iconoclast as Beni is
classical, in the very act and process of belittling the classics.
At the same time, this accepted faith of Criticism, when we come to
examine it, is a very peculiar Catholicity. Uncompromisingly
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 diagnosing. But, by
the time at least when the creed became triumphant, a 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
movements, need not be denied; but this is comparatively irrelevant. We
have traced above, in almost all their principal exponents, 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. A professed satirist could evolve, in his happiest moments,
nothing more comic than the eirenicon of Mambrun,[539] or, rather, than
his clinical examination of the poet in fury, and his observation of the
poet in his right mind.
-----
Footnote 539:
_V. supra_, p. 268.
-----
The survey of the development of this phenomenon, or group of phenomena,
in different countries, requires less minuteness than was needed in the
last Interchapter, because the central stage of the movement is both of
less importance and of less complexity than the beginnings of it: but it
is essential to the scheme of these Interchapters, and to that of the
whole book, that some such survey should be given.
In Italy, as we have seen, the results of the period were almost
insignificant—a fact no doubt connected with, though in no sense
necessarily caused by, the declension of the Italian creative genius
after Tasso. We have, it may be hoped, established, by the slow but
irresistible process of reciting the actual history, the truth that no
constant ratio exists between periods of creation and periods of
criticism—that they may go hand in hand, or that one may follow the
other, or that both may fail to put in any important appearance, as Fate
and metaphysical aid may determine. This, for Italy, was a period of the
last kind, though not one of its very worst examples. The Italians
continued both to play at criticism in their Academies, and to
accumulate solid though second-hand work in such laboratories as those
of Aromatari. They fought out the half-mock battle of the Ancients and
Moderns, as became them, before other nations meddled with it: and they
still maintained, for long, though not for the whole time, that position
of supremacy, as masters in title to Europe, which the great
achievements of the preceding century had given them. But they added
nothing to their claims, and by degrees the supremacy passed from
them.[540]
-----
Footnote 540:
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.
-----
That it passed to France 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 first invented the
term “Gallo-Classic,” which, to judge by 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
influence, 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. Some pains have been taken in the foregoing Book to put
the reader in a position to appreciate the real rise, progress, and
history of French criticism of the Neo-classic[541] type. The survey,
whatever difference may exist as to its justice in matter of opinion,
will not, I think, be found erring in matters of fact: and it will show
that the position usually accorded to Boileau requires some
reconsideration. But Boileau was undoubtedly the greatest man of letters
who, holding these views, devoted himself specially and definitely to
the expression of them; and, for good or for ill, his name is associated
with the movement. I agree with Keats,[542] who here, as in so many
other matters, came right by genius. Those of us who do not possess this
royal key can, at any rate, if we choose to take the trouble, come right
by knowledge.
-----
Footnote 541:
“Neo-classic” itself is not a very “blessed” word; but it has been
long recognised, and the objections to it are mainly formal.
Footnote 542:
In the well-known and early lines on “Sleep and Poetry.”
-----
The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns—though we have spoken hard words
of it—might look like revolt against the tyranny of Despréaux, and 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. As we have partly shown, and as might be
shown much more fully, the Moderns were, as a rule, just as “classical”
in their ideas as the Ancients. They were as incapable of catholic
judgment; 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 anything which
lessens the importance of that gift, and that the man who cannot
conjugate _tupto_ will not hear of any virtue attaching to it.
Most other countries require little notice here. The Germans make
practically no figure; the Dutch confine themselves to classical study
and the popularisation of reviewing; and the Spaniards, with
characteristic indolence, refuse to work out the interesting problem
presented to them by the recalcitrance of their national drama to the
consecrated ideas of the general creed. England is of more importance. I
have tried to show that it is of very much more; but 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—Lilius Giraldus and
Patrizzi between them might have produced one in Italy, but it is of the
highest significance that they did not—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 of 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 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
something 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.”
