A shrewd judge could hardly fail to perceive, from these famous

twin-books, that a new genius of thoroughly critical character had

arisen: but such a judge might well have doubted how far its exercise

could be anything but negative. [Sidenote: _Minor works._] His doubts,

as we have already hinted, were to be justified. Indirectly, indeed, not

merely in the _Tatler_ paper above referred to and elsewhere, but by

that almost uncanny influence which he seems to have exerted in so many

ways on men only less than himself, Swift had very much to do with the

rescuing of Style, by the hands of Addison and the rest, from the

vulgarisation which it was undergoing at the close of the seventeenth

century, not merely in common writers, not merely in the hands of an

eccentric like L’Estrange, but in those of scholars like Collier and

Bentley. But even this was a task of destruction rather than of positive

construction, and he was always most at home in such tasks. The

_Meditation on a Broomstick_ and the _Tritical Essay_, though every good

reviewer should know them by heart, and will have but too many

opportunities of using his knowledge, are delivered with the backward,

not the forward, speech of the critic; the _Proposal for correcting the

English Tongue_, which falls in with the _Tatler_ paper, aims at a sort

of stationary state of language and literature alike, at proscriptions

and ostracisings; the _Letter to a Young Clergyman_ and the _Essay on

Modern Education_, though both touch on literature, are exceedingly

general in their precepts; and though all persons with a true English

appreciation of shameless puns and utter nonsense must delight in _The

Antiquity of the English Tongue_, it cannot be called serious criticism.

There is more in the _Advice to a Young Poet_: but even here Swift is

rather “running humours” on his subject than discussing it in the grave

and chaste manner.

We shall therefore hardly be wrong if, after excepting the literary

directions of the universal satiric _douche_ in the _Tale of a Tub_, and

the useful but somewhat rudimentary warnings of the _Tatler_ paper, we

see the most characteristic critical work of Swift in _Martinus

Scriblerus_ and the _Peri Bathous_, especially in the latter, which,

though it be principally attributed to Arbuthnot and Pope, is as surely

Swiftian in suggestion as if the Dean had written and published it

alone. Often as it has been imitated, and largely as its methods have

been drawn upon, it has never been surpassed as an Art of General and

Particular “Slating”: and the sections on the Figures, with the immortal

receipt for making an epic poem (the full beauty of which is lost on

those who do not know how appallingly close it is to the approved

prescriptions of the best neo-classic critics), cannot be too highly

praised. But, once more, the critic is here at hangman’s work only: he

allows himself neither to admire nor to love.

These principles, put in various ways by writers of more or less genius

for half a century, found what seemed to more than two generations

(always with a few dissidents) something like consummate expression in

certain well-known utterances of Pope. [Sidenote: _Pope._] As expression

these utterances may still receive a very high degree of admiration: as

anything else it is difficult to believe that any turn of fashion,

unless it brings with it oblivion for large districts of noble

literature, can restore them to much authority. Pope, though better read

than he seems in his poems, was by no means a learned man; and it is now

pretty generally admitted that his intellect was acute rather than

powerful. The obstinate superficiality—the reduction of everything, even

the most recondite problems of philosophy, even the most far-ranging

questions of erudition, to a jury of “common-sense” persons, decorated

with a little of the fashion of the town—which had set in, found in him

an exponent as competent to give it exquisite expression as he was

indisposed, and probably incompetent, to deepen or extend its scope. He

attained early to nearly his full powers, and it does not much matter

whether the _Essay on Criticism_ was written at the age of twenty or at

that of twenty-two. He could have improved it a little in form, but

would hardly have altered it at all in matter, if he had written it

thirty years later. The _Imitation of the Epistle of Horace to

Augustus_, which was actually written about that time, is, though

superior as verse, almost inferior as criticism, and more “out” in fact.

The two together give a sufficient view of Pope as he wished to be taken

critically. [Sidenote: _The_ Letters.] But to be perfectly fair we must

add the critical utterances in his _Letters_,[592] his Preface to

Shakespeare, and (with caution of course) the remarks attributed to him

by Spence. The Preface has received much praise; and has deserved some

even from those who follow not Pope generally. It would be unfair to

blame him for adopting the mixed “beauty and fault” system which had the

patronage of great names in antiquity, and found hardly even questioners

in his own time. And it is something that he recognises Shakespeare’s

power over the passions, the individuality of his characters, his

intuitive knowledge of the world and of nature. He is moderate and

sensible on the relations of Shakespeare and Jonson; he has practically

said all that is to be said, in an endless and tiresome controversy, by

writing, [Sidenote: _The Shakespeare Preface._] “To judge Shakespeare by

Aristotle’s rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who

acted under those of another.” And for such utterances we may excuse, or

at least pass over with little or no comment, the remarks that

Shakespeare kept bad company, that he wrote to please the populace, that

he resembles “an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture [so far,

so good], where many of the details are childish, ill-placed, and

unequal to its grandeur.” The littleness of this patchy, yea-nay

criticism beside the great and everlasting appreciation of his master

Dryden speaks for itself; it is only fair to remember that the very

existence of Dryden’s for once really marmoreal inscription almost

inevitably belittled and hampered Pope. He was obliged to be different;

and internal as well as external influences made it certain that if he

were different he would be less.

-----

Footnote 592:

The most important of these is the sentence on Crashaw (with whom Pope

has some points of sympathy), that he is wanting in “design, form,

fable, which is the soul of poetry,” and “exactness or consent of

parts, which is the body,” while he grants him “pretty conceptions,

fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast

of verse, which are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments” of

it. See my friend Mr Courthope (in his _Life_, ed. cit. of the

_Works_, v. 63), with whom, for once, I am in irreconcilable

disagreement.

-----

The _Popiana_ of Spence[593] add more to our idea of Pope’s critical

faculty, or at least of its exercises; in fact, it is possible to take a

much better estimate of Pope’s “literature” from the _Anecdotes_ than

from the _Works_. [Sidenote: _Spence’s_ Anecdotes.] Although the

Boswellian spirit was, fortunately enough for posterity, very strong in

the eighteenth century, there was no particular reason why Spence should

toady Pope—especially as he published nothing to obtain pence or

popularity from the toadying. That rather remarkable collection, or

re-collection, of Italian-Latin poetry of the Renaissance,[594] of which

not much notice has been taken by Pope’s biographers, would, of itself,

show critical interest in a part, and no unnoteworthy part, of

literature: and a few of the Spencean salvages bear directly upon this.

He need not have been ashamed of his special liking for Politian’s

_Ambra_: and he was right in thinking Bembo “stiff and unpoetical,”

though hardly in joining Sadolet with him in this condemnation. We know

perfectly well why he did not like Rabelais, for which Swift very

properly scolded him: indeed, he tells us himself, twice over, that

“there were so many things” in Master Francis, “in which he could not

see any manner of meaning driven at,” that he could not read him with

any patience. This is really more tale-telling than the constantly

quoted passage about Walsh and correctness. For, after all, everybody

aspires to be correct: only everybody has his own notions of what is

correctness. It is not everybody—and, as we see, it was not the great Mr

Pope—who could, or can, appreciate nonsense, and see how much more

sensible than sense the best of it is. It would skill but little to go

through his isolated judgments: but there are one or two which are

eloquent.

-----

Footnote 593:

Spence (whose _Anecdotes_ were printed partly by Malone, and

completely by Singer in 1820, reprinted from the latter edition in

1858, and re-selected by Mr Underhill (London, n. d.) in the last

decade of the nineteenth century) has sometimes received praise as a

critic himself. His _Polymetis_ usefully brought together classical

art and letters, and the _Anecdotes_ themselves are not without taste.

But his elaborate criticism of Pope’s _Odyssey_, published in 1726, is

of little value, neither praising nor blaming its subject for the

right things, and characterised as a whole by a pottering and peddling

kind of censorship.

Footnote 594:

_Selecta Poemata Italorum qui Latine Scripserunt. Cura cujusdam

Anonymi anno 1684 congesta, iterum in lucem data, una cum aliorum

Italorum operibus. Acccurante A. Pope._ 2 vols., London, 1740. The

title-page contains absolutely all the ostensible editorial matter,

and, as I have not got hold of the work of the Anonymus, I do not know

how much Pope added. But his collection, as I can testify from some

little knowledge of the subject, is good.

-----

Still, it is to the _Essay_ and the _Epistle_ that we must turn for his

deliberate theory of criticism, announced in youth, indorsed and

emphasised in age. [Sidenote: _The_ Essay on Criticism.] And we meet at

once with a difficulty. The possessor of such a theory ought, at least,

to have something like a connected knowledge, at least a connected view,

of literature as a whole, and to be able to square the two. All Pope

seems to have done is to take the _Arts_ of Horace, Vida, and Boileau,

to adopt as many of their principles as he understood, and as would go

into his sharp antithetic couplet, to drag their historical

illustrations head and shoulders into his scheme without caring for the

facts, and to fill in and embroider with criticisms, observations, and

precepts, sometimes very shrewd, almost always perfectly expressed, but

far too often arbitrary, conventional, and limited. He is most

unfortunate of all in the historical part, where Boileau had been

sufficiently unfortunate before him. The Frenchman’s observations on

Villon and Ronsard had been ignorant enough, and forced enough: but Pope

managed to go a little beyond them in the _Essay_, and a great distance

further still in the _Epistle_. The history of the famous passage,

“We conquered France, but felt our captive’s charms,”[595]

is like nothing on earth but the history-poetry of the despised monkish

ages, in which Alexander has twelve peers, and Arthur, early in the

sixth century, overruns Europe with a British force, and fights with a

Roman Emperor named Lucius. And the sketch of European literature in the

_Essay_, if it contains no single statement so glaringly absurd, is as

much a “tissue of gaps” as the Irishman’s coat.

-----

Footnote 595:

_Ep. to Aug._, l. 263.

-----

Attempts have been made (including some by persons deserving all

respect, and thoroughly acquainted with the subject) to give Pope a high

place, on the score of his charges to “follow nature.” Unfortunately

this is mere translation of Boileau, of Vida, and of Horace, in the

first place: and, still more unfortunately, the poet’s own arguments on

his doctrine show that what _he_ meant by “following nature,” and what

_we_ mean by it, are two quite different things. He, usually at least,

means “stick to the usual, the ordinary, the commonplace.” Just so the

legendary King of Siam, had he written an _Art of Poetry_, would have

said “Follow nature, and do not talk about such unnatural things as ice

and snow.”

Regarded merely as a manual of the art of Pope’s own poetry, without

prejudice to any other, and as a satire on the faults of other kinds,

without prejudice to the weaknesses of his own, the _Essay_ is not

merely an interesting document, but a really valuable one. Its cautions

against desertion of nature in the directions of excess, of the unduly

fantastic, are sound to this day: and its eulogies of ancient writers,

though perhaps neither based on very extensive and accurate first-hand

knowledge, nor specially appropriate to the matter in hand, contain much

that is just in itself. One of the weakest parts, as might have been

expected, is the treatment of rules, licences, and faults. The

poet-critic practically confesses the otiosity of the whole system by

admitting that a lucky licence is a rule, and that it is possible, as

one of his own most famous and happiest lines says,

“To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.”

And when he paraphrases Quintilian to the effect that you must criticise

“With the same spirit that the author writ,”

and judge the whole, not the parts, he again goes perilously near to

jettison his whole system.

In the same way consistency is the last thing that can be claimed for

his chapters, as they may be called, on conceit, on language, “numbers”

(the most famous and the most ingenious passage of the _Essay_),

extremes, “turns,” the Ancient and Modern quarrel, &c. The passage on

Critics is among the best—for here sheer good sense (even in the

temporary, much more in the universal, meaning) tells—and the historical

sketch of them, though not too accurate, is vigorous.

The much later _Epistle_ is far more desultory, and inevitably tinged by

those personal feelings which many years of literary squabble had helped

ill-health and natural disposition to arouse in Pope. [Sidenote: _The_

Epistle to Augustus.] But its general critical attitude is not

different. He is angry with the revival of old literature which Watson

and Allan Ramsay in Scotland, Oldys and others in England, were

beginning, hints sneers even at Milton and the “weeds on Avon’s bank,”

is at least as hackneyed as he is neat in his individual criticisms on

poets nearer his own day, and defends poetry and literature generally in

a patronising and half-apologetic strain. In fact, what he has really at

heart is to be politely rude to George II.; not to give any critical

account of English literature.

But the _Essay on Criticism_ is too important a thing not to require a

little more notice here. [Sidenote: _Remarks on Pope as a critic_,] It

is extremely desultory; but so is the _Epistola ad Pisones_, and it is

by no means certain that Pope was not wise in falling back upon the

Roman method, instead of emulating the appearance of system in the _Art

Poétique_. This latter emphasises faults; Pope’s _causerie_ veils

promiscuousness in the elegant chit-chat of conversation. A bad critic

is a more dangerous person than a bad poet; and true taste is as

uncommon as true genius. Bad education is responsible for bad taste, and

we must be very careful about our own. Nature is the guide; the “rules”

are but methodised nature. We derive them, however, not from nature but

from the ancient poets, whom we must study. Even in licences we must

follow them. Bad critics are made by various causes, from ignorance and

party spirit to personal animus. A good critic is candid, modest,

well-bred, and sincere. The sort of history of criticism which concludes

the piece makes it specially surprising that Johnson should have been so

much kinder to Pope’s learning than he was to Dryden’s; but the author

of the actual _Essay on Criticism_, and the author of the unhappily but

projected _History_ of it, were too thoroughly in agreement about

poetry, and even about criticism itself, to make the latter quite an

impartial judge of the former.

