the last turning-point of the recorded critical course, it is necessary
to insist on those reserves which have been made already. Everybody who
has read Lessing carefully must have noticed, whether with immediate
understanding of the reason or not, the very small attention which he
pays to two writers in his own favourite department, whom some would
call the very greatest in it, as far as Greece is concerned, and to whom
hardly any nowadays would deny a place among the greatest of Greece or
of the world—that is to say, Æschylus and Aristophanes. His defenders
are prompt with an excuse at least as damaging as most excuses. People
did not, says Lessing’s very able and very erudite commentator, M. Kont,
fully understand in those days the importance of Æschylus in connection
with Greek myths: and the forms of drama which he, and still more
Aristophanes, adopted were unsuitable to that modern use and application
which Lessing always had at heart. Alas! the value of an author in
connection with Greek myths is so exceedingly indifferent to literature!
and his value as helping to fill a stage at the present day is also of
so very little importance! If ignorance of one of these things and
consciousness of the absence of the other determined Lessing’s neglect
of the greatest tragic poet of Greece,—of the greatest comic poet,
except Shakespeare, of the world,—then it will be but too clear that
whatever Lessing cared most for, it was not poetry,—that his care for
poetry as such—nay, for literature as such—was even rather small. To
call him a “king of criticism” is foolish, because that is just what he
is not. He is grand-duke of not a few critical provinces which, somehow
or other, he never can consolidate into a universal monarchy of critical
wit.
Let me, however, assure any of my readers who are apt to regard as
“unfriendly” or “unsympathetic” criticism which is not eulogy thick and
slab, neat and unmixed, that there is no intention here of belittling
Lessing’s critical qualities,[86] only one of indicating critically what
they were and what they were not. The gift of critical expression he
most certainly had in a very high degree. His exposition is masterly:
though he is constantly, as has been said, leading the discussion aside
from concrete to abstract, and from particular to general points, he is
scarcely ever obscure, confused, or vague. His language is precise,
without being technical or jargonish. He has something of the German
lack of urbanity, but he often has a felicity of expression that is
French rather than German, with depth and humour which are far more
German than French. Never has one of the tricks of the critical pedant—
common to the kind in our day as in his—been so happily described as in
the opening of _Wie die Alten den Tod gebildeten_: “Herr Klotz always
thinks he is at my heels. But when I look back at his yelp, I see him
lost in a cloud of dust quite astray from the road I have trodden.”[87]
The unlucky distraction of his later years, to theological or
anti-theological squabbling may—nay, must—have lost us much. But as it
is, he never fails for long together to give those _fermenta
cognitionis_ of which he speaks. He is always “for thoughts”: that
fecundity, as a result of the critical congress, which we shall remark
in his part-master Diderot, is everywhere present in him.
[Sidenote: _Frederic the Great._]
Lessing, whom the king neglected, may suggest Frederic the Great, whose
_De la Littérature Allemande_ (1780) the Germans have most forgivingly
translated into the language despised by the writer, and adopted as a
“monument” of its literature.[88] It is certainly a monument of a kind,
and the most striking contrast possible to Lessing’s work. I shall not
say that it shows, as a Carlylian not less fervent than myself[89] has
admitted of Frederic’s historian on Marryat, that Frederic “was stupid
for once in his life.” But it certainly shows that he could be absurdly
narrow and perverse, and could push the confidence of ignorance to a
wonderful length. That Frederic _was_ very ignorant of literature there
is no doubt. It is known that he “had small Latin[90] and _no_ Greek”;
his expressions about English, the language and the literature, in this
very tractatule, are, if possible, more impudently ignorant than those
about German: he does not, I think, so much as name a Spanish author;
and his references to Italian might have been, and probably were,
derived from mere hearsay.
All this was a good preparation for judging a literature in the very
peculiar state of German in 1780, when, to do it justice, a man should
have had the knowledge, then almost impossible, of the various periods
from “Middle High” onwards, the power to appreciate its very different
phases, which few had, and the power, which hardly anybody ever has, of
appreciating the literary present, and even future. But Frederic need
not have made so near an approach to stupidity as he makes here.[91]
[Sidenote: De la Littérature Allemande.]
That there is considerable truth and shrewdness in the king’s censure of
his subjects’ pedantry and want of taste is quite certain; that the
German language was in a less favourable condition for literature than
any other of the great European languages is certain also. Many of his
practical precepts are as sensible as we should expect from a man so
great in affairs. But his literary criticism is rather worse than we
should expect even from a disciple of Voltaire, whose pet prejudices
they not merely reflect but exaggerate. Of all the “answers” (a most
interesting list of which, with account of them where possible, from
that one of Goethe’s, which has the here most deplorable “defect of
being lost,” downwards, will be found in Herr Geiger’s Introduction) the
happiest is in three words of Herder’s, which describe the treatise as
“_ein comisches Meisterstück_.”[92] Frederic attributes to Horace, and
in the _Ars Poetica_ too, four words[93] which do not occur there, which
would not be very easy to get into the metre without destroying their
juxtaposition, and which it would be not much easier to adjust to any
context of the actual piece. He attributes to Aristotle not merely the
Three Unities, but instead of the “Unity of _Action_” the “Unity of
_Interest_,” thus handing over
the whole position to the anti-Aristotelians after a fashion which, if
one of the king’s own generals had imitated it in actual war, would have
“broken” him for life, if it had not put him against a wall, and
opposite to a file of grenadiers. He thinks that Epictetus and Marcus
Aurelius wrote in Latin; that Toland wrote the _Leviathan_; that Marot,
Rabelais, and Montaigne wrote a jargon at least as bad as any German—
“gross and destitute of grace.” In the most celebrated passage[94]—
perhaps the only one generally known—he not only out-Voltaires Voltaire
by speaking of the “abominable pieces of Shakespeare,” those absurd
“farces worthy of Canadian savages,” but stigmatises _Goetz von
Berlichingen_ as a “detestable imitation” of them. He hardly knows of
any other German writers, and of those whom he praises Gellert and
Gessner are the only ones who have retained the least reputation. If for
one thing that he did—the injunction to write in German and not take
refuge in other languages—one is tempted to spare him, the merit almost
disappears when one remembers that he meant the German to be written in
the teeth of the natural bent of the language. The bulk of his positive
directions has nothing to do with literature whatsoever, but with the
teaching of physical science, of law, &c. And the real apex of the
_comisches Meisterstück_ (for Herder’s words are too good not to be
repeated) is to be found at the end. He prophesies, and (such is the
unending and unfathomable irony of Fate!) he prophesies quite truly,
that “the palmy days of our Literature have not come, but they are
approaching,” that he is their harbinger, that they are just about to
appear, “that though he shall not see them, his age making it hopeless,
he, like Moses, sees the Promised Land, but must not enter it.” The
inevitable jests at Moses himself, and the bare “rocks of sterile
Idumea,” follow. But it was Moses who laughed last. Every word of
Frederic’s prophecy came true; but it was because Germany neglected
every item of Frederic’s prescription. The palmy days did come: they
lasted for fifty glorious years and (with Heine) longer. But their light
was the light borrowed from the abominable Shakespeare, and their leader
was the author of _Goetz von Berlichingen_.[95]
CHAPTER III.
THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS.
THE FIRST GROUP—MEDIÆVAL REACTION—GRAY—PECULIARITY OF HIS CRITICAL
POSITION—THE LETTERS—THE ‘OBSERVATIONS’ ON ARISTOPHANES AND PLATO—
THE ‘METRUM’—THE LYDGATE NOTES—SHENSTONE—PERCY—THE WARTONS—JOSEPH’S
‘ESSAY ON POPE’—THE ‘ADVENTURER’ ESSAYS—THOMAS WARTON ON SPENSER—HIS
‘HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY’—HURD: HIS COMMENTARY ON ADDISON—THE
HORACE—THE DISSERTATIONS—OTHER WORKS—THE 'LETTERS ON CHIVALRY AND
ROMANCE’—THEIR DOCTRINE—HIS REAL IMPORTANCE—ALLEGED IMPERFECTIONS OF
THE GROUP—STUDIES IN PROSODY—JOHN MASON: HIS ‘POWER OF NUMBERS’ IN
PROSE AND POETRY—MITFORD: HIS ‘HARMONY OF LANGUAGE’—IMPORTANCE OF
PROSODIC INQUIRY—STERNE AND THE STOP-WATCH.
We have already, in the last volume, seen that in England, about the
middle of the eighteenth century, the tables of criticism turned, and
that a company of critics, not large, not as a rule very great men of
letters, began slowly, tentatively, with a great deal of rawness, and
blindness, and even backsliding, to grope for a catholic and free theory
of literature, and especially of poetry. We are now to examine this
group[96] more narrowly. With the not quite certainly to be allowed
exception of Gray, no one of them could pretend to the first rank in the
literature of the time; and most of them (Hurd and Percy were the chief
exceptions) did not live to see, even at the extreme verge of life, the
advent of the champions who were to carry their principles into
practice. But they were the harbingers of the dawn, little as in some
cases (perhaps in all) they comprehended the light that faintly and
fitfully illuminated them beforehand.
[Sidenote: _The first group._]
Three of the writers of this class whom it is necessary to name here
have been alluded to already; the others were Shenstone and the Wartons.
As so often happens in similar cases, it is exceedingly difficult to
assign exact priority, for mere dates of publication are always
misleading; and in this case, from their close juxtaposition, they
almost of themselves give the warning that they are not to be trusted.
How early, in his indolent industry at Cambridge, Gray had come to a
Pisgah-sight of the true course of English poetry; Shenstone, in
pottering and maundering at the Leasowes, to glimpses of the same; Percy
and Shenstone again to their design, afterwards executed by Percy alone,
of publishing the _Reliques_; the Wartons to their revolutionary views
of Pope on the one side and Spenser on the other; Hurd to his curious
mixture of true and false _aperçus_;—it is really impossible to say. The
last-named, judging all his work together, may seem the least likely,
early as some of that work is, to have struck out a distinctly original
way for himself; but all, no doubt, were really driven, _nolentes
volentes_, conscious or unconscious, by the Time-Spirit.
[Sidenote: _Mediæval reaction._]
The process which the Spirit employed for effecting this great change
was a simple one; indeed, we have almost summed up his inspiration in
the oracular admonition, _Antiquam exquirite matrem_. For more than two
hundred years literary criticism had been insolently or ignorantly
neglecting its mother, the Middle Age—now with a tacit assumption that
this period _ought_ to be neglected, now with an open and expressed
scorn of it. But, as usually happens, a return had begun to be made just
when the opposite progress seemed to have reached its highest point.
Dryden himself had “translated” and warmly praised Chaucer; Addison had
patronised _Chevy Chase_. But before the death of Pope much larger and
more audacious explorations had been attempted. In Scotland—whether
consciously stung or not by the disgrace of a century almost barren of
literature—Watson the printer[97] and Allan Ramsay[98] had, in 1706-11
and 1724-40, unearthed a good deal of old poetry. In England the
anonymous compiler[99] of the _Ballads_ of 1723 had done something, and
Oldys the antiquary, under the shelter of “Mrs Cooper’s” petticoat, had
done more with the _Muses’ Library_ of 1737. These examples[100] were
followed out, not without a little cheap contempt from those who would
be in the fashion, and knew not that this fashion had received warning.
But they _were_ followed, and their most remarkable result, in criticism
and creation combined, is the work of Gray.
[Sidenote: _Gray _]
We have not so very many fairer figures in our “fair” herd than Gray,
though the fairness may be somewhat like that of Crispa,[101] visible
chiefly to a lover of criticism itself. His actual critical performance
is, in proportion, scantier even than his poetical; and the scantiness
may at first sight seem even stranger, since a man can but poetise when
he can, but may, if he has the critical faculty, criticise almost when
he will and has the opportunity. That opportunity (again at first sight)
Gray may seem to have had, as scarcely another man in our whole long
history has had it. He had nothing else to do, and was not inclined to
do anything else. He had sufficient means, no professional avocations,
the knowledge, the circumstances, the _locale_, the wits, the taste,
even the velleity—everything but, in the full sense, the will. This
indeed he might, in all circumstances and at all times, have lacked, for
Mr Arnold showed himself no philosophic student of humanity when he said
that at the date of Milton, or at the date of Keats, Gray would have
been a different man. His _work_ would doubtless have been a different
work; but that is another matter. At all times, probably, Gray would
have had the same fastidiousness, the same liability to be “put off”;
and if his preliminary difficulties had been lightened by the provision,
in times nearer our own, of the necessary rough-hewing and first
research by others, yet this very provision would probably have
prevented him from pursuing what he would have disdainfully regarded as
a second-hand business. We may—we must—regret that he never finished
that _History of English Poetry_ which he hardly began, that he never
attempted the half-dozen other things of the kind, which he was better
equipped for doing than any man then living, and than all but three or
four men who have lived since. But the regret must be tempered by a
secret consciousness that on the whole he probably would _not_ have done
them, let time and chance and circumstance have favoured him never so
lavishly.
