THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.
CHAPTER I.
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES.
Wordsworth and Coleridge 200
The former’s Prefaces 201
That to _Lyrical Ballads_, 1800 202
Its history 202
The argument against poetic diction, and even
against metre 203
The appendix: Poetic Diction again 204
The Minor Critical Papers 204
Coleridge’s examination of Wordsworth’s views 205
His critical qualifications 206
Unusual integrity of his critique 207
Analysis of it 207
The “suspension of disbelief” 208
Attitude to metre 208
Excursus on Shakespeare’s _Poems_ 210
Challenges Wordsworth on “real” and “rustic” life 210
“Prose” diction and metre again 211
Condemnation in form of Wordsworth’s theory 212
The _Argumentum ad Gulielmum_ 212
The study of his poetry 213
High merits of the examination 213
Wordsworth a rebel to Longinus and Dante 214
The _Preface_ compared more specially with the _De
Vulgari_ 215
And Dante’s practice 215
With Wordsworth’s 216
The comparison fatal to Wordsworth as a critic 217
Other critical places in Coleridge 218
The rest of the _Biographia_ 218
_The Friend_ 219
_Aids to Reflection_, &c. 220
The _Lectures on Shakespeare_, &c. 220
Their chaotic character 221
And preciousness 222
Some noteworthy things in them: general 223
And particular 224
Coleridge on other dramatists 224
The _Table Talk_ 224
The _Miscellanies_ 225
The Lecture _On Style_ 226
The _Anima Poetæ_ 227
The _Letters_ 229
The Coleridgean position and quality 230
He introduces once for all the criterion of
Imagination, realising and disrealising 231
The “Companions” 232
Southey 233
General characteristics of his Criticism 234
Reviews 235
_The Doctor_ 235
Altogether somewhat _impar sibi_ 236
Lamb 237
His “occultism” 238
And alleged inconstancy 238
The early _Letters_ 239
The _Specimens_ 240
The Garrick Play Notes 241
Miscellaneous Essays 242
_Elia_ 242
The later _Letters_ 243
Uniqueness of Lamb’s critical style 244
And thought 245
Leigh Hunt: his somewhat inferior position 246
Reasons for it 246
His attitude to Dante 247
Examples from _Imagination and Fancy_ 248
Hazlitt 251
Method of dealing with him 251
His surface and occasional faults: Imperfect
knowledge and method 252
Extra-literary prejudice 253
His radical and usual excellence 254
_The English Poets_ 255
The _Comic Writers_ 256
_The Age of Elizabeth_ 257
_Characters of Shakespeare_ 258
_The Plain Speaker_ 259
_The Round Table_, &c. 261
_The Spirit of the Age_ 262
_Sketches and Essays_ 263
_Winterslow_ 263
Hazlitt’s critical virtue 263
In set pieces 264
And universally 265
Blake 266
His critical position and dicta 267
The “Notes on Reynolds” 268
And Wordsworth 268
Commanding position of these 268
Sir Walter Scott commonly undervalued as a critic 270
Injustice of this 271
Campbell: his _Lectures on Poetry_ 272
His _Specimens_ 272
Shelley: his _Defence of Poetry_ 274
Landor 276
His lack of judicial quality 276
In regular Criticism 276
The _Conversations_ 277
_Loculus Aureolus_ 278
But again disappointing 278
The revival of the Pope quarrels 279
Bowles 279
Byron 281
The _Letter to Murray_, &c. 281
Others: Isaac Disraeli 282
Sir Egerton Brydges 283
_The Retrospective Review_ 283
The _Baviad_ and _Anti-Jacobin_ 286
With Wolcot and Mathias 287
The influence of the new _Reviews_, &c. 288
Jeffrey 289
His loss of place and its cause 289
His inconsistency 290
His criticism on Madame de Staël 291
Its lesson 293
Hallam 293
His achievement 294
Its merits 294
And defects 295
In general distribution and treatment 295
In some particular instances 296
His central weakness 297
And the value left by it 298
CHAPTER II.
MIL-HUIT-CENT-TRENTE.
The _Globe_ 299
Charles de Rémusat, Vitet, J. J. Ampère 300
Sainte-Beuve: his topography 301
The earlier articles 302
_Portraits Littéraires_ and _Portraits de Femmes_ 304
The _Portraits Contemporains_ 306
He “arrives” 309
_Port-Royal_ 310
Its literary episodes 311
On Racine 312
_Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire_ 313
Faults found with it 314
Its extraordinary merits 315
And final _dicta_ 316
The _Causeries_ at last 317
Their length, &c. 318
Bricks of the house 319
His occasional polemic 322
The _Nouveaux Lundis_ 324
The conclusion of this matter 326
Michelet and Quinet 329
Hugo 330
_William Shakespeare_ 331
_Littérature et Philosophie_ 331
The _Cromwell_ Preface 332
And that to the _Orientales_ 333
Capital position of this latter 334
The “_work_” 335
Nisard: his _Ægri Somnia_ 335
His _Essais sur le Romantisme_ 336
Their _culpa maxima_ 338
Gautier 339
His theory—“Art for Art’s sake,” &c. 340
His practice—_Les Grotesques_ 341
_Histoire du Romantisme_, &c. 341
Ubiquity of felicity in his criticism 342
Saint-Marc Girardin 343
Planche 344
Weight of his criticism 344
Magnin 347
Mérimée 348
CHAPTER III.
GOETHE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Hamann 352
Lichtenberg 354
Herder 355
His drawbacks of tediousness 355
Pedagogy 355
And _meteorosophia_ 356
But great merits 356
The _Fragmente_ 356
The _Kritische Walder_ 357
The _Ursachen des Gesunknen Geschmacks_ 357
The _Ideen_, &c. 358
Age-, Country-, and Race-, Criticism 358
Specimens and Remarks 359
Wieland 360
Goethe 361
The _Hamlet_ criticism, &c. 361
The _Sprüche in Prosa_ 362
The Sterne passages 363
Reviews and Notices 365
The _Conversations_ 366
Some more general things: Goethe on Scott and
Byron 372
On the historic and comparative estimate of
literature 372
Summing up: the merits of Goethe’s criticism 373
Its drawbacks: too much of his age 374
Too much a utilitarian of Culture 375
Unduly neglectful of literature as literature 376
Schiller 377
His Æsthetic Discourses 378
The Bürger review 378
The _Xenien_ 380
The Correspondence with Goethe 381
The _Naïve and Sentimental Poetry_ 383
Others: Bürger 384
Richter 385
The _Vorschule der Æsthetik_ 385
The so-called “Romantic School” 386
Novalis 387
The _Heinrich_ 387
The earlier _Fragments_ 388
The later 389
His critical magic 390
Tieck 390
The Schlegels 391
Their general position and drift 392
The _Characteristiken_ 393
A. W.: the _Kritische Schriften_ of 1828 394
On Voss 394
On Bürger 395
The _Urtheile_, &c. 396
The _Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und
Literatur_ 396
Their initial and other merit 397
The Schlegelian position 398
The _Vorlesungen über Schöne Literatur und Kunst_ 399
Illustrated still more by Friedrich 401
Uhland 402
Schubarth 403
Solger 404
Periodicals, Histories, &c. 404
CHAPTER IV.
THE CHANGE IN THE OTHER NATIONS 406
INTERCHAPTER VIII.
(WITH AN EXCURSUS ON PERIODICAL CRITICISM.) 408
BOOK IX.
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.
CHAPTER I.
THE SUCCESSORS OF SAINTE-BEUVE.
_Ordonnance_ of this chapter 431
Philarète Chasles 432
Barbey d’Aurévilly 433
On Hugo 434
On others 435
Strong redeeming points in him 436
Doudan 436
Interest of his general attitude 437
And particular utterances 437
Renan 439
Taine 440
His _culpa_ 440
His miscellaneous critical work 441
His _Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise_ 442
Its shortcomings 443
Instances of them 443
Moutégut: his peculiarities 444
Delicacy and range of his work 446
Scherer: peculiar _moral_ character of his
criticism 447
Its consequent limitations 448
The solid merits accompanying them 448
Sainte-Beuve + Gautier 450
Banville 450
Saint-Victor 451
Baudelaire 452
Crépet’s _Les Poètes Français_ 453
Flaubert: the “Single Word” 454
“Naturalism” 454
Zola 455
_Le Roman Experimental_ 456
Examples of his criticism 456
The reasons of his critical incompetency 458
“Les Deux Goncourt” 458
“Scientific criticism”: Hennequin 459
“Comparative Literature”: Texte 462
Academic Criticism: Gaston Paris 464
Caro, Taillandier, &c. 465
The “Light Horsemen”: Janin 466
Pontmartin 467
Veuillot 468
Not so black as, &c. 469
The present 469
CHAPTER II.
BETWEEN COLERIDGE AND ARNOLD.
The English Critics of 1830-60 472
Wilson 472
Strange medley of his criticism 473
The _Homer_ and the other larger critical 473
collections
The _Spenser_ 474
The _Specimens of British Critics_ 475
_Dies Boreales_ 476
Faults in all 476
And in the republished work 477
De Quincey: his anomalies 478
And perversities as a critic 479
In regard to all literatures 480
Their causes 480
The _Rhetoric_ and the _Style_ 481
His compensations 482
Lockhart 483
Difficulty of appraising his criticism 483
The _Tennyson_ review 483
On Coleridge, Burns, Scott, and Hook 484
His general critical character 485
Hartley Coleridge 485
Forlorn condition of his criticism 485
Its quality 486
Defects 486
And examples 487
Maginn 487
His parody-criticisms 488
And more serious efforts 488
Macaulay 490
His exceptional competence in some ways 490
The early articles 490
His drawbacks 490
The practical choking of the good seed 491
His literary surveys in the _Letters_ 492
His confession 493
The _Essays_ 493
Similar dwindling in Carlyle 495
The earlier _Essays_ 497
The later 497
The attitude of the _Latter-day Pamphlets_ 498
The conclusion of this matter 499
Thackeray 500
His one critical weakness 500
And excellence 501
_Blackwood_ in 1849 on Tennyson 502
George Brimley 504
His Essay on Tennyson 505
His other work 507
His intrinsic and chronological importance 508
“Gyas and Cloanthus” 508
Milman, Croker, Hayward 509
Sydney Smith, Senior, Helps 509
Elwin, Lancaster, Hannay 510
Dallas 511
The _Poetics_ 511
_The Gay Science_ 512
Others: J. S. Mill 514
CHAPTER III.
ENGLISH CRITICISM—1860-1900.