That, however, there was, at any rate in the earlier part of the time,
much blind, and even a little conscious revolt against classicism,
independent of the Ancient and Modern quarrel, is not to be wholly
denied. I have hinted doubts as to the correctness of regarding the
Euphuist-Metaphysical extravagances in England, Marinism in Italy,
Gongorism in Spain, and the fantastic and “precious” fancies which mark
the reign of Louis XIII. and the Fronde in France, as either deliberate
reactions against classicism, or abortive births and false dawns of
Romance. They are in almost every case direct results of the Romantic or
mediæval side of the earlier Renaissance—last things, not first. But, by
the end of the century, they were almost everywhere got well under;
though in Spain, their greatest stronghold, it was not till the
eighteenth century itself was some way advanced that Luzán administered
the critical _miséricorde_, or, if we must use the language of the
country, played _despeñador_ to them. Any other interpretation of the
phenomena seems to me to distort them and make them unintelligible,
while the procession of the Metaphysical from the Spenserian stage, of
Marinism from Tasso, of Gongorism from the great Spanish age, and of the
French extravagants from the Spaniards and Marino, working not a little
on the Pléiade itself, is natural, historical, and consistent with
logic. But these very facts prepare and lead up to the triumph of
Neo-Classicism.
By dint, however, of these actions and interactions, there was actually
evolved, towards the end of the 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 two totally different things; there is even a
very considerable difference between the taste of Hédelin and the taste
of Bouhours. But in all save the very happiest minds the Taste of this
time, 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.[543] 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.[544] But
this topples over into the most absurd 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 we saw long ago that 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 anything 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 invariably against the highest poetry, and
often against certain kinds not so high.[545]
-----
Footnote 543:
Perhaps there is not a more unhappy gibe in literature (which has many
such) than that in _The Rehearsal_ on Bayes, who is made to say that
“Spirits must not be confined to talk sense.” They certainly must not;
even Addison (_Sp._, 419) admits that “their sense ought to be a
little _discoloured_.” There is much virtue in this “discolour.”
Footnote 544:
It may be said that this was later. But Prior was a man of thirty-six
in 1700.
Footnote 545:
Yet it is not for the twentieth century to throw stones at the
seventeenth, 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.
-----
The result of all this is that, with the exception of Dryden and
somewhat later Fontenelle (see next Book), hardly any critics of the
time achieve, 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
patronesses of the contemporary Almack’s, and dress herself in the
prescribed uniform, and come up for judgment with the 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[546]) 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.[547]
-----
Footnote 546:
See _Spenser Redivivus_. London, 1686-87. The Person of Quality
“delivers” Spenser “in Heroick numbers,” as per sample—
“Then to the lady gallant Arthur said,
All grief repeated is more grievous made.”
This is “what Spenser ought to have been instead of what is to be
found in himself.”
Footnote 547:
Dryden and Fontenelle themselves are of course not quite sinless. The
latter (v. _infra_, p. 505) proposes emendations in the magnificent
couplet which he cites from _Saint-Louis_; and Dryden, let us say,
does not improve Shakespeare and Chaucer. But it was on Shakespeare
and Chaucer as they were, not as he travestied them for popular use,
that Dryden passed the immortal eulogies; and Fontenelle thought that
the couplet even as it stood “might easily _not_ have been found by
distinguished poets,” which is from him equivalent to a blare of
superlatives from our modern critics.
-----
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
on the larger scale; and other things—the fancy of Chapelain himself for
the Romances, the lingering attraction which Gongorism exercises even on
such a man as Bouhours—confirm it. Yet even this was, as has been said,
steadily dying down; and by the end of the century the old Phœnix 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.
It was not in flippancy, but in logical connection with the present
subject, that attention was drawn above[548] to a certain _aporia_ of
Tassoni’s 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 them in purview as well as lineally, he
might have 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 godlike defiance.[549] 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 with the infallibility
of Hédelin, and those of the Epic with the finality of Le Bossu, 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.
-----
Footnote 548:
P. 325.
Footnote 549:
See the whole absurd scheme in the appendix-matter to Dryden’s
Translation of Du Fresnoy (_ed. cit. sup._, xvii. 429).