[Sidenote: _Peculiarity of his critical position._]
Yet this very idiosyncrasy of limitation and hamper in him made, in a
sense, for criticism; inasmuch as there are two kinds of critical
temperament, neither of which could be spared. There is the eager,
strenuous, almost headlong critical disposition of a Dryden, which races
like a conflagration[102] over all the field it can cover; and there is
the hesitating, ephectic, intermittent temperament of a Gray, which
directs an intense and all-dissolving, but ill-maintained heat at this
and that special part of the subject. In what is called, and sometimes
is, “originality,” this latter temperament is perhaps the more fertile
of the two, and Gray has it in an almost astounding measure. Great as
was his own reading, a man might, I think, be as well read as himself
without discovering any real indebtedness of his, except to a certain
general influence of literary study in many times and tongues. He knew
indeed, directly or indirectly, most of the other agents in the quiet
and gradual revolution which was coming on English poetic and literary
taste; but he was much in advance of all of them in time. Well as he was
read in Italian, he nowhere, I think, cites Gravina, in whom there was
something to put him on new tracks; and though he was at least equally
well read in French, and does cite Fontenelle, it is not for any of the
critical germs which we have discovered in that elusive oracle. The one
modern language to which he seems to have paid little or no attention
was German,[103] where the half-blind strugglings of the Zürich school
might have had some stimulus for him. Whatever he did, alone he did it;
and though the volume of his strictly critical observations (not
directed to mere common tutorial scholarship) would, if printed
consecutively, perhaps not fill twenty—certainly not fifty—pages of this
book, its virtue, intrinsic and suggestive, surpasses that of libraries
full of Rapins and even of Batteux.
[Sidenote: _The Letters._]
From the very first these observations have, to us, no uncertain sound.
In a letter to West,[104] when the writer was about six-and-twenty, we
find it stated with equal dogmatism, truth, and independence of
authority that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry
except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does
not support it, differs nothing from prose,” with a long and valuable
citation, illustrating this defence of “poetic diction,” and no doubt
thereby arousing the wrath of Wordsworth. Less developed, but equally
important and equally original, is the subsequent description of our
language as not being “a settled thing” like the French. Gray, indeed,
makes this with explicit reference only to the revival of archaisms,
which he defends; but, as we see from other places as well as by natural
deduction, it extends to reasonable neologisms also. In this respect
Gray is with all the best original writers, from Chaucer and Langland
downwards, but against a respectably mistaken body of critics who would
fain not merely introduce the caste system into English, but, like Sir
Boyle Roche, make it hereditary in this caste not to have any children.
This same letter contains some of Gray’s best-known criticisms, in his
faint praise of _Joseph Andrews_ and his warm appreciation of Marivaux
and Crébillon. I am not quite certain that, in this last, Gray intended
any uncomplimentary comparison, or that he meant anything more than a
defence of the novel generally—a defence which itself deserves whatever
crown is appropriated to critical merit, inasmuch as the novel had
succeeded to the place of Cinderella of Literature. However, both
Fielding and Smollett were probably too boisterous for Gray, who could
appreciate Sterne better, though he disliked “Tristram’s” faults.
But the fact is that it is not in criticisms of his contemporaries, or
indeed in definite critical appreciation at all, that Gray’s strength
lies. For any defects in the former he has, of course, the excuse that
his was a day of rather small things in poetry; but, once more, it is
not quite certain that circumstances would have much altered the case.
We must remember that Mr Arnold also does not come very well out of this
test; and indeed, that second variety of the critical temperament which
we have defined above is not conducive to enthusiasm.[105] It is, of
course, unlucky that Gray’s personal affection for Mason directed his
most elaborate praises to a tenth-rate object; but it is fair to
remember that he does reprehend in Mason faults—such as excessive
personification—which were not merely those of his friend, the husband
of “dead Maria,” but his own. It is a thousand pities that, thanks to
Mason himself, we have the similar criticisms of Beattie only in a
garbled condition; but they too are sound and sensible, if _very_
merciful. The mercy, however, which Gray showed perhaps too plentifully
to friends and relations he did not extend to others. That the “frozen
grace” of Akenside appealed little to him is less remarkable than his
famous pair of judgments on “Joe” Warton and Collins.
The coupling itself, moreover, and even the prophecy that “neither will
last,” are less extraordinary (for the very keenest eyes, when
unassisted by “the firm perspective of the past,” will err in this way,
and Joseph’s _Odes_ are, as his friend, Dr. Johnson, said of the rumps
and kidneys, “very pretty little things”) than the ascription of “a bad
ear” to Collins. This is certainly “a term inexplicable to the Muse.” It
was written in 1746. Five years later an undated but clearly datable
letter to Walpole contains (lxxxiv., ed. cit.) in a notice of Dodsley’s
_Miscellany_, quite a sheaf of criticisms. That of Tickell—“a poor
short-winded imitator of Addison, who had himself not above three or
four notes in poetry, sweet enough indeed, like those of a German flute,
but such as soon tire and satiate the ear with their frequent return”—is
very notable for this glance backward on the great Mr Addison, though it
would have been unjust to Tickell if (which does not quite appear) it
had been intended to include his fine elegy on Addison himself, and the
still finer one on Cadogan.[106] Gray is quite amiable to _The Spleen_
and _The Schoolmistress_, and _London_; justly assigns to Dyer (the Dyer
of _Grongar Hill_, not of _The Fleece_) “more of poetry in his
imagination than almost any of our number,” but unjustly calls him
“rough and injudicious,” and brushes most of the rest away, not too
superciliously. A year later (December 1752, to Wharton) he grants to
Hall’s Satires “fulness of spirit and poetry; as much of the first as Dr
Donne, and far more of the latter.” In the elaborate “buckwashing” of
Mason’s _Caractacus_ ode, which occupies great part of the very long
letter of December 19, 1756, there is a passage of great importance on
Epic and Lyric style, which exhibits as well perhaps as anything else
the independence, and at the same time the transitional consistency, of
Gray’s criticism.
He says first (which is true, and which no rigidly orthodox Neo-Classic
would or could have admitted): “The true lyric style, with all its
flights of fancy ornaments, heightening of expression, and harmony of
sound, is in its nature superior to every other style.” Then he says
that this is just the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great
length; then that the epic “therefore assumed graver colours,” and only
stuck on a diamond borrowed from her sister here and there; then that it
is “natural and delightful” to pass from the graver stuff to the
diamond, and then that to pass from lyric to epic is to drop from verse
to mere prose. All of which seems to argue a curious inequality in
clearing the mind from cant. It _is_ true, as has been said, that Lyric
is the highest style. But surely the reason why this height cannot be
kept is the weakness, not of human receptivity but of human
productiveness. Give us an _Iliad_ at the pitch of the best chorus of
the _Agamemnon_, and we will gladly see whether we can bear it or not.
Again, if you can pass from the dress to the diamond, why not pass from
the diamond to the dress? It is true that in Mason’s case the diamonds
were paste, and bad paste; but that does not affect the argument. When,
in still a later letter (clxii.) to the same “Skroddles”[107] he lays it
down that “extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and
musical is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry,” we must
accentuate _one of the_. But there is a bombshell for Neo-Classicism in
cvii., still to “Skroddles.” “I insist that sense is nothing in poetry,
but according to the dress she wears and the scene she appears in.”
Gray’s attitude to _Ossian_ is interesting, but very much what we should
have expected. He was bribed by its difference from the styles of which
he was weary; but he seems from the very first to have had qualms (to
which he did some violence, without quite succeeding, in order to stifle
them) as to its genuineness.
[Sidenote: _The_ Observations _on Aristophanes and Plato_.]
No intelligent lover of the classics, whose love is not limited to them,
can fail to regret that by very far the larger bulk of Gray’s critical
_Observations_ is directed to Aristophanes and Plato. The annotator is
not incompetent, and the annotated are supremely worthy of his labours;
but the work was not specially in need of doing, and there have been
very large numbers of men as well or better qualified to do it. Such
things as this—_Aves_, 1114: “These were plates of brass with which they
shaded the heads of statues to guard them from the weather and the
birds”—are things which we do not want from a Gray at all. They are the
business of that harmless drudge, the lexicographer, in general, of a
competent fifth-form master editing the play, in particular. But there
was probably at that time not a single man in Europe equally qualified
by natural gifts and by study to deliver really critical and comparative
opinions on literature, to discuss the history and changes of English,
and the like. Nor has there probably at any date been any man better
qualified for this, having regard to the conditions of his own time and
country. One cannot, then, but feel it annoying that a life, not long
but by no means very short, and devoted exclusively to literary leisure,
should have resulted, as far as this special vocation of the author is
concerned, in some eighty small pages of Dissertation devoted to English
metres and to the Poems of Lydgate.
Let us, however, rather be thankful for what we have got, and examine
it, such as it is, with care.
[Sidenote: _The_ Metrum.]
In the very first words of the _Metrum_ it is curious and delightful to
see a man at this early period cutting right and left at the error of
the older editors, who calmly shoved in, or left out, words and
syllables to make what they thought correct versification for Chaucer,
and at the other error committed by the majority of philologists to-day
in holding that Chaucer’s syntax, accidence, and orthography were as
precise as those of a writer in the school of the French Academy. Even
more refreshing are, on the one hand, his knowledge and heed of
Puttenham, and, on the other, his correction of Puttenham’s doctrine of
the fixed Caesura, his admissions of this in the case of the
Alexandrine, and his quiet demonstration that the admission of it in the
decasyllable and octosyllable would make havoc of our best poetry. The
contrast of this reasonable method and just conclusion, not merely with
the ignorant or overbearing dogmatism of Bysshe half a century earlier,
but with the perversity, in the face of light and knowledge, of Guest a
century later, is as remarkable as anything in the history of English
criticism.
Gray, of course, was fallible. He entangles himself rather on the
subject of “Riding Rhyme”; and though he, first (I think) of all English
writers, notices the equivalenced dimeter iambics of Spenser’s _Oak and
Bryar_, and compares Milton’s octosyllables with them, he goes wrong by
saying that this is the _only_ English metre in which such a liberty of
choice is allowed, and more wrong still in bringing Donne’s well-known
ruggedness under this head. And he does not allow himself to do more
than glance at the Classical-metre craze, his remarks on which would
have been very interesting.
His subsequent analysis of “measures” with the chief books or poems in
which they are used is of very great interest, but as it is a mere table
it hardly lends itself to comment, though it fills nearly twenty pages.
The conclusion, however, is important, and, without undue guessing,
gives us fair warrant for inferring that Gray would have had much (and
not a favourable much) to say on the contemporary practice he describes
if the table had been expanded into a dissertation. And the table
itself, with its notes, shows that though his knowledge of Middle
English before Chaucer was necessarily limited, yet he knew and had
drawn right conclusions from Robert of Gloucester and Robert of Brunne,
_The Owl and the Nightingale_, the early English Life of St. Margaret,
and the _Poema Morale_.[108]
His observations on “the pseudo-Rhythmus” (which odd and misleading term
simply means Rhyme) present a learned and judicious summary of the facts
as then known with the shorter appendices on the same subject.
[Sidenote: _The Lydgate Notes._]
The observations on John Lydgate which close Gray’s critical _dossier_
might have been devoted to a more interesting subject, but they enable
us to see what the average quality of the _History_ would have been. And
they certainly go, in scheme and quality, very far beyond any previous
literary history of any country with which I am acquainted. The article
(as we may call it) is made up of a judicious mixture of biography,
account of books (in both cases, of course, as far as known to the
writer only), citation, exposition of points of interest in subject,
history, manners, &c., criticisms of poetical characteristics in the
individual, and now and then critical _excursus_ of a more general kind
suggested by the subject. In one place, indeed, Gray does introduce
Homer in justification of Lydgate: but no one will hesitate to do this
now and then; and it is quite clear that he does not do it from any
delusion as to a cut-and-dried pattern, or set of patterns, to which
every poem, new or old, was bound to conform.
And to this we have to add certain facts which, if not critical
utterances, speak as few such utterances have done—the novelty of Gray’s
original English poetry, and his selection of Welsh and Scandinavian
originals for translation and imitation. These things were themselves
unspoken criticism of the most important kind on the literary habits and
tastes of his country, and of Europe at large. The, to us, almost
unintelligible puzzlement of his contemporaries—the “hard as Greek” of
the excellent Garrick, and the bewilderment of the three lords at York
races, establish[109] the first point; as for the second, it establishes
itself. To these outlying languages and literatures nobody had paid any
attention whatever previously;[110] they were now not merely admitted to
literary attention, but actually allowed and invited to exercise the
most momentous influence on the costume, the manners, the standards of
those literatures which had previously alone enjoyed the citizenship of
Parnassus.
Small, therefore, as is the extent of deliberate critical work which
Gray has left us, we may perceive in it nearly all the notes of
reformed, revived, we might almost say reborn, criticism. The two
dominants of these have been already dwelt upon—to wit, the constant
appeal to history, and the readiness to take new matter, whether
actually new in time, or new in the sense of having been hitherto
neglected, on its own merits; not indeed with any neglect of the
ancients—for Gray was saturated with “classical” poetry in every
possible sense of the word, with Homer and Virgil, as with Dante and
Milton and Dryden—but purely from the acknowledgment at last of the
plain and obvious truth, “other times, other ways.” As a deduction from
these two we note, as hardly anywhere earlier, a willingness to take
literature as it is, and not to prescribe to it what it should be—in
short, a mixture of catholicity with tolerance, which simply does not
exist anywhere before. Lastly, we may note a special and very particular
attention to prosody. This is a matter of so much importance that we
must[111] ourselves bestow presently some special attention upon it, and
may advantageously note some other exercitations of the kind at the time
or shortly afterwards.