When we pass from generals to particulars Pope’s cleverness at least

appears more than ever. The sharply separated, neatly flying, and neatly

ringing couplets deliver “one, two” in the most fascinating

cut-and-thrust style, not without a brilliant parry now and then to

presumed (and never very formidable) objections. The man’s perfect skill

in the execution of his own special style of poetry raises, and in this

case not delusively, the expectation that he will know his theory as

well as his practice. The “good sense,” the “reason,” are really and not

merely nominally present. A great deal of what is said is quite

undoubtedly true and very useful, not merely for reproof and correction

in point of critical and poetical sin, but actually for instruction in

critical and poetical righteousness.

But on further examination there is too often something wanting; nay,

there is too often no real root of the matter present. The preliminary

flourishes are well enough. And certainly no school will quarrel—though

each school may take the privilege of understanding the words in its own

way—with the doctrine “Follow Nature.” But

“One science only will one genius fit”

is notoriously false to nature, and if intended as a hint to the critic,

can only result in too common mistakes and injustices. So, too, when we

pass from the glowing eulogy of Nature, and of her union with Art, to

the Rules, there is a most deplorable gap. Those Rules, “discovered not

devised,” are “nature methodised.” Very good. This means, if it means

anything, a very true thing—that the Rules are extracted from observed

works of genius. But how, a most fervent admirer of the Greeks may ask,

did it happen that the Greeks discovered _all_ these rules? How,

especially, did it happen that they did so, when some kinds of

literature itself were notoriously neither discovered nor devised? And

when we get a little further, and are bidden to

“Know well each Ancient’s proper character,”

we may, or rather must, reply, “It is most necessary; but you will

neglect the Moderns at your peril.”

In short, here as elsewhere, Pope’s dazzling elocution, winged with a

distinct if narrow conception of his general purpose, flies right enough

in the inane, but makes painfully little progress when it lights on the

prosaic ground. The picture of “young Maro,” with a sort of ciphering

book before him, “totting up” Homer, Nature, and the Stagirite, and

finding them all exactly equivalent, is really far more ludicrous than

those flights of metaphysical fancy at which critics of Pope’s school

delight to gird; while the very climax of another kind of absurdity is

reached by the accordance to the Ancients, not merely of the prerogative

of laying down the rule always to be followed, but of the privilege of

making the not-to-be-imitated exception. So again, fine as is the Alps

passage, the famous doctrine of a “little learning” is an ingenious

fallacy. It is not the little learning acquired, but the vast amount of

ignorance left, that is dangerous. The admirable couplet,

“True Wit is nature to advantage drest;

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,”

though in itself the best thing in the whole poem, is unluckily placed,

because this sensation of familiarity beneath novelty is constantly

given by those very “conceits” which Pope is denouncing. On “Language”

and “Numbers” he is too notoriously speaking to a particular brief. And

as for his more general cautions throughout, they are excellent sense

for the most part, but have very little more to do with criticism than

with any other function of life. A banker or a fishmonger, an architect,

artist, or plain man, will no doubt be the better for avoiding extremes,

partisanship, singularity, fashion, mere jealousy (personal or other),

ignorance, pedantry, vice. And if he turns critic he will find these

avoidances still useful to him, but not more specially useful than in

his former profession.

What then was the critical attitude which was expressed so brilliantly,

and which gave Pope a prerogative influence over all the orthodox

criticism of his own century in England and even elsewhere? [Sidenote:

_and the critical attitude of his group._] It can be sketched very

fairly as being a sort of compromise between a supposed following of the

ancients, and a real application, to literature in general and to poetry

in particular, of the general taste and cast of thought of the time. The

following of the Ancients—it has been often pointed out already—was, as

the Articles of the Church of England have it, a “corrupt following”:

those who said Aristotle meant now nobody more ancient than Boileau, now

no one more ancient than Vida, scarcely ever any one more ancient than

Horace. The classics as a whole were very little studied, at least by

those who busied themselves most with modern literature; and it had

entered into the heads of few that, after all, the standards of one

literature might, or rather must, require very considerable alteration

before they could apply to another.[596] But Greek and Roman literature

presented a body of poetry and of most other kinds, considerable,

admittedly excellent, and mostly composed under the influence of

distinct and identical critical principles. Very few men had a complete

knowledge of even a single modern literature; hardly a man in France

knew Old French as a whole, hardly a man in England, except mere

antiquaries, knew Old English even as a part. There was probably not a

man in Europe till Gray (and Gray was still young at Pope’s death) who

had any wide reading at once in classical literature and in the mediæval

and modern literatures of different countries. Accordingly the

principles of ancient criticism, not even in their purity fully adequate

to modern works, and usually presented, not in their purity but in

garbled and bastardised form, were all that they had to stand by.

-----

Footnote 596:

Pope, _v. supra_, p. 454, actually admitted this as regards Aristotle

and Shakespeare; yet the admission practically revokes most of the

_Essay_.

-----

This classical, or pseudo-classical, doctrine was further affected, in

the case of literature generally, by the _ethos_ of the time, and, in

the case of poetry, by the curious delusion as to hard and fast syllabic

prosody which has been noticed in connection with Bysshe. Classicism, in

any pure sense, was certainly not to blame for this, for everybody with

the slightest tinge of education knew that the chief Latin metre

admitted the substitution of trisyllabic for dissyllabic feet in every

place but one, and most knew that this substitution was even more widely

permitted by Greek in a standard metre, approaching the English still

nearer. But it had, as we have seen, been a gradually growing delusion,

for a hundred and fifty years, in almost every kind of non-dramatic

poetry.

As for the general tendency, the lines of that are clear—though the

arbitrary extension and stiffening of them remain a little

incomprehensible. Nature was to be the test; but an artificialised

Nature, arranged according to the fashion of a town-haunting society—a

Nature which submitted herself to a system of convention and

generalisation. In so far as there was any real general principle it was

that you were to be like everybody else—that singularity, except in

doing the usual thing best, was to be carefully avoided. Pope, being a

man of genius, could not help transcending this general conception

constantly by his execution, not seldom by his thought, and sometimes in

his critical precepts. But it remains the conception of his time and of

himself.

The writers whom we have been discussing, since we parted with Dennis,

have all been considerable men of letters, who in more or less degree

busied themselves with criticism. [Sidenote: _Philosophical and

Professional Critics._] We must now pass to those who, without exactly

deserving the former description, undertook the subject either, as part

of those “philosophical” inquiries which, however loosely understood,

were so eagerly and usefully pursued by the eighteenth century, or as

direct matter of professional duty. The first division supplies Lord

Kames in Scotland and “Hermes” Harris in England. Whether we are right

in reserving Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith, &c., from it, so as to deal

with them from the Æsthetic side in the next volume, may be matter of

opinion.

To the second belong Trapp, Blair, and Campbell. [Sidenote: _Trapp._]

Trapp need not detain us very long; but as first occupant of the first

literary chair in England, and so the author of a volume of

_Prælections_ respectable in themselves, and starting a line of similar

work which, to the present day, has contributed admirable critical

documents, he cannot be omitted. He was the author of one of the

wittiest epigrams[597] on record, but he did not allow himself much

sparkle in his lectures.[598] Perhaps, indeed, he was right not to do

so.

-----

Footnote 597:

Individual preference, in the case of the famous pair of epigrams on

the books and the troop of horse sent by George I. to Cambridge and to

Oxford respectively, may be biassed by academical and by political

partisanship. But while it is matter of opinion whether “Tories own no

argument but force,” and whether, in certain circumstances, a

University may not justifiably “want loyalty,” no one can ever

maintain that it is not disgraceful to a university to “want

learning.” This it is which gives the superior wing and sting to

Trapp’s javelin.

Footnote 598:

_Prælectiones Poeticæ_, London, 3rd ed., 1736. The first of the first

batch was printed as early as 1711, and an English translation (not by

the author) was published in 1742. I hope to give in the next volume,

as a prelude to notice of Mr Arnold’s work in the Oxford Chair, a

survey of all the more noteworthy of his predecessors.

-----

Hugh Blair, half a century later than Trapp, in 1759, started, like him,

the teaching of modern literature in his own country. [Sidenote:

_Blair._] He had the advantage, as far as securing a popular audience

goes, of lecturing in English, and he was undoubtedly a man of talent.

The _Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres_,[599] which were delivered

with great _éclat_ for nearly a quarter of a century from the Chair of

their subject, are very far, indeed, from being devoid of merit. They

provide a very solid, if a somewhat mannered and artificial instruction,

both by precept and example, in what may be called the “full-dress plain

style” which was popular in the eighteenth century. They are as original

as could be expected. The critical examination of Addison’s style, if

somewhat meticulous, is mostly sound, and has, like Johnson’s criticisms

of Dryden and Pope, the advantage of thorough sympathy, of freedom from

the drawback—so common in such examinations—that author and critic are

standing on different platforms, looking in different directions,

speaking, one may almost say, in mutually incomprehensible tongues. The

survey of Belles Lettres is, on its own scheme, ingenious and correct:

there are everywhere evidences of love of Literature (as the lover

understands her), of good education and reading, of sound sense. Blair

is to be very particularly commended for accepting to the full the

important truth that “Rhetoric” in modern times really means

“Criticism”; and for doing all he can to destroy the notion, authorised

too far by ancient critics, and encouraged by those of the Renaissance,

that Tropes and Figures are not possibly useful classifications and

names, but fill a real arsenal of weapons, a real cabinet of reagents,

by the employment of which the practitioner can refute, or convince, or

delight, as the case may be.

-----

Footnote 599:

The first ed. is that of Edinburgh, 1783: mine is that of London,

1823.

-----

But with this, and with the further praise due to judicious borrowings

from the ancients, the encomium must cease. [Sidenote: _The_ Lectures

on Rhetoric.] In Blair’s general critical view of literature the

eighteenth-century blinkers are drawn as close as possible. From no

writer, even in French, can more “awful examples” be extracted, not

merely of perverse critical assumption, but of positive historical

ignorance. Quite early in the second Lecture, and after some remarks

(a little arbitrary, but not valueless) on delicacy and correctness in

taste, we find, within a short distance of each other, the statements

that “in the reign of Charles II. such writers as _Suckling and

Etheridge_ were held in esteem for dramatic composition,” and later,

“If a man shall assert that Homer has no beauties whatever, that he

holds him to be a dull and spiritless writer, and that he _would as

soon peruse any legend of old knight-errantry_ as the _Iliad_, then I

exclaim that my antagonist is either void of all taste,” &c. Here, on

the one hand, the lumping of Suckling and Etherege together, and the

implied assumption that not merely Suckling, but Etherege, is a

worthless dramatist, gives us one “light,” just as the similar

implication that “an old legend of knight-errantry” is necessarily an

example of dulness, spiritlessness, and absence of beauty, gives us

another. That Blair lays down, even more peremptorily than Johnson,

and as peremptorily as Bysshe, that the pause in an English line may

fall after the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, and no other, is not

surprising; and his observations on Shakespeare are too much in the

usual “faults-saved-by-beauties” style to need quotation. But that he

cites, with approval, a classification of the great literary periods

of the world which excludes the Elizabethan Age altogether, is not to

be omitted. It stamps the attitude.

These same qualities appear in the once famous but now little read

_Dissertation on Ossian_.[600] [Sidenote: _The_ Dissertation on Ossian.]

That, in the sense of the word on which least stress is laid in these

volumes, this “Critical Dissertation” is absolutely _un_critical does

not much matter. Blair does not even attempt to examine the evidence for

and against the genuineness of the work he is discussing. He does not

himself know Gaelic; friends (like Hector M’Intyre) have told him that

they heard Gaelic songs very like _Ossian_ sung in their youth; there

are said to be manuscripts; that is enough for him. Even when he cites

and compares parallel passages—the ghost-passage and that from the book

of Job, Fingal’s “I have no son” and _Othello_—which derive their whole

beauty from exact coincidence with the Bible or Shakespeare, he will

allow no kind of suspicion to cross his mind. But this we might let

pass. It is in the manner in which he seeks to explain the “amazing

degree of regularity and art,” which he amazingly ascribes to

Macpherson’s redaction, the “rapid and animated style,” the “strong

colouring of imagination,” the “glowing sensibility of heart,” that the

most surprising thing appears. His citations are as copious as his

praises of them are hard to indorse. But his critical argument rests

almost (not quite) wholly on showing that _Fingal_ and _Temora_ are

worked out quite properly on Aristotelian principles by way of central

action and episode, and that there are constant parallels to Homer, the

only poet whom he will allow to be Ossian’s superior. In short, he

simply applies to _Ossian_ Addison’s procedure with _Paradise Lost_. The

critical piquancy of this is double. For we know that _Ossian_ was

powerful—almost incredibly powerful—all over Europe in a sense quite

opposite to Blair’s; and we suspect, if we do not know, that Mr James

Macpherson was quite clever enough purposely to give it something of the

turn which Blair discovers.