-----
But the angry gods were not wholly able to maintain their anger; and at
the other end of the century, in that Quarrel of the Ancients and
Moderns which, for all its irritating _ignorationes elenchi_, did
certainly assist in the discussion of general æsthetic problems, we
find, among other glimpses, an advance, though only a partial advance,
on this suggestion of the _Pensieri_. Perrault, who doubtless knew
Tassoni (one of his brothers had translated the _Secchia_), has a
curious passage on the diversity of the forms of feminine beauty. He
had,[550] he says, visited the gallery of a connoisseur who had
collected portraits of the most famous beauties of Europe for a century
past. There were not two of the same type of loveliness; and of the
spectators there were not two who fixed on the same portrait as the most
beautiful. But Perrault, though he has had this glimpse of the true path
opened up to him, does not dare pursue it. He is as convinced as the
rest of them that you can reduce ideas of beauty to a minimum which is
always invariable, though you may add others which vary; and he is
perfectly arbitrary in his admissions and exclusions of these latter. He
hates Gothic architecture; it may be strongly suspected that he would
fall far short of Chapelain in appreciating Romance, for all his fairy
tales. His criticisms of the Ancients belie his theory itself; for he
will not open his eyes to see the beauty of their peculiarity. His
remarks on Homer are pitiable. My always estimable and not seldom
admirable predecessor, Blair, was no doubt sadly “left to himself” when
he selected,[551] as the awful example of a man of bad taste, the person
who said that Homer was no better than “some old tale of chivalry.” But
Perrault, I fear, is a more terrible spectacle when he says that none of
the Three Tragedians will bear comparison with Corneille (and I think I
may claim the merit of not undervaluing Corneille), that nobody but
professed scholars can read Aristophanes, and that Ovid is the inferior
of Benserade. When we read these things—and except in Fontenelle, the
eternal exception, they are to be found in every espouser of the Modern
side, just as the corresponding absurdities are to be found in every
defender of the Ancients—there is nothing to say but “This is all out of
focus. Both of you see men as trees walking.”
-----
Footnote 550:
_Parallèle_, ii. 45; cf. Rigault, p. 187.
Footnote 551:
_V. infra_, p. 463.
-----
A summary of the whole merits and defects of neo-classicism must again
be postponed; though with no further prorogation than to the end of the
next Book and the present volume. As for the special defects of this
special period we have said enough; and we may conclude this
Interchapter with a glance at its special merits. They 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 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—and it
was done, as we shall see, first in Italy, then elsewhere—to write real
literary histories: it became still more easily possible to criticise
new books on a certain 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 development of eccentric
excellence; but it was not eccentric excellence 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 the better poet for it; 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 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 we should not have had good
or great Romantic poetry; we should at best have had (to take England) 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.
BOOK VI
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORTHODOXY
“_Voilà un tableau poétique aussi neuf, et produit
par un enthousiasme aussi vif qu’il soit
possible.... Il étoit bien aisé, même à de grands
poëtes, de ne le pas trouver._”—FONTENELLE.
CHAPTER I.
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 RHETORIC’—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.[552] [Sidenote: _Criticism at
Dryden’s death._] In general letters it is succeeded—not at all
immediately—by the great school of Queen Anne men. In criticism[553] one
of the greatest of these, a special pupil of Dryden, takes up the
running at this interval, and others a little later; but the succession
is steadily maintained. Dennis, an unhappily 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 extraordinarily assorted persons as Afra Behn, Bysshe
himself, and William Blake.[554]
-----
Footnote 552:
An interesting monograph on our subject, before and after 1700, is
Herr Paul Hamelius’s _Die Kritik in der Engl. Literatur des 17 und 18
Jahrhunderts_ (Leipsic, 1897). I was able, as I always prefer to do,
to postpone the reading of this till I had finished the English part
of this volume, and I do not think I owe Herr Hamelius much. I am all
the more glad to find that we agree on the Romantic element in Dryden
(though not as to that in Dennis), and as to reducing the importance
of French influence in England.
Footnote 553:
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 composition. But it
connects itself not obscurely with the Collier quarrel.
Footnote 554:
See Mr Swinburne’s _William Blake_, p. 130 note, for the _sortes
Bysshianæ_ of Blake and his wife.
-----
Edward Bysshe’s _Art of English Poetry_[555] puts the eighteenth-century
theory of this art with a rigour and completeness which can only be
attributed either to something like genius, or to a wonderful and
complete absence of it. [Sidenote: _Bysshe’s_ Art of English Poetry.]