[Sidenote: _Shenstone._]
Of the rest of the group mentioned above, Shenstone[112] is the
earliest, the most isolated, and the least directly affected by the
mediæval influence. Yet he, too, must have felt it to have engaged, as
we know he did, with Percy in that enterprise of the _Reliques_ which
his early death cut him off from sharing fully. From his pretty
generally known poems no one need have inferred much tendency of the
kind in him: for his Spenserian imitation, _The Schoolmistress_, has as
much of burlesque as of discipleship in it. Nor are indications of the
kind extremely plentiful in his prose works. But the remarkable _Essays
on Men and Manners_, which give a much higher notion of Shenstone’s
power than his excursions into the rococo, whether versified or
hortulary, are full of the new germs. Even here, however, he is, after
the prevailing manner of his century, much more ethical than literary,
and shows deference, if not reverence, to not a few of its literary
idols. The mixed character of his remarks on Pope[113] (which are,
however, on the whole very just) may be set down by the Devil’s Advocate
to the kind of jealousy commonly entertained by the “younger generations
who are knocking at the door”; and his objection to the plan of Spenser
is neo-classically purblind. But his remarks on Prosody[114] breathe a
new spirit, which, a little later, we shall be able to trace in
development. His preference for rhymes that are “long” in pronunciation
over snip-snaps like “cat” and “not”; his discovery—herald of the great
Coleridgean reaction—that “there is a vast beauty in emphasising in the
eighth and ninth place a word that is virtually a dactyl”; the way in
which he lays stress on harmony of period and music of style as sources
of literary pleasure; and above all the fact, that when examining the
“dactylic” idea just given, he urges the absurdity of barring
trisyllabic feet in _any_ place, and declares that a person ignorant of
Latin can discern Virgil’s harmony, show us the new principles at work.
Perhaps his acutest critical passage is the maxim, “Every good poet
includes a critic: the reverse will not hold”; his most Romantic, “The
words ‘no more’ have a singular pathos, reminding us at once of past
pleasure and the future exclusion of it.”[115]
[Sidenote: _Percy._]
Shenstone’s colleague in the intended, his executor in the actual,
scheme of the _Reliques_ was allowed by Fate to go very much further in
the same path. At no time, perhaps, has Bishop Percy had quite fair
play. In his own day his friend Johnson laughed at him, and his enemy
Ritson attacked him with his usual savagery. In ours the publication at
last of his famous _Folio Manuscript_[116] has resulted in a good deal
of not exactly violent, but strong language as to his timorous and
eclectic use of the precious material he had obtained, and his scarcely
pardonable tamperings with such things as he did extract. Nobody indeed
less one-sided and fanatical than Ritson himself, or less prejudiced
than the great lexicographer, could ignore the vastness of the benefit
which the _Reliques_ actually conferred upon English literature, or the
enormous influence which it has directly and indirectly exercised; but
there has been a slight tendency to confine Percy’s merits to the
corners of this acknowledgment.
Yet there is much more, by no means always in the way of mere allowance,
to be said for Percy than this. His poetic taste was not perfect: it
could not be so. It was unlucky that he had a certain not wholly
contemptible faculty for producing as well as for relishing verse, and
an itch for exercising this; while he suffered, as everybody did till at
least the close of his own life, from failing entirely to comprehend the
late and rather decadent principle that you must let ruins alone—that
you must not “improve” your original. But a man must either be strangely
favoured by the gods, or else have a real genius for the matter, who
succeeds, at such a time and in such circumstances, in getting together
and publishing such a collection as the _Reliques_. Nor are Percy’s
dissertations destitute of critical as well as of instinctive merit.
Modern scholarship—which has the advantage rather of knowing more than
Percy could know than of making a better use of what it does know, and
which is much too apt to forget that the scholars of all ages are
“Priests that slay the slayer
And shall themselves be slain”—
can find, of course, plenty of errors and shortcomings in the essays on
the Minstrels and the Ancient Drama, the metre of _Piers Plowman_, and
the Romances; and they are all unnecessarily adulterated with theories
and fancies about origin, &c. But this last adulteration has scarcely
ceased to be a favourite
“form of competition” among critics; while I am bound to say that the
literary sense which is so active and pervading in Percy seems to have
deserted our modern philologists only too frequently.
At any rate, whatever may be his errors and whatever his shortcomings,
the enormous, the incalculable stimulus and reagency of the _Reliques_
is not now matter of dispute; while it is equally undeniable that the
poetical material supplied was reinforced by a method of historical and
critical inquiry which, again with all faults, could not fail to have
effects almost equally momentous on criticism if not quite so momentous
on creation.
[Sidenote: _The Wartons._]
The two Wartons and Hurd gave still more powerful assistance in this
latter department, while Thomas Warton at least supplied a great deal of
fresh actual material in his _History_. To none of the three has full
justice, as it seems to me, been recently done; while to one of them it
seems to me that there has been done very great injustice. The main
documents which we have to consider in the case of the two brothers are
for Joseph, his _Essay on Pope_ (1756-71), and the numerous critical
papers in _The Adventurer_; for Thomas, the _Observations on The Faerie
Queene_ (1754), and of course _The History of English Poetry_ (1774-81).
[Sidenote: _Joseph’s_ Essay on Pope.]
Warton’s _Essay on Pope_[117]—vaguely famous as a daring act of
iconoclasm, and really important as a document in the Romantic Revolt—
almost literally anticipates the jest of a hundred years later on
another document, about “chalking up ‘No Popery!’ and then running
away.” It also shows the uncertainty of stand-point which is quite
pardonable and indeed inevitable in these early reformers. To us it is
exceedingly unlucky that Warton should at page ii. of his Preface ask,
“What traces has Donne of pure poetry?” Yet when we come immediately
afterwards to the (for the time) bold and very nearly true statement
that Boileau is no more poetical than La Bruyère, we see that Warton was
thinking only of the satirist, not of the author of _The Anniversaries_
and the “Bracelet” poems.
Further, Warton lays down, _sans phrase_ and with no Addisonian
limitations, that “a poet must have imagination.” He is sure (_we_ may
feel a little more doubtful) that Young, his dedicatee, would not insist
on being called a poet on the strength of his own Satires. And he works
himself up to the position that in Pope there is nothing
_transcendently_ sublime or pathetic, supporting this by a very curious
and for its time instructive division of English poets into four
classes. The first contains poets of the first rank on the
sublime-pathetic-imaginative standard, and is limited to three—Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Milton. The second company—headed by Dryden, but
including, not a little to our surprise, Fenton—has less of this poetic
intensity, but some, and excels in rhetorical and didactic vigour. The
third is reserved for those—Butler, Swift, Donne, Dorset, &c.—who, with
little poetry, have abundant wit; and the fourth “gulfs” the mere
versifiers, among whom we grieve to find Sandys and even Fairfax herded
with Pitt and Broome.
There is evidently, both in its rightgoings and its short-comings,
considerable matter in this for discussion were such discussion in
place. But the main heads of it, which alone would be important, must be
obvious to every one. In the body of the _Essay_, Warton, as was hinted
above, rather “hedges.” He maintains his position that Pope was not
_transcendently_ a poet; and indulges in much detailed and sometimes
rather niggling criticism of his work; but readmits him after a fashion
to a sort of place in Parnassus, not quite “utmost, last, provincial,”
but, as far as we can make out, on the fence between Class Two and Class
Three. The book, as has also been said, is a real document, showing
drift, but also drifting. The Time-Spirit is carrying the man along, but
he is carried half-unconsciously.
[Sidenote: _The_ Adventurer _Essays_.]
Warton’s _Adventurer_ essays are specially interesting. They were
written early in 1753-54, some years before the critical period of
1760-65, and two or three before his _Pope_ essay; and they were
produced at the recommendation, if not under the direct editorship, of
Johnson. Further, in the peroratorical remarks which were usual with
these artificial periodicals, Warton explains that they were planned
with a definite intention not merely to reintroduce Criticism among
polite society, but to reinvest her with something more of exactness and
scholarship than had been usual since Addison followed the French
critics in talking politely about critical subjects. Warton’s own
exercitations are distinguished by a touch which may be best called
“gingerly.” He opens (No. 49) with a “Parallel between Ancient and
Modern Learning,” which is in effect an almost violent attack on French
critics, with exceptions for Fénelon, Le Bossu, and Brumoy. Then, taking
the hint of Longinus’s reference to “the legislator of the Jews,” he
feigns a fresh discovery of criticisms of the Bible by the author of the
Περὶ Ὕψους. He anticipates his examination of Pope by some remarks (No.
63) on that poet from the plagiarism-and-parallel-passage standpoint;
upholds the _Odyssey_ (Nos. 75, 80, 83) as of equal value with the
_Iliad_, and of perhaps greater for youthful students; insinuates some
objections to Milton (No. 101); studies _The Tempest_ (Nos. 93, 97) and
_Lear_ (Nos. 113, 116, 122) more or less elaborately.[118] Throughout he
appears to be conditioned not merely by the facts glanced at above, by
the ethical tendency of these periodicals generally, and by his own
profession of schoolmaster, but also by a general transition feeling, a
know-not-what-to-think-of-it. Yet his inclination is evidently towards
something new—perhaps he does _not_ quite know what—and away from
something old, which _we_ at least can perceive without much difficulty
to be the Neo-Classic creed. He would probably by no means abjure that
creed if it were presented to him as a test, but he would take it with
no small qualifications.
[Sidenote: _Thomas Warton on Spenser._]
For a combination of earliness, extension, and character no book noticed
in this chapter exceeds in interest Thomas Warton’s _Observations on
Spenser_.[119] To an ordinary reader, who has heard that Warton was one
of the great ushers of Romanticism in England, and that Spenser was one
of the greatest influences which these ushers applied, the opening of
the piece, and not a very few passages later, may seem curiously
half-hearted and unsympathetic. Such a reader, from another though
closely connected point of view, may be disappointed by the fragmentary
and _annotatory_ character of the book, its deficiency in _vues
d’ensemble_, its apologies, and compromises, and hesitations. But those
who have taken a little trouble to inform themselves on the matter,
either by their own inquiries or by following the course which has been
indicated in this book, will be much better satisfied. They will see
that he says what he ought to have said in the concatenation
accordingly.
It is impossible to decide how much of yet not discarded orthodoxy, and
how much of characteristic eighteenth-century compromise there is in the
opening about “depths of Gothic ignorance and barbarity,” “ridiculous
and incoherent excursions,” “old _Provençal_ vein,” and the like.
Probably there is a good deal of both;[120] there is certainly a good
deal which requires both to excuse it. Yet before long Warton fastens a
sudden petard on the main gate of the Neo-Classic stronghold by saying:
“But it is absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or Spenser by
precepts which they did not attend to.” Absurd, indeed! But what becomes
of those antecedent laws of poetry, those rules of the kind and so
forth, which for more than two hundred years had been accumulating
authority? It is no good for him to go on: “We who live in the days of
writing by rule.... Critical taste is universally diffused ...” and so
on. The petard goes on fizzing and sparkling at the gate, and will blow
it in before long.
In the scattered annotations, which follow for a long time, the attitude
of compromise is fairly kept; and even Neo-Classics, as we have seen,
need not necessarily have objected to Warton’s demonstration[121]
_pièces en main_, that Scaliger “had no notion of simple and genuine
beauty”; while the whole of his section (iv.) on Spenser’s stanza, &c.,
is full of _lèse-poésie_, and that (vii.) on Spenser’s inaccuracies is
not much better. But the very next section is an important attack on the
plagiarism-and-parallel-passage mania which almost invariably develops
itself in bad critics; and the defence of his author’s Allegory (§ x.),
nay, the plump avowal of him as a Romantic poet, more than atones for
some backslidings even here. Above all, the whole book is distinguished
by a genuine if not always understanding _love_ of the subject;
secondly, by an obvious refusal—sometimes vocal, always latent—to accept
_a priori_ rules of criticism; thirdly, and most valuably of all, by
recurrence to contemporary and preceding models as criteria instead of
to the ancients alone. Much of the last part of the book is occupied
with a sort of first draft in little of the author’s subsequent
_History_; he is obviously full of knowledge (if sometimes flawed) and
of study (if sometimes misdirected) of early English literature. And
this is what was wanted. “Nullum numen abest si sit _conscientia_”
(putting the verse aside) might almost be the critic’s sole motto if it
were not that he certainly cannot do without _Prudentia_ itself. But
Prudentia without her sister is almost useless: she can at best give
inklings, and murmur, “If you are not conscious of what has actually
been done in literature you can never decide what ought and ought not to
have been done.”
[Sidenote: _His_ History of English Poetry.]
This is what gives the immense, the almost unequalled importance which
Warton’s _History of English Poetry_[122] should possess in the eyes of
persons who can judge just judgment. It has errors: there is no division
of literature in which it is so unreasonable to expect accuracy as in
history, and no division of history to which that good-natured
Aristotelian dictum applies so strongly as to literary history. Its
method is most certainly defective, and one of its greatest defects is
the disproportion in the treatment of authors and subjects. When the
author expatiates into Dissertation, he may often be justly accused of
first getting out of his depth as regards the subject, and then
recovering himself by making the treatment shallow.[123] And I do not
know that his individual criticisms betray any very frequent or very
extraordinary acuteness of appreciation. To say of the lovely
“_Lenten is come with love to town_,”
that it “displays glimmerings of imagination, and exhibits some faint
ideas of poetical expression,” is surely to be, as Dryden said of Smith
and Johnson in _The Rehearsal_, a “cool and insignificant gentleman”;
and though it is quite accurate to recognise “much humour and spirit” in
_Piers Plowman_, it is a little inadequate and banal.