-----

Footnote 600:

I have it with _The Poems of Ossian_, 2 vols., London, 1796. Blair had

taken Macpherson under his wing as early as 1760.

-----

The charge which may justly be brought against Blair—that he is both too

exclusively and too purblindly “belletristic”—cannot be extended to

Henry Home, Lord Kames. [Sidenote: _Kames._] Johnson, whom Kames

disliked violently, and who returned the dislike with rather

good-natured if slightly contemptuous patronage, dismissed the _Elements

of Criticism_, 1761,[601] as “a pretty Essay, which deserves to be held

in some estimation, though much of it is chimerical.”[602] The sting of

this lies, as usual, in the fact that it is substantially true, though

by no means all the truth. The _Elements of Criticism_ is a pretty book,

and an estimable one, and, what is more, one of very considerable

originality. Its subtlety and ingenuity are often beyond Johnson’s own

reach; it shows a really wide knowledge of literature, modern as well as

ancient; and it is surprisingly, though not uniformly, free from the

special “classical” purblindness of which Johnson and Blair are opposed,

but in their different ways equal, examples. Yet a very great deal of it

_is_ “chimerical,” and, what is worse, a very great deal more is,

whether chimerical or not in itself, irrelevant. It presents a

philosophical treatise, vaguely and tentatively æsthetic rather than

critical, yoked in the loosest possible manner to a bundle of

quasi-professorial exercises in Lower and Higher Rhetoric. The second

part might not improperly be termed “Critical Illustrations of

Rhetoric.” The first could only be properly entitled “Literary

Illustrations of Morals.”

-----

Footnote 601:

It had reached its eighth edition in 1807, the date of my copy.

Perhaps some may think that Kames, as being mainly an æsthetician,

ought to be postponed with Shaftesbury, Hume, &c. My reason for not

postponing is the large amount of _positive_ literary criticism in his

book.

Footnote 602:

Boswell, Globe ed., p. 132. He was elsewhere more, and less, kind.

-----

Of course this excellent Scots lawyer and ingenious “Scotch

metaphysician” had strong precedents to urge for making a muddle of

Moral Philosophy and Literary Criticism. [Sidenote: _The_ Elements of

Criticism.] It has been pointed out that Aristotle himself is not a

little exposed to the same imputation. But Kames embroils matters to an

extent never surpassed, except by those, to be found in every day, who

are incapable of taking the literary point of view at all, and who

simply treat literature as something expressing agreement or

disagreement with their moral, political, religious, or other views. He

seems himself to have had, at least once, a slight qualm. “A treatise of

ethics is not my province: I carry my view no farther than to the

elements of criticism, in order to show that the fine arts are a subject

of reasoning as well as of taste.”[603] If this was his rule he

certainly gives himself the most liberal indulgence in applying it. His

First Chapter is devoted to “Perceptions and Ideas in a Train”; the

second (an immensely long one, containing a good third of the first

volume) to “Emotions and Passions”; while the whole of the rest till the

end of the seventeenth chapter is really occupied by the same class of

subject. Kames excels in that constantly ingenious, and often acute,

dissection of human nature which was the pride and pleasure of his

century and his country, but which is a little apt to pay itself with

clever generalisations as if they were _veræ causæ_. In one place we

find a distribution of all the pleasures of the senses into pain of

want, desire, and satisfaction. In another[604] the philosopher solemnly

informs us, “I love my daughter less after she is married, and my mother

less after a second marriage; the marriage of my son or my father

diminishes not my affection so remarkably.” An almost burlesque

illustration of the procedure of the school is given in the dictum,[605]

“Where the course of nature is joined with Elevation the effect must be

delightful; and hence the singular beauty of smoke ascending in a calm

morning.” When one remembers this, and comes later[606] to the admirable

remark, “Thus, to account for an effect of which there is no doubt, any

cause, however foolish, is made welcome,” it is impossible not to say

“Thou sayest it”; as also in another case, where he lays it down that

“Were corporeal pleasures dignified over and above [_i.e._, beside the

natural propensity which incites us to them] with a place in a high

class, they would infallibly disturb the balance of the mind by

outweighing the social affections. This is a satisfactory final cause

for refusing to these pleasures any degree of dignity.”[607] I am

tempted to quote Kames’s philosophy of the use of tobacco[608] also, but

the stuff and method of his first volume must be sufficiently

intelligible already.

-----

Footnote 603:

Vol. i. chap. iii., on “Beauty”; i. 195 ed. cit.

Footnote 604:

i. 77.

Footnote 605:

i. 26.

Footnote 606:

i. 288, _note_. Kames had just before, in his chapter on “Motion and

Force” (i. 250-255), referred complacently to his own indulgence in

this foible, and had accumulated others of the same kind.

Footnote 607:

i. 359.

Footnote 608:

i. 405, 410, 411, 416, 417.

-----

The second, much more to the purpose, is considerably less interesting.

A very long chapter deals with Beauty of Language with respect to Sound,

Signification, Resemblance between Sound and Signification, and Metre.

It is abundantly stocked with well-chosen examples from a wide range of

literature, and full of remarks, generally ingenious and sometimes both

new and bold, as where at the outset Kames has the audacity to

contradict Aristotle, by implication at least, and lay it down that “of

all the fine arts, painting and sculpture only are in their nature

imitative.”[609] But it is not free from the influence of the idols of

its time. Of such, in one kind, may be cited the attribution to Milton

of “many careless lines”;[610] for if there is one thing certain in the

risky and speculative range of literary dogmatism, it is that Milton

never wrote a “careless” line in his life. If his lines are ever bad

(and perhaps they are sometimes), they are bad deliberately and of

malice. In another and more serious kind may be ranged the predominating

determination to confuse the sensual with the intellectual side of

poetry. This, of course, is Kames’s root-idea; but that it is a root of

evil may be shown sufficiently by the following passage in his

discussion of the pause—in relation to which subject he is as wrong as

nearly all his contemporaries. He is talking of a pause between

adjective and substantive.[611] What occurs to him is that “a quality

cannot exist independent of a subject, nor are they separable even in

imagination, because they make part of the same idea, and for that

reason, with respect to melody as well as to sense, it must be

disagreeable to bestow upon the adjective a sort of independent

existence by interjecting a pause between it and its substantive.” His

examples are no doubt vitiated by the obsession of the obligatory

“middle” pause, which makes him imagine one between adjective and

substantive in

“The rest, his many-coloured robe concealed,”

where the only real pause, poetic as well as grammatical, is at “rest.”

But his principle is clear, and it is as clearly a wrong principle. It

ignores the great fact glanced at above, that the pleasure of poetry is

double—intellectual _and_ sensual—and that the two parts are in a manner

independent of each other. And in the second place, even on its own

theory, it credits the mere intellect with too sluggish faculties. In

the first line which Kames suggests as “harsh and unpleasant” for this

reason,

“Of thousand bright inhabitants of air,”

the pause at “bright” is so slight a one that some might deny its

existence. But if it be held necessary, can we refuse to the _subtilitas

intellectus_ the power of halting, for the second of a second, to

conceive the joint idea of number and brightness, before it moves

further to enrich this by the notion of “inhabitants of air”? The mere

and literal Lockist may do so; but no other will. The Figures enjoy a

space which, without being surprised at it, one grudges; and the Unities

are handled rather oddly, while a digression of some fifty pages on

Gardening and Architecture speaks for itself. The conclusion on the

Standard of Taste is singularly inconclusive; and an interesting

appendix on “terms defined and explained” presents the singularity that

not, I think, one of the terms so dealt with has anything specially to

do with literature or art at all.

-----

Footnote 609:

ii. 3.

Footnote 610:

ii. 163.

Footnote 611:

ii. 129.

-----

Nevertheless, though it is easy to be smart upon Kames, and not very

difficult to expose serious inadequacies and errors both in the general

scheme and the particular execution, the _Elements of Criticism_ is a

book of very great interest and importance, and worthy of much more

attention than it has for a long time past received. To begin with, his

presentation, at the very outset of his book, of Criticism as “the most

agreeable of all amusements”[612] was one of those apparently new and

pleasant shocks to the general which are, in reality, only the

expression of an idea for some time germinating and maturing in the

public mind. Even Addison, even Pope, while praising and preaching

Criticism, had half-flouted and half-apologised for it. Swift, a great

critic on his own day, had flouted it almost or altogether in others.

The general idea of the critic had been at worst of a malignant, at best

of a harmless, pedant. Kames presented him as something quite

different,—as a man no doubt of learning, but also of position and of

the world, “amusing,” as well as exercising himself, and bringing the

fashionable philosophy to the support of his amusement.

-----

Footnote 612:

i. 33.

-----

But he did more than this. His appreciation of Shakespeare is, taking

it together (and his references to the subject are numerous and

important), the best of his age. His citations show a remarkable

relish for the Shakespearian humour, and though he cannot clear his

mind entirely from the “blemish-and-beauty” cant, which is ingrained

in the Classical theory, and which, as we saw, infected even such a

critic as Longinus, he is far freer from it than either Johnson or

Blair. In his chapter on the Unities he comes very near to Hurd[613]

(to whom, as the _Elements of Criticism_ preceded the _Letters on

Chivalry_ in time, he may have given a hint) in recognising the true

Romantic Unity of Action which admits plurality so far as the

different interests work together, or contrast advantageously. He has

a most lucid and sensible exposure of the difference between the

conditions of the Greek theatre and ours. In short, he would stand

very high if he were not possessed with the pseudological mania which

makes him calmly and gravely write[614]—“Though a cube is more

agreeable in itself than a parallelopipedon,[615] yet a large

parallelopipedon set on its smaller base is by its elevation more

agreeable, and hence the beauty of a Gothic tower.” But this _amabilis

insania_ is in itself more amiable than insane. He wants to admit the

Gothic tower, and that is the principal thing. Magdalen, and Merton,

and Mechlin may well, in consideration of his slighting in their

favour the more intrinsic charms of a cube, afford to let a smile

flicker round their venerable skylines at his methodical insistence on

justifying admiration of them by calling them large parallelopipeda

set on their smaller ends. And the cube can console herself with his

admission of her superior intrinsic loveliness.

-----

Footnote 613:

Hurd is reserved for the next volume.

Footnote 614:

ii. 457.

Footnote 615:

Kames has this spelling, which is indeed so universal that any other

may seem pedantic. Yet it is needless to say that the word so spelt is

a _vox nihili_, and should be “parallel_e_pipedon.”

-----

The faults of Blair and of Kames are both, for the most part, absent,

while much more than the merit of either, in method and closeness to the

aim, is present, in the very remarkable _Philosophy of Rhetoric_[616]

which Dr George Campbell began, and, to some extent, composed, as early

as 1750; though he did not finish and publish it till nearly thirty

years later (1777). [Sidenote: _Campbell._] It may indeed be admitted

that this piecemeal composition is not without its effect on the book,

which contains some digressions (especially one on Wit, Humour, and

Ridicule, and another on the cause of the pleasure received from the

exhibition of painful objects) more excrescent than properly episodic.

It is, moreover, somewhat weighted by the author’s strictly professional

and educational design, in retaining as much of the mere business part

of the ancient Rhetoric as would or might be useful to future preachers,

advocates, or members of Parliament. Campbell, too, is a less “elegant”

writer than Blair; and his acuteness has a less vivacious play than that

of Kames. But here concessions are exhausted; and the book, however much

we may disagree with occasional expressions in it, remains the most

important treatise on the New Rhetoric that the eighteenth century

produced. Indeed, strange as it may seem, Whately’s, its principal

formal successor in the nineteenth, is distinctly retrograde in

comparison.

-----

Footnote 616:

I use the Tegg edition, London, 1850.

-----

The New Rhetoric—the Art of Criticism—this is what Campbell really

attempts. [Sidenote: _The_ Philosophy of Rhetoric.] He is rather chary

of acknowledging his own position, and, in fact, save in his title,

seldom employs the term Rhetoric, no doubt partly from that unlucky

contempt of scholastic appellations which shows itself in his well-known

attack on Logic. But his definition of “Eloquence”—the term which he

employs as a preferred synonym of Rhetoric itself—is very important, and

practically novel. The word “Eloquence, in its greatest latitude,

denotes that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its

end.” Now this, though he modestly shelters it under Quintilian’s

_scientia bene dicendi_ and _dicere secundum virtutem orationis_,

asserting also its exact correspondence with Cicero’s description of the

best orator as he who _dicendo animos delectat audientium et docet et

permovet_, is manifestly far more extensive than the latter of these,

and much less vague than the former. In fact Rhetoric, new dubbed as

Eloquence, becomes the Art of Literature, or in other words Criticism.