His _Rules for Making English Verse_ are the first part of the book in
order, but much the least in bulk. Then follow, first a collection of
“the most natural and sublime thoughts of the best English poets,” or,
in other words, an anthology, reasoned under headings, from poets of the
seventeenth 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.[556] The Dictionary is preceded by a few prefatory
remarks, including one important historically, “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.
-----
Footnote 555:
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 _Institution_ signed J. D., _The English Parnassus_. This
contains a double gradus of epithets and passages (the authors named
only in a general list), 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 if rather general and
scrappy.
Footnote 556:
Addison, Atterbury, Beaumont and Fletcher, Afra Behn, Blackmore, Tom
Brown, Buckingham, Cleveland, Congreve, 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.
-----
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 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._, anapæstic 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
splitting 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 disappear, 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 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 poetical
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 relinquished, 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 intellect affected to despise him for this, and
Mr Charles Gildon in his _Complete Art of Poetry_,[557] published a few
years later, is very high and mighty with Bysshe. [Sidenote: _Gildon._]
As for himself he does not think that Poetry consists even in
“colouring,” 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,[558] 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 ingeniously, 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
bespattered him [Dryden],” &c. The book is in the main bibliographic and
biographic rather than critical.
-----
Footnote 557:
London, 1718.
Footnote 558:
The _Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets_, &c., _First
begun by Mr Langbain, improved and continued down to this time by a
Careful Hand_ (London, printed for Tho. Leigh, &c. No date in my copy,
but the _Dict. Nat. Biog._ gives 1699).
-----
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 of Leonard Welsted, who in 1712 published a
translation of Longinus, “with some remarks on the English Poets.”
[Sidenote: _Welsted._] Welsted’s translation, whether made directly from
the Greek or not,[559] 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 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.
-----
Footnote 559:
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—_v. inf._, p. 554 note.)
-----
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 coming to 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 applied to himself the words of Ulysses, “I am become a name.”
[Sidenote: _Dennis._] 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 incompetent
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 Dennis_[560] mainly consist 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.
-----
Footnote 560:
2 vols., London, 1718.
-----
That view, when obtained, may perhaps differ not a little from those
which have, in a certain general way, succeeded each 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.[561]
-----
Footnote 561:
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 appendix is purely ethical:
it is all on “the previous question.”
-----
That this more charitable view is not entirely without foundation may be
at once admitted. [Sidenote: _On Rymer._] As compared with Rymer, in
whose company he too often finds himself in modern 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
Impartial Critic_ of 1693, is 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 perfectly different from those of
the English.[562] 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.[563]
-----
Footnote 562:
Had Dryden let his Cambridge admirer see the _Heads_? (_v. supra_, pp.
373, 397 notes.)
Footnote 563:
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.”
-----
Dennis’s answer to Collier is a little later,[564] 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, either 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”[565] 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.
-----
Footnote 564:
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, together with _The Advancement and Reformation of
Modern Poetry_ and the tragedy of _Rinaldo and Armida_, all separately
titled, but continuously paged.
Footnote 565:
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 pathetic and
numerous speech.”
-----
The fact is that, though he has, as has been admitted, a certain
advantage over Rymer, Lord Derby’s observation that “He never knew
whether it was John or Thomas who answered the bell” will too often
apply here. [Sidenote: _On Shakespeare._] Rymer himself 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 unconscious 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 invulnerable 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_[566]—a most illaudable 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_[567] 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 nobody 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 may so
say) wrong-mindedness appear in a very different work, the _Remarks on
the Rape of the Lock_.[568] I do not refer to Dennis’s mere scurrilities
about “AP—E” and the like. [Sidenote: _On “Machines.”_] But part of the
piece is quite serious criticism. Few of 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
be—
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.
-----
Footnote 566:
London, 1702.
Footnote 567:
London, 1712.
Footnote 568:
London, 1728.
-----
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 Right. [Sidenote: _His
general theory of Poetry._] In his three chief books of abstract
criticism[569] he endeavours to elaborate, with Longinus in part for
code, and with Milton for example, a noble, indeed, and creditable, but
utterly arbitrary and hopelessly 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 sort of mediate divinity to Dennis: as we have
seen, he upbraided 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.
-----
Footnote 569:
_The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry_, 1701; _A Large Account of
the Taste in Poetry_, next year; and _Grounds of Criticism in Poetry_,
1704.