Matthew Arnold: one of the greater critics 515
His position defined early 516
The _Preface_ of 1853 517
Analysis of it 517
And interim summary of its gist 520
Contrast with Dryden 520
Chair-work at Oxford, and contributions to
periodicals 521
_On Translating Homer_ 522
The “grand style” 522
Discussion of it 523
The Study of Celtic Literature 526
Its assumptions 527
The _Essays_: their case for Criticism 527
Their examples thereof 529
The latest work 530
The Introduction to Ward’s _English Poets_ 531
“Criticism of Life” 531
Poetic Subject or Poetic Moment 532
Arnold’s accomplishment and position as a critic 534
The Carlylians 537
Kingsley 538
Froude 539
Mr Buskin 539
G. H. Lewes 540
His _Principles of Success in Literature_ 540
His _Inner Life of Art_ 542
Bagehot 542
R. H. Hutton 543
His evasions of literary criticism 544
Pater 544
His frank Hedonism 545
His _polytechny_ and his style 545
His formulation of the new critical attitude 546
_The Renaissance_ 546
Objections to its process 547
Importance of _Marius the Epicurean_ 547
_Appreciations_ and the “_Guardian_” Essays 548
Universality of his method 551
Mr J. A. Symonds 551
Thomson (“B. V.”) 552
William Minto 553
His books on English Prose and Poetry 554
H. D. Traill 554
His critical strength 555
On Sterne and Coleridge 555
_Essays on Fiction_ 556
“The Future of Humour” 556
Others: Mansel, Venables, Stephen, Lord Houghton,
Pattison, Church, &c. 557
Patmore 558
Mr Edmund Gurney 559
_The Power of Sound_ 559
_Tertium Quid_ 560
CHAPTER IV.
LATER GERMAN CRITICISM.
Heine: deceptiveness of his criticism 563
In the _Romantische Schule_, and elsewhere 563
The qualities and delights of it 564
Schopenhauer 566
Vividness and originality of his critical
observation 567
_Die Welt als Wille_, &c. 568
Grillparzer 569
His motto in criticism 569
His results in aphorism 570
And in individual judgment 571
A critic of limitations: but a critic 571
Carrière: his _Æsthetik_ 573
Later German Shakespeare-critics 575
Gervinus: his _German Poetry_ 575
On Bürger 576
The Shakespeare-heretics: Rümelin 577
Freytag 578
Hillebrand and cosmopolitan criticism 579
Nietzsche 581
_Zarathustra_, the _Birth of Tragedy_, and _Der
Fall Wagner_ 582
_Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_ 582
_La Gaya Scienza_ 583
_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, &c. 584
_Götzen-Dämmerung_ 585
His general critical position 586
CHAPTER V.
REVIVALS AND COMMENCEMENTS.
Limitations of this chapter 587
Spain 588
Italy 588
De Sanctis 589
Character of his work 590
Switzerland 591
Vinet 592
Sainte-Beuve on him 592
His criticism of Chateaubriand and Hugo 593
His general quality 593
Amiel: great interest of his critical impressions 594
Examples thereof 595
The pity of it 597
CONCLUSION.
§ I. THE PRESENT STATE OF CRITICISM 603
§ II. THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER 610
APPENDIX I.
THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
The holders 615
Eighteenth-century minors 616
Lowth 617
Hurdis 617
The rally: Copleston 618
Conybeare 620
Milman 620
Keble 621
The _Occasional_ [English] Papers 622
The _Prælections_ 622
Garbett 625
Claughton 626
Doyle 626
Shairp 627
Palgrave 628
_Salutantur vivi_ 629
APPENDIX II.
AMERICAN CRITICISM.
An attempt in outline only 630
Its difficulties 631
The early stages 631
The origins and pioneers 632
Ticknor 632
Longfellow 633
Emerson 633
Poe 634
Lowell: his general position 636
_Among my Books_ 637
_My Study Windows_ 637
_Essays on the English Poets_ 638
Last Essays 639
O. W. Holmes 639
The whole duty of critics stated by him _in alia
materia_ 639
Whitman and the “Democratic” ideal 640
Margaret Fuller 641
Ripley 642
Whipple 642
Lanier 643
INDEX 647
BOOK VII
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM
--------------
“_May there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to
the views of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not the
philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and
contempt of it?_”—HURD.
“_Quelquefois un besoin de philosopher gâte tout._”—JOUBERT.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY AND RETROSPECTIVE.
SCOPE OF THE VOLUME—THE TERM MODERN—THE ORIGINS—NEED OF CAUTION HERE—
CASE OF BUTLER ON RYMER, DENHAM—AND BENLOWES—OF ADDISON AND OTHERS—
OF LA BRUYÈRE AND “TOUT EST DIT”—OF FÉNELON AND GRAVINA—OF DRYDEN
AND FONTENELLE—THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY.
[Sidenote: _Scope of the volume._]
The present volume takes the work of no more than one century, the
nineteenth, as a whole; but, according to our plan, casts back to the
eighteenth, and even earlier, in order to deal with those dissidents or
pioneers who then laid the foundation of the chief critical performances
of the nineteenth itself.
[Sidenote: _The term Modern._]
For this work—foundation and superstructure—there is no more convenient
and suitable appellation than “Modern,” used neither in the
complimentary and rather question-begging sense which has recently been
attached to it,[2] nor in the more slighting one of Shakespeare, but
with a merely accurate and chronological connotation. Some would call
this criticism “Romantic”; but that term, in addition to a certain
vagueness, has the drawbacks both of question-begging and of
provocation. There is no other that has the slightest claim to enter
into competition, though we may have in passing to refer to such
pretenders as “Æsthetic,” “Dogmatic,” “Scientific,” and what not.
The term “Modern” has, moreover,—so long as it is dissociated from any
such futile belittling of “Ancient” as was implied in its use during the
Quarrel,—the great advantage of keeping a secondary, but very convenient
and in no way objectionable, opposition to “Ancient” itself. We have
seen that, with much intelligent and judicious, there was more
unintelligent and corrupt, following of the ancients during the period
which we surveyed in the last volume: and that there was a still more
dangerous and hurtful tendency to disfranchise modern literature as an
equal source with ancient for the discovery of critical truths. Now, if
there is a point wholly to be counted for righteousness, to at least the
better part of the criticism which has prevailed for the last hundred
years, and was a militant force for at least fifty years earlier, it is
this taking into consideration of “Modern” literature, not to the
exclusion of “Ancient,” but on even terms with it. It is no doubt much
easier to say _nullo discrimine habebo_[3] than to carry it out,
especially as a man grows older. But it is the cardinal principle of
“Modern” criticism that the most modern of works is to be judged, not by
adjustment to anything else, but on its own merits—that the critic must
always behave as if the book he takes from its wrapper might be a new
_Hamlet_ or a new _Waverley_,—or something as good as either, but more
absolutely novel in kind than even _Waverley_,—however shrewdly he may
suspect that it is very unlikely to be any such thing.
[Sidenote: _The origins._]
The actual investigation of the last volume brought us down to (and in
La Harpe’s case a little beyond) the close of the eighteenth century
itself, and showed us the final stages of the Neo-Classic dynasty, which
still, in all European countries except Germany, reigned, and even
appeared to govern; but which, not merely in Germany but to some extent
also in England, was on the point of having the sceptre wrenched out of
its hands. We had traced this critical system from its construction or
reconstruction by the Italians of the sixteenth century onwards; we saw
its merits and its defects. And we saw likewise that, in the usual
general, gradual, incalculable way, opposition to it, conscious or
unconscious, began to grow up at different times and in different
places. This opposition was a plant of early but slow and fitful growth
in England, rather later but more vigorous and rapid in Germany; while
in the Southern countries it hardly grew at all, and in France was
cruelly attacked and kept down, if not exactly extirpated, by the
weeding-hook of authority.
[Sidenote: _Need of caution here._]
But it does not follow that we can put the finger on this and that
person as having “begun” the new movement. Such an opinion is always
tempting to not too judicious inquirers, and there has been no lack of
books on _Le Romantisme des Classiques_ and the like. The fact, of
course, simply is that everything human exists essentially or
potentially in the men of every time; and that you may not only find
books in the running brooks but (what appears at first more
contradictory) dry stones in them: while, on the other hand, founts of
water habitually gush from the midst of the driest rock. Indagation of
the kind is always treacherous, and has to be conducted with a great
deal of circumspection.
[Sidenote: _Case of Butler on Rymer, Denham,_]
It would be difficult to find an author who illustrates this danger and
treachery better than Butler, whom some may have been surprised not to
find in the last volume. The author of _Hudibras_ was born not long
after Milton, and nearly twenty years before Dryden, who outlived him by
the same space. His great poem did not give much room for critical
utterances in literature; but the _Genuine Remains_[4] are full of it in
separate places, both verse and prose. Take these singly, and you may
make Butler out to be, not merely a critic, but half a dozen critics. In
perhaps the best known of his minor pieces, the _Repartees between Cat
and Puss_, he satirises “Heroic” Plays, and is therefore clearly for
“the last age,” as also in the savage and admirable “On Critics who
Judge Modern Plays precisely by the Rules of the Ancients,” which has
been reasonably, or certainly, thought to be directed against Rymer’s
blasphemy of Beaumont and Fletcher, published two years before Butler’s
death. The satirist’s references and illustrations (as in that to “the
laws of good King Howel’s days”) are sometimes too Caroline to be
quotable; but the force and sweep of his protest is simply glorious. The
_Panegyric on Sir John Denham_ is chiefly personal; but if Butler had
been convinced that _Cooper’s Hill_ was the _ne plus ultra_ of English
poetry he could hardly have written it: and though the main victim of
“To a Bad Poet” has not been identified,[5] the lines—
“For so the rhyme be at the verse’s end,
No matter whither all the rest does tend”—
could scarcely have been written except against the new poetry. The
“Pindaric Ode on Modern Critics” is chiefly directed against the general
critical vice of snarling, and the passages on critics and poets in the
_Miscellaneous Thoughts_ follow suit. But if we had only the verse
_Remains_ we should be to some extent justified in taking Butler, if not
for a precursor of the new Romanticism, at any rate for a rather
strenuous defender of the old.
[Sidenote: _and Benlowes._]
But turn to the _Characters_. Most of these that deal with literature
are in the general vein which the average seventeenth-century
character-writer took from Theophrastus, though few put so much salt of
personal wit into this as Butler. In “A Small Poet” the earlier pages
might be aimed at almost anybody from Dryden himself (whom Butler, it is
said, did not love) down to Flecknoe. But there is only one name
mentioned in the piece; and that name, which is made the object of a
furious and direct attack, lightened by some of the brightest flashes of
Butler’s audacious and acrid humour, is the name of Edward Benlowes.[6]
Now, that Benlowes is a person _taillable et corvéable à merci et à
miséricorde_ by any critical oppressor, nobody who has read him can
deny. He is as extravagant as Crashaw without so much poetry, and as
Cleveland without so much cleverness. But he is a poet, and a
“metaphysical” poet (as Butler was himself in another way), and an
example, though a rather awful example, of that “poetic fury” which
makes Elizabethan poetry. Yet Butler is more savage with him than with
Denham.
The fact is that Butler’s criticism is merely the occasional
determination of a man of active genius and satiric temper to matters
literary. Absurdities strike him from whatever school they come; and he
lashes them unmercifully whensoever and whencesoever they present
themselves. But he has no general creed: he speaks merely to his brief
as public prosecutor of the ridiculous, and also as a staunch John Bull.
If he had been writing at the time when his _Remains_ were first
actually published, it is exceedingly probable that he would have
“horsed” Gray as pitilessly as he horses Benlowes; if he had been
writing sixty years later still, that he would have been as “savage and
Tartarly” to Keats and Shelley, or seventy years later, to Tennyson, as
the _Quarterly_ itself. This is not criticism: and we must look later
and more carefully before we discern any real revolution in literary
taste.
[Sidenote: _Of Addison and others._]
It is even very unsafe to attempt to discover much definite and
intentional precursorship in Addison, who was born sixty years after
Butler. There is no need to repeat what has been said of what seems to
me misconception as to his use of the word Imagination: nor is this the
point which is principally aimed at here. But the more we examine
Addison’s critical utterances, whether we agree with Hurd or not that
they are “shallow,” we shall, I think, be forced to conclude that any
depth they may have has nothing to do with Romanticism. Addison likes
Milton, no doubt, because he is a sensible man and a good critic, as a
general reason. But when we come to investigate special ones we shall
find that he likes him rather because he himself is a Whig, a pupil of
Dryden, and a religious man—nay, perhaps even because he really does
think that Milton carries out the classical idea of Epic—than because of
Milton’s mystery, his “romantic vague,” his splendour of diction and
verse and imagery. So, too, the admiration of _Chevy Chase_ is partly a
whim or a joke, partly determined by the fact that at that time the
Whigs were the “Jingoes,” and that _Chevy Chase_ is very pugnacious and
very patriotic. Nowhere, from the articles on True and False Wit to the
Imagination papers, do we find any real sense of unrest or
dissatisfaction with the accepted theory of poetry. There is actually
more in Prior, with all his profanation of the _Nut-browne Maid_ and his
distortions of the Spenserian stanza.
[Sidenote: _Of La Bruyère and_ “Tout est dit.”]
So if we look backward a little, and a little southward, we shall,
despite the praise which we were able to accord to some critical dicta
of La Bruyère, find very little reason to regard that admirable master
of Addison himself as a “Romantic before Romanticism.” He is a sensible
man with a fairly catholic taste: but that is all. Nay, his principle of
_Tout est dit_, though not quite irresistibly in practice, almost
certainly leads to the conclusion that the oldest writers are likely to
be the best, and to the habit of extending to new writers, or to the
mass of precedent writing, a rather lukewarm welcome and a distinctly
prejudiced criticism. In a certain sense, no doubt, all _has_ been said
long ago—in gist, in matter, in subject. But then in literature, and
especially in poetry, there is so much which is beside the gist, that is
superadded to the matter, that does _not_ depend upon the subject! The
thoughts suggested by birth and death, by dawn and sunset, by a blush
and a smile, by the red wine when it moveth itself aright in the glass,
and the green sea stretching from the white cliff-foot, and the “huge
and thoughtful night,” will always be at bottom and in essence the same.
But he must be a blind person who does not see that at any moment any
poet who _can_ may give them an entirely new form and cast and
presentation. In this sense—and it is the sense of the best “modern”
criticism—“tout est _à dire_.”
[Sidenote: _Of Fénelon and Gravina._]
We may seem to have got into an _impasse_: nor will such excellent
persons as Fénelon, and to go to yet another country, Gravina,[7] help
us out of it. Fénelon indeed had, as we saw, some striking
resipiscences, some individual pronouncements which, if they were as
unaccompanied by others as they are disconnected from them, would be
very promising indeed. But this very company that they do _not_ keep
disestates them unluckily: and you cannot doubt, as you read
_Télémaque_, that if the world had had to depend upon its author for
leadership in the migration from the critical House of Bondage, it would
never have got over the Red Sea, if it had even started on the journey.
Gravina, to that general perspicacity and equity which distinguishes all
these doubtful cases, added an unusually early and thorough appreciation
of _Greek_, and the advantage, peculiar to an Italian, of having an
actual classical period of modern literature extending over four entire
centuries: of all which he made good use. But it is at least very
difficult to discover, either in his original work or in the general
trend of his critical utterances, any dissatisfaction with the
prevailing direction of criticism in his time, or any determination to
take a wider outlook.
[Sidenote: _Of Dryden and Fontenelle._]
Indeed, putting aside Dryden (whose method led straight to the Promised
Land, and whose utterances show that he occasionally saw it afar off) as
one who came too early to feel any very conscious desire of setting out
on the pilgrimage of discovery, Fontenelle is perhaps the very earliest
critic of distinction who shows a decided restlessness. And he, as we
have sufficiently set forth, has too much of the critical Puck about him
to be a safe guide for the wayfaring man. In fact, “Lord! what fools
these mortals be!” is an exclamation which is always hovering on the
door of his lips, and sometimes all but escapes it.
[Sidenote: _The more excellent way._]
But this history must have been told to very little purpose if readers
still expect sharp and decided turns, assignable to definite hours and
particular men, in the evolutions of criticism. Rather has it been one
of our special lessons—it would be uncritical to say our special
objects—to prove that these things are not to be expected. It is a part
of the Neo-Classic error itself to assume some definite goal of critical
perfection towards which all things tend, and which, when you have
attained it, permits you to take no further trouble except of imitation
and repetition. Just as you never know what new literary form the human
genius may take, and can therefore never lay down any absolute and final
schedule of literary kinds, and of literary perfection within these
kinds, so you can never shape the set of the prevalent taste, and you
can never do much more than give the boat the full benefit of the
current by dexterous rowing and steering. Indeed, as we have seen, the
taste in criticism and the taste in creation unite, or diverge, or set
dead against each other in a manner quite incalculable, and only
interpretable as making somehow for the greater glory of Literature.
Somewhere about the time to which we have harked back—the meeting of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or a little later, or much later,
as the genius of different countries and persons would have it—a veering
of the wind, an eddy of the current, _did_ take place. And it is of this
that we have to give account in the present Book—of the consequences of
it that we have to give an account in the present volume.
CHAPTER II.
THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING.
STARTING-POINT OF THIS VOLUME—NEO-CLASSIC COMPLACENCY AND EXCLUSIVENESS
ILLUSTRATED FROM CALLIÈRES—BÉAT DE MURALT—HIS ATTENTION TO ENGLISH—
AND TO FRENCH—GERMAN CRITICISM PROPER—A GLANCE BACKWARD—THEOBALD
HOECK—WECKHERLIN AND OTHERS—WEISE, WERNICKE, WERENFELS, ETC.—SOME
MUTINEERS: GRYPHIUS AND NEUMEISTER—GOTTSCHED ONCE MORE—BODMER AND
BREITINGER—THE ‘DISKURSE DER MALER’—GRADUAL DIVERGENCE FROM THEIR
STANDPOINT; KÖNIG ON “TASTE”—MAIN WORKS OF THE SWISS SCHOOL—
BREITINGER’S ‘KRITISCHE DICHTKUNST,’ ETC.—BODMER’S ‘VON DEM
WUNDERBAREN,’ ETC.—SPECIAL CRITICISMS OF BOTH—BODMER’S VERSE
CRITICISM—THEIR LATER WORK IN MEDIÆVAL POETRY, AND THEIR GENERAL
POSITION—THE “SWISS-SAXON” QUARREL—THE ELDER SCHLEGELS: JOHANN
ADOLF—JOHANN ELIAS—MOSES MENDELSSOHN—LESSING—SOME CAUTIONS
RESPECTING HIM—HIS MORAL OBSESSION; ON ‘SOLIMAN THE SECOND’—THE
STRICTURES ON ARIOSTO’S PORTRAIT OF ALCINA—‘HAMLET’ AND ‘SEMIRAMIS’—
THE ‘COMTE D’ESSEX,’ ‘RODOGUNE,’ ‘MÉROPE’—LESSING’S GALLOPHOBIA—AND
TYPOMANIA—HIS STUDY OF ANTIQUITY MORE THAN COMPENSATING—AND
ESPECIALLY OF ARISTOTLE—WITH WHOM HE COMBINES DIDEROT—HIS
DEFICIENCIES IN REGARD TO MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE—THE CLOSE OF THE
‘DRAMATURGIE’ AND ITS MORAL—MISCELLANEOUS SPECIMENS OF HIS
CRITICISM—HIS ATTITUDE TO ÆSCHYLUS AND ARISTOPHANES—FREDERIC THE
GREAT—‘DE LA LITTÉRATURE ALLEMANDE’.
[Sidenote: _Starting point of this volume._]
It should not be necessary to make much further observation of the
linking kind between this volume and the last; but a few more words may
be desirable on the fact that from a very early period of the eighteenth
century itself there were perceptible underground mutterings of revolt;
and that, steadily or fitfully, another current of criticism, fed
likewise by springs underground, [Sidenote: _Neo-Classic complacency and
exclusiveness illustrated from Callières._] made its appearance side by
side with, but running counter to, the orthodox, yet almost entirely
neglected by orthodoxy. Orthodoxy indeed, in its special home, would
have specially emphasised the scornful question, “Can any good thing
come out of _Germany_?” The _locus_ of Bouhours is hackneyed, and has
been quoted already (ii. 315). But nothing can better show the state of
complacent fatuity to which Neo-Classicism, _plus_ national conceit, had
reduced the French at the close of the seventeenth century, than the
“Laws of Apollo,” which, in the twelfth book of the treatise which has
the honour to have given suggestions to Swift, Callières[8] represents
the god as promulgating to appease the strife of Ancients and Moderns.
_Les trois nations polies_ are the French, the Italians, and the
Spaniards: all others are more or less barbarians. These barbarians
(including not only the Germans, but the nation which had to its credit
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, with others who, if
lesser than these, were the equals of the two or three best of France)
may be allowed to write Latin as a concession to the literary
incompetence of their own tongues; but the polished nations should not
do so. Homer is the greatest of all poets, and Virgil the second; the
third place had better remain vacant. No witchcraft or romance of
chivalry is to be admitted into poetry. Acrostics and anagrams are to be
banished from it. _Et patati et patata._ Apollo himself could at the
time hardly have got into the head of Callières, not merely academician
but diplomatist as he was, what an utterly ridiculous figure he would
cut to all but the most philosophical and tolerant of posterity. Yet be
it remembered that Gottsched held no different creed nearly fifty years
after in Germany itself, and La Harpe no very different one more than a
hundred years after in France; while among ourselves, and halfway
between these two, even such iconoclasts in other ways as Adam Smith and
David Hume would have made very little difficulty about accepting it.
The overthrow of a belief of such prevalence, such toughness, such
duration, cannot have been achieved but by agencies widespreading,
patient, various: and it is these agencies that we must now investigate.
[Sidenote: _The_ Béat de Muralt.]
Not very many years later than the _Histoire Poétique_ there was
written, in French also, but not by a Frenchman, a document curiously
different in tenor, though by no means ostensibly, or indeed to any
great extent really, breaking with Neo-Classicism. The Swiss—as their
peculiar position, not merely politically in the midst of Europe, but
racially as overlapping and overlapped by France, Germany, and Italy,
made almost necessary—had begun early to take a sort of bystander-view
of European Literature. The excellent essay of Herr Hamelius[9] was
perhaps the first recent document to attract much attention to the
_Lettres sur les Anglois et sur les Francois_ of Béat Louis de Muralt.
Muralt was a French-writing but a German-speaking Swiss; he says (rather
to his disadvantage as a critic, but usefully on this head) that
“H_ou_mour” is “ce que _nous_ appellons _Einfall_,” and what the French
mean by “dire de bons mots,” from which we can at least see that the
excellent M. de Muralt had not the faintest notion of what Humour
specifically is. He travelled in England during the last decade of the
seventeenth century; but his _Letters_ upon us and the French were not
published till 1727, in 12mo, with no imprint of place. They acquired,
after the fashion of the time, a sort of “snow-ball” increment of
comment by apologists (a “Lord,” of course, for England), and are
chiefly valuable as symptoms. [Sidenote: _His attention to English,_]
Muralt is, as we should expect, much more occupied with manners than
with letters; and in fact, as regards English, deals in detail with
hardly any literary kind save comedy. Here (as the _orbis terrarum_
often remarks of our _alter orbis_) he thinks that we have too good an
opinion of ourselves: “Sur toutes sortes de sujets il faut qu’ils se
préfèrent au reste du monde.” He thinks Corneille and Molière (whom he
would specially avenge) ill-treated by the English dramatists who borrow
from them. He accuses Dryden—not by name, but transparently and truly as
“the most famous of their poets”—of stealing from Corneille and abusing
him; neither of which articles is just. On the other hand, he is
certainly too complimentary (though Saint-Evremond[10] was responsible
for the exaggeration) in calling Shadwell “_one of_ the most famous” of
the same poets; and we may abandon _The Miser_ to his arrows. He admits
that our literature outside the theatre is “full of good sense and
originality,” but says little about it. He has himself the good sense to
object to Louis Quatorze dress, for Romans and Carthaginians, on both
stages.
[Sidenote: _and to French._]
He is much more copious on French Literature; and his judgments here are
more interesting, because he is at a more original angle. Much of his
outlook is purely Neo-Classic. He has a thorough belief in Kinds; he has
abundance to say “in the _aib_stract” about _bon sens_ and _bel esprit_;
and for one writing so late he is surprisingly copious on Voiture and
Sarrasin and Balzac. He thinks Rabelais quite “beneath humanity,”—having
indeed, here and elsewhere, a good deal of solid German morals about
him. The most surprising thing is his attitude to Boileau, whom he
pronounces to have plenty of sense and art, but no great genius. This
attitude, and the taking of English literature into serious literary
consideration for almost the first time on the Continent, since Lilius
Giraldus,[11] are the things which, from the literary side, deserve most
note in Muralt.[12] And the latter—not by any means merely from that
point of view of “preferring ourselves to others”—is the most important
of all. So long as general critical attention to modern literature was
confined to French, Italian, and Spanish, all intimately connected with
and indebted to each other, and all descended from Latin, no real
“fermentation” could take place. The English yeast set it going at once,
in Germany as elsewhere.
Muralt, however, was an exceptional and cosmopolitan sort of person, and
the note which he sounded was not immediately taken up, though it is
very noteworthy that when it was, it was again in Switzerland.
[Sidenote: _German Criticism proper._]
The account which we gave of German criticism proper before 1700, and of
that part of it which belongs to the Neo-Classic dispensation after that
date, was avowedly scanty: the reasons for this apparent stinginess
being twofold—the comparative paucity of the materials, and even more
the comparative unimportance of almost all those that do exist. But we
undertook in a manner to make good the seeming slight; and it is our
present business to do so.[13]
[Sidenote: _A glance backward._]
We saw that up to the eighteenth century, and indeed nearly up to the
end of its first quarter, German criticism had done very little, and
that it was never to do much in the direction of “correctness.”
Indirectly, however, in the later half of the seventeenth century, when
the _furia_ of the Thirty Years’ War had in a manner sunk to rest,
something was done in the way of preliminary fermentation both by the
late inoculation of Germany with the Euphuist-Marinist-Gongorist
measles, which is there identified chiefly with the names of Lohenstein
and Hoffmanswaldau, and by reaction against this,[14] while something
further has, at least by some, been considered to have been done by
Gottsched himself.
[Sidenote: _Theobald Hoeck._]
The works of this period are not, I believe, very common even in
Germany, but the unwearied intelligence with which the British Museum
has been managed for the last two generations has supplied English
readers with a very fair, though not yet quite satisfying, proportion of
the most important. The earliest of these authors—a predecessor of Opitz
even, who might, and perhaps should, have been mentioned in the last
volume—was Theobald Hoeck, or as he is called on the title-page of his
quaintly-named _Poems_,[15] Othoblad Oeckhe. Hoeck makes the nineteenth
chapter of his “Fair Field of Flowers” an ode of fourteen five-lined
stanzas, _Von Art der Deutschen Poeterey_, which perhaps ranks next to,
and certainly marks the new departure from, the vernacular Meister-song
_Arts_ referred to above.[16] But the style and the gist of the piece
are, I think, fairly enough shown in the following stanza—
“Warumb sollen wir denn unser Teutsche Sprache[n]
In gwisse Form und Gsatz nit auch mögen machen,
Und Deutsches Carmen schreiben,
Die Kunst zu treiben
Bey Mann und Weiben?”
But it is hard for the poet when he has both metre and rhyme to look to—
when
“Mann muss die _Pedes_ gleich so wol scandiren
Den dactylum und auch Spondaeum rieren,”
and at the same time see that his rhymes are proper. The thing is
interesting as exhibiting modern German poetry in the go-cart with
laudable anxiety on the part of the infant to go rightly.
[Sidenote: _Weckherlin and others._]
The chief ferment, however, of German poetic and criticism of a kind did
not come till towards the middle of the century and when the Thirty
Years’ War was dying down (though it is thought to have been to some
extent determined by the sojourning of at least one German of
letters[17] in England quite in the earlier stage of that convulsion):
and it took final colour from French rather than from English, partly in
the form of Pléiade and Louis Treize _ampullæ_, partly in that of
“correctness” (as far as the Germans could reach it) _à la_ Boileau. The
earlier inquirers, such as Schottel, Zesen, Buchner, were painful and
estimable rhetoricians, anxious to get German into good scholastic ways.
Schottel, in his _Teutsche Sprachkunst_[18] and other works, is quite of
the old fashion in compounding rhetoric-poetic-composition books with
dictionary. Zesen’s _Hochdeutscher Helikon_[19] is an extremely fat
little book, the component parts of which are separately paged, and
sometimes not paged at all, and which discusses with the utmost care the
terms of the art in metre, rhyme, stanza-building, &c., gives rhyming
dictionaries first of masculine then of feminine rhymes, supplies
plenteous example-verse, and finishes with a _De Poetica_ of a more
general kind. Augustine Buchner[20] is still older-fashioned, and
reminds one of the sixteenth-century Italians in his little tractate on
the office and aim of poetry, its kinds, ornaments, &c.
[Sidenote: _Weise, Wernicke, Werenfels, &c._]
These are hardly at all critical; they are rhetorical-preceptist. But
the later men, such as Weise, Wernicke, and Werenfels, exhibit the
revolt against the school of conceit and bombast which in the later part
of the seventeenth century radiates from France all over Europe.
Christian Weise, _Professor Poeseos_ as he called himself, degrades
Poetry in his _Curiose Gedanken neben Deutschen Versen_ (1691) to the
position of a mere _ancilla_ of Rhetoric, and seems to have anticipated
Shaftesbury in making “ridicule the test of truth.” His namesake,
Wernicke, in the “Ad Lectorem” of his _Poetische Versuche_,[21] extols
Longinus, and makes “polite” remarks on Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau.
But _the_ German manifesto against the florid is the _Dissertatio de
Meteoris Orationis_ appended to the _De Logomachiis Eruditorum_ of
Samuel Werenfels, which appeared at Amsterdam within the eighteenth
century,[22] dedicated to no less a person than Gilbert Burnet, but
presents the matter of two theses composed fourteen and ten years
earlier. The _De Logomachiis_ itself has a certain interest for us, as
it hits among other things at frivolous and verbal criticism; but the
_Dissertatio_ is all ours. Werenfels, as usual basing himself upon
Longinus, without the slightest suspicion that he will be undone by his
reliance, distinguishes between ὕψηλα and μετέωρα—our old friends the
True and the False Sublime. He admits the importance of Imagination, but
will have it strictly ruled by Judgment, and makes another distinction
(not without acuteness) between good Figures and bad. He harks as far
back as Longolius and the Ciceronians for examples of literary
will-worship; but is evidently thinking throughout rather of
gorgeousness than of over-precision, and directs his attacks specially
at Claudian among the ancients, though he names Gongora among the
moderns. His final decision is that Italians, Spaniards, and Germans are
all painfully given to the meteoric; the French are _saniores_.[23]
[Sidenote: _Some mutineers: Gryphius and Neumeister._]
The germaner spirit of Germany, however,—to speak “meteorically” and in
character,—was by no means quenched by these _douches_ of correctness,
and continued to assert itself at intervals between the practice of the
Silesians and the theory of the Swiss. The most considerable German
dramatist of the seventeenth century, Andreas Gryphius, not merely
neglected the “classical” rules in his plays, but made light of them in
prefaces and lectures. Just before the end of the century, Erdmann
Neumeister (who was to live sixty years longer and overlap the time of
Goethe), enthusiastically recommending the fashionable opera, dismisses
the rules with a contemptuous inaccuracy[24] much more humiliating than
any polemic.
Without therefore wandering longer in these side-walks, we may say that
they form a real approach to the Romantic Revolt of the next century,
quite as much as—perhaps more than—they lead to the Gottschedian
preciseness. And this should sufficiently justify the notice of them
here.
[Sidenote: _Gottsched once more._]
The most important—perhaps one might say the only important—critical
document furnished by Gottsched himself to our general history is the
_Kritische Dichtung_, which has been already disposed of,[25] and this
is a document of the extremest Neo-Classicism. But he did not reach this
point at once: and the successive hardenings of heart by which he did
reach it are a curious topsy-turvy document in the other sense—a
document of the growth of Romanticism, and its effect in making its
enemies the more stubborn. These stages have been traced diligently and
clearly, if perhaps with a little unnecessary _animus_ and polemic, by
Herr Braitmaier.[26] When the appearance of the _Diskurse der Maler_
(_The_v. infra) induced Gottsched (who is allowed by friends and foes to
have had a very shrewd literary sense of the journalist’s or publisher’s
kind) to imitate them in the periodical entitled _Die Vernünftigen
Tadlerinnen_[27]—“The Intelligent Blamingwomen” or “Carperesses”—his
attitude was not at first very different from that of his then friends,
Bodmer and Breitinger, in appearance at least. But he proceeded to pay
attention (perhaps guided by them) to French criticism: and he
henceforward followed it, more and more to do evil in another
periodical, the _Biedermann_, in the successive editions of his
_Kritische Dichtkunst_, with increasing intensity in the important
_Beiträge zur Kritischen Historie der Deutschen Sprache, Poesie und
Beredsamkeit_, which he directed from 1732 to 1744, and lastly, in the
pamphlets and articles of the so-called Swiss-Saxon or Leipzig-Zürich
war.
As for the claims of Gottsched to be not a mere critical fossil, but a
real reformer and even a kind of precursor of the great German literary
school, in criticism as well as on creation, from Lessing to Goethe,
they were first put forward many years ago by Danzel, and after the
usual manner of literary whitewashings of the paradoxical kind, have
been accepted by some since. But they never could have commended
themselves to impartial and instructed students of literary history: and
they have been quite sufficiently disposed of by Herr Braitmaier. One
may fully take the view which was put forward towards the end of the
last volume about Gottsched’s critical worth, and yet have formed it
with full knowledge of the fact that he was an active and
well-intentioned worker in that enormous effort towards self-improvement
to which justice has there been done. But the notion that he was really
a fellow-worker with the Swiss school is, I must repeat, mistaken; and
the further notions of his having played the part of Dante, or at least
of Du Bellay, towards the purification and exaltation of German
language, and almost that of Dryden towards the refashioning of German
literature, are but fond things.[28]
[Sidenote: _Bodmer and Breitinger._]
The two Swiss professors, Bodmer and Breitinger, who have already
several times been named, form one of the most curious pairs of
brothers-in-arms whereof literary story makes mention. They were both
born in or near the same town, Zürich; the long lives of both (though
Breitinger’s was a little the shorter at both ends) nearly coincided;
both were christened John James; and they very early began, and long
continued, to qualify themselves for the position of heroes of a new
“Legend of Friendship” without even finding it necessary to begin with a
fight like Spenser’s Cambel and Triamond. Both pugnacious, they always
took the same side in their battles; they prefaced each other’s books
alternately, and sometimes finding even this association not close
enough, signed them jointly J. J. J. J. In this kind of society it is
generally difficult to be certain whether even the writings which appear
to belong to one writer only do not contain a good deal of the other’s,
and therefore to assign a sharply differential character to either: nor
is it really of much importance. The general opinion, I believe, is that
Bodmer had more originality and enterprise, Breitinger a sounder
judgment, wider learning, and a more philosophical _ethos_: but in such
collaborations the parts are almost always thus distributed. There can,
however, be no reasonable question that the pair were—more than any
other pair or person—responsible for the Rally of Germany: or rather, to
use the phrase of our saner custom, that they mark the turn of the tide
which neither they nor any one could have caused. Nor is it surprising
to find that this turn is at first almost imperceptible.
[Sidenote: _The_ Diskurse der Maler.]
The _Discourses of the Painters_ took its title directly from a sort of
coterie which Bodmer had founded; and was named, probably after Italian
models, but indirectly, as no doubt was the coterie also, from the
strong prominence in the founder’s mind of the doctrine _ut pictura
poesis_. Started in 1721, the periodical was one, and the most
important, of these imitations of _The Spectator_ which, as has been
said, played so great a part not merely in English, but in Continental,
and especially German, culture. Like the model, the copy was intended to
reform manners and morals, speech and style. In the latter respect
Bodmer did not merely follow Addison, but fell back to some extent on
the French preceptists of “correctness,” cheerfully echoing Boileau’s
recommendations of “nature,” though his eclecticism already appears in
admiration of Fontenelle likewise. As Boileau himself had made awful
examples of the extravagants of the Louis XIII. time, and as Addison had
denounced “false wit,” conceits, and so forth, so did Bodmer take up his
parable anew against the bombast and preciousness of the Lohenstein
School in German. Like both, he believes thoroughly in “Taste,” though
the “German paste” in him is not contented without an attempt at a more
philosophical treatment of this than either the Frenchman or the
Englishman had thought necessary. He makes something of a theory of
Poetry as Imitation of Nature: he refines upon the doctrines about
Imagination which he finds in Addison. But in all this there is not very
much advance upon Addison himself. Bodmer has only been brought by
Addison to the threshold of Milton, and, it would seem, not even to that
of Shakespeare,[29] while the divine, the instinctive, the all-saving
caution, _antiquam exquirite matrem_, does not in the case of old German
poetry carry him beyond Opitz as yet.
[Sidenote: _Gradual divergence from their standpoint; König on
“Taste.”_]
For some years, therefore, it was quite possible for Swiss and Saxons to
work together. The literature of the Ancient and Modern quarrel had much
influence on both; and that odd upshot of it, the Fénelonian and La
Mothian dislike to rhyme, was destined to exercise a very great
influence in Germany. For a time, however, attention was principally
fixed on the general subject of “Taste,”[30] and a dispute, really
important in its results, if not exactly in itself, grew up round a
short dissertation by the Saxon Poet-Laureate König, and led, among
other things, to an exchange of letters between Bodmer and the Italian
Conti,[31] on the nature of this much-discussed quality or faculty.
König’s work appeared in 1727, two years before the first edition of
Gottsched’s _Dichtkunst_, but in the same year with a treatise on
Imagination from the Swiss side, in which may be seen the first sketch
of their elaborate dealings with Poetics many years later.
[Sidenote: _Main works of the Swiss School._]
By this time the tendencies of the contending parties—of Bodmer and
Breitinger in the Æsthetic-Romantic direction, and of Gottsched in the
Classical-Preceptist—had been strengthened and developed, in the one
case by study of Milton specially, in the other by that of the French:
and the gulf between them was deepened and widened in various writings,
especially in the successive editions of Gottsched’s _Dichtkunst_, and
in occasional utterances of his _Beiträge_. But the great manifestos of
the Swiss school—four in number, but it would seem representing a larger
and more uniform scheme, of which the _Imagination_ had been the
pioneer—did not appear till nearly twenty years after the first
publication of the _Diskurse_. Three of them came out at Zürich in the
single year 1740; the fourth, a year later, in 1741. The titles given
below require no comment in their exhibition of the odd enlacements of
the pair.[32]
[Sidenote: _Breitinger’s_ Kritische Dichtkunst, &c.]
Of these the _Kritische Dichtung_ is the largest, the most ambitious,
and, according to Herr Braitmaier, the most important. It was certainly
that which hurt and shocked Gottsched most, and which drew from him the
pathetically ludicrous expostulation with its unpractical character,
which was quoted in the last volume.[33] And no doubt it must appear so
to those who pay most attention to the theory of poetry in general. As
the very title shows, Breitinger here nails the poetic-pictorial
principle to the mast, and he defends it in the book itself, and in the
Dissertation on Similes, which is a sort of tender to it, with no
insufficient learning and variety of application, with reinforcements of
philosophy from Leibnitz and Wolff, even with the sketching of a “Logic
of Phantasy,” which is to be regulator and administrator of things
poetical.
[Sidenote: _Bodmer’s_ Von Dem Wunderbaren, &c.]
From my point of view, however, the most important of the four is the
_Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren_ by Bodmer, and next to this, the same
writer’s elaborate examination, in the _Poetische Gemahlde_, of _Don
Quixote_, and of that _Durchlauchstigste Syrerin Aramena_, which is one
of the chief German Heroic Romances, and one of the literary
achievements of the House of Brunswick, having been written by Duke
Anton Ulrich. The generalities of the _Kritische Dichtkunst_ are, no
doubt, as one of the characters in _Westward Ho!_ says, “all very good
and godly”: but the unfortunate Gottsched, if he had had a little more
wit, might so have couched his complaint of their unpracticality that it
would not have been ridiculous. “Logics of Phantasy” are all very well:
doctrines that the poet must be thus and thus minded are all very well.
But we want _poems_, we want imaginative literature itself; and these
were the most difficult things in the world to get in the first half of
the eighteenth century. Bodmer, in dealing with prose fiction,
recognises, as few critics had recognised, the second greatest division
of the imaginative literature of the world—greater even than drama in a
way, because it borrows nothing from poetry, but stands on its own
merits,—the division which was at last slowly rising from the ocean
where it had been so long submerged. And in the _Dissertation on the
Wonderful_ he boldly unlocked the tabooed treasury wherein men had been
so long forbidden to seek the true riches of poetry.
There was the real _labor_, the real _opus_. It is not too much to say
that the prevailing doctrine—during the seventeenth century
increasingly, and at the beginning of the eighteenth as a recognised
orthodoxy—made poetry almost impossible. In spite of the grudging
permission of such inadequate safety-valves as _furor poeticus_, _beau
désordre_, “lucky license,” and the rest, this doctrine was that even
the _Wunderbar_ had got to submit itself to the _Wahrscheinlich_, with a
very distinct understanding that it was far the safer way to attend to
the Verisimilar and let the Wonderful alone. Even Bodmer himself seems
to have been rather led to a sounder creed by his admiration for Milton
and his revolt against such things as Voltaire’s condemnation of parts
of _Paradise Lost_,[34] than by a clear, straightforward apperception of
the prerogative of Wonder. Even he proceeds rather by extension of
“machinery,” by pointing out the capabilities and interest of the use of
Angels and the like, than by any thorough-going anticipation of the
Coleridgean “suspension of disbelief.” But this was very natural and
almost necessary: while it may be pointed out that his attention to the
Prose Romance—in which, for this reason or that, the unexpected and the
exceptional had always held rather a prominent place—tended in the same
direction as his doctrine of the Wonderful in Poetry.
[Sidenote: _Special criticisms of both._]
It is, however, only fair to say that neither Breitinger nor Bodmer
fails in that critical examination of actual literature which, as it has
been one of the objects of this book to show, is the most fruitful way
of the critic. Bodmer’s study of _Paradise Lost_, which he translated,
nay, even that of Opitz, who was edited by the pair, provided perhaps
the most important element in his critical education. And whatever gaps
there may have been in their literary accomplishment, they knew and used
the greatest critics of antiquity. If they did not know or use all its
greatest poets, they used what they did know freshly and independently.
They knew French and Italian literature fairly, and Breitinger at least
had studied the Ancient and Modern Quarrel. They knew something of
English besides Milton, though little or nothing of “Sasper,” and their
earnest and affectionate study of German literature itself, reaching
by-and-by to the treasures of the “Middle High” period, is, to me at
least, one of their greatest titles to credit. They may have pushed the
picture-poetry notion too far—Lessing was at the door with a veritable
“two-handed engine” to cut off any superfluity here. But in their time,
and in all times, it could but do more good than harm.
[Sidenote: _Bodmer’s verse criticism._]
With the commentatorial side of their activity may be connected the four
verse pieces edited with much care by Herr Baechtold in the _Deutsche
Literatur-Denkmale_.[35] The two last of these, dating from the author’s
latest years, when he felt himself among those that knew not Joseph—
_Untergang der Beruhmten Namen_, and _Bodmer nicht verkannt_—are in
hexameters, and are only pathetic curiosities. The first, _Character der
Teutschen Gedichte_, 1734, with an appendix, _Versuch einer Kritik über
die Deutschen Dichter_, and a second but more independent sequel, _Die
Drollingerische Muse_ (Drollinger was a poet and friend of Bodmer’s who
had just died), have more substantive interest.[36] They are in
Alexandrines, duly arranged with masculine and feminine alternation, and
contain not a little mostly sound criticism of mostly much-forgotten
bards.
[Sidenote: _Their later work in mediæval poetry, and their general
position._]
I find myself, perhaps necessarily from the difference of our points of
view, again in disagreement with Herr Braitmaier as to the critical
importance of Bodmer’s later industry (shared again in part by
Breitinger) on older German literature. To me, the mere fact that Bodmer
in 1748—that is to say, before the middle of the eighteenth century, and
nearly twenty years before the appearance of Percy’s _Reliques_—
published with his faithful double J. J. his _Specimens of Old Suabian
Poetry_, the Middle High German poetry of the thirteenth century; nine
or ten years later, and still before Percy, before Hurd, _Fabeln aus der
Zeiten der Minnesänger_; with, later again, parts of the
_Nibelungenlied_ and collections of Minnesong itself, is, as perhaps the
reader knows by this time, an almost greater claim to importance in the
_History of Criticism and Literary Taste_ than his earlier directly
critical work, and a much greater one than the more abstract æsthetic
inquiries of Breitinger even, still more of Baumgarten and Sulzer and
the rest. Taken with these earlier inquiries they give him and his
coadjutor a high and most memorable place in the general story of the
appreciation of literature. He was certainly not a man of much—and
Breitinger does not seem to have been one of any—original poetical
power; he does not himself seem to have had even so much as his
colleague had of learning or acuteness: and both were _echt Deutsch_ in
their long-windedness and want of concinnity. But they did what they
could; and it turned out that they had done a great deal.
[Sidenote: _The “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel._]
Of the famous “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel[37] which followed the publication
of Breitinger’s _Kritische Dichtkunst_ and Gottsched’s denunciation
thereof in a new edition of his own, I shall, according to my previous
practice, say little. It has in all the books the usual disproportionate
prominence of such things, and its actual importance was even less than
usual. A brief but good account of it, and of all the underground
jealousies and littlenesses that led up to it, may be found in
Braitmaier. These jealousies, especially the general revolt against the
sort of tyranny of letters which Gottsched’s skilful management of his
periodicals and his pedagogic temper had instituted, were much more
noticeable in it than any clear classic-romantic “dependence.” But, _on
the whole_, the revolt against Gottsched was in the direction of revolt
against at least Neo-Classicism. By degrees, too, it branched out into
an attack on, and a defence of, two particular poets—Haller and
Klopstock; and though neither of these is very delectable “to us,” both
were distinctly in their time champions of the freedom of the poetic
Jerusalem. It was fought out in Gottsched’s _Beiträge_ on his side, and
in a kind of periodical entitled _Sammlung Kritischer, poetischer, und
geistvoller Schriften_, which Bodmer brought out in opposition,[38] in
divers others,[39] and in numerous pamphlets. The most important critics
whom it produced, and these indirectly for the most part, were the elder
Schlegels, especially the eldest, Johann Elias, who, from a contributor,
though never exactly a partisan, of Gottsched, became one of the objects
of his special indignation. Of others, Schwabe, Cramer, Mylius, Pyra, we
can but take note in passing here. Gellert has been mentioned in the
last volume.[40]
[Sidenote: _The elder Schlegels: Johann Adolf._]
If not every schoolboy, every one with the slightest tincture of
letters, is supposed to be aware that there were two persons of the name
of Schlegel, who are of very great account in German and in European
criticism. Not merely the schoolboy, but the person ordinarily tinged
with letters, may perhaps be excused if he does not know that at
least[41] _four_ of the name and family have claim to rank here—Johann
Elias, his younger brother Johann Adolf, August Wilhelm, and Karl
Wilhelm Friedrich, these two last being sons of Johann Adolf. Of these
the elder pair concern us in this particular place. And of them it will
be most convenient to take Johann Adolf first, not for the sake of his
famous offspring, but because his critical work is the less important.
He took part in the obscure and uninteresting squabble over the Pastoral
school,[42] but his main contribution to our subject is a translation,
with notes and elaborate _Abhandlungen_, of Batteux. In this, published
as early as 1751, and reprinted later,[43] he is still an evidence of
the domination of French, which his more original brother at least
partly rejected. But there are signs and tokens. He is constantly making
respectful suggestions and limitations: “This conclusion is too large,”
“this is true _to a certain extent_,” and so forth.
The _Abhandlungen_ show the German tendency to generalisation and
abstract disquisition:—On the Origin of Arts, the Building up of Taste,
the divisions of Poetry, its foundation in imitation or illusion, its
distinction from History, and from Ornate Prose, &c. Schlegel is very
much cumbered about Kinds, insists that we must try each new kind and
see whether it comes naturally or not. If it does, that is right. The
Wonderful has “a natural right to please us, a right founded in the
constitution of our souls.” The soul demands novelty, &c. But like his
part-master, Gottsched, he is very doubtful about Ariosto and Milton
(Death and Sin are such “_shadowy_ persons”!), and I do not think he
mentions Shakespeare. He has a considerable position in the list of
writers on German versification, a subject which was acquiring much
importance from the set against rhyme, mentioned above.
[Sidenote: _Johann Elias._]
His elder brother, Johann Elias, is a much more original and independent
person. The very high claims made for him by his editor, Herr von
Antoniewicz,[44] and by Herr Braitmaier, may require some deduction when
we consider his actual work; but not much. He died (1749) at a little
over thirty: and during this short life he had been a diplomatist, a
professor, a prolific and remarkable dramatist, and a miscellaneous
poet. So that he had not much time to spare for criticism. But his work
in it has that rare quality, or combination of qualities, which we have
noted in Dryden, the quality of marking and learning the things that a
man reads and writes of, and correcting himself by both processes. It is
quite astonishing to read his first critical work, a “Letter on Ancient
and Modern Tragedy,” and to note, though his actual standpoint is not
very advanced, the thoroughness and freshness of appreciation shown by a
boy of one-and-twenty, in the very dawn and almost the twilight of the
great period of German literature. Other interesting papers lead to the
still more remarkable review of Borck’s prose translation of _Julius
Cæsar_, with its parallel between that play and the _Leo Armenius_ of
the German seventeenth-century dramatist, Andreas Gryphius. There is, of
course, a danger, if this be uncritically read, of our failing to grasp
Schlegel’s standpoint in regard to both the subjects, and of the
excellent Gryph appearing to us too much in the light in which
Shakespeare himself appeared to Voltaire. Moreover, the German
Alexandrine is—even to an ear broken to a thousand measures in half a
dozen languages—one of the most disagreeable that can be found. But
allow for all these things, as criticism demands, and you will have a
piece of appreciation such as (so far at least as I know) had not
appeared in German before, and one of which, _æquatis æquandis_, hardly
any of the greatest English or French critics since need have been
ashamed in his _Lehrjahre_. The discussions of Imitation,[45] which the
lovers of abstract criticism seem to regard as Schlegel’s greatest title
to fame, and which are certainly his largest, though very sound and
stimulating for their time, and not even obsolete in regard to the
“realist” and “naturalist” debates of the latest nineteenth century, are
a little scholastic in method. From reading some estimates of Schlegel
the student might almost be prepared to find in him a promulgation of
one of the last secrets of criticism, the discovery that not only need
you not always realise but you nearly always must _dis_realise—give the
things as they are _not_ in nature; and that by no means merely to
suppress uglinesses and the like. So far as this I do not think he gets
anywhere,[46] but he gets pretty far: and his argument was most valuable
at the time when Gottsched was priding himself on having once more based
Poetic on a rigid Imitation-principle. But some of the best of
Schlegel’s work is to be found in the last example of it, the “Gedanken
zur Aufnahme des Dänischen Theaters,” where the good and bad points of
both English and French drama, and the imitation or avoidance which they
deserve accordingly, are set forth with an insight, a range, and a power
of appreciation which do not come much behind Lessing, not to mention an
impartiality which Lessing by no means always shows. In the
Shakespeare-and-Gryph parallel Johann Elias had practically founded
German Shakespeare-study, and in this piece he takes the line necessary
to prevent a too one-sided pursuit of it. His actual critical
achievement is not, and could not be, large; but it is precious in
itself, and it shows that, had he lived, there was almost nothing at all
possible in his time that he might not have done in criticism. You could
trust him, I think, on the English novel, and you could trust him on
German and mediæval poetry, with the certainty that, in the long-run at
any rate, he would come
right.
[Sidenote: _Moses Mendelssohn._]
Of the praiseworthy industry of Nicolai we have spoken in the last
volume: and the only critic whom it is necessary to mention in any
detail before passing to Lessing, who is himself in a way the critical
sum and substance as well as the crown and flower of this period—Moses
Mendelssohn—belongs rather to the æstheticians pure and simple. He did,
however, much solid actual critical work, to a great extent in
collaboration with both of the persons just mentioned. Those who are
curious about him may consult the very extensive (indeed, I fear it must
rather be called the disproportionately extensive) notice of him by Herr
Braitmaier, who gives this learned Jew some two-thirds of his second
volume, and not much less than one-third of his whole book. Mendelssohn,
however, is really an important person in the history of German
criticism, and probably counted for something in the development of
Lessing, who was his intimate friend. He seems to have had little
tincture of classical literature, but was intensely interested in
modern; and was for some twenty years a constant reviewer of it. He
inclines somewhat to the moral rather than to the purely literary
judgment in his notices of English writers, even of Shakespeare, much
more of Young and Richardson, and he was not disposed to accept the
Wartonian view of Pope. Indeed, with all his merits he seems to me to be
further “below proof,” from the literary point of view, not merely than
Lessing but than J. E. Schlegel. The actual critical work[47] of this
Moses, as shown in his collected writings, leaves us, if not in the
depths of the wilderness, at any rate at some distance from the Promised
Land. There is a certain amount of criticism in his _Letters_, and he
illustrates eighteenth-century tendencies by writing on _Das Erhabene
und das Naïve_. His general drift is very frankly displayed in the
epistles of Aristes to Hylas, on “How the Young should read Old and New
Poetry,” where Plutarch’s title[48] is not more closely followed than
his spirit. The treatise, though in no way contemptible, is one of those
which have been described (no doubt by a reminiscence of Hobbes) as “all
_-keit_ and _-lung_.” And Mendelssohn’s attitude to criticism could not
be better indicated than in the following sentence:[49] “We laugh at
Regnard’s _Le Joueur_ and avoid being called gamblers; we weep over the
English _Gamester_ and are ashamed to be such.” Perhaps so; perhaps also
not. But the symptoms, if existent, are quite compatible with the
existence of any degree of literary merit in either case, if not also
with the existence of none.
Baumgarten, Sulzer, and some others must be relegated to the Æsthetic
pound.
[Sidenote: _Lessing._]
The general reputations which are wholly or mainly founded on criticism
are so few that it behoves the historian thereof to approach them with
unusual circumspection, to “put on the inquirer’s holy robe and a purged
considerate mind,” as Mr Arnold says. There is the obvious danger of
merely indorsing the general opinion in a tame and banal assentation;
and there is the not much less obvious (and perhaps not a little
greater) danger of succumbing to the temptation of “saying something
different”—of aiming at a cheap distinction by paradox or eccentricity.
Perhaps it is even easier to escape these dangers in reality than to
seem to escape them: more particularly in the case of Lessing, of whom,
in England at least, almost every educated person knows that he was a
great critic, while only specialists know much more.
[Sidenote: _Some cautions respecting him._]
That he was a great critic nobody can deny: but it is perhaps desirable
to warn those who come to him knowing something of literary criticism
already, and expecting great things in it from him, that they should not
raise their expectations too high, and that they should thoroughly
master certain preliminary facts. The most important of these is that
Lessing’s interests were not, as the interests of very great critics
almost invariably have been, either wholly literary, or literary first
of all, or, as in Aristotle’s case, as literary as possible. As it was
said of Clarissa that “there is always something that she prefers to the
truth,” so there is nearly always something that Lessing prefers to
literature, constantly as he was occupied with books. Now it is the
theatre;[50] now it is art—especially art viewed from the side of
archæology; now it is classical scholarship of the minuter kind; now
philosophy or theology; now it is morals; not unfrequently it is more,
or fewer, or all of these things together, which engage his attention
while literature is left out in the cold.
[Sidenote: _His moral obsession; on_ Soliman the Second.]
The most curious instance of his moral preoccupation (which, as the
commonest and that with which we are most familiar, we may get rid of
first) has reference[51] to Marmontel’s _conte_ of _Soliman the
Second_.[52] Lessing rather liked Marmontel, who had been civil to _Miss
Sara Sampson_, I think, and whom he somewhere couples with Diderot,
thereby showing that he at any rate was able to distinguish in the
author of the _Eléments de Littérature_ something very different from a
_perruque_. He admits “the wit, the knowledge of the world, the
elegance, the grace” of this “excellent and delightful” tale. But he is
fearfully disturbed at its morality. The Sultan, it seems, is “a
satiated libertine”; [but would not Rymer be for once justified in
urging this as “a character worn by them in all ages of the world” in
which there were Sultans?] Roxelane is “a baggage which gets its way.”
[Undoubtedly: but do not baggages as a rule get theirs?] Lessing,
however, cannot away with “the thing,” as he calls the owner of the
_petit nez retroussé_. What a wretched part is the great Soliman made to
play! He and Roxelane “belong neither to the actual world, nor to a
world in which cause and effect follow a different order, but to the
general effect of good.” “The Turk only knows sensual love” [Rymer!
Rymer!]. Lessing is afraid that the _lune rousse_ will rise for Soliman
on the very morrow of his wedding: and that he will see in Roxelane
“nothing but her impudence and the _nez retroussé_.” [Now as these were
the very things that captivated him, it might rather seem that all would
be well.] In Soliman the instructive is lacking. “We ought to despise
both him and Roxelane; or rather one [which one?] ought to disgust and
the other to anger us,” though, or perhaps more particularly, _because_
“they are painted in the most seductive colours.”
There is really nothing to be said to this but ὦ πόποι! In the first
place, all this good moral indignation simply explodes through the
touch-hole. The tale is pure satire on the _actual_ weakness of man and
triumph of woman—and this actuality who dare deny? If Lessing does not
think both Soliman and Roxelane natural, so much the worse for Lessing.
In the second place, neither is in the least degree held up for our
admiration, though the skill of the artist may deserve that admiration
in almost the highest degree. We may, if we like, pronounce Soliman a
weak man and rather immoral ruler, and suspect Roxelane (as he suspected
her himself) of being very little better than she should be. But not
only does the critic waste his powder in the direction in which he
actually fires; he loses the opportunity of bringing down excellent
game. He lets slip altogether (as Tassoni[53] had _not_ altogether,
though he did not follow it out) the chance of arguing that most
important and interesting critical question of the attraction of the
irregular, the unexpected, the capricious, the teasing. He might have
got “instruction” to his heart’s content, for us and for himself, out of
this shocking story of the great Sultan and the _petit nez retroussé_.
Surely it were better done thus to profit by the curves of Roxelane’s
countenance than to read us a dull sermon on her want of moral
rectitude? But Lessing does not think so—master though he be, at least
according to German notions, of that very irony which should have kept
him right.
[Sidenote: _The strictures on Ariosto’s portrait of Alcina._]
His merely dramatic and his merely artistic preoccupations deserve less
severe treatment, because it cannot be said that they lead him wrong or
even astray, except from our special point of view. But from that
special point of view they _do_ lead him astray: at least in the sense
that he becomes sometimes unimportant to us. In the whole of the
_Laocoön_, reserving a point to be returned to later, I remember only
one passage of any length which is really literary,[54] and that is the
famous and not undeserved, but somewhat insufficiently worked out,
censure of Ariosto’s description of Alcina.[55] Here Lessing does show
what a critic he is by his triumphant demonstration that the carefully
accumulated strokes which would in the sister art go towards making, if
they would not completely make, a most attractive _picture_, produce
very little definite effect as a _passage_. Even here he allows himself
to be called off from the discovery which he was on the point, it might
seem, of making. He excepts for praise the beautiful—in fact consummate—
simile of the breasts which—
“Vengono e van, come onda al primo margo
quando piacevole aura il mar combatte.”
Here of course the charm arises from the fact that the image is _new_,
personal—that is to say, that it is _literary_. The curves of the
wind-engrailed surge on the sand are not Vida’s “stealings,” they are
originals—whoso takes them will not make them, though in themselves they
remain delightful for ever. They are like the “chrysoprase” eyes of
Clarimonde in Gautier’s _Morte Amoureuse_, which make that piece
immortal. The man who _now_ gives us eyes of chrysoprase might as well
make them gooseberries. Lessing does not say this, does not hint it:
indeed (as Lamb’s Scotchman would point out) it would have been, in
reference to the _Morte Amoureuse_, impossible for him to do so. But he
is on the way to saying it, and he instigates others to do so if he does
not.[56]
[Sidenote: Hamlet _and_ Semiramis.]
The objection indeed which may be most justly taken to these dramatic
and artistic preoccupations is that they too often directly prevent him
in this way from doing what he might have done. The _Dramaturgie_ is to
the student of properly literary criticism a mixture of irritation and
delight—a parallel to Coleridge’s conversation, in which “glorious”
literary “islets” constantly loom through the dramatic haze, and then
get engulfed again. How admirable in principle that comparison[57] of
Voltaire’s and of Shakespeare’s ghosts! Yet how we sigh for concrete
illustrations from the actual _words_—for a little, little
_Zusammensetzung_, say, of
“This eternal blazon,”
—three words only, but three words with the whole soul of poetry in
them, and of
“Arrête! et respecte ma cendre.”[58]
[Sidenote: _The_ Comte d’Essex, Rodogune, Mérope.]
The defence of Thomas Corneille’s _Comte d’Essex_[59] against Voltaire’s
unhistorical history is very good; but then it is so unnecessary! and in
the longest criticisms of all, those given to the greater Corneille s
_Rodogune_[60] and to Maffei’s and Voltaire’s _Merope_[61] (once more
one wishes that Lessing could have taken in Mr Arnold’s), the
entanglements of the preoccupation reach, for a literary critic, the
exasperating.
[Sidenote: _Lessing’s Gallophobia_]
The truth is that in reading the _Dramaturgie_[62] one cannot help
remembering Carlyle’s capital complaint of Voltaire that “to him the
Universe was one larger patrimony of St Peter from which it were good
and pleasant to chase the Pope,” and regretting that Lessing should have
thought it necessary to substitute Voltaire himself for the Holy Father.
It was inevitable perhaps and necessary for the time: but the result is
tedious. And unfortunately this Gallophobia in general, this
Corneliophobia and Voltairiophobia in particular, affects, and very
unfavourably affects, those rectifications and reconstructions of
Aristotle which have given the _Dramaturgie_ its great reputation. With
all his talent, all his freshness, Lessing is to a very great extent
merely varying the Addisonian error—and indeed, as with all these early
German critics, Addison himself had too great an influence on him. As
Addison had wasted his powers on showing that Milton, whom the
pseudo-Aristotelians had decried, was very Aristotelian, or at least
Homeric, after all, so Lessing devotes a most unnecessary amount of
energy to showing that the pseudo-Aristotelians themselves were not
Aristotelian at all. It was true; it was in a sense well worth doing;
but there was so much else to do! There is a famous passage at the
beginning of No. 7 which itself really annihilates the whole proceeding,
and laughs “boundary lines of criticism” out of court. Nor is Lessing’s
aberration a mere accidental one. It comes from the fact that he had not
cleared up his own mind on some important parts of the question. He
says, for instance, in his criticism of _Rodogune_ (No. 31, beginning),
“The revenge of an ambitious woman should never resemble that of a
jealous one.” _Æternum vulnus!_ What is “_the_ revenge of _an_ ambitious
woman?” “_the_ revenge of _a_ jealous one?” Show me the revenge of your
jealous Amaryllis, the revenge of your ambitious Neæra; and _then_ I
will tell you whether they are right or not.
[Sidenote: _and typomania._]
The fact is, that on what we may call the other side of his virtue—to
call it the defect of his quality would be rather to beg the question—he
is, after all, a preceptist with some difference. Not merely is he an
unflinching and almost “right-or-wrong” Aristotelian, but from genuine
agreement of taste and judgment he still criticises almost wholly by
Kinds. It is _the_ drama, _the_ epic, _the_ fable, _the_ lyric, _the_
epigram that he makes for, across or sometimes almost outside of the
actual examples of their classes. And here, too, we find that the more
poetical divisions and the more poetical aspects of these and others
have no very special appeal to him. He belittles Lyric altogether; if he
is particularly fond of the Fable in the special sense, it is because it
also has a “fable” in the general, it is an imitation of life, a
criticism of it. His attempt to prove that Horace had no looking-glasses
in his bedroom[63] is a pleasant pendant to his indignation with
Roxalana’s _minois chiffonné_: and though there is a great deal to be
said for Martial, Lessing[64] is bribed to adopt the _vita proba_ view
rather by the Roman poet’s intense _vivacity_ than by his literary
merit.
[Sidenote: _His study of antiquity more than compensating._]
Yet this, once more, is but “the other side of a virtue.” The best
authorities agree that to Lessing may be assigned absolutely the return
to, if not the very initiation of,[65] a direct, scholarly, intelligent,
_literary_ study of the ancients themselves. As far as the Greek Theatre
itself is concerned, Brumoy had anticipated him: far too little justice
has often been done to the work of this modest and solid scholar. But
Brumoy’s outlook was wanting in range. Lessing had in his mind, as well
as Latin and Greek, English,[66] French and German always, Italian, even
Spanish[67] to some extent. And he read the Latin and the Greek in
themselves—and with all due apparatus of technical scholarship
considering his time. He was as far from the twice- and thrice-garbled
sciolism of the average French, and even English, critic of the late
seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, as from the arid pedantry of
the Dutch and German scholars of the same date. To him, more perhaps
than to any one else, it is due that modern criticism has not followed,
more than it has done, the mere foolishness of the “modern” advocates in
the Quarrel—that it has fortified itself with those sound and solid
studies which antiquity alone can supply. For once more let it be said
that if, from the pure critical point of view, Ancient without Modern is
a stumbling-block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and
irremediable.
[Sidenote: _And especially of Aristotle._]
Perhaps Lessing’s greatest glory is that he has given answer to the
despairing question which his master quoted in the Ethics.[68] “If the
water chokes, what must one drink on the top of it?” “More and purer
water” is that answer, of course: and Lessing scoured the clogged and
stagnant channels of Neo-Classicism by recurrence to the original fount.
Of course he was not himself absolutely original. He owed something to
Heinsius, in that most remarkable tractate to which we did justice in
its place, among the more distant moderns, to Dacier, pedant as he is,
to Brumoy, to Hurd among the nearer. But more than to any of them he
devoted himself to the real text of the _Poetics_, interpreted by a
combination of scholarship and mother-wit. To this day he has to be
consulted upon the _cruces_ of Fable and Character, of Unity, of
knotting and unknotting, of _katharsis_.[69] That he has said no final
word on them matters nothing: final words are not to be said on things
of opinion and probability
Until God’s great _Venite_ change the song.
But on these and not a few other matters he reorganised the whole method
and the whole tenor of the inquiry. And so he not only earns his own
place in the story, but half unintentionally establishes, or helps us to
establish, the great truth that the whole _is_ a story, a history, a
chain of opinion and comment on opinion, now going more, now less,
right, but to be kept as a chain.
[Sidenote: _With whom he combines Diderot._]
Nothing can illustrate this better than the fact that Lessing’s second
master in criticism is—Diderot! He does not regard that erratic and
_cometic_ genius as he regards Aristotle, he does not think the _Bijoux
Indiscrets_, and the remarks on the _Fils Naturel_, and the rest, as
being “as infallible as the _Elements of Euclid_.”[70] He would have
disqualified himself from serious consideration if he had. He dissents
from some of Diderot’s opinions; he combats some of his arguments. But
he admits, almost in so many words, and in a constant attitude which is
more valuable than any verbal admission, that this most irregular,
revolutionary, _casual_ of modern thinkers has set him on his own path
of independent revaluation of critical principles.
[Sidenote: _His deficiencies in regard to mediæval literature._]
And we find confirmation of this in those of his critical writings which
have not yet been mentioned, as well as illustrations of other critical
characteristics in him. It is curious that Lessing, so sensitive and
receptive to ancient and later modern influences, is almost as proof
against mediæval and (in his own language) early modern as Gottsched
himself. His low estimate of Lyric seems to come partly from the fact
that Aristotle had slighted it, or at least passed it over, partly from
the fact that in relation to Germany he is not thinking of her ballads
and lays, not even of the extravagances of the seventeenth century, but
of the tame Anacreontic of Hagedorn, Gleim, and Company. Even his study
of Shakespeare has not set him right in this respect. It is most curious
to read his contemporary Hurd, a contemporary for whom Lessing had a
just respect, and to remember that Hurd could appreciate not merely both
Aristotle and Shakespeare, but both Horace and Spenser. And there are
few things which bring out more clearly that immense debt to Shakespeare
and Spenser themselves which has been insisted on as due by English
criticism. It was too early for Lessing to have gone back to Gottfried
and Walther;[71] the German Renaissance had nothing (save the ballads,
which he would not have) to offer him.
[Sidenote: _The close of the_ Dramaturgie _and its moral_.]
The greatest places of the _Dramaturgie_ are those at the close of No.
95, and the penultimate passage of all. In the former, after a long
discussion of the Aristotelian commentaries of Hurd and Dacier, he
refashions his master’s famous dictum in other matter, that “accuracy
must not be expected.” He is not, he says, “obliged to solve all the
problems he raises.” His thoughts may seem desultory, or even
contradictory: but it does not matter if they supply others with the
germ of individual thought. He would but scatter “_fermenta
cognitionis_.” In the other, he proceeds still farther, though still
perhaps without a clear idea how far the path itself will lead. Germans,
he says (I shorten somewhat here), had imitated the French because the
French were believed to be your only followers of the ancients. Then
English plays came in, an entirely different style of drama was
revealed, and the Germans concluded that the aim of tragedy could be
fulfilled without the French rules—that the rules were wrong. And then
they went on to object to rules altogether as mere genius-hampering
pedantry. “In short, we had very nearly thrown away in wantonness all
past experience, insisting that the poet shall in every instance
discover the whole art for himself.” Lessing has endeavoured “to arrest
this secondary fermentation,” and that is all.
Invaluable words! and, if somewhat extra-literary,—or, from another
point of view, directed to too narrow a part of literature,—yet in their
true acceptation governing and guiding the whole method, the entire
campaign, of literary criticism. Whether Lessing had taken any
suggestion from Batteux,[72] who had written long before him, I do not
know: but the different attitude of the French critic and the German is
most interesting, and gives the reason why we have treated Batteux in
the last volume and are treating Lessing in this. Both writers perceive,
each in his own fashion, that every work of genius is, or at any rate
contains, a rule. I do not even know that it can be denied that Lessing,
almost as much as Batteux, though under happier stars, has an idea of
working out one general rule of all the particulars—a process which is
but too likely to lead back again into the House of Bondage; but his
actual notion takes a far more catholic form, leads far more directly to
the way of salvation. You must study each work of genius in order to get
its contribution to the Inner Rule, the highest formula. And if you do
this all will be well. It is not the Rule—as some falsely hold, and as
perhaps some even have falsely thought that the present writer holds—
that does the harm, but its exclusive and disfranchising application _a
priori_—not even the Kind, but its elevation into a caste, with the
correlative institution of pariahdom. And Lessing’s principle of never
neglecting study of former experience saves this danger at once.[73]
[Sidenote: _Miscellaneous specimens of his criticism._]
But the twenty volumes of Lessing’s Works, or rather the round dozen,
more or less, of them which contain or concern criticism, are not to be
passed over without some more detailed mention. The first contains
(besides the early and not uninteresting Preface to his collected
_Poems_ in 1753) the famous Dissertations on the Fable, which, whether
one agrees or not with them, give an admirable example of the
thoroughness, the sense, and the scholarship of Lessing’s critical
method. He lays out the history of opinion on his subject from Aristotle
and Aphthonius to Breitinger and Batteux; he combats, not long-windedly
but scientifically, those opinions with which he disagrees; he sets
forth his own with such further disposition of the subject as he thinks
proper. And in sixty pages he has given as masterly an example of
“criticism on a _kind_,” of general criticism (for we must maintain the
reservations above outlined), as need be desired—an example uniting
antique clearness and proportion, scholastic method, and modern vivacity
and illustrative variety. A somewhat different kind of document, but the
kind which we have so often looked for in vain hitherto, is given by the
great mass of reviews, literary letters, the rhetorical discussions of
various kinds, and the like, which fill four successive volumes.[74]
From the very first, written when Lessing was but two-and-twenty, his
scholarship, his reading, and his formidable and rather aggressive
intellectual ability, appear unmistakably. Much is mere abstract, but
more independent work appears from the long and early criticism of the
_Captivi_[75] to the review of Meinhardt’s _Italian Poets_, which came
just before the _Laocoön_.
Here may be found all manner of dealings with interesting and
heterogeneous subjects and persons, from Rousseau’s Dijon Discourse
through Klopstock and Piron, Bodmer’s sacred epics (“Three Epic Poets in
Germany at once!” says Lessing, setting the tone of mischievous
reviewing early; “too much! too much of a good thing!”), and “Gentil”
Bernard on the Art of Love, to elaborate dissertations on Simon Lemnius,
the author of that edifying work the _Monachopornomachia_.[76] And
later,[77] in more extensive reference to German Literature, much about
the early work of Klopstock and Wieland, a sustained polemic against
Gottsched, ranging from serious attacks on his authority as a literary
historian and critic to “skits” tending to prove that he was the author
of _Candide_,[78] not unaccompanied by businesslike abstracts of the
critic’s own work to adjust the same to more general acceptance.[79]
Of the _Kleinere Philologische Abhandlungen_, which fill the 15th
volume, the curious “Rettungen des Horaz” have been glanced at above.
The opening “Vademecum für Lange,” a vitriolic and practically
destructive retort on that blundering translator of Horace himself, who
had not had the sense to sit down quietly under a severe but not
offensive review of Lessing’s, is one of the capital examples of its
kind—a kind questionable but sometimes to be allowed. The “Anmerkungen
über das Epigramm,” the principal single constituent of the volume,[80]
are very noteworthy. The rest consist mainly of textual and other
animadversions of the kind which we reluctantly leave out here from the
Renaissance downward. The chief are on Paulus Silentiarius, and on that
interesting book the fables of the so-called _Anonymus Neveleti_.
He returns to this in one[81] of the numerous papers of vol. xvi.,
another collection of notes, notices (some of Old German Literature),
and reviews, the last mostly very short and sometimes a little
perfunctory. What might have been the most, and is not the least,
interesting of these,[82] has for subject a German translation of the
first two volumes of _The Rambler_ in 1754. Lessing does not name
Johnson, nor does he seem to know anything about him; but he praises the
Essays highly. Now, if you could have combined the good points of these
two, and “sprinkled in,” as Mambrun might say,[83] a little _furor
romanticus_, it would have been difficult to get a better critical
mixture than the result.
The still further collection of critical miscellanea in vol. xix. is
mostly philosophical or, according to Lessing’s unfortunate later habit,
theological in character,[84] but the long “Pope als Metaphysiker”
deserves mention as at least partially literary and as more than
partially good. Finally, the numerous and not seldom interesting notes
or motes of the _Kollectaneen_ or Commonplace Book published after
Lessing’s death, though they frequently approach or flit round strictly
literary criticism, never, I think, actually constitute it.[85]
[Sidenote: _His attitude to Æschylus and Aristophanes._]