It has been allowed that this bold and admirable challenge of the whole

province—for “discourse” is soon seen to include “writing”—is not always

so well supported. After an interesting introduction (vindicating the

challenge, and noting Kames more especially as one who, though in a

different way, had made it before him), Campbell for a time, either

because he is rather afraid of his own boldness, or to conciliate

received opinions on the matter (or, it has been suggested, because the

book was written at different times, and with perhaps slightly different

ends), proceeds to discuss various matters which have very little to do

with his general subject. Sometimes, as in the Chapter, before referred

to, on “The Nature and Use of the Scholastic Art of Syllogising,” he

wrecks himself in a galley which he had not the slightest need to enter.

The longer discourse on Evidence which precedes this is, of course,

fully justified on the old conception of Rhetoric, but digressory, or at

least excursory, on his own. The above-mentioned sections on Ridicule,

and on the æsthetic pleasure derivable from painful subjects, are

excursions into the debatable kinds between literature and Ethics,

though much less extravagant than those of Kames, and perhaps, as

excursions, not absolutely to be barred or banned; while chapters

vii.-x., which deal with the “Consideration of Hearers,” &c., &c., are

once more Aristotelian relapses, pardonable if not strictly necessary.

But not quite a third part of the whole treatise is occupied by this

First Book of the three into which it is divided; and not a little of

this third is, strictly or by a little allowance, to the point. The

remaining two-thirds are to that point without exception or digression

of any kind, so that the Aristotelian distribution is exactly reversed.

The titles of the two Books, “The Foundations and Essential Properties

of Elocution,” and “The Discriminating Properties of Elocution,” must

be taken with due regard to Campbell’s use of the last word.[617] But

they require hardly any other proviso or allowance. He first, with

that mixture of boldness and straight-hitting which is his great

merit, attacks the general principles of the use of Language, and

proceeds to lay down nine Canons of Verbal Criticism, which are in the

main so sound and so acute that they are not obsolete to the present

day. There is more that is arbitrary elsewhere, and Campbell seems

sometimes to retrograde over the line which separates Rhetoric and

Composition. But it must be remembered that this line has never been

very exactly drawn, and has, both in Scotland and in America, if not

also in England, been often treated as almost non-existent up to the

present day. In his subsequent distinction of five rhetorical

Qualities of Style—Perspicuity, Vivacity, Elegance, Animation, and

Music—Campbell may be thought to be not wholly happy. For the three

middle qualities are practically one, and it is even questionable

whether Music would not be best included with them in some general

term, designating whatever is added by style proper to Perspicuity, or

the sufficient but unadorned conveyance of meaning. As, however, is

very common, if not universal, with him, his treatment is in advance

of his nomenclature, for the rest of the book—nearly a full half of

it—is in fact devoted to the _two_ heads of Perspicuity and Vivacity,

the latter tacitly subsuming all the three minor qualities. And there

is new and good method in the treatment of Vivacity, as shown first by

the choice of words, secondly by their number, and thirdly by their

arrangement, while a section under the first head on “words considered

as sounds” comes very near to the truth. That there should be a

considerable section on Tropes was to be expected, and, as Campbell

treats it, it is in no way objectionable. His iconoclasm as to logical

Forms becomes much more in place, and much more effective, in regard

to rhetorical Figures.

-----

Footnote 617:

He had, of course, good authority for it, including that of Dryden;

but it is obviously better to limit it in the modern sense than to use

it equivocally. Mason (not Gray’s friend, but an interesting and

little-known person to whom I hope to recur in the next volume) had

already seen this, and expressly referred to it.

-----

One, however, of the best features of the work has hardly yet been

noticed; and that is the abundance of examples, and the thorough way in

which they are discussed. To a reader turning the book over without much

care it may seem inferior as a _thesaurus_ to Kames, because the

passages quoted are as a rule embedded in the text, and not given

separately, in the fashion which makes of large parts of the _Elements

of Criticism_ a sort of anthology, a collection of beauties or

deformities, as the case may be. But this is in accordance with the

singularly businesslike character of Campbell’s work throughout. And if

it also seem that he does not launch out enough in appreciation of books

or authors as wholes, let it be remembered that English criticism was

still in a rather rudimentary condition, and that the state of taste in

academic circles was not very satisfactory. It would not, of course, be

impossible to produce from him examples of those obsessions of the time

which we have noticed in his two compatriots, as we shall notice them in

the far greater Johnson. But he could not well escape these obsessions,

and he suffers from them in a very mild form.

James Harris,[618] author of _Hermes_ (and of the house of Malmesbury,

which was ennobled in the next generation), is perhaps the chief writer

whom England, in the narrower sense, has to set against Blair, Kames,

and Campbell in mid-eighteenth century. [Sidenote: _Harris._] But he is

disappointing. It would not be reasonable to quarrel with the _Hermes_

itself for not being literary, because it does not pretend to be

anything but grammatical; and the _Philosophical Arrangements_, though

they do sometimes approach literature, may plead benefit of title for

not doing so oftener. But the _Discourse on Music, Painting, and

Poetry_, and the _Philological Enquiries_—in which Philology is

expressly intimated to mean “love of letters” in the higher sense—hold

out some prospects. The performance is but little. Readers of Boswell

will remember that Johnson, though the author of _Hermes_ was very

polite to him, both personally and with the pen, used, to his henchman’s

surprise and grief, to speak very roughly of Harris, applying to him on

one occasion the famous and damning phrase, “a prig, and a bad prig,”

and elsewhere hinting doubts as to his competency in Greek. That the

reproach of priggishness was deserved (whether with the aggravation or

not) nobody can read half-a-dozen pages of Harris without allowing,—his

would-be complimentary observation on Fielding[619] would determine by

itself. But the principal note of Harris, as a critic, is not so much

priggishness as confused superficiality. These qualities are less

visible in the _Dialogue_ (which is an extremely short, not

contemptible, but also not unimportant, exercitation in the direction of

Æsthetic proper) than in the _Enquiries_, which were written late in

life, and which, no doubt, owe something of their extraordinary

garrulity to “the irreparable outrage.”

-----

Footnote 618:

_Works_, Oxford, 1841.

Footnote 619:

Note to Pt. II. chap. vii. of the _Enquiries_, p. 433, ed. cit.

-----

This book begins, with almost the highest possible promise for us, in a

Discussion of the Rise of Criticism, its various species, Philosophical,

Historical, and Corrective, &c. [Sidenote: _The_ Philological

Enquiries.] It goes on hardly less promisingly, if the mere

chapter-headings are taken, with discourses on Numbers, Composition,

Quantity, Alliteration, &c.; the Drama, its Fable and its Manners,

Diction, and, at the end of the second part, an impassioned defence of

Rules. But the Third, which promises a discussion of “the taste and

literature of the Middle Age,” raises the expectation almost to

agony-point. Here is what we have been waiting for so long: here is the

great gap going to be filled. At last a critic not merely takes a

philosophic-historic view of criticism, but actually proposes to

supplement it with an inquiry into those regions of literature on which

his predecessors have turned an obstinately blind eye. As is the

exaltation of the promise, so is the aggravation of the disappointment.

Harris’s first part, though by no means ill-planned, is very

insufficiently carried out, and the hope of goodness in the third is

cruelly dashed beforehand by the sentence, “At length, after a long and

barbarous period, when the shades of monkery began to retire,” &c. The

writer’s mere enumeration of Renaissance critics is very haphazard, and

his remarks, both on them and their successors, perfunctory in the

extreme. He hardly dilates on anybody or anything except—following the

tradition from Pope and Swift—on Bentley and his mania for correction

and conjecture.

In the second part he gives himself more room, and is better worth

reading, but the sense of disappointment continues. In fact, Harris is

positively irritating. He lays it down, for instance, that “nothing

excellent in a literary way happens merely by chance,” a thesis from the

discussion of which much might come. But he simply goes off into a loose

discussion of the effects and causes of literary pleasure, with a good

many examples in which the excellence of his precept, “seek the cause,”

is more apparent than the success of his own researches. The rest is

extremely discursive, and seldom very satisfactory, being occupied in

great part with such tenth-rate stuff as Lillo’s _Fatal Curiosity_. As

for Harris’s defence of the Rules, he does not, in fact, defend them at

all; but, as is so common with controversialists, frames an indictment,

which no sensible antagonist would ever bring, in order to refute it. He

says that “he never knew any genius cramped by rules, and had known

great geniuses miserably err by neglecting them.” A single example of

this last would have been worth the whole treatise. But Harris does not

give it. Finally, “the Taste and Literature of the Middle Age” seem to

him to be satisfactorily discussed by ridiculing the Judgment of God,

talking at some length about Byzantine writers, giving a rather long

account of Greek philosophy in its ancient stages, quoting freely from

travellers to Athens and Constantinople, introducing “the Arabians,”

with anecdotes of divers caliphs, saying something of the Schoolmen, a

little about the Provençal poets, something (to do him justice) of the

rise of accentual prosody,[620] and a very, very little about Chaucer,

Petrarch, Mandeville, Marco Polo, Sir John Fortescue, and—Sannazar! “And

now having done with the Middle Age,” he concludes—having, that is to

say, shown that, except a _pot-pourri_ of mainly historical anecdote, he

knew nothing whatever about it; or, if this seem harsh, that his

knowledge was not of any kind that could possibly condition his judgment

of literature favourably. In fact, no one shows that curious

eighteenth-century confusion of mind, which we shall notice frequently

in other countries, better than Harris. He is, as we have seen, a

fervent devotee of the Rules—he believes[621] that, before any examples

of poetry, there was an abstract schedule of Epic, Tragedy, and

everything else down to Epigram, which you cannot follow but to your

good, and cannot neglect but to your peril. Yet, on the one hand, he

feels the philosophic impulse, and on the other, the literary and

historical curiosity, before which these rules were bound to vanish.

-----

Footnote 620:

Harris deserves a good word for his prosodic studies, which may

entitle him to reappear in the next volume.

-----

[Sidenote: _“Estimate” Brown: his_ History of Poetry.]

A few allusions,[622] in contemporaries of abiding fame, have kept half

alive the name—though very few, save specialists, are likely to be

otherwise than accidentally acquainted with the work—of John Brown of

Newcastle, author of the once famous _Estimate of the Manners and

Principles of the Times_,[623] and afterwards, when he had gained

reputation by this, of a _Dissertation on the Rise of Poetry and

Music_,[624] later still slightly altered, and re-christened _History of

the Rise and Progress of Poetry_.[625] The _Estimate_ itself is one of

those possibly half-unconscious pieces of quackery which from time to

time put (in a manner which somehow or other tickles the longer ears

among their contemporaries) the old cry that _every_thing is rotten in

the state of Denmark. There is not much in it that is directly literary;

the chief point of the kind is an attack on the Universities: it may be

noted that quacks generally do attack Universities. The

_Dissertation-History_ is a much less claptrap piece, but far more

amusing to read. Brown is one of those rash but frank persons who

attempt creation as well as criticism; and those who will may hear how

“Peace on Nature’s lap reposes [why not _vice versa_?]

Pleasure strews her guiltless roses,”

and so forth. The difference of the two forms is not important. In the

second, Brown simply left out Music, so far as he could, as appealing to

a special public only. He believes in _Ossian_, then quite new. He

thinks it contains “Pictures which no civilised modern could ever

_imbibe_ in their strength, nor consequently could ever _throw out_”—an

image so excessively Georgian (putting aside the difficulty of imbibing

a picture) that one has to abbreviate comment on it. For the rest, Brown

rejoices and wallows in the naturalistic generalisation of his century.

He begins, of course, with the Savage State, lays it down that, at

religious and other festivals, men danced and sang, that then organised

professional effort supplemented unorganised, and so poets arose. Then

comes about a sort of Established Choir, whence the various kinds are

developed. And we have the Chinese—the inevitable Chinese—Fow-hi, and

Chao-hao, and all their trumpery. Negligible as an authority, Brown

perhaps deserves to rank as a symptom.

-----

Footnote 621:

“There never was a time when rules did not exist; they always made a

part of that immutable truth,” &c.—P. 450.

Footnote 622:

The best known is Cowper’s, in _Table Talk_, ll. 384, 385—

“The inestimable Estimate of Brown

Rose like a paper-kite and charmed the town.”

See also Chesterfield, to the Bishop of Waterford, April 14, 1758.

Chesterfield was no Bottom, but, being melancholy at the time, he was

tickled.

Footnote 623:

London, 1757, 8vo.

Footnote 624:

London, 1763, 4to.

Footnote 625:

Newcastle, 1764, 8vo.

-----

But we must leave minorities, and come to him who is here ὁ μέγας.

There is no reason to doubt that Johnson’s critical opinions were formed

quite early in life, and by that mixture of natural bent and influence

of environment which, as a rule, forms all such opinions. [Sidenote:

_Johnson: his preparation for criticism._] There has been a tendency to

regard, as the highest mental attitude, that of considering everything

as an open question, of being ready to reverse any opinion at a moment’s

notice. As a matter of fact, we have record of not many men who have

proceeded in this way; and it may be doubted whether among them is a

single person of first-rate genius, or even talent. Generally speaking,

the men whose genius or talent has a “stalk of carle hemp” in it find,

in certain of the great primeval creeds of the world, political,

ecclesiastical, literary, or other, something which suits their bent.

The bent of their time may assist them in fastening on to this by

attraction or repulsion—it really does not much matter which it is. In

either case they will insensibly, from an early period, choose their

line and shape their course accordingly. They will give a certain

independence to it; they will rarely be found merely “swallowing

formulas.” It is the _other_ class which does this, with leave reserved

to get rid of the said formulas by a mental emetic and swallow another

set, which will very likely be subjected to the same fate. But the hero

will be in the main _Qualis ab incepto_.

Johnson was in most things a Tory by nature, his Toryism being

conditioned, first by that very strong bent towards a sort of

transcendental scepticism which many great Tories have shown; secondly,

by the usual peculiarities of social circumstance and mental

constitution; and lastly, by the state of England in his time—a state to

discuss which were here impertinent, but which, it may be humbly

suggested, will not be quite appreciated by accepting any, or all, of

the more ordinary views of the eighteenth century.

His view of literature was in part determined by these general

influences, in part—perhaps chiefly—by special impinging currents. His

mere birth-time had not very much to do with it—Thomson, Dyer, Lady

Winchelsea, who consciously or unconsciously worked against it, were

older, in the lady’s case much older, than he was; Gray and Shenstone,

who consciously worked against it in different degrees, were not much

younger.[626] The view was determined in his case, mainly no doubt by

that natural bent which is quite inexplicable, but also by other things

explicable enough. Johnson, partly though probably not wholly in

consequence of his near sight, was entirely insensible to the beauties

of nature; he made fun of “prospects”; he held that “one blade of grass

is like another” (which it most certainly is not, even in itself, let

alone its surroundings); he liked human society in its most artificial

form—that provided by towns, clubs, parties. In the second place, his

ear was only less deficient than his eye. That he did not care for

music, in the scientific sense, is not of much importance; but it is

quite clear that, in poetry, only an extremely regular and almost

mathematical beat of verse had any chance with him. Thirdly, he was

widely read in the Latin Classics, less widely in Greek, still more

widely in the artificial revived Latin of the Renaissance and the

seventeenth century.[627] Fourthly, he was, for a man so much given to

reading—for one who ranged from Macrobius in youth to _Parismus and

Parismenus_ in age, and from _Travels in Abyssinia_ to _Prince Titi_—not

very widely read either in mediæval Latin or in the earlier divisions of

the modern languages; indeed, of these last he probably knew little or

nothing. Fifthly, the greatest poet in English immediately before his

time, and the greatest poet in English during his youth and early

manhood, had been exponents, the one mainly, the other wholly, of a

certain limited theory of English verse. Sixthly, the critical school in

which he had been brought up was strictly neo-classic. Seventhly, and to

conclude, such rebels to convention as appeared in his time were chiefly

men whom he regarded with unfriendly dislike, or with friendly contempt.

Nor can it be said that any one of the contemporary partisans of “the

Gothick” was likely to convince a sturdy adversary. Walpole was a

spiteful fribble with a thin vein of genius; Gray a sort of Mr

Facing-Both-Ways in literature, who had “classical” mannerisms worse

than any of Johnson’s own, and whose dilettante shyness and scanty

production invited ridicule. Both were Cambridge men (and Johnson did

not love Cambridge men, nor they him), and both were Whigs. Percy and

Warton were certainly not very strong as originals, and had foibles

enough even as scholars. But whether these reasons go far enough, or do

not so go, Johnson’s general critical attitude never varies in the

least.[628] It was, as has been said, probably formed quite early; it no

doubt appeared in those but dimly known contributions to periodical

literature which defrayed so ill the expense of his still more dimly

known first twenty years in London. We have from him no single treatise,

as in the cases of Dante and Longinus, no pair of treatises, as in the

case of Aristotle, to go upon. But in the four great documents of _The

Rambler_, _Rasselas_, the Shakespeare _Preface_, and the _Lives_, we see

it in the two first rigid, peremptory, in the _Preface_, curiously and

representatively uncertain, in the last conditioned by differences which

allow it somewhat freer play, and at some times making a few

concessions, but at others more pugnacious and arbitrary than before.

-----

Footnote 626:

His birth-year was 1709; Thomson’s 1700; Dyer’s perhaps the same;

Shenstone’s 1714; Gray’s 1716. Lady Winchelsea had been born as far

back as 1660.

Footnote 627:

He was perhaps the last man of very great power who entertained the

Renaissance superstition of Latin. He was horrified at the notion of

an English epitaph; and in the first agony of his stroke in 1783 he

rallied and racked his half-paralysed brains to make Latin verses as

the best test of his sanity.

Footnote 628:

Let it be noted, however, that in Johnson, as in most strong men,

there were certain leanings to the other side, certain evidences of

the “identity of contradictories.” His sense of mystery, his

religiosity, his strong passions, his tendency to violence in taste

and opinions—were all rather Romantic than Classical.

-----

The critical element in _The Rambler_ is necessarily large; but a great

deal of it is general and out of our way.[629] [Sidenote: The Rambler

_on Milton_.] Directly concerning us are the papers on the aspects

(chiefly formal) of Milton’s poetry—especially versification—on which

Addison had not spoken, with some smaller papers on lesser subjects. The

Miltonic _examen_ begins at No. 86. Johnson is as uncompromising as the

great Bysshe himself on the nature of English prosody. “The heroick

measures of the English language may be properly considered as pure or

mixed.” They are pure when “the accent rests on every second syllable

through the whole line.” In other words, “purity” is refused to anything

but the strict iambic decasyllable. Nay, he goes further; this is not

only “purity” and “the completest harmony possible,” but it ought to be

“exactly kept in distichs” and in the last line of a (verse) paragraph.

-----

Footnote 629:

The Allegory on Criticism (daughter of Labour and Truth, who gives up

her task to Time, but is temporarily personated by Flattery and

Malevolence) in No. 3 almost speaks itself in the parenthetical

description just given. Cf. also 4, on Ancient and Modern Romances;

22, another Allegory on Wit and Learning; 23, on the Contrariety of

Criticism; and 36, 37, on “Pastoral Poetry.”

-----

Nevertheless, for variety’s sake, the “mixed” measure is allowed;

“though it always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself,”

it makes us appreciate the “harmonious” lines better. And we soon

perceive that even this exceedingly grudging, and in strictness

illogical, licence is limited merely to substitution of other

dissyllabic feet for the pure iamb. In

“Thus at their shady lodge arrived, _both stood,

Both turned_,”

the rigid Johnson insists on the spondaic character, “the accent is on

two syllables together and both strong”; while he would seem to regard

“And when,” in the line

“And when we seek as now the gift of sleep,”

as a pyrrhic (“both syllables are weak”). A trochee (“deviation or

inversion of accent”) is allowed as a “mixture” in the first place, but

elsewhere is “remarkably inharmonious,” as, for instance, in Cowley’s

beautiful line,

“And the soft wings of peace _cover_ him round.”

The next paper (88) passes, after touching other matters, to “elision,”

by which he means (evidently not even taking tri-syllabic possibility

into consideration) such a case as

“Wisdom to folly as nourishment to wind.”

This licence, he says, is now disused in English poetry; and adds some

severe remarks on those who would revive or commend it. He even objects

to the redundant ending in heroic poetry.

In the third paper (90) he comes to Pauses; and once more plays the

rigour of the game. The English poet, in connecting one line with

another, is _never_ to make a full pause at less than three syllables

from the beginning or end of a verse; and in all lines pause at the

fourth or sixth syllable is best. He gives a whole paper to Milton’s

accommodation of the sound to the sense, and winds up his Miltonic

exercitations, after a very considerable interval, with a set critique

(139) of _Samson Agonistes_, partly on its general character as an

Aristotelian tragedy (he decides that it has a beginning and end, but no

middle, poor thing!) and partly on details. These papers show no

_animus_ against Milton. There are even expressions of admiration for

him, which may be called enthusiastic. But they do show that the critic

was not in range with his author. Almost every one of his axioms and

postulates is questionable.

Of the remaining critical papers in the _Rambler_ it is very important

to notice No. 121, “On the Dangers of Imitation, and the Impropriety of

imitating Spenser.” [Sidenote: _On Spenser._] Johnson’s acuteness was

not at fault in distrusting, from his point of view, the consequences of

such things as the _Castle of Indolence_ or even the _Schoolmistress_;

and he addresses a direct rebuke to “the men of learning and genius” who

have introduced the fashion.[630] In so far as his condemnation of

“echoes” goes he is undoubtedly not wrong, and he speaks of the idol of

Neo-Classicism, Virgil, with an irreverent _parrhesia_[631] which, like

many other things in him, shows his true critical power. But on Spenser

himself the other idols—the _idola specus_ rather than _fori_—blind him.

In following his namesake in the condemnation of Spenser’s language he

is, we may think, wrong; yet this at least is an arguable point. But in

regard to the Spenserian stanza things are different. Johnson calls it

“at once difficult and unpleasing; tiresome to the ear from its

uniformity, and to the attention by its length,” while he subsequently

goes off into the usual error about imitating the Italians. No truce is

here possible. That the Spenserian is not easy may be granted at once,

but Johnson was certainly scholar enough to anticipate the riposte that,

not here only, it is “hard to be good.” As for “unpleasing,” so much the

worse for the ear which is not pleased by the most exquisite harmonic

symphony in the long and glorious list of stanza-combinations. As for

monotony, it is just as monotonous as flowing water. While as for the

Italian parallel, nothing can probably be more to the glory of Spenser

than this; just as nothing can be more different than the pretty, but

cloying, rhyme even of Tasso, nay, sometimes even of Ariosto, and the

endless unlaboured beauty of Spenser’s rhyme-sound. It is no valid

retort that this is simply a difference of taste. If a man, as some men

have done, says that Spenser is pleasing and Dryden and Pope are _not_,

then the retort is valid. When the position is taken that _both_ rhythms

are pleasing, both really poetical, but poetical in a different way, the

defender of it may laugh at all assailants.

-----

Footnote 630:

He was no doubt thinking also of Gilbert West, in his _Life_ of whom

he introduces a _caveat_ against West’s Imitations of Spenser as

“successful” indeed and “amusing” but “only pretty.”

Footnote 631:

“The warmest admirers of the great Mantuan poet can extol him for

little more than the skill with which he has ... united the beauties

of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_,” and he adds a longish exposure of the

way in which Virgil, determined to imitate at all costs, has put in

his borrowed matter without regard to keeping.

-----

The criticism of the English historians which immediately follows has an

interest chiefly of curiosity, because it was written just at the

opening of the great age of the department with which it deals.

[Sidenote: _On History and Letter-writing._] Prejudices of different

kinds would always have prevented Johnson from doing full justice to

Robertson, to Hume, and, most of all, to Gibbon; but, as it is, he deals

with nobody later than Clarendon, and merely throws back to Raleigh and

Knolles. Very much the same drawback attends the criticism on Epistolary

writing: for here also it was the lot of Johnson’s own contemporaries,

in work mostly not written, and hardly in a single case published, at

the date of the _Rambler_, to remove the reproach of England. But the

paper on Tragi-Comedy (156) is much more important.

For here, as in other places, we see that Johnson, but for the

combination of influences above referred to, might have taken high, if

not the highest, degrees in a very different school of criticism.

[Sidenote: _On Tragi-comedy._] He puts the great rule _Nec quarta loqui_

into the dustbin, with a nonchalance exhibiting some slight shortness of

sight; for the very argument he uses will sweep with this a good many

other rules to which he still adheres. “We violate it,” he says coolly,

“without scruple and without inconvenience.” He is equally iconoclastic

about the Five Acts, about the Unity of Time, while he blows rather hot

and cold about tragi-comedy in the sense of the mixing of tragic and

comic scenes. But the close of the paper is the most remarkable, for it

is in effect the death-knell of the neo-classic system, sounded by its

last really great prophet. “_It ought to be the first endeavour of a

writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established

because it is right from that which is right only because it is

established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a

desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties

within his view by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary

dictator had authority to enact._”

“Oh! the lands of Milnwood, the bonny lands of Milnwood, that have been

in the name of Morton twa hundred years; they are barking and fleeing,

infield and outfield, haugh and holme!” With this utterance, this single

utterance, all the ruling doctrines of sixteenth, seventeenth, and

eighteenth century criticism receive notice to quit.[632]

The well-known “Dick Minim” papers in the _Idler_ (60, 61) are excellent

fun, and perhaps Johnson’s chief accomplishment in the direction of

humour. [Sidenote: “_Dick Minim._”] The growth of criticism in Dick, his

gradual proficiency in all the critical commonplaces of his day (it is

to be observed that Johnson, like all true humourists, does not spare

himself, and makes one of Minim’s _secrets de Polichinelle_ a censure of

Spenser’s stanza), his addiction to Johnson’s pet aversion, “suiting the

sound to the sense,” and his idolatry of Milton, are all capitally done.