-----
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. Moreover, 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 intolerance 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
prosaism, yet destitute of eighteenth-century neatness and
concinnity—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 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 assurance 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 creditable to both. [Sidenote:
_Addison._] 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,[570] 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.[571]
-----
Footnote 570:
Mr W. Basil Worsfold in his _Principles of Criticism_ (London, 1897).
I hope that nothing which, in a politely controversial tone, I may
have to say here, will be taken as disparagement of a very interesting
and valuable essay.
Footnote 571:
The most convenient edition of Addison’s _Works_ is that of Bohn, with
Hurd’s editorial matter and a good deal more (London, 6 vols., 1862).
-----
His _début_ as such was not fortunate. He was, it is true, only
three-and-twenty when at “dearest Harry’s” request (that is to say Mr
Harry Sacheverell’s) he undertook an _Account of the greatest English
Poets_.[572] [Sidenote: _The_ Account of the Best known English Poets.]
In 1694 nobody, except Dryden, could be expected to write very good
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.[573] So, too,
the consummate art of Spenser, his exquisite versification, 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.[574] 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,”
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.”
-----
Footnote 572:
It is fair to say that he never published this, and that, as Pope told
Spence, he used himself to call it “a poor thing,” and admitted that
he spoke of some of the poets only “on hearsay.” Now when Pope speaks
to Addison’s credit it is not as “what the soldier said.” It _is_
evidence, and of the strongest.
Footnote 573:
“In vain he jests in his unpolished strain,
And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.”
Footnote 574:
“His moral lay so bare that it lost the effect” (_Ess. on Po._, iii.
420, _ed. cit. sup._) Indeed it has been suggested that Addison’s debt
to Temple here is not confined to this.
-----
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 unhappily, 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[575] about the English literature
not of his own day, and judged very badly of what he pretended to know.
-----
Footnote 575:
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.
-----
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 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. [Sidenote: _The_
Spectator _criticisms_.] The _Tatler_ Essays, such as the rather well
known papers on Tom Folio and Ned Softly, those in the _Guardian_, the
good-natured puff of Tom D’Urfey, &c., are not so much serious and
deliberate literary criticisms, as applications, 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 criticism 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 description,[576] 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 knowledge than any creative art—and, above all, it is
necessary to make so many mistakes in it before one comes right, that,
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.
-----
Footnote 576:
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 a critic to a tea-taster, and it ends with this
retrospect, and the promise of the “Imagination” Essays (_v. ed.
cit._, iii. 393).
-----
In Group One[577] Addison is still animated by the slightly desultory
spirit of moral satire, which has been referred to above; and, though
fifteen or sixteen years have 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. [Sidenote: _On True and
False Wit._] 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 rather overloaded it with somewhat
artificial allegory, the ethical temper rather overpowers 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,
anagrams, 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 playfulness which is not the worst
affection of the human heart.
-----
Footnote 577:
_Sp._ 58-63.
-----
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 numbers.[578] [Sidenote: _On Tragedy._]
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, 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.
-----
Footnote 578:
_Sp._ 39, 40, 42, 44, 45.
-----
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 application of the “Why?” the “_Après?_” and a harsh judge
might, in some places, say that it is not more arbitrary than ignorant.
The Second Group,[579] or Miltonic batch, with which may be taken its
“moon,” the partly playful but more largely serious _examen_ of _Chevy
Chase_, is much the best known, and has been generally ranked as the
most important exhibition of Addison’s critical powers. [Sidenote: _On
Milton._] 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.
-----
Footnote 579:
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 _Spectator_ (8 vols.,
London, 1897).
-----
These things posed, he proceeds to examine _Chevy Chase_ at some,
_Paradise Lost_ at great, length by their aid; and discovers 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 admiration
of Milton, it stamped that admiration with a comfortable seal of
official orthodoxy. But it is actually more antiquated 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.[580] [Sidenote: _The “Pleasures
of the Imagination.”_] Sight is the “sense which furnishes the
imagination with its ideas; so that by the ‘Pleasures of the
Imagination’ or Fancy, which I shall use promiscuously, I here mean such
as arise from visible objects, either when 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 pleasantness 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.
-----
Footnote 580:
_Sp._ 411, ed. cit., iii. 394.