But this is mere hole-picking at worst, at best the necessary or
desirable ballast or set-off to a generous appreciation of Warton’s
achievement. If his erudition is not unflawed, its bulk and mass are
astonishing in a man of his time; if his method and proportion are
defective, this is almost inevitable in the work of a pioneer; and we
have seen enough since of critics and historians who make all their
geese swans, not to be too hard on one who sometimes talked of peacocks
or humming-birds as if they were barndoor fowls or sparrows. The good
which the book, with its wealth of quotation as well as of summary, must
have done, is something difficult to realise but almost impossible to
exaggerate. Now at least, for England and for English, the missing links
were supplied, the hidden origins revealed, the Forbidden Country thrown
open to exploration. It is worth while (though in no unkind spirit) once
more to recall Addison’s _péché de jeunesse_ in his _Account of the
English Poets_, in order to contrast it with the picture presented by
Warton. Instead of a millennium of illiteracy and barbarism, with
nothing in it worth noticing at all but Chaucer and Spenser—presented,
the one as a vulgar and obsolete merryandrew, and the other as half
old-wives’-fabulist and half droning preacher—century after century,
from at least the thirteenth onward (Warton does not profess to handle
Anglo-Saxon)’ was presented in regular literary development, with
abundant examples of complicated literary kinds, and a crowded bead-roll
of poets, with specimens of their works. Men had before them—for the
first time, except in cases of quite extraordinary leisure,
opportunities, taste, and energy—the _actual_ progress of English
prosody and English poetic diction, to set against the orthodox doctrine
that one fine day not so very early in the seventeenth century Mr Waller
achieved a sort of minor miracle of creation in respect of both. And all
these works and persons were accorded serious literary and critical
treatment, such as had been hitherto reserved for the classics of old,
for the masterpieces of what Callières calls _les trois nations polies_
abroad, and for English writers _since_ Mr Waller. That Warton did not
gush about them was no fault; it was exactly what could have been
desired. What was wanted was the entrance of mediæval and Renaissance
poetry into full recognition; the making of it _Hoffähig_; the
reconstitution of literary history so as to place the work of the Middle
Period on a level basis, and in a continuous series, with work ancient
and modern. And this Warton, to the immortal glory of himself, his
University, and his Chair,[124] effected.
[Sidenote: _Hurd. His Commentary on Addison._]
The remaining member of the group requires handling with some care. Not
much notice has been taken of Bishop Hurd for a long time past, and some
authorities who have given him notice have been far from kind. Their
unkindness, I think, comes very near injustice; but Hurd has himself to
blame for a good deal of it. As a man he seems to have been, if fairly
respectable, not in the least attractive; an early but complete
incarnation of the disposition called “donnishness”; a toady in his
earlier manhood, and an exacter of toadying in his later. He lived long
enough to endanger even his critical fair fame; by representing his
admiration for Shakespeare as an aberration, and declaring that he
returned to his first love Addison.[125] And his work upon Addison
himself (by which, I suppose, he is most commonly known) is of a
meticulous and peddling kind for the most part, by no means likely to
conciliate the majority of recent critics. Most of Hurd’s notes deal
with mere grammar; and while nearly all of them forget that writers like
Addison make grammar and are not made by it, some are choice examples of
the sheer senseless arbitrariness which makes grammar itself too often a
mere Lordship of Misrule and Abbacy of Unreason.[126] Yet even here
there are good things; especially some attempts[127]—very early and till
recently with very few companions in English—to bring out and analyse
the rhythmical quality of prose. But it may be frankly admitted that if
the long-lived Bishop[128] had been a critic only in his Addisonian
commentary, he would hardly have deserved a reference, and would
certainly have deserved no long reference, here.
[Sidenote: _The Horace._]
His own _Works_[129] are of much higher importance. The edition (with
commentary, notes, and dissertations) of Horace’s _Epistles to the Pisos
and to Augustus_ is in part of the class of work to which in this stage
of our history we can devote but slight attention, but even that part
shows scholarship, acuteness, and—what is for our purpose almost more
important than either—wide and comparative acquaintance with critical
authorities, from Aristotle and Longinus to Fontenelle and Hume.[130]
[Sidenote: _The Dissertations._]
The “Critical Dissertations” which follow mark a higher flight, indeed,
as their titles may premonish, they rather dare that critical inane to
which we have more than once referred. Hurd is here a classicist with
tell-tale excursions and divagations. In his _Idea of Universal Poetry_
he will not at first include verse in his definition, nor will he accept
the commonplace but irresistibly cogent argument of universal practice
and expectation. Poetry is the only form of composition which has
pleasure for its end; verse gives pleasure; therefore poetry must use
verse. The fiction or imitation is the soul of poetry; but style is its
body (not “dress,” mark). Hurd even takes the odd and not maintainable
but rather original view that the new prose fiction is a clumsy thing,
foolishly sacrificing its proper aids of verse.[131] He is most
neo-classically peremptory as to the laws of Kinds, which are _not_
arbitrary things by any means, nor “to be varied at pleasure.”[132] But
the long Second Dissertation _On the Provinces of the Drama_, which
avowedly starts from this principle shows, before long, something more
than those easements and compromises by which, as was said in the last
volume, eighteenth-century critics often temper the straitness of their
orthodoxy. “It is true,” says Hurd,[133] “the laws of the drama, as
formed by Aristotle out of the Greek poets, can of themselves be no rule
to us in this matter, because these poets had given no examples of such
intermediate species.” It is, indeed, most true; but it will be a little
difficult to reconcile it with the prohibition of multiplying and
varying Kinds. The Third and Fourth Dissertations, filling a volume to
themselves, deal with _Poetical Imitation_ and its _Marks_, the
hard-worked word “imitation” being used in its secondary or less
honourable sense.
The Discourses are, in short, of the “parallel passage” kind, but
written in a liberal spirit,[134] showing not merely wide reading but
real acuteness, and possessing, in the second instance, the additional
interest of being addressed to “Skroddles” Mason, who certainly
“imitated” in this sense pretty freely. Even here that _differentia_
which saves Hurd appears, as where he says,[135] “The golden times of
the English poetry were undoubtedly the reigns of our two queens,”
while, as we saw in the last volume,[136] Blair was teaching, and for
years was to teach,
his students at Edinburgh, a scheme of literary golden ages in which
that of Elizabeth was simply left out.
Still, these three volumes, though they would put Hurd much higher than
the Addison Commentary, are not those which give him the position sought
to be vindicated for him here.
[Sidenote: _Other Works._]
Neither will his titles be sought by any one in his _Lectures on the
Prophecies_: while even that edition of Cowley’s _Selected Works_ the
principle of which Johnson[137] at one time attacked, while at another
he admitted it to more favour, can only be drawn on as a proof that Hurd
was superior to mere “correctness” in harking back to this poet. Nay,
the _Moral and Political Dialogues_ (which drew from the same
redoubtable judge[138] the remark, “I fear he is a Whig still in his
heart”), though very well written and interesting in their probable
effect on Lander, are not in the main literary. Literary characters—
Waller, Cowley, and others—often figure in them, but only the third, “On
the Age of Queen Elizabeth,” has something of a literary bent, and this
itself would scarcely be noteworthy but for its practically independent
appendix, the _Letters on Chivalry and Romance_. Here—not exactly in a
nutshell, but in less than one hundred and fifty small pages—lie all
Hurd’s “proofs,” his claims, his titles: and they seem, to me at least,
to be very considerable. It is true that even here we must make some
deductions. [Sidenote: _The_ Letters on Chivalry and Romance.] The
passages about Chivalry and about the Crusades not merely suffer from
necessarily insufficient information, but are exposed to the diabolical
arrows of that great _advocatus diaboli_ Johnson when he said[139] that
Hurd was “one of a set of men who account for everything systematically.
For instance, it has been a fashion to wear scarlet breeches; these men
would tell you that according to causes and effects no other wear could
at the time have been chosen.” This is a most destructive shrapnel to
the whole eighteenth century, and by no means to the eighteenth century
only; but it is fair to remember that Hurd’s Romance was almost as
distasteful to Johnson as his Whiggery. And now there is no need for any
further application of the refiner’s fire and the fuller’s soap; while
on the other hand what remains of the _Letters_ (and it is much) is of
altogether astonishing quality. I know nothing like it outside England,
even in Germany, at its own time; I know nothing like it in England for
more than thirty years after its date; I should be puzzled to pick out
anything superior to the best of it (with the proper time allowance)
since.
[Sidenote: _Their doctrine._]
At the very opening of the _Letters_, Hurd meets the current chatter
about “monkish barbarism,” “old wives’ tales,” and the rest, full tilt.
“The greatest geniuses,” he says, “of our own and foreign countries,
such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England,
were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even
charmed by the Gothic Romances. _Was this caprice and absurdity in them?
Or 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 contempt and
ridicule of it?_” There is no mistake possible about this; and if the
author afterwards digresses not a little in his “Chivalry” discussions—
if he even falls into the Addisonian track, which he elsewhere condemns,
of comparing classical and romantic methods, as a kind of apology for
the latter, one ought, perhaps, to admit that it was desirable, perhaps
necessary, in his day to do so. But when he returns to his real subject,
the uncompromisingness and the originality of his views are equally
evident, and they gain not a little by being compared with Warton, whose
_Observations on the Faërie Queene_ had already appeared. After arguing,
not without much truth, that both Shakespeare and Milton are greater
when they “use Gothic manners” than when they employ classical, he
comes[140] to Spenser himself, and undertakes to “criticise the _Faërie
Queene_ under the idea not of a classical, but of a Gothic composition.”
He shows that he knows what he is about by subjoining that, “if you
judge Gothic architecture by Grecian rules, you find nothing but
deformity, but when you examine it by its own the result is quite
different.” A few pages later[141] he lays the axe even more directly to
the root of the tree. “The objection to Spenser’s method arises from
your classic ideas of Unity, which have no place here.” There is unity
in the _Faërie Queene_, but it is the unity not of action, but of
design.[142] Hurd even reprobates the additional unities which Spenser
communicates by the ubiquity of Prince Arthur, and by his allegory. (He
may be thought wrong here, but this does not matter.) Then he proceeds
to compare Spenser with Tasso, who tries to introduce classic unity, and
gives the Englishman much the higher place; and then again he unmasks
the whole of his batteries on the French critics. He points out, most
cleverly, that they, after using Tasso to depreciate Ariosto, turned on
Tasso himself; and, having dealt dexterous slaps in the face to
Davenant, Rymer, and Shaftesbury, he has a very happy passage[143] on
Boileau’s _clinquant du Tasse_, and the way in which everybody, even
Addison, dutifully proceeded to think that Tasso was _clinquant_, and
nothing else. Next he takes the offensive-defensive for “the golden
dreams of Ariosto, the celestial visions of Tasso” themselves, champions
“the fairy way,” and convicts Voltaire out of the mouth of Addison, to
whom he had appealed. And then, warming as he goes on, he pours his
broadsides into the very _galère capitaine_ of the pirate fleet, the
maxim “of following Nature.” “The source of bad criticism, as
universally of bad philosophy, is the abuse of terms.”[144] A poet, no
doubt, must follow “Nature”; but it is the nature of the poetical world,
not of that of science and experience. Further, there is not only
confusion general, but confusion particular. You must follow the
ordinary nature in satire, in epigram, in didactics, _not_ in other
kinds. _Incredulus odi_ has been absurdly misunderstood.[145] The
“divine dream”[146] is among the noblest of the poet’s prerogatives.
“The _Henriade_,” for want of it, “will in a short time be no more read
than _Gondibert_.”[147] And he winds up a very intelligent account of
Chaucer’s satire on Romance in _Sir Thopas_ by a still more intelligent
argument, that it was only the abuse of Romance that Chaucer satirised,
and by an at least plausible criticism of the advent of Good Sense,
“Stooping with disenchanted wings to earth.”
“What,” he concludes, “we have gotten is, you will say, a great deal of
good sense; what we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the illusion
of which is so grateful to the charmed spirit that, in spite of
philosophy and fashion, ‘Fairy’ Spenser still ranks highest among the
poets; I mean, with all those who are either come of that house, or have
any kindness for it.”
And now I should like to ask whether it is just or fair to say that the
work of the man who wrote this thirty-three years before _Lyrical
Ballads_ is “vapid and perverted,” that it is “empirical, dull, and
preposterous,” and, at the best, “not very useful as criticism”?
[Sidenote: _His real importance._]
On the contrary, I should say that it was not only useful as criticism,
but that it was at the moment, and for the men, the _unum necessarium_
therein. Why the Time-Spirit chose Hurd[148] for his mouthpiece in this
instance I know no more than those who have used this harsh language of
him; this Spirit, like others, has a singular fashion of blowing where
he lists. But, at any rate, he does not blow hot and cold here. Scraps
and orts of Hurd’s doctrine may of course be found earlier—in Dryden, in
Fontenelle, in Addison, even in Pope; but, though somebody else may know
an original for the whole or the bulk of it, I, at least, do not. The
three propositions—that Goths and Greeks are to be judged by their own
laws and not by each other’s; that there are several unities, and that
“unity of _Action_” is not the only one that affects and justifies even
the fable; and that “follow Nature” is meaningless if not limited, and
pestilent heresy as limited by the prevailing criticism of the day—these
three abide. They may be more necessary and sovereign at one time than
at another, but in themselves they are for all time, and they were for
Hurd’s more than for almost any other of which Time itself leaves
record.
[Sidenote: _Alleged imperfections of the group._]
Literary currishness and literary cubbishness (an ignoble but hardy and
vivacious pair of brethren) have not failed almost from the first to
growl and gambol over the mistakes which—in most cases save that of
Gray—were made by these pioneers. Some of these mistakes they might no
doubt have avoided, as he did, by the exercise of a more scholarly care.
But it may be doubted whether even Gray was not saved to a great extent
from committing himself by the timidity which restrained him from
launching out into extensive hypotheses, and the indolence or
bashfulness which held him back from extensive publication, or even
writing. It was indeed impossible that any man, without almost
superhuman energy and industry, and without a quite extraordinary share
of learning, means, health, leisure, and long life, should have at that
time informed himself with any thoroughness of the contents and
chronological disposition of mediæval literature. The documents were, to
all but an infinitesimal extent, unpublished; in very few cases had even
the slightest critical editing been bestowed on those that were in
print; and the others lay in places far distant, and accessible with the
utmost difficulty, from each other; for the most part catalogued very
insufficiently, or not at all, and necessitating a huge expense of time
and personal labour even to ascertain their existence. At the beginning
of the twentieth century any one who in these islands cannot find what
he wants in a published form could in forty-eight hours obtain from the
librarians at the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Cambridge Library,
that of Trinity College, Dublin, and that of the Faculty of Advocates in
Edinburgh, information on the point whether what he wants is at any of
them, and by exerting himself a little beyond the ordinary could visit
all the five in less than a week. When the British Museum was first
opened, in the middle of the last century, and Gray went to read in it
“through the jaws of a whale,” it would have taken a week or so to
communicate with the librarians; they would probably have had to make
tedious researches before they could, if they chose to do so, reply, and
when the replies were received, the inquirer would have had to spend the
best part of a month or more in exhausting, costly, and not always safe
journeys, before he could have got at the books.
There was, therefore, much direct excuse for the incompleteness and
inaccuracy of the facts given by Percy, and Warton, and even Hurd; and
not a little indirect excuse for the wildness and baselessness of their
conjectures on such points as the Origin of Romance and the like. It is
scarcely more than thirty or forty years—it is certainly not more than
fifty or sixty—since it began to be possible for the student to acquaint
himself with the texts, and inexcusable for the teacher not to do so. It
is a very much shorter time than the shortest of these since theories,
equally baseless and wild with those of these three, have been
confidently and even arrogantly put forward about the origin of the
Arthurian legends, and since mere linguistic crotchets have been allowed
to interfere with the proper historical survey of European literature.
The point of importance, the point of value, was that Percy, and Warton,
and Hurd, not only to the huge impatience of Johnson, the common friend
of the first two, devoted their attention to ballad, and romance, and
saga, and mediæval treatise—not only recognised and allowed the
principle that in dealing with new literary forms we must use new
literary measures—not only in practice, if not in explicit theory,
accepted the pleasure of the reader, and the idiosyncrasy of the book,
and the “leaden rule” which adapts itself to Art and not Art to itself,
as the grounds of criticism, but laid the foundations of that wider
study of literary history which is not so much indispensable to literary
criticism as it is literary criticism itself.
[Sidenote: _Studies in Prosody._]
To this remarkable group of general precursors may be added, for a
reason previously given, a couple of pioneers in a particular branch—one
contemporary with and indeed in most cases anticipating their general
work; the other coming level with its latest instances. It is for the
author of the missing _History of English Prosody_—which the present
writer would have attempted long ago if his time and studies had been at
his own disposal, and which he may yet adventure if the night and the
shadows permit—to account for if he can, to set forth and analyse as he
may, the curious and unique coincidences of metrical with general
criticism in England. The fact of them is not contestable, and, as we
have seen already, the tyranny of the absolutely syllabic,
middle-paused, end-stopped couplet coincides exactly with the
“prose-and-sense” dynasty in English poetry. We have seen also that most
of the precursors, explicitly or incidentally, by theory or by practice,
attacked or evaded this tyranny. But not one of them—though Gray’s
_Metrum_ shows what he might have done if in this matter, as in others,
he could only have persuaded himself to “speak out”—had the inclination
or the courage to tackle the whole subject of the nature and laws of
harmony in English composition. The two whom we have mentioned were
bolder, and we must give them as much space as is allowable without
unduly invading the province of that other _History_.
[Sidenote: _John Mason: his_ Power of Numbers _in Prose and Poetry_.]
In 1749 appeared two pamphlets, on _The Power of Numbers and the
Principles of Harmony in Poetic Compositions_, and on _The Power and
Harmony of Prosaic Numbers_. No author’s name is on either title-page,
but they are known to be by a Dissenting minister named John[149] Mason.
He seems to have given much attention to the study and teaching of
elocution, and he published another pamphlet on that special subject,
which attained its fourth edition in 1757.[150]
In his poetical tractate Mason plunges into the subject after a very
promising fashion, by posing the question with which he has to deal as
“What is the cause and source of that pleasure which, in reading either
poetry or prose, we derive not only from the sound and sense of the
words, but the order in which they are disposed?” or, as an alternative,
“Why a sentence conveying just the same thought, and containing the very
same words, should afford the ear a greater pleasure when expressed one
way than another, though the difference may perhaps arise only from the
transposition of a single word?” One feels, after reading only so far,
that De Quincey’s well-known phrase, “This is what you can recommend to
a friend!” is applicable—that whether the man gives the right answers or
not he has fixed at once on the right questions, and has acknowledged
the right ground of argument. Not “How ought sentences to be arranged?”
not “How did A. B. C. arrange them or bid them be arranged?” but “How
and why do they give the greatest _pleasure_ as the result of
arrangement?”
So also, in his prose tractate, Mason starts from the position that
“numerous” arrangement adds wonderfully to the _pleasure_ of the reader.
To enter into the details of his working out of the principle in the two
respects would be to commit that “digression to another kind” from which
we have warned ourselves off. But it is not improper to say that, a
hundred and fifty years ago, he had already cleared his mind of all the
cant and confusion which to this day beset too many minds in regard to
the question of Accent _v._ Quantity, by adopting the sufficient and
final principle[151] that “that which _principally fixes and determines_
the quantities in English numbers is the accent and emphasis”; that
though he is not quite so sharply happy in his definition, he evidently
uses “quantity” itself merely as an equivalent for “unit of metrical
value”; that he clears away all the hideous and ruinous nonsense about
“elision,” observing[152] that in
“And many an amorous, many a humorous lay”
there are fourteen syllables instead of ten, and that “the ear finds
nothing in it redundant, defective, or disagreeable, but is sensible of
a sweetness not ordinarily found in the common iambic verse.” Further,
he had anticipated[153] Hurd by giving elaborate examples of quantified
analysis of prose rhythm. The minutiæ of all this, interesting as they
are, are not for us; the point is that here is a man who has not the
fear of Bysshe before his eyes, or the fear of anybody; who will not be
“connoisseured out of his senses,” and whose brain, when his ear tells
it that a line is beautiful, proceeds calmly to analyse if possible the
cause of the beauty, without troubling itself to ask whether anybody has
said that it ought not to exist.[154]
[Sidenote: _Mitford—his_ Harmony of Language.]
These inquiries into prosody and rhythm formed no unimportant part of
the English criticism of the mid-eighteenth century.[155] The two
different ways in which they were regarded by contemporaries may be
easily guessed, but we have documentary evidence of them in an
interesting passage of the dedication to John Gilpin[156] of the second
edition of the book in which they culminated, and to which we now come.
Mitford’s _Inquiry into the Principles of Harmony in Language_
represents himself as having paid a visit to Pye, afterwards Laureate;
and, finding him with books of the kind before him, as having
expostulated with “a votary of fancy and the Muses” for his “patience
with such dull and uninteresting controversy.” Pye, it seems, replied
that “interest in the subject so warmly and extensively taken by English
men of letters” had excited his curiosity, which had been gratified by
Foster’s elucidation of the subject itself. And Mitford, borrowing the
book, soon found his own excited too.[157]
The volume of which this was the genesis, appeared first in 1774.[158]
The second edition, very carefully revised and extended, was not
published till 1804. It may appear at first sight unfortunate, but on
reflection will probably be seen to have been a distinct advantage, that
even this second edition preceded the appearance of any of the capital
works of the new school except the _Lyrical Ballads_. For had it been
otherwise, and had Mitford taken any notice of the new poetry, we should
in all probability have had either the kind of reactionary protest which
often comes from pioneers who have been overtaken and passed, or at best
an attempt at awkward adjustment of two very different points of view.
As it is, the book, besides exhibiting much original talent, belongs to
a distinct school and platform—that of the later but still
eighteenth-century Romantic beginners, while at the same time it
represents a much greater knowledge of old literature, helped by Ellis’s
_Specimens_, by Ritson’s work, and other products of the last years of
the century, than had been possible to Shenstone, to Gray, or even to
Warton.
Once more, its detailed tenets and pronouncements, with all but the
general methods by which they are arrived at, belong to another story.
But these general methods, and some special exemplifications of them,
belong to us. Rightly or wrongly, Mitford sought his explanations of the
articulate music of poetry from the laws of inarticulate music itself.
For this reason, or for another, he was disposed to join the accentual
and not the quantitative school of prosodists, and to express strong
disapproval of the adoption of classical prosodic terms in regard to
English. He is sometimes arbitrary, as when he lays down[159] “that in
English every word has one syllable always made eminent by accent”; and
we have to remember that he was writing after nearly a hundred years of
couplet verse on Bysshian principles before we can excuse—while we can
never endorse—his statement[160] that “to all who have any familiarity
with English poetry a _regularity_ in the disposition of accents is its
most striking characteristic.” He is rather unsound on the Pause, but
lays down the all-important rule that “rhyme is a time-beater” without
hesitation. He admits trisyllabic feet even in what he calls “common
time”; but (in consequence of his accentual theories probably) troubles
himself with “aberration” of accent (_i.e._, substitution of trochee for
iamb), with redundant or extra-metrical syllables in the middle of the
line, and with other epicyclic and cumbrous superfluities. But the most
important thing in the whole book—the thing which alone makes it really
important to _us_—is that he supports his theories by a regular
examination of the whole of English verse as far as he knows it, even
back to Anglo-Saxon times, and that in making the examination, he
appeals not to this supposed rule or to that accepted principle, but to
the _actual_ practice of the _actual_ poets as interpreted to him by his
own ear.
In his errors, therefore (or in what may seem to some his errors), as
well as in his felicities, Mitford exhibits himself to the full as an
adherent of that changed school of poetical criticism which in the first
place strives to master the actual documents, in the second to
ascertain, as far as possible and as closely as possible, their
chronological relation to each other, and in the third to take them as
they are and explain them as well as it may, without any selection of a
particular form of a particular metre at a particular time as a norm
which had been painfully reached and must on no account be departed
from. He shows the same leaning by his constant reference to the ear,
not the rule, as the authority. The first draft of his book was
published not only when Johnson was still alive, but long before the
_Lives of the Poets_ appeared; and it is most interesting to see the
different sides from which they attack the prosodic character, say of
Milton. Johnson—it is quite evident from his earlier and more
appreciative handling of the subject in the _Rambler_—approaching Milton
with the orthodox decasyllabic rules in hand, found lines which most
undoubtedly do not accord with those rules, and termed them harsh
accordingly. Mitford approaches the lines with nothing but a listening
ear, finds them “not harsh and crabbed, but musical as Apollo’s lute,”
and then proceeds to construct, rightly or wrongly, such a rule as will
allow and register their music.
[Sidenote: _Importance of prosodic inquiry._]
The truth is, that these inquirers both builded and pulled down better
than they knew. Many persons besides Mitford have begun by thinking
controversies about prosody dull and uninteresting, while only too few
have allowed themselves to be converted as he did; nor is it common to
the present day to find a really intelligent comprehension of the
importance of the subject. On the contrary, a kind of petulant
indignation is apt to be excited by any criticism of poetry which
pursues these “mechanical” lines, as they are called, and the critic has
sometimes even to endure the last indignity of being styled a
“philologist” for his pains.
Yet nothing is more certain than that these inquiries into prosody were
among the chief agencies in the revolution which came over English
poetry at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
next. A sort of superstition of the decasyllable, hardened into a
fanaticism of fixed pause, rigidly disyllabic feet and the rest, had
grown upon our verse-writers. A large part of the infinite metrical
wealth of English was hidden away and locked up under taboo. Inquiries
into prosody broke this taboo inevitably; and something much more than
mere metrical wealth was sure to be found, and was found, in the
treasure-houses thus thrown open.
[Sidenote: _Sterne and the stop-watch._]
One expected figure of a different kind may perhaps have been hitherto
missed in this part of our gallery. Sterne’s well-known outburst as to
criticism, in the twelfth chapter of the third book of _Tristram
Shandy_, is far too famous a thing to be passed over with the mere
allusion given to it in the last volume, or with another in this. Nay,
it may be said at once, from its fame and from its forcible expression,
to have had, and even in a sense still to have, no small place among the
Dissolvents of Judgment by Rule. “Looking only at the stop-watch” is one
of those admirable and consummate _phrases_ which settle themselves once
for all in the human memory, and not merely possess—as precisians
complain, illegitimately—the force of an argument, but have a property
of self-preservation and recurrence at the proper moment in which
arguments proper are too often sadly lacking.
Further, it must be admitted that there are few better instances of the
combined sprightliness and ingenuity of Sterne’s humour. “Befetiched
with the bobs and trinkets of criticism” is in reality even happier than
the “stop-watch,” and of an extraordinary propriety. Though he did
“fetch it from the coast of Guinea,” nothing was ever less far-fetched
or more home-driven. The “nothing of the colouring of Titian” is equally
happy in its rebuke of the singular _negativeness_—the attention to what
is _not_ there, not to what is—of Neo-Classicism; while the outburst,
again world-known, as to the “tormenting cant of criticism,” and the
ingenious and thoroughly English application of this cant itself to the
eulogy of the curse of Ernulphus, are all too delightful, and have been
too effective for good, not to deserve the heartiest acknowledgment.
At the same time the Devil’s Advocate—who is always a critic, if a
critic is not always an officer of the devil—-may, nay must, point out
that Sterne’s main object in the passage is not strictly literary. It is
assuredly from the sentimental point of view that he attacks the
Neo-Classic “fetichism”; the “generous heart” is to “give up the reins
of its imagination into the author’s hands,” to “be pleased he knows not
why, and cares not wherefore.” To which Criticism, not merely of the
Neo-Classic persuasion, can only cry, “Softly! Before the most generous
of hearts gives up the reins of imagination (which, by the way, are not
entirely under the heart’s control) to an author, he must show that he
can manage them, he must _take_ them, in short. And it is by no means
superfluous—it is highly desirable, if not absolutely necessary—to know
and care for the wherefore of your pleasing.” Nor, wide as was Sterne’s
reading, and ingenious as are the uses which he makes of it, does it
appear that he had any very great interest in literature as such—as
being _good_, and not merely odd, or naughty, or out-of-the-way, or
conducive to outpourings of heart. He might even, by a very ungenerous
person, be described as by no means disinterested in his protests. For
certainly his own style of writing had very little chance of being
adjudged to keep time according to the classical stop-watch, of
satisfying, with its angles and its dimensions, the requirements of the
classical scale. So he is rather a “Hal o’ the Wynd” in the War of
Critical Independence—he fights for his own hand, though he does
yeoman’s service to the general cause.
CHAPTER IV.
DIDEROT AND THE FRENCH TRANSITION.
THE POSITION OF DIDEROT—DIFFICULT TO AUTHENTICATE—BUT HARDLY TO BE
EXAGGERATED. HIS IMPRESSIONISM—THE RICHARDSON ÉLOGE—THE ‘REFLECTIONS
ON TERENCE’—THE REVIEW OF THE ‘LETTRES D’AMABED’—THE EXAMINATION OF
SENECA—THE QUALITY AND EMINENCE OF HIS CRITICAL POSITION— ROUSSEAU
REVISITED—MADAME DE STAEL— HER CRITICAL POSITION—AND WORK— THE
‘LETTRES SUR ROUSSEAU’—THE ‘ESSAI SUR LES FICTIONS’— THE ‘DE LA
LITTÉRATURE’—THE ‘DE L’ALLEMAGNE’— HER CRITICAL ACHIEVEMENT:
IMPUTED—AND ACTUAL— CHATEAUBRIAND: HIS DIFFICULTIES—HIS CRITICISM—
INDIRECT—AND DIRECT—THE ‘GÉNIE DU CHRISTIANISME’— ITS SATURATION
WITH LITERARY CRITICISM—SURVEY AND EXAMPLES— SINGLE POINTS OF
EXCELLENCE—AND GENERAL IMPORTANCE— JOUBERT: HIS REPUTATION—HIS
LITERARY αὐτάρκεια— THE LAW OF POETRY—MORE ON THAT SUJECT— ON STYLE—
MISCELLANEOUS CRITICISMS— HIS INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENTS MORE DUBIOUS— THE
REASON FOR THIS—ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS— GENERAL REMARKS—THE OTHER
‘EMPIRE CRITICS’— FONTANES—GEOFFROY—DUSSAULT—HOFFMAN, GARAT, ETC.—
GINGUENÉ—M.J. CHÉNIER—LEMERCIER—FELETZ— COUSIN—VILLEMAIN—HIS CLAIMS—
DEDUCTIONS TO BE MADE FROM THEM—BEYLE— RACINE ET SHAKESPEARE—HIS
ATTITUDE HERE— AND ELSEWHERE—NODIER.
[Sidenote: _The position of Diderot._]
One of those judgments of the Common Sense which, while sometimes
finding it necessary to contest or correct them, we have also found in
the main not untrustworthy, has long ago decided that for good or for
ill, the weakening of the neo-classic tradition in its great stronghold,
France, is due originally to Denis Diderot more than to any one else—
nay, that the Germans themselves owe him a heavy quit-rent. With this
decision we shall have no quarrel here; on the contrary, a long
familiarity with the writings[161] of this voluminous and disorderly
genius, has made the present writer one of its very strongest
supporters. There is not the slightest need to engage either in
controversy or in compromise with others, or to hark back upon our own
demonstrations that in Fontenelle, in La Motte, and elsewhere, there are
seeds and germs of a critical calculus very different from Boileau’s. We
may at this stage take these things for granted. Far be it from us to
say that “there’s nothing new or true, and it doesn’t matter.” But we
may very modestly, but very unflinchingly say that there is nothing
wholly new or old; that there are at least very few things wholly true
or false; and that it matters very much that it should be so.
[Sidenote: _Difficult to authenticate._]
Therefore, or however (for either link of the argument would be
defensible) it is reasonable or convenient to start this chapter with
Diderot. Yet he can hardly have, in mere space, a treatment
proportionate—as proportion has been in other cases observed—to his
importance. It is an importance rather of attitude and suggestion than
of explicit pronouncement; and the explicit pronouncements are so many,
and so various, that to summarise and discuss them would require far
more than the utmost room that we have given to our very greatest
authorities. Moreover, that inadequate universality, that flawed
all-round-ness, which every competent critic has noticed in Diderot,
would make wildernesses of proviso and commentary necessary. It is not
quite safe to leave unread a single page of the twenty big octavos of
his works, in arriving at an independent estimate of his critical, as of
his general quality: and those who do not care to undertake so
considerable an investigation, must take the word of those who have
undertaken it, to some extent on trust. Further, though Diderot is by no
means a mere general aesthetician—though his very critical value
consists largely in the fact that he flies upon the corporal work of art
like a vulture—yet his utterances in different arts concern and
condition one another after a fashion, of which, before his time, there
was hardly any example. We cannot possibly here bestow space on the
_Paradoxe sur le Comédien_ and the vast and tempting assemblage of the
_Salons_. Yet the person who attempts to examine Diderot’s purely
literary pronouncements without examining these, will do so at his peril
certainly, and almost certainly to his damage. _Le Neveu de Rameau_ is
imperative: nay, the much-abused _Jacques le Fataliste_ itself must not
be neglected.[162]
[Sidenote: _But hardly to be exaggerated. His Impressionism._]
Diderot is the first considerable critic—it would hardly be too much to
say the first critic—known to history who submits himself to any, to
every work of art which attracts his attention, as if he were a
“sensitised” plate, animated, conscious, possessing powers of
development and variation, but absolutely faithful to the impression
produced. To say that he has no theories may seem to those who know him
a little, but only a little, the very reverse of the truth: for from
some points of view he is certainly a _machine à théories_ as much as
Piron was a _machine à saillies_. But then the theory is never a theory
_precedent_; it never (or so seldom as to require no correction of these
general statements) governs, still less originates, his impression; it
follows the impression itself and is based thereon. Not seldom the
substructure, if not even the foundation, of the impression itself may
seem to us quite disproportionate to the originating work of art—be it
book, or play, or picture; but that is not the point. Constantly, the
enthusiasm which had made Diderot give himself up to the fascination of
his new subject may seem to lead him into all sorts of extravagances.
The best known and perhaps the best example of these extravagances, the
almost famous _éloge_ of Richardson, has been drawn
upon by nearly everybody who has written on Diderot, and by most who
have written on Richardson, for examples.
[Sidenote: _The Richardson éloge._]
This marvellous dithyramb[163] really exceeds, in the superlatives of
its commendation of a work of originality and genius, the most “azure
feats” of a modern reviewer on a tenth-rate novelist or minor poet.
Richardson puts in action all the maxims of all the moralists: and yet
all these maxims would not enable one to write a single page of him.
Diderot was constantly going to cry out [He _does_ constantly cry out “O
Richardson!”] “Don’t believe him! Don’t go there!” to the characters,
and especially to Clarissa. This author sows in the mind whole crops of
virtues, which are sure to come up sooner or later. He knows _every_
kind of life, and scrutinises its secrets infallibly. He preaches
resignation, sympathy, justice. He has made Diderot so melancholy that
his friends ask him tenderly “What is the matter?” But Diderot would not
be cured for anything. To think that there should be pedantic,
frivolous, insensible wretches who reproach Richardson with being
long-winded! He must be read in the original. He should be discussed in
society. Richardson is a new gospel: he will always be popular, though
thoroughly appreciated only by the elect. He is truer than history; his
intense interest hides his art; a friend of Diderot, who had only read
the French translation, omitting the burial and will of Clarissa, wept,
sobbed, abused the Harlowe family, walked up and down without knowing
what he was doing, on perusing the original. Richardson simply haunts
Diderot, stifles his genius, delays him from work and effort. Ye Ages!
begone and hasten the full harvest of the honours due to Richardson!
Very extravagant, no doubt; rather absurd, if anybody likes. But fair
and softly; let us, as usual, examine the nature and the circumstances
of this extravagant, this absurd, critical fact.
In the first place, we have to remember that it _was_ a work of genius—
whatever its faults—that was brought under Diderot’s notice; in the
second, that as at least a majority, if not a consensus, of competent
critics has long ago decided, it was an example or collection of
examples of genius applied in a new way—that without going to the
pedantic extremes to which some have gone in their definition of the
novel, it has been found impossible to discover before Richardson the
necessary mixture of incident and character-interest, the unity (not
necessarily a dramatic or even an epic unity) of plot, the mingled
appeal to, and play upon, passions and manners. Then let us ask
ourselves whether the systems of criticism and the critics, with which
and with whom we are up to this point familiar, have as a rule proved
themselves equal to cope with new geniuses and new kinds of composition—
whether their tendency has not rather been distinctly to frown upon such
things; at any rate, to give them the coldest and most distrustful
welcome. Let us remember that Hurd, about the same time as Diderot,[164]
and in the very act of defending the older and more poetical romance,
was throwing cold water on prose fiction as a clumsy upstart. And
finally, let us ask ourselves whether all Diderot’s exaggerations are
not, after all, exaggerations of the truth—owing their weak points to an
excitable nature and a prevalent fashion of expression, their strong
ones to a genius, and a perception of truth itself, not unfairly
comparable in their way to Richardson’s own in his.
[Sidenote: _The_ Reflections on Terence.]
Side by side in the Works with this effusion there are some _Reflections
on Terence_[165] written within a year of the other. In the famous Roman
dramatist there is neither novelty, nor intense sentiment, nor
multiplicity of individual character, nor volume of story. He was the
darling of those critics from whom Diderot differed most. His faults—at
least his shortcomings—are obvious to infinitely less acute, restless,
and rapid judgments than that of the great Encyclopædist. His
excellences are of the kind which might seem least likely to appeal to
Diderot. Yet Diderot is not merely just to him, not merely bountiful,
but not in the least clumsy or haphazard in his bounty. He will not have
the time-honoured (or _dis_honoured) putting off of the praise of
Terence on Scipio and Lælius. Admitting his “lack of verve,” he gives
him full credit for its compensation of even humanity, for his
“statuesque” and quiet perfection. He adds remarks on translation which
are excellent; and if he may have taken the idea of holding up Terence
_and_ Molière together for admiration from La Bruyère,[166] he escapes
La Bruyère’s mistake of suggesting the _mixture_ of the immiscible.
[Sidenote: _The Review of the_ Lettres d’Amabed.]
Take a third example of a very different kind. We have a short
review[167] by Diderot (first extracted by M. Assézat from MS.) of
Voltaire’s _Lettres d’Amabed_. This book, it is hardly necessary to say,
is anti-religious: and Diderot was violently anti-religious himself. It
is saturated with Voltaire’s sniggering indecency: and Diderot was the
author of _Les Bijoux Indiscrets_.[168] Lastly, it was by Voltaire, of
whom Diderot, though an independent, was an eager and faithful champion.
But it is “without taste, without _finesse_, without invention; a
botching up of stale blackguardisms about Moses and Christ and the rest;
it has no interest, no fire, no verisimilitude, but plenty of dirt and
of clumsy fun.” This is the plain critical truth about the _Letters of
Amabed_, and it is Diderot who says it in so many words, and says it
moreover in MS.—which could curry no favour with, and obtain none from,
public hypocrisy and cant.
[Sidenote: _The Examination of Seneca_.]
Turn the examining instrument from these short pieces to the long
critical examination of Seneca,[169] which forms the second part of the
_Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron_. It is open to any one to
agree or disagree with Diderot’s uncompromising, though by no means
indiscriminate, championship of the usurious philosopher-statesman; as a
matter of fact, though it is a matter of only argumentative importance,
I am, except on the head of style, one of those who disagree with it.
But agree or disagree as he may with the conclusion, no competent
critic, I should suppose, can fail to admire the thoroughness with which
Diderot has taken in and digested his complicated literary subject, the
range and extent of literary knowledge with which he illustrates it, the
readiness of his argumentation and exposition, and, above all, the
craftsmanlike and attractive fashion in which he combines analysis and
criticism. Again, I doubt whether there is an earlier example of what we
may call “freehand” criticism—the criticism which is not tethered to the
necessity of applying or expounding rules in reference to its subject,
but can take that subject in, can deal with it on its own plan and
specification—can, in fact, _appreciate_, without being bound to refer
to and obey some official book of prices. There are some two hundred
pages of this appreciation, and one’s only reason (itself rather
uncritical) for qualified satisfaction with it is that it does not
handle some writer of greater intrinsic value and wider artistic appeal.
[Sidenote: _The quality and eminence of his critical position._]
I should be prepared to multiply the citation and discussion of the
critical “places” in Diderot to almost any extent, if such
multiplication were reconcilable with my plan; but, as has been said, to
do so would be as superfluous logically as it is methodically
impossible.[170] Diderot’s commanding position, in criticism as well as
in aesthetics, is due not more to the number and variety of his
individual utterances than to the fact that he certainly obtrudes, and
in all probability conceals, no general æsthetic “preventions” (as the
French would say, and as Dryden very wisely does say) whatsoever. One of
the great resources and one of the great charms of his criticism is the
way in which he draws it from, and returns it to, all the arts without
letting any of them interfere with the other. The pedants of
art-criticism have of course said that his is too literary; but the
pedant is always pedantic, and always negligible, whether he draws his
principles from French classrooms in the seventeenth century or from
French studios in the nineteenth and twentieth. No matter whether he is
talking of writing or of acting, of painting or of sculpture, the work
of art is for Diderot something which ought to give the human sense and
the human soul pleasure, which, if it does so, is to be welcomed and
extolled, not without (if anybody feels thereto disposed) inquiry into
the manner and the causes, rather mediate and immediate than ultimate,
of that pleasure. He can everywhere display a really encyclopædic
“curiosity,” in the good sense. He can be extremely inventive and
subtle, as in the famous _Paradoxe_;[171] he can enter into infinite
detail and yet never lose grasp of principle, as in the essay _De la
Poésie Dramatique_;[172] he can glance and digress in lightning fashion
as he does everywhere, but especially in the _Salons_. As good an
instance of this as any is the admirable excursus on Mannerism in the
_Salon_ of 1767,[173] which is applicable to literature quite as much as
to painting.
Certainly, if any devout Arnoldian says that Diderot’s greatness is due
to his “fertility in ideas,” no contradiction will be thought of here.
But then we have the old difficulty as to what “ideas” mean. I do not
remember that Mr Arnold himself makes much reference to our Denis; and,
indeed, Diderot must have been, from some points of view, nearly as
horrible—let us lay cards on table and say as incomprehensible—to him as
to his friend M. Scherer. But it may be that the critical “idea” is
neither more nor less than the result of that contact of subject and
critic which has been glanced at before—a contact intimate, physical,
uninterrupted, and resulting in conception and birth. This, if anything,
is the “idea” of modern criticism; and while few have been more prolific
of such results than Diderot, none before him and hardly any since have
so invariably and consciously guided themselves by its law. I do not
know that he has ever positively stated this law; I really do not know
that it ever has been explicitly laid down by any of the constituted, or
even the non-constituted, critical authorities. But his whole work is an
exemplification of it.
And the result is, that this whole work, wherever it approaches
criticism, is alive; and that he cannot help its becoming alive, even if
he has apparently given hostages to Death by attempting set
dissertations on cut-and-dried subjects, or by dallying with science, or
atheism, or what not. It is a further reason why even such
contemporaries as Lessing, and later, Goethe, found in him such an
extraordinary stimulus. The dead, mechanical deductions of too many
critics under the older system could produce nothing but copies, even
more dead and more mechanical than themselves, though, as we have seen
in many a figure of our gallery, the principle of life in human nature
made the greater critics of the older dispensation sometimes quicken
under it. But Diderot’s fecundity was contagious: his “cultures” have
propagated themselves from generation to generation directly, have set
the example of a similar creation of critical entities to fit subjects
ever since. From a formula you will never get anything but formulas:
from the living contact of critic and subject you will get live
criticism.
[Sidenote: _Rousseau revisited._]
I was so severely rebuked by an excellent and friendly critic for
dismissing Rousseau, with but a reference, from the last volume, that I
thought it my duty to reconsider the matter, though the principal plea
of the rebuker, that M. Texte had devoted some hundred pages to
Jean-Jacques, appeared to me _nihil ad rem_. But I might have committed
an error as to the _res_ itself, and so I took down the four quartos,
and went through them to see if my memory had played me false, as that
faculty sometimes does when one is walking in the browner shades. I need
not have alarmed myself; but it is perhaps worth while to spare a page
to put the _pièces_ actually before the reader. _There is in Rousseau
practically no literary criticism at all from the first line of the
“Confessions” to the last of the “Correspondence.”_[174] No writer known
to me abstains with such an inevitable and tell-tale deflection from
“judging of authors.” His attitude is that of his favourite Plutarch
heightened to a Jean-Jacquian intensity. It is always of the moral,
never of the literary, character and effect of a book that he is
thinking. His fervid sensibility to the fascination of women, of
scenery, of mere food and wine (for he admits this), does not seem to
have extended to literature at all. By an extremely humorous coincidence
(I do not know whether any one has noticed it before me, but probably
some one has) he writes from Venice—the very place where he had just
received, or was just to receive, the withering advice, “_Zanetto!
studia la matematica!_”—to order books from Paris; and they are nearly
all mathematics. The famous _Discours_ about arts and sciences blinks
the literary point of view altogether. The famous Letter to D’Alembert
on Plays would almost adjust itself to plays in dumb show, except that
spoken words have an additional moral or immoral effect. When
Saint-Preux writes to Julie about her studies, he never so much as
glances at the literary value of books: nor is this touched in all the
talk about Education in _Emile_. The everlasting moral has dinned the
Muses out. So it is in the two only less famous letters to Voltaire; so
everywhere. I replace my four quartos, having found just one really
critical sentence, in allocation and application only, for Jean-Jacques,
probably, was not thinking of literature at all. But when he asked
himself, “Serais-je damné?” and replied, “Selon mes Jansénistes la chose
était indubitable, mais selon ma conscience il me paraissait que non,”
he does _mutatis mutandis_ suggest the revolt of the Romantic conscience
against the Neoclassic.
“Ah, but,” they say, “Rousseau’s influence on the mind of Europe counted
for so much in its changes of critical and creative taste.” _A la bonne
heure!_ and I have recognised this, and shall recognise it in the proper
places. But the agencies that bring about changes of critical and
creative taste, proper to be mentioned, are not also as proper to be
worked out here. Of such influences the capture of Constantinople is a
famous and undoubted one. Was I bound to tell the story of Byzantine
decadence, and the story of Mussulman progress? It has in innumerable
instances, if not universally, influenced a man’s criticism, a man’s
creation—whether he is in love at the time; whether he has arrived at
that right and happy point, which Mr Thackeray would not call “a _pint_”
in the drinking of good wine; whether he has been under the soothing
influence of the Indian weed. Am I therefore bound to insert in this
History a treatise on “Feminine Attraction,” a book on “The Wines of the
World,” and an “Anti-Counterblast” to King James? In all seriousness, it
may, I think, be requested once more of readers and of critics that they
will “look at the bill of fare.” If the meat and the wine suit them,
well and good; if not, are there not, in this particular instance, M.
Texte and his hundred pages to make _quaere aliud diversorium_ no merely
churlish or vindictive dismissal? While, as to such remarks as _are_
proper to be made here on the general critical temper and tendency of
the Romantic movement, they were deliberately postponed in the last
volume, and will find their proper place, not here, but in the
Interchapters of the present.
This indirect influence of Rousseau, with the direct influence of
Diderot, no doubt cast a mighty leaven into the mind of France during
the later decades of the eighteenth century; and it is noteworthy that,
of the three remarkable writers with whom we shall next deal, while
Madame de Staël directly and Chateaubriand indirectly express the first,
Joubert was much in contact with Diderot during his youth. But the
dominant criticism of the last twenty or five-and-twenty years of the
century remained neo-classic; and we have accordingly dealt with it[175]
in the last volume. Nay, the dominant criticism of the first twenty or
so of the next abode in no very different state. Here we shall deal with
what has not yet been handled of this half century, or nearly so, in
France, isolating more or less the three great figures above mentioned,
and dealing more in group with these “Empire Critics,” who in different
ways reflect the transition to Romanticism.
[Sidenote: _Madame de Staël._]
Of the interest, the influence, the significance, and, in so far as
these important things go, the importance, of the work of Madame de
Staël[176] in criticism, there can, as to their mere existence, be no
two well-formed opinions. I wish that I could think this statement—made
frankly in intention, and with deliberate consideration of the weight of
every word—likely to obtain for the examination which follows the credit
of impartiality which I think it deserves. Unfortunately, we are now
approaching closely matters which are distinctly _cinis dolosus_. At
every step the apparently irreconcilable difference between those who
mean by criticism the judging and judicial enjoyment of literature, and
those who mean by it theorising about the ultimate causes of such
judgment and such enjoyment, is likely—is sure—to interfere. Nor does it
seem possible for the philosophers to agree to keep these points of law
for the appropriate tribunal, and to let the rest of the case be stated
on its own merits.[177]
[Sidenote: _Her critical position._]
Now “Corinne” is about the first person in whose case this difficulty
and this difference become acute and annoying. She is not quite so
popular with the critics of “ideas” as she used to be; they have,
belike, discovered at last her rather awkward sciolism of fact; her very
theories are not theirs; the “hideous hum” of “Madame de Staël : ideas;
Chateaubriand : images,” ceases to tire the weary ear quite to the same
extent as it used to do in histories of literature and critical
discussions thereof. But historically she is not to be denied; there is
no doubt that no one has ever done the popularising of “metacritic”
throughout Europe as she did.
[Sidenote: _And work._]
But if the painful historian were only left to his own hod-and-trowel
work instead of having to draw the sword and don the helmet against
metacritical raiders, his task would not be a difficult one. Madame de
Staël, unlike her countryman and in some sort master, Rousseau, _is_ a
critic, not merely indirectly, conjecturally, and by dint of the “must
have,” but frankly, plainly, in honest straightforward deliverances _ad
hoc_. The documents of her criticism are mainly four: the early
_Letters_ on Rousseau himself, the later but still early _Essay on
Fiction_, the famous _De La Littérature_, and the more famous _De
l’Allemagne_. In all, but in increasing measure as they come, we see the
curious and interesting development and production of a temperament
originally no doubt possessing some masculine gifts of thought, as well
as many feminine ones of feeling, excited and almost irritated to the
highest activity by the word-fencing of the _philosophe_ salons, and
presented with all the current doctrines or fancies in regard to
literature and its precincts, by contact with the most active minds of
Geneva, Paris, and Germany. With her half-masculine vigour and her
wholly feminine receptivity, she absorbs and reproduces, _tant bien que
mal_, all or a large part of the ideas which had been fermenting in all
countries more or less, but especially in Germany, for the great part of
a century,—French-Godwinian perfectibility, the æsthetic of Lessing and
Winckelmann, the historical theories of Herder, as much as she could of
the applied criticism of Goethe and Schiller and the Schlegels. Her
different works show her of course at different stages of this
influence. They show also—with equal necessity and undisguised by a
system of explanatory and supplementary notes in the later editions—what
actual knowledge of literature she had, what stock of material to expose
and submit to all this complicated apparatus, all this varied range of
reagency.
[Sidenote: _The_ Lettres sur Rousseau.]
The very early work on Rousseau is of course the most immature, and it
meddles the least with purely literary criticism, but it is, for reasons
obvious _à priori_, not the least interesting, and it is perhaps not the
least satisfactory on acquaintance. The contrast between the modest (but
not fairly to be called mock-modest) brevity of the original Preface,
and the pomp and cant and claptrap of the second, twenty-six years
later, may raise a sigh in amiable breasts. But the text, whether one
agree or disagree with its sentiments and estimates, by no means lacks
merit. The writer is well acquainted with the actual matter of
discussion (which was by no means always the case with her later): she
is in intelligent as well as emotional sympathy with it. She does not
indeed take the purely literary side very strongly; she had her master’s
own practice as warrant for not doing so. But her remarks (some of which
are perhaps innocently borrowed from Longinus) on Rousseau’s style, and
the inapplicability of the word “perfection” to it are not despicable:
and the characterisations of the various works, though always tending to
the moral and material side, are very far from negligible. It may be
worth noting that while objecting, not without reason, to “les
plaisanteries de Claire,”[178] she does not seem to know that they are
only a corrupt following of Richardson. But the whole is a very fair
_début_ in criticism, inclined as we should expect to the moral side,
but not illegitimately so.
[Sidenote: _The_ Essai sur les Fictions.]
The _Essai sur les Fictions_, a sort of after-thought introduction to
the three little stories, _Mirza_, _Adelaide et Théodore_, and
_Pauline_, is a slight and rather curious defence of the novel of actual
life moralised, as the most useful of fictitious or imitative writings,
by means of a survey of such writings under three heads: “Marvellous and
allegorical fictions,” “historical fictions,” and “natural fictions,”
_i.e._ novels proper, where nothing is true, but everything _true-like_.
The first two are very insufficiently treated, and her condemnation of
the historical novel is deprived of all weight by the fact that she
wrote too early to know any really good example of it. Perhaps the same
may be said of the third.
[Sidenote: _The_ De La Littérature.]
The _Rousseau_, however, is but the work of a novice, and the _Sur Les
Fictions_ is still something of an essay-piece: yet in both one may
observe a _nisus_ towards large generalising, which was the natural
result of the author’s time, temperament, and education. This _nisus_
turns into a full spread of wing in _De La Littérature_, published as
the centuries met, and when the author was four and thirty. Its avowed
central principle is a transformed “Modernism,”—the application of the
favourite _philosophe_ doctrine of perfectibility to literature, with an
inflexible determination that though Greek literature may be better than
anything before it, Roman shall be better than Greek, and (though there
is _hiatus valde lacrimabilis_ about mediæval), that modern literature
shall be greater than either. To those who are not pure “ideologists,”
and who do not think that an ounce of generalisation, however silly,
however demonstrably false, is better than a ton of sober consideration
and array of fact, this theory condemns itself at once. Here, at any
rate, we may legitimately echo Mr Burchell and his “Fudge!” Yet
Corinne’s attempts to prove it are interesting, and would be more so, if
she had had skill enough to hide her ignorance of the facts themselves,
or knowledge enough of them to gild her paradox. Her actual method is
not merely characteristic of time and person, but has a certain
ingenuity: indeed, it no doubt deceived herself. She will not take
literature _per se_, but she takes it in its relations with “virtue,”
“glory,” “liberty,” “happiness,” first in the abstract, and then under
these categories as illustrated by Greek, Roman, “Northern,” “Southern,”
and individual national literatures, paying special attention to
English, and defending it from the objections of French
eighteenth-century critics. It is, of course, easy to see how, by
showing, or trying to show, that virtue, &c., is, _according to her_,
better displayed in literature as it goes on, she proves, or attempts to
prove, her general point.
Unfortunately, in the course of the argument, the most enormous errors
of fact, the most startling assertions, which cannot take the benefit of
_de gustibus_, simply pullulate. The book nearly drops from one’s hands
when one reads “Eschyle ne présente aucun résultat moral”: and the
reference to the _Prometheus_ by which this statement is supported,
suggests very forcibly that the writer knew nothing else, and did not
understand this. More allowance must be made, no doubt, for the point of
view, when we read further that “les héros (of Greek tragedy) n’avaient
pas cette grandeur soutenue que leur a donnée Racine”; but what a point
of view it is![179] We are in full topsyturvydom with the statement[180]
that “la philosophie des Grecs me paraît fort au-dessous de celle de
leurs imitateurs les Romains,” and we do not get out of the country as
long as the contrast of Greek and Roman continues. But here, it may be
said, we are in the region of opinion. The plea cannot be urged for the
astounding statements which diversify the defence of our own barbarous
poetry. In believing _Ossian_ genuine, as in admiration for it, she, of
course, had respectable companions: but the person who could say[181]
“les poètes Anglais qui _ont succédés aux bardes écossais_ ont ajouté à
leurs tableaux,” &c., could have possessed neither the faintest
knowledge of literary, or even political, history, nor the least
extensive acquaintance with actual examples. The note,[182] “le docteur
Blair n’aurait pu juger en Angleterre Shakespere avec l’impartialité
d’un étranger,” betrays the most obvious and complete ignorance of what
_le docteur Blair_ had actually said. The description in the text[183]
of Falstaff as a _charge_, a “caricature populaire,” a “plaisanterie
grossière,” speaks the lady’s critical competence with a voice of doom.
But the most utterly damning page is that[184] which denies inventive
imagination to English poetry; airily dismisses Waller and Cowley as
unsuccessful imitators of the Italians; adds _je pourrais y joindre
Downe_ (sic), _Chaucer_, &c.; and a moment later despatches at a blow,
as showing this want of inventive imagination, _The Rape of the Lock_
(full of faults of taste), _The Faërie Queene_ (the most tiresome thing
in the world), _Hudibras_ (witty, but dwelling too long on its jokes).
Admit (it is a good deal to admit) that there may be faults of taste in
the _Rape_; admit that more than one Englishman has been unfortunate
enough to find Spenser tedious; admit that there is even some justice in
the charge against _Hudibras_. How (except by the easy method of having
never read them) can you leash these three books together? and, most of
all, by what prank of her own elves does “that Elfish Queen” find
herself between Trulla and Belinda? I have myself not the slightest
doubt that though Madame de Staël may have glanced at the _Rape_, and
disliked the sylph machinery, she had never so much as opened “Downe” or
Chaucer, Butler or Spenser, and I should not be surprised if she knew
nothing, save at second-hand, of Waller or Cowley.
I could multiply examples _ad lib._, from the German chapters
especially, but the “matter of Germany” had better be dealt with under
the book exclusively devoted to it. As for general strictures on the
_Littérature_, they also will best be postponed till the _De
l’Allemagne_ has been dealt with.
[Sidenote: _The_ De l’Allemagne.]
That this book is, as far as criticism goes, her masterpiece, there can
be no doubt, and it would be surprising if it were not so. She was
older; she had read more; and she had enjoyed very distinguished
“coaching.” This kept her fairly straight in matters of fact within the
comparatively limited range which she here allowed herself as far as
literature is concerned. German literature had taken itself by this time
pretty seriously for a couple of generations: and the German men of
letters whom she interrogated or “led about,” were perfectly competent
and apparently not unwilling[185] to keep her from such absurdities as
we have just been noticing. Very much of the book is plain,
straightforward _compte rendu_, and generally _très bien rendu_,
whatever minor faults one may find here and there. Above all, the
expressed and very fairly carried out purpose of comparative study which
made Napoleon so angry, and with such good reason,[186] gives the book
an honourable place as a precursor, if not, indeed, an absolute origin,
in a new way which had to be trodden. If Napoleon’s innate and colossal
vulgarity had not been constantly tripping up his immense cleverness, he
might have perceived that here was a new feather of some consequence to
stick in his sham crown-imperial. The analyses and _précis_ of such
short things as _Lenore_ and the _Braut von Korinth_ are rather
excessive for a book: but neither piece is easily translatable into
French, and Madame de Staël probably knew very well that few of her dear
quasi-countrymen were likely to learn German, in order to read them.
The old leaven of French and _philosophe_ taste and culture shows itself
at intervals interestingly. She cites[187] (a little generously perhaps
in any case) the line in Raynouard’s _Les Templiers_, when the reprieve
arrives too late to save the knights who have been chanting hymns on the
pyre
“Mais il n'était plus temps; les chants avaient cessés,”
in connection with the yoke of the unities. But, strangely enough, she
does not seem to notice the weakening and watering down of what she
calls _l’un des mots les plus sublimes qu’on puisse entendre au
théâtre_, by its being made part of the speech of a messenger. The
voices of the warrior-priests ceasing one by one in agony, and the
reprieve coming on the silence of the last, would be, though a rather
_melo_-dramatic, a really dramatic moment. The recital of the situation
is a little less ordinary than talk “of the rain and the fine time,” and
that is all.
This, however, is succeeded by some really acute, and in French quite
novel, criticism of Shakespeare as too subtle, too impartial, &c., for
the stage—criticism which she had probably learnt from Schlegel,—and the
whole chapter[188] is important; as is that on “Comedy,” though the
definition[189] from Schlegel himself, with which it starts, is very
nearly _galimatias_.
There is much good sense in the criticism of German romance, though the
old leaven once more appears in the statement that “verse is required
for the marvellous; prose will not do.”[190] Always on Goethe she is
good, and, “philosophess” as she is, she has some very sensible remarks
on the over-dose of metaphysic in Schiller’s criticism. On most of her
subjects, indeed, from Wieland to Jean Paul, she is still worth reading.
[Sidenote: _Her critical achievement—Imputed._]
Her admirers, however,—or the partisans of the school of criticism,
which, as has been said, she did so much to “vulgarise”—would no doubt
regard this matter as merely, in Luther’s famous epithet of contempt,
“stramineous.” It is on her attempt to grasp the principles not merely
of kinds but of literatures, to identify or at least connect these with
national characteristics, and to extend the definition and comparison
beyond even the bounds of nations to national groups—that they would
base her claims. Here, perhaps, we may find ourselves in a distressing
inability to follow. Certainly, no one will deny that there are some
apparent national characteristics in literature; certainly no one will
say that it is useless or idle to attempt to separate the national and
the generic from the individual. But, in the first place, there was
nothing absolutely new in this, though it might be for almost the first
time used as a frequent implement, and as a fertile store-cupboard, in
literary research. Even the despised Middle Ages had had national
tickets for the different states of the European republic—had discovered
that the Englishman had a proud look and a high stomach, that he took
his pleasure sadly, and so forth. And had it been newer than it was, it
might still have been distrusted. After all, the literature of a nation,
though we talk of it as if it were something existent _per se_, is
merely the aggregate of the work of individuals. It is the work of those
individuals that you have to judge; and it is open to the very gravest
doubt whether, in trying the several cases, the general
inductive-deductive ready-to-hand estimate of the national quality is
not more of a snare than of a help. At any rate, experience proves that
those who have been readiest to use it, from Madame de Staël to M. Taine
and M. Texte—to name no living examples—have been more snared than
helped by it. Your preoccupation with the idea that the Englishman will
be insular and rebel to ideas, the German unpractical and
“inner-conscious,” the Frenchman logical, witty, tasteful, may very
likely, according to the weaknesses of the poor but constant creature
Human Nature, rather lead you to dispense with inquiry into the fact
whether he, the individual Briton, Teuton, or Gaul, does really exhibit
these characteristics. It will tempt you in the same way to exaggerate
what tendencies he may have to them—to force them on him if he has them
not—or even to leave him out of consideration if he is so impudent as
too incontestably not to have them.
And there is also the gravest possibility of doubt whether, even in
themselves, they have sufficient truth to make them of more than the
slightest value. After all, a man is a man before he is an Englishman or
a Frenchman; it is scarcely too paradoxical to say that he is himself
before he is even a man. The very greatest men of course carry this
disconcerting triumph of individuality furthest; all but the very
smallest help to flaunt its banner now and then. And when the hasty
generaliser generalises still more hastily, and talks about Literature
of the North and Literature of the South, the Rebellion of Fact is more
inconvenient still. You lay it down that the literature of the North
does not busy itself with frank youthful passion, and you have to settle
matters with _Romeo and Juliet_; that the Italian is a light-hearted
being whose only wants are sunshine, an olive or two, a flask of red
wine with a wisp of tow in it, and a _donna leggiadra_, and there rises
before you the _Divina Commedia_.
[Sidenote: _And actual._]
But this argument would tempt ourselves out of the way; and, even in so
far as it is legitimate here at all, is rather for the Interchapters.
Let it suffice that Madame de Staël is undoubtedly a notable figure in
the mere History of Criticism, and that, like nearly all such figures,
she has by no means lost her actual critical value; that she is no
“shadow”; that she is still, dead as she is, a speaking voice of some of
the perpetual forms and phases of criticism itself. That her
intellectual ability, if only of the receptive and transmissive kind,
was somewhat extraordinary, there can be little question. She frequently
claims for herself the invention of the word “vulgarity”: and though she
lived to be so unfortunate as to apply it[191] to Miss Austen—though it
has perhaps been more misused than any other single word of criticism—it
was needed. Nor was she herself much the dupe of words, though she often
was of supposed ideas. She has somewhere quoted from Rousseau, and
expanded, a wise protest against the requirement of a pedantic adherence
to definition in terminology. It was unlucky for her, no doubt, that to
some extent she came at, and could not but represent, one of those
rather unsatisfactory transition periods which are neither quite one
thing nor quite another. She has touches of classic “dignity” and of
philosophic cant, harlequinned with others of Romantic _sehnsucht_ and
“naturalistic” passion. Or rather she is like one of the
picture-cleaners’ sign-portraits—half in eighteenth century shadow, half
in nineteenth century light—or the other way about, if anybody chooses.
Yet the ill-luck is not total, and may perhaps even seem to be but
apparent. For it is precisely this _bariolage_, this partition, this
intermixture, which gives her not merely her historical position, but
even, I think, her intrinsic attraction as a critic. She helps us by
giving a fresh “triangulation,” a fresh aspect, a midway stage. Her
perfectibilism keys on as interestingly from the literary side to the
old Ancient-and-Modern dispute as on the political side to the
Republican manias of the time. Her struggles to retain some conviction
of the supremacy of Racine make more interesting, and