Indeed, like all good caricatures, the piece is a standing piece to

consult for the fashions and creeds which it caricatures. But it neither

contains nor suggests any points of critical doctrine that we cannot

find elsewhere, and it is only indirectly serious.[633]

-----

Footnote 632:

The chief remaining critical _loci_ in the _Rambler_ are the unlucky

strictures in No. 168 on “dun,” “knife,” and “blanket” in _Macbeth_ as

“low”; and the remarks on unfriendly criticism in 176.

Footnote 633:

There are, of course, other passages in the _Idler_ touching on

Criticism,—59 on the Causes of Neglect of Books, 68, 69 on

Translation, 77 on “Essay Writing,” 85 on Compilations. But they

contain nothing of exceptional importance.

-----

The Dissertation upon Poetry of Imlac in _Rasselas_ (chap. x.) may be

less amusing; but it is of course much more serious. [Sidenote:

Rasselas.] There can be no reasonable doubt that Imlac gives as much of

Johnson’s self as he chose to put, and could put, in character: while it

is at least possible that his sentiments are determined in some degree

by the menacing appearances of Romanticism. Imlac finds “with wonder

that in almost all countries the most ancient poets are reputed the

best”; that “early writers are in possession of nature and their

successors of art”; that “no man was ever great by imitation”; that he

must observe everything and observe for himself, but that he must do it

on the principle of examining, “not the individual, but the species.” He

is to remark “general properties and large appearances. He does not

number the streaks of the tulip or describe the different shapes in the

verdure of the forest,” but must “exhibit prominent and striking

features,” neglecting “minuter discriminations.” In the same way his

criticism of life must be abstracted and generalised; he must be “a

being superior to time and place”; must know many languages and

sciences; must by incessant practice of style “familiarise to himself

every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony.”

Surely a high calling and election! yet with some questionable points in

it. If the poet must not count the streaks of the tulip, if he must

merely generalise and sweep; if he must consult the laziness and dulness

of his readers by merely portraying prominent and striking features,

characteristics alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness—then even

Dryden will not do, for he is too recondite and conceited. Pope alone

must bear the bell. Lady Winchelsea’s horse in twilight, the best part

of a century earlier; Tennyson’s ashbuds in the front of March, the best

part of a century later, are equally “streaks of the tulip,” superfluous

if not even bad. Habington’s picture of the pitiless northern sunshine

on the ice-bound pilot, and Keats’s of the perilous seas through the

magic casements, must be rejected, as too unfamiliar and individual. The

poetic strangeness and height are barred _en bloc_. Convention,

familiarity, generalisation—these are the keys to the poetical kingdom

of heaven. The tenant of Milnwood has a fresh enfeoffment!

The Shakespeare Preface is a specially interesting document, because of

its illustration, not merely of Johnson’s native critical vigour, not

merely of his imbibed eighteenth-century prejudices, but of that

peculiar position of compromise and reservation which, as we have said

and shall say, is at once the condemnation and the salvation of the

English critical position at this time. [Sidenote: _The Shakespeare

Preface._] Of the first there are many instances, though perhaps none in

the _Preface_ itself quite equal to the famous note on the character of

Polonius, which has been generally and justly taken as showing what a

triumph this failure of an edition might have been. Yet even here there

is not a little which follows in the wake of Dryden’s great eulogy, and

some scattered observations of the highest acuteness, more particularly

two famous sentences which, though Johnson’s quotation is directed to a

minor matter—Shakespeare’s learning—settle beforehand, with the

prophetic tendency of genius, the whole monstrous absurdity of the

Bacon-Shakespeare theory.[634] The rest, however, is, if not exactly a

zigzag of contradiction, at least the contrasted utterance of two

distinct voices. Shakespeare has this and that merit of nature, of

passion; but “his set speeches are commonly cold and weak.” “What he

does best he soon ceases to do.” Johnson, here also, has no

superstitious reverence for the Unities, and even speaks slightly of

dramatic rules; nay, he suggests “the recall of the principles of the

drama to a new examination,” the very examination which Lessing was to

give it. But he apologises for the period when “_The Death of Arthur_

was the favourite volume,” and hints a doubt whether much of our and his

own praise of Shakespeare is not “given by custom and veneration.” “He

has corrupted language by every mode of depravation,” yet Johnson echoes

Dryden “when he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it

too.” A singular triumph of “depraved language.” In short, throughout

the piece it is now Johnson himself who is speaking, now some one with a

certain bundle of principles or prejudices which Johnson chooses to

adopt for the time.

-----

Footnote 634:

“Jonson, ... who besides that he had no imaginable temptation to

falsehood, wrote at a time when the character and acquisitions of

Shakespeare were known to multitudes. His evidence ought therefore to

decide the controversy, unless some testimony of equal force could be

opposed.”

-----

It was with these opinions on the formal and substantial nature of

poetry and of criticism that Johnson, late in life, sat down to the

_Lives of the Poets_,[635] one of the most fortunate books in English

literature. [Sidenote: _The_ Lives of the Poets.] In very few cases have

task and artist been so happily associated. For almost all his authors,

he had biographical knowledge such as no other living man had, and the

access to which has long been closed. If, now and then, his criticism

was not in touch with his subjects, this was rare: and the fact gave a

certain value even to the assertions that result—for _we_, do what we

will, cannot see Milton quite as Johnson saw him, and so his view is

valuable as a corrective. By far the greater part of these subjects

belonged to one school and system of English poetry, a school and system

with which the critic was at once thoroughly familiar and thoroughly in

sympathy. And, lastly, the form of the work, with its subdivision into a

large number of practically independent and not individually burdensome

sections, was well suited to coax a man who suffered from constitutional

indolence, and who for many years had been relieved from that pressure

of necessity which had conquered his indolence occasionally, and only

occasionally, earlier. No other man, it is true, has had quite such a

chance: but he must indeed have a sublime confidence, both in the

strength of his principles and in the competence of his talents, who

thinks that, if he had the chance, he could do the task better than

Johnson did his.

-----

Footnote 635:

With Johnson, as with some other writers, I have not thought it

necessary to specify editions. I must, however, mention Mr J. H.

Millar’s issue of the _Lives_ (London, 1896) for the sake of the

excellent _Introduction_ on Johnson’s criticism.

-----

The work, of course, is by no means equal throughout: and it could not

be expected to be. [Sidenote: _Their general merits._] Some was merely

old work, dating from a much less mature period of the writer’s genius,

and made to serve again. Some was on subjects so trivial that good

nature, or simple indolence, or, if any one pleases, an artistic

reluctance to break butterflies on so huge a wheel, made the criticisms

almost as insignificant as the criticised. Here and there extra-literary

prejudice—political-ecclesiastical, as in the case of Milton; partly

moral, partly religious, and, it is to be feared, a little personal, as

in that of Swift—distorted the presentation. And it is quite possible

that a similar distortion, due to the same causes or others, was in the

case of Gray intensified by a half-unconscious conviction that Gray’s

aims and spirit, if not his actual poetical accomplishments, were fatal

to the school of poetry to which the critic himself held.

But make allowance for all this, and with how great a thing do the

_Lives_ still provide us! In that combination of biography and

criticism, which is so natural that it is wonderful it should be so

late,[636] they are all but the originals, and are still almost the

standard. They are full of anecdote, agreeably and crisply told, yet

they never descend to mere gossip: their criticism of life is almost

always just and sound, grave without being precise, animated by the same

melancholy as that of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_, but in milder mood

and with touches of brightness. Their criticism of literature is all the

more valuable for being the criticism of their time. When we read

Johnson’s remarks on Milton’s minor poems it is foolish to rave, and it

is ignoble to sneer. The wise will rejoice in the opportunity to

understand. So when Johnson bestows what seems to us extraordinary and

unintelligible praise on John Pomfret’s _Choice_,[637] he is really

praising a moral tract couched in verse not unpleasing in itself, and

specially pleasing to his ear. When he speaks less favourably of

_Grongar Hill_, he is speaking of a piece of nature-poetry, not arranged

on his principle of neglecting the streak of the tulip, and availing

itself of those Miltonic licences of prosody which he disapproved. But

we shall never find that, when the poetry is of the stamp which he

recognises, he makes any mistake about its relative excellence: and we

shall find that, in not a few cases, he is able to recognise excellence

which belongs to classes and schools not exactly such as he approves.

And, lastly, it has to be added that for diffused brilliancy of critical

expression, subject to the allowances and conditions just given, the

_Lives_ are hardly to be excelled in any language. It is not safe to

neglect one of them, though no doubt there are some six or seven which,

for this reason or that, take precedence of the rest.

-----

Footnote 636:

There are blind attempts at it even in antiquity; but Dryden’s Lives

of Lucian and Plutarch are, like other things of his elsewhere, the

real originals here.

Footnote 637:

Let me draw special attention to “John.” I once, unwittingly or

carelessly, called him “Thomas,” and I am afraid that I even neglected

to correct the error in a second edition of the guilty book. A man who

writes “Thomas” for “John,” in the case of a minor poet, can, I am

aware, possess no virtues, and must expect no pardon. But I shall

always henceforth remember to call him “Pomfret, Mr _John_.” “Let this

expiate,” as was remarked in another case of perhaps not less mortal

sin.

-----

The “Cowley” has especial interest, because it is Johnson’s only

considerable attempt at that very important part of criticism, the

historical summary of the characteristics of a poetical period or

school. [Sidenote: _The_ Cowley.] And, though far from faultless, it is

so important and so interesting in its kind that it ranks with his

greatest Essays. Only that singular impatience of literary history, as

such, which characterised the late Mr Matthew Arnold, and which not

infrequently marred his own critical work, can have prevented him from

including, in his Johnsonian _points de repère_, the Essay which

launched, and endeavoured to make watertight, the famous definition of

the “Metaphysical” School—of the school represented earlier by Donne,

and later by Cowley himself.

The phrase itself[638] has been both too readily adopted and too

indiscriminately attacked. Taken with the ordinary meaning of

“metaphysical,” it may indeed seem partly meaningless and partly

misleading. Taken as Johnson meant it, it has a meaning defensible at

least from the point of view of the framer, and very important in

critical history. Johnson (it is too often forgotten) was a scholar; and

he used “metaphysical” in its proper sense—of that which “comes after”

the physical or natural. Now, it was, as we have seen, the whole

principle of his school of criticism—their whole critical

contention—that _they_ were “following nature.” The main objection to

the poetry of what Dryden calls the “last Age”—what we call, loosely but

conveniently, “Elizabethan” poetry—was that its ideas, and still more

its expressions, went beyond and behind nature, substituted

afterthoughts and unreal refinements for fact. It would be delightful to

the present writer to defend the Metaphysicals here—but it would not be

to the question.

-----

Footnote 638:

It was of course probably suggested by Dryden (_Essay on Satire_,

“Donne ... affects the metaphysics”), but in Johnson’s hands is much

altered and extended.

-----

Political and religious prejudice accounts, as has been said, for much

in the _Milton_. [Sidenote: _The_ Milton.] But it will not fully account

for the facts. The at first sight astonishing, and already often

referred to, criticisms on the minor poems show a perfectly honest and

genuine dislike to the form as well as to the matter, to the manner as

well as to the man. If Johnson calls _Lycidas_ “harsh,” it is because he

simply does not hear its music; he can even call the songs in _Comus_

“not very musical in their numbers.” When of the, no doubt unequal but

often splendid, sonnets he can write, “of the best it can only be said

that they are not bad,” he gives us the real value of his criticism

immediately afterwards by laying it down that “the fabric of a sonnet,

however adapted to the Italian language, has _never_ succeeded in ours.”

And when he has earlier stated that “all that short compositions can

commonly attain is sweetness and elegance,” we see in this the whole

thing. Milton is condemned under statute (though the statute is

hopelessly unconstitutional and unjust) on certain counts; on others his

judge, though capable and perfectly honest, does not know the part of

the code which justifies the accused. Johnson is listening for

couplet-music or stanzas with regular recurrence of rhyme, for lines

constituted entirely on a dissyllabic, or entirely on a trisyllabic,

basis. He does not find these things: and he has no organ to judge what

he does find.

With the lives of Dryden and Pope we are clear of all difficulties, and

the critic is in his element. The poets whom he is criticising occupy

the same platform as he does; they have in fact been themselves the

architects of that platform. [Sidenote: _The_ Dryden _and_ Pope.] There

is no fear of the initial incompatibilities which, when aggravated by

accident, lead to the apparent enormities of the _Milton_ Essay, and

which, even when not so aggravated, condition the usefulness, though

they may positively increase the interest, of the _Cowley_. But there is

more than this. In no instance, perhaps, was Johnson so well in case to

apply his biographical and critical treatment as in regard to Dryden and

Pope. With the latter he had himself been contemporary; and when he

first came to London the traditions even of the former were still fresh,

while there were many still living (Southerne the chief of them) who had

known glorious John well. Further, Johnson’s peculiar habits of living,

his delight in conversation and society, his excellent memory, and his

propensity to the study of human nature, as well as of letters,

furnished him abundantly with opportunities. Yet, again, his sympathy

with both, on general literary sides, was not unhappily mixed and

tempered by a slight, but not uncharitable or Puritanic, disapproval of

their moral characters, by regret at Dryden’s desertion of the Anglican

Church, and at the half-Romanist half-freethinking attitude of Pope to

religion.

The result of all this is a pair of the best critical Essays in the

English language. Individual expressions will of course renew for us the

sense of difference in the point of view. We shall not agree that Dryden

“found English poetry brick and left it marble,” and we shall be only

too apt to take up the challenge, “If Pope be not a poet, where is

poetry to be found?” even if we think the implied denial, to which the

challenge was a reply, an absurdity. And we may find special interest as

well as special difference in the condemnation even of these masters for

attempting Pindarics, because Pindarics “want the essential constituent

of metrical compositions, the stated recurrence of settled numbers,”

seeing in it a fresh instance of that Procrustean tyranny of suiting the

form to the bed, not the bed to the form, which distinguishes all

neo-classic criticism. But these points occur rarely. The criticism, as

a whole, is not merely perfectly just on its own scheme, but requires

very little allowance on others; nor, in the difficult and dangerous art

of comparative censorship, will any example be found much surpassing

Johnson’s parallel of the two poets.

In the _Milton_ and the _Cowley_ we find Johnson dealing with schools of

poetry which he regards as out of date and imperfect; in the _Dryden_

and the _Pope_, with subjects which are not to him subjects of any

general controversy, but which he can afford to treat almost entirely on

their merits. [Sidenote: _The_ Collins _and_ Gray.] In the _Collins_ and

the _Gray_ we find a new relation between poet and critic—the relation

of decided, though not yet wholly declared, innovation on the part of

the poets, and of conscious, though not yet quite wide-eyed and

irreconcilable, hostility on the part of the critic. The expression of

this is further differentiated by the fact that Johnson regarded Collins

with the affection of a personal friend, and the generous sympathy of

one who, with all his roughness, had a mind as nearly touched by mortal

sorrows as that of any sentimentalist; while it is pretty clear, though

we have no positive evidence for it, that he reciprocated the personal

and political dislike which Gray certainly felt for him.

The result was, in the case of Collins, a criticism rather inadequate

than unjust, and not seldom acute in its indication of faults, if

somewhat blind to merits; in that of Gray, one which cannot be quite so

favourably spoken of, though the censure which has been heaped upon

it—notably by Lord Macaulay and Mr Arnold—seems to me very far to

surpass its own injustice. Johnson’s general summing up—that Gray’s

“mind had a large grasp; his curiosity[639] was unlimited, and his

judgment cultivated; he was likely to love much where he loved at all,

but fastidious and hard to please”—is acute, just, and far from

ungenerous. That on the Elegy—“The four stanzas beginning, ‘Yet even

these bones,’ are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any

other place. Yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has

always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame

and useless to praise him”—is a magnificent and monumental compliment,

said as simply as “Good morning.” He is absolutely right when he says

that in all Gray’s Odes “there is a kind of cumbrous splendour that we

wish away,” for there never was such an abuser of “poetic diction” (to

be a poet) as Gray was. Yet undoubtedly the Essay is not satisfactory;

it has not merely, as the _Collins_ has, blindness, but, what the

_Collins_ has not, that obvious _denigration_, that determination to

pick holes, which always vitiates a critique, no matter what learning

and genius be bestowed on it. And the probable reasons of this are

interesting. It has been said that they were possibly personal in part.

We know that Gray spoke rudely of Johnson; and there were many reasons

why Johnson might rather despise Gray, though he certainly should not

have called him “dull.”

-----

Footnote 639:

It must be remembered that this word had no unfavourable connotation

with Johnson. It meant intelligent and scholarly interest.

-----

On the whole, however, I have little doubt—and it is this which gives

the essay its real interest for me—that one main reason of Johnson’s

antipathy to Gray’s poetry was the same as that for which we like it. He

suspected, if he did not fully perceive, the romantic snake in Gray’s

classically waving grass. And he had on his own grounds good reason for

suspecting it. Gray might use Greek and Latin tags almost extravagantly.

But he sedulously eschewed the couplet; and, while preferring lyric, he

chose lyrical forms which, though Johnson was too much of a scholar to

dare to call them irregular, violated his own theories of the prompt and

orderly recurrence of rhyme, and the duty of maintaining a length of

line as even as possible. The sense of nature, the love of the despised

“prospect,” was everywhere; even the forbidden “streak of the tulip”

might be detected. And, lastly, Gray had too obvious leanings to classes

of subject and literature which lay outside of the consecrated

range—early English and French, Welsh, Norse, and the like. It is no

real evidence of critical incapacity, but of something quite the

reverse, that Johnson should have disliked Gray. He spied the great

Romantic beard under the Pindaric and Horatian muffler—and he did not

like it.

On the whole, it may be safely said that, however widely a man may

differ from Johnson’s critical theory, he will, provided that he

possesses some real tincture of the critical spirit himself, think more

and more highly of the _Lives of the Poets_ the more he reads them, and

the more he compares them with the greater classics of critical

literature. [Sidenote: _The critical greatness of the_ Lives _and of

Johnson_.] As a book, they have not missed their due meed of praise; as

a critical book, one may think that they have. The peculiarity of their

position as a body of direct critical appraisement of the poetical work

of England for a long period should escape no one. But the discussion of

them, which possesses, and is long likely to possess, prerogative

authority as coming from one who was both himself a master of the craft

and a master of English, admirable and delightful as it is and always

will be, is not, critically speaking, quite satisfactory. Mr Arnold

speaks of the Six Lives which he selected in very high terms: but he

rather pooh-poohs the others, and, even in regard to the chosen Six, he

puts upon himself—and in his amiable, but for all that exceedingly

peremptory, way, insists in putting on his readers—a huge pair of

blinkers. We are to regard the late seventeenth and the whole of the

eighteenth century as an Age of Prose: and we are to regard Johnson,

whether he was speaking of the poets of this age or of others, as the

spokesman of an age of prose. Far be it from me to deny that there is an

element of truth in this: but it is not the whole truth, and the critic

must strive, though he may not boast, to “find the whole.”

The whole truth, as it seems to me, about Johnson is that he was very

much more than the critic of an age of prose, though he was not (who has

been? even Longinus? even Coleridge?)

“The King who ruled, as he thought fit,

The universal monarchy of wit”

as regards poetic criticism. He saw far beyond prose, as in those few

words of the concluding and reconciling eulogy of Gray which have been

quoted above. It is poetry and not prose which has the gift of putting

new things so that the man who reads them ingenuously thinks that they

are merely a neat statement of what he has always thought. And Johnson

was far more than merely a critic of the eighteenth-century Neo-Classic

theory, though he was this. A most noteworthy passage in the _Rambler_

(No. 156), which I have purposely kept for comment in this place, though

it is delivered on the wrong side, shows us, as the great critics always

do show us, what a range of sight the writer had. In this he expresses a

doubt whether we ought “to judge genius merely by the event,” and,

applying this to Shakespeare, takes the odd, but for an

eighteenth-century critic most tell-tale and interesting, line that if

genius succeeds by means which are wrong according to rule, we may think

higher of the genius but less highly of the work. It is hardly necessary

to point out that this is, though in no way a discreditable, a

transparent evasion of the difficulty which is pressing on the defenders

of the Rules. “Show me,” one may without irreverence retort, “thy genius

without thy works; and I will show thee my genius by my works.” If

Shakespeare shows genius in neglecting the Rules, the inexorable voice

of Logic, greater than Fortune, greater than all other things save Fate,

will point out that the Rules are evidently not necessary, and, with

something like the Lucretian _Te sequar_, will add, “Then for what _are_

they necessary?” But Johnson’s power is only a little soured and not at

all quenched by this. He has seen what others refused—perhaps were

unable—to see, and what some flatly denied,—that a process of literary

judgment “by the event” is possible, and that its verdicts, in some

respects at any rate, cannot be challenged or reversed. These great

critical _aperçus_, though sometimes delivered half unwillingly or on

the wrong side, establish Johnson’s claim to a place not often to be

given to critics; but they do not establish it more certainly than his

surveys of his actual subjects. It was an unfortunate consequence of Mr

Arnold’s generous impatience of all but “the chief and principal

things,” and of his curious dislike to literary history as such, that he

should have swept away the minor Lives. One may not care for Stepney or

Yalden, Duke or King, much more, or at all more, than he did. But with a

really great member of the craft his admissions and omissions, his

paradoxes, his extravagances, his very mistakes pure and simple, are all

critically edifying. How does he apply his own critical theory? is what

we must ask: and, with Johnson, I think we shall never ask it in vain.

His idea of English poetry was the application to certain classes of

subjects, not rigidly limited to, but mainly arranged by, the canons of

the classical writers—of what seemed to him and his generation the

supreme form of English language and metre, brought in by Mr Waller and

perfected by Mr Pope, yet not so as to exclude from admiration the

_Allegro_ of Milton and the _Elegy_ of Gray. We may trace his

applications of this, if we have a real love of literature and a real

sense of criticism, nearly as profitably and pleasantly in relation to

John Pomfret as in relation to Alexander Pope. We may trace his failures

(as we are pleased, quite rightly in a way, to call them), the failures

arising from the inadequacy, not of his genius, but of his scheme, not

less agreeably in relation to Dyer than in relation to Dryden. We are

not less informed by his passing the _Castle of Indolence_ almost _sub

silentio_ than we are by that at first sight astounding criticism of

_Lycidas_. This Cæsar never does wrong but with just cause—to use the

phrase which was too much for the equanimity or the intelligence of his

great namesake Ben, in the work of one whom both admired yet could not

quite stomach.

Now, this it is which makes the greatness of a critic. That Johnson

might have been greater still at other times need not necessarily be

denied; though it is at least open to doubt whether any other time would

have suited his whole disposition better. But, as he is, he is great.

The critics who deserve that name are not those who, like, for instance,

Christopher North and Mr Ruskin, are at the mercy of different kinds of

caprice—with whom you must be always on the _qui vive_ to be certain

what particular watchword they have adopted, what special side they are

taking. It may even be doubted whether such a critic as Lamb, though

infinitely delightful, is exactly “great” because of the singular gaps

and arbitrariness of his likes and dislikes. Nay, Hazlitt, one of the

greatest critics of the world on the whole, goes near to forfeit his

right to the title by the occasional outbursts of almost insane

prejudice that cloud his vision. Johnson is quite as prejudiced; but his

prejudice is not in the least insane. His critical calculus is perfectly

sound on its own postulates and axioms; and you have only to apply

checks and correctives (which are easily ascertained, and kept ready) to

adjust it to absolute critical truth. And, what is more, he has not

merely flourished and vapoured critical abstractions, but has left us a

solid reasoned body of critical judgment; he has not judged literature

in the exhausted receiver of mere art, and yet has never neglected the

artistic criterion; he has kept in constant touch with life, and yet has

never descended to mere gossip. We may freely disagree with his

judgments, but we can never justly disable his judgment; and this is the

real criterion of a great critic.

Johnson is so much the eighteenth-century orthodox critic in

quintessence (though, as I have tried to show, in transcendence also)

that he will dispense us from saying very much more about the rank and

file, the ordinary or inferior examples, of the kind. [Sidenote: _Minor

Criticism: Periodical and other._] If we were able to devote this Book,

or even this volume, to the subject of the present chapter, there would

be no lack of material. Critical exercitations of a kind formed now, of

course, a regular part of the work of literature, and a very large part

of its hack-work. The _Gentleman’s Magazine_ devoted much attention to

the subject; and for a great part of the century two regular _Reviews_,

the _Critical_ and the _Monthly_,[640] were recognised organs of

literary censorship, and employed some really eminent hands, notably

Smollett and Goldsmith. The periodicals which, now in single spies, now

(about the middle of the century) in battalions, endeavoured to renew

the success of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, were critical by kind; and

dozens, scores, hundreds probably, of separate critical publications,

large and small, issued from the press.[641] But, with the rarest

exceptions, they must take the _non_-benefit of the warning which was

laid down in the Preface to the First Volume. Something we must say of

Goldsmith; then we may take two contrasted examples, Knox and Scott of

Amwell, of the critic in Johnson’s last days who inclined undoubtingly

to the classical, and of the critic of the same time who had qualms and

stirrings of Romanticism, but was hardly yet a heretic. And then,

reserving summary, we may close the record.

-----

Footnote 640:

Johnson’s relative estimates of the two (_Boswell_, Globe ed., pp.

186, 364) are well known; as is his apology for the _Critical_

Reviewers’ habit [he had been one himself] of not reading the books

through, as the “duller” _Monthly_ fellows were glad to do. Later

generations have perhaps contrived to be dull _and_ not to read.

Footnote 641:

For instance, here is one which I have hunted for years—_Essay on the

New Species of Writing founded by Fielding, with a word or two on

Modern Criticism_ (London? 1751). The better-known _Canons of

Criticism_ of Thomas Edwards (4th ed., London, 1750) may serve as a

specimen of another kind. It is an attack on Warburton’s

_Shakespeare_, uncommonly shrewd in all senses of the word, but, as

Johnson (_Boswell_, Globe ed., p. 87 note) justly enough said, of the

gad-fly kind mainly. A curious little book, which I do not remember to

have seen cited anywhere, is the _Essay upon Poetry and Painting_ of

Charles Lamotte (Du_d_lin (_sic_), 1742). La Motte, who was an F.S.A.,

a D.D., and chaplain to the Duke of Montagu, and who has the still

rarer honour of not appearing in the _Dict. Nat. Biog._, never, I

think, refers to his namesake, but quotes Voltaire and Du Bos

frequently. He is very anxious for “propriety” in all senses, and

seems a little more interested in Painting than in Poetry. As to the

latter, he is a good example of the devouring appetite for sense and

fact which had seized on the critics of this time (save a few rebels)

throughout Europe. The improbabilities of Tasso and of “Camoenus, the

Homer and Virgil of the Portuguese,” afflict him more, because they

amuse him less, than they do in Voltaire’s own case, and to any

liberty with real or supposed history he is simply Rhadamanthine.

“That which jars with probability—that which shocks Sense and

Reason—can never be excused in Poetry.” Mrs Barbauld and _The Ancient

Mariner_ sixty years before date!

-----

Of Goldsmith as a critic little need be said, though his pen was not

much less prolific in this than in other departments. But the angel is

too often absent, and Poor Poll distressingly in evidence. [Sidenote:

_Goldsmith._] The _Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in

Europe_ is simply “prodigious.” It is admirably written—Macaulay owes

something to its style, which he only hardened and brazened. The author

apes the fashionable philosophastering of the time, and throws in cheap

sciolism like the prince of journalists that he was. It is almost always

interesting; it is, where it touches life, not literature, sometimes

excellently acute; but there is scarcely a critical dictum in it which

is other than ridiculous. So in the _Citizen of the World_ the Author’s

Club is of course delightful; but why should a sneer at Drayton have

been put in the mouth of Lien Chi Altangi? And the miscellaneous Essays,

including the _Bee_, which contain so much of Goldsmith’s best work, are

perhaps the best evidences of his nullity here. When one thinks how

little it would cost anybody of Goldsmith’s genius (to find such an one

I confess would cost more) to write a literary parallel to the

magnificent _Reverie_, which would be even finer, it is enough to draw

iron tears down the critic’s cheek. Goldsmith on Taste, Poetry,

Metaphor, &c.,[642] is still the Goldsmith of the _Inquiry_. His

“Account of the Augustan Age,”[643] though much better, and (unless I

mistake) resorted to by some recent critics as a source of criticism

different from that mostly prevalent in the nineteenth century, has all

the limitations of its own period. And the Essay on Versification,[644]

though it contains expressions which, taken by themselves, might seem to

show that Goldsmith had actually emancipated himself from the tyranny of

the fixed number of syllables, contains others totally irreconcilable

with these, supports English hexameters and sapphics,[645] and as a

whole forces on us once more the reluctant belief that he simply had no

clear ideas, no accurate knowledge, on the subject.

-----

Footnote 642:

Essays, xii.-xvii.

Footnote 643:

_The Bee_, viii.

Footnote 644:

Essay xviii.

Footnote 645:

It is perhaps only fair to hope that this fancy, as later with Southey

and others, was a blind motion for freedom. Yet Goldsmith commits

himself to the hemistich theory of decasyllables.

-----

Vicesimus Knox[646] is a useful figure in this critical Transition

Period. [Sidenote: _Vicesimus Knox._] A scholar and a schoolmaster, he

had some of the advantages of the first state and some of the defects of

the less gracious second, accentuated in both cases by the dying

influences of a “classical” tradition which had not the slightest idea

that it was moribund. He carries his admiration for Pope to such a point

as to assure us somewhere that Pope was a man of exemplary piety and

goodness, while Gay was “uncontaminated with the vices of the world,”

which is really more than somewhat blind, and more than a little kind,

even if we admit that it is wrong to call Pope a bad man, and that Gay

had only tolerable vices. He thinks, in his Fourteenth Essay on the

“Fluctuations of Taste,” that the Augustans “arrived at that standard of

perfection which,” &c.; that the imitators of Ariosto, Spenser, and the

smaller poems of Milton are “pleasingly uncouth” [compare Scott,

_infra_, on the metrical renaissance of Dyer], depreciates Gray, and

dismisses the Elegy as “a confused heap of splendid ideas”; is certain

that Milton’s sonnets “bear no mark of his genius,” and in discussing

the versions of “the sensible[647] Sappho” decides that Catullus is much

inferior to—Philips! “The Old English Poets [Essay Thirty-Nine] are

deservedly forgotten.” Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve “seem to

have thought that rhyme was poetry, and even this constituent they

applied with extreme negligence”—the one charge which is unfair against

even Occleve, and which, in reference to Chaucer, is proof of utter

ignorance. Patriotism probably made him more favourable to Dunbar,

Douglas, and Lyndsay, though he groans over the necessity of a glossary

in their case also. In fact, Knox is but a Johnson without the genius.

Let it, however, be counted to him for righteousness that he defended

classical education, including verse-writing, against its enemies, who

even then imagined vain things.

-----

Footnote 646:

_Essays, Moral and Literary_, 2nd ed., London, 1774, 8vo.

Footnote 647:

This is perhaps the most delightful instance in (English) existence of

the change which has come over the meaning of the word.

-----

John Scott of Amwell, once praised by good wits, now much forgotten, was

a very respectable critic and a poet of “glimmerings.” [Sidenote: _Scott

of Amwell._] In fact, I am not at all sure that he does not deserve to

be promoted and postponed to the next volume, as a representative of the

rising, not the falling, tide. His Essays on poetry[648] exhibit in a

most interesting way the “know-not-what-to-think-of-it” state of public

opinion about the later years of Johnson. He defends _Lycidas_ against

the Dictator; yet he finds fault with the “daystar” for acting both as a

person and an orb of radiance, and admits the “incorrectness” of the

poem, without giving us a hint of the nature or authority of

“correctness.” He boldly attacks the consecrated _Cooper’s Hill_, and

sets the rival eminence of Grongar against it, pronouncing Dyer “a

sublime but strangely neglected poet,” yet picking very niggling holes

in this poet himself. He often anticipates, and oftener seems to be

going to anticipate, Wordsworth, who no doubt owed him a good deal; yet

he thinks Pope’s famous epigram on Wit “the most concise and just

definition of Poetry.” In _Grongar Hill_ itself he thinks the “admixture

of metre [its second, certainly, if not its first great charm] rather

displeasing to a nice ear”; and though he defends Gray against Knox, he

is altogether yea-nay about _Windsor Forest_, and attacks Thomson’s

personifications, without remembering that Gray is at least an equal

sinner, and without giving the author of the _Seasons_, and still more

of the _Castle of Indolence_, any just compensation for his enthusiasm

of nature. In fact, Scott is a man walking in twilight, who actually

sees the line of dawn, but dares not step out into it.

-----

Footnote 648:

_Critical Essays_, London, 1785, 8vo.

-----

CHAPTER II.

THE CONTEMPORARIES OF VOLTAIRE.

CLOSE CONNECTION OF FRENCH SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CRITICISM:

FONTENELLE—EXCEPTIONAL CHARACTER OF HIS CRITICISM—HIS ATTITUDE TO

THE “ANCIENT AND MODERN” QUARREL—THE ‘DIALOGUES DES MORTS’—OTHER

CRITICAL WORK—LA MOTTE—HIS “UNITY OF INTEREST”—ROLLIN—BRUMOY—RÉMOND

DE SAINT-MARD—L. RACINE—DU BOS—STIMULATING BUT DESULTORY CHARACTER

OF HIS ‘RÉFLEXIONS’—MONTESQUIEU—VOLTAIRE: DISAPPOINTMENT OF HIS

CRITICISM—EXAMPLES OF IT—CAUSES OF HIS FAILURE—OTHERS: BUFFON—“STYLE

AND THE MAN”—VAUVENARGUES—BATTEUX—HIS ADJUSTMENT OF RULES AND

TASTE—HIS INCOMPLETENESS—MARMONTEL—ODDITIES AND QUALITIES OF HIS

CRITICISM—OTHERS: THOMAS, SUARD, ETC.—LA HARPE—HIS ‘COURS DE

LITTÉRATURE’—HIS CRITICAL POSITION AS “ULTIMUS SUORUM”—THE ACADEMIC

ESSAY—RIVAROL.

The later seventeenth and at least the earlier eighteenth century in

France are perhaps more closely connected than any other literary

periods, if, indeed, they are not practically one, like the two halves

of our own so-called “Elizabethan” time. [Sidenote: _Close connection of

French seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism. Fontenelle._] And

this connection we can duly demonstrate, as far as criticism is

concerned. Boileau himself outlived the junction of the centuries by

more than a decade: and the birth of Voltaire preceded it by more than a

lustrum. The Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns—a very poor thing

certainly—revived in the new century, as if on purpose to show the

connection with the old. And, lastly, the prolonged life of one

remarkable and representative critic was almost equally distributed over

the two. Fontenelle is one of the most interesting, if not exactly one

of the most important, figures in our whole long gallery; and if he has

never yet held quite his proper place in literary history, this is due

to the facts, first, that he was a critic more than he was anything

else; and, secondly, that he forgot the great “Thou shalt not” which

Criticism lays upon her sons, and would lay (if she had any) on her

daughters. No critic is in the least bound to produce good work, or any

work, of the constructive kind: but he is bound not to produce that

which is not good. The author of _Aspar_ and the _Lettres du Chevalier

d’Her_ ... forgot this, and paid the penalty.[649]

Yet his attractions are so great that few people who have paid him much

attention have failed to be smitten with them. M. Rigault,[650] who does

not approve of him generally, is a conspicuous example of this.

[Sidenote: _Exceptional character of his criticism._] But what we must

look to is what he has actually written himself. His utterances are

almost too tempting. In such a book as this the expatiation which they

invite must be perforce denied them. Yet one may break proportion a

little in order to do something like justice to a critic whose like, for

suggestiveness, delicacy, and range, we shall hardly meet in the French

eighteenth century. It is indeed curious that of the three men of his

own earliest years from whom Voltaire inherits—Saint-Evremond, Hamilton,

and Fontenelle—every one should have surpassed him in the finer traits,

while all fall short of him in force and, as he himself said, _diable au

corps_. Saint-Evremond we have dealt with; Hamilton[651] does not come

into our story. Fontenelle is for the moment ours.

-----

Footnote 649:

The standard edition of Fontenelle (8 vols., Paris, 1790) is an

agreeable book, excellent in print and paper.

Footnote 650:

_Op. cit. sup._, especially Part I., chaps, ix. and xi.

Footnote 651:

Though there is a good deal of the critical spirit in him, too, and

the famous advice to “Bélier, mon ami” has fellows of critical

application.

-----

It must be confessed that he is an elusive if an agreeable possession.

From wisdom, from worldly-wisdom, from whim, or from what not, he seems

to have wished to be an enigma; and—to borrow one of Scott’s great

sentences—“the wish of his heart was granted to his loss, and the hope

of his pride has destroyed him”—at least has certainly made him rank

lower than he would otherwise have ranked. However _délié_—to use a word

of his own language for which we have no single English

equivalent—however watchful, mercurial, sensitive the reader’s spirit

may be, he will, over and over again in Fontenelle, meet passages where

he cannot be sure whether his author is writing merely with tongue in

cheek, or applying an all-dissolving irony, hardly inferior to Swift’s

in power, and almost superior in quietness and subtlety. Moreover, his

critical position is a very peculiar one, and constantly liable to be

misunderstood—if, indeed, it be not safer to say that it is almost

always difficult to apprehend with any certainty of escaping misprision.

The good folk who magisterially rebuke Dryden as to _Gorboduc_, because

he made mistakes about the form of the verse and the sex of the

person—even those (one regrets to say this includes M. Rigault himself)

who are shocked at that great critic’s laudatory citations of, and

allusions to, Le Bossu—need never hope to understand Fontenelle.

Few things (except that he was the author of that _Plurality of Worlds_

which happily does not concern us) are better known concerning him than

that he was a champion of the Moderns. [Sidenote: _His attitude to the

“Ancient and Modern” Quarrel._] Yet, when we come to examine his

numerous and elusive writings on the subject, the one principle of his

that does emerge is a principle which, if it chastises the Ancients with

whips, chastises the Moderns with scorpions. A man writing, as M.

Rigault wrote, in 1856, would have been a wonderful person if he had not

been misled by the great idol of Progress. But Fontenelle was at least

as far from the delusion as he was from the date. His argument is just

the contrary—that as human wisdoms and human follies, human powers and

human weaknesses, are always the same, it is absurd to suppose that any

one period can have general and intrinsic superiority over any other.

[Sidenote: _The_ Dialogues des Morts.]