-----
Addison then goes on to consider the sources of entertainment 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
Architecture, 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 poet may avail himself 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, because
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 Nature. Let oranges
grow wild, and roses, woodbines, and jessamines flower at the same time.
As for “the fairy way of writing”[581]—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 imagination. 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.
-----
Footnote 581:
This phrase is originally Dryden’s (dedication to _King Arthur_, viii.
136, ed. cit.), who, however, has “kind” for “way”.
-----
It is upon these papers mainly that Mr Worsfold[582] 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,[583] stick, in our humdrum way, to the facts.
-----
Footnote 582:
_Op. cit._, pp. 93-107, and more largely pp. 55-93.
Footnote 583:
Students of the Stagirite may be almost equally surprised to find
Aristotle regarded as mainly, if not wholly, a critic of Form as
opposed to Thought.
-----
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 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 exercises 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 something
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,[584] though he works out his
doctrine at much greater length, and with assistance from Descartes and
Locke.
-----
Footnote 584:
See vol. i. p. 165 _sq._
-----
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 Addisonian Imaginations are
identical—much more that Addison’s Imagination is the supreme faculty,
creative, transcending Fancy,[585] 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[586] partly glimpsed. Addison tells us—tells
us over and over again—that _all_ the ideas and pleasures of the
imagination 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 Imagination 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,
irremovable, 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.
-----
Footnote 585:
It would be unfair to lay too much stress on his identification of
Imagination and Fancy; but there is something tell-tale in it.
Footnote 586:
See vol. i. p. 118 _sq._
-----
But is he therefore to be ignored, or treated lightly, because of this
strange overvaluation of him? Certainly not. [Sidenote: _His general
critical value._]Though by no means a very great critic, he is a useful,
an 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 time past merely a
curiosity, is again full of good sense, displays (if not altogether
according to knowledge) a real liking for real poetic goodness, and had
an inestimable effect in keeping 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 interesting, 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 correctness, mere decency, mere
stop-watch.
Between Addison and Pope, Steele, Atterbury, and Swift call for notice.
[Sidenote: _Steele._] Steele has little for us.[587] There are few
things more curious than the almost entire abstinence from 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.
-----
Footnote 587:
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
Romanticism.” Steele’s temperament was undoubtedly Romantic, and both
in essays and plays he displayed it; but he was not really critical.
-----
Atterbury gives rather more. He was himself a man of great intellectual
power, a scholar, an eloquent and delicate writer, and possessed
independent taste enough to 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. [Sidenote: _Atterbury._] But his
observations on Waller[588] are the very quintessence of pseudodoxy, as
to that respectable 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
introduced a _different_ kind of music, he insisted that Waller
substituted 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.[589]
-----
Footnote 588:
In his Preface to the Second Part of the _Poems_ (1690).
Footnote 589:
Of course he might, to some extent, have sheltered himself under
Dryden’s own authority for all this.
-----
The critical work of Swift[590] is much more important, and though a
good deal of it is inextricably mixed up with the work of Pope and of
Arbuthnot, the lion’s claw is generally perceptible enough. [Sidenote:
_Swift._] The famous _Tatler_ of September 28, 1710, on the conceptions
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.
-----
Footnote 590:
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.
Of their whole works there is, in the former case, no real standard,
Scott’s being much inferior to his _Dryden_; but in the latter that of
the late Mr Elwin and Mr Courthope is not likely soon to be
superseded.
-----
_The Battle of the Books_ is one of the most eccentric documents in the
whole History of our subject. [Sidenote: The Battle of the Books.]
Directly, and on its face, it may be said to be of the first critical
importance; because it shows how very little subject, intention,
accuracy to 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,
never need 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 preposterousness of
selecting Temple as their champion. The details 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.[591] 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 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.
-----
Footnote 591:
_V. inf._, p. 553 note.
-----
Though the _Tale of the Tub_ is less ostensibly bookish, it shows even
greater purely critical power: for the power of the _Battle_ is mainly
that of a consummate craftsman, who can accomplish by sheer
craftsmanship whatsoever his hand findeth to do. [Sidenote: _The_ Tale
of a Tub.]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 proclaimed, and is most vigorously waged with
or without proclamation. 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 momentary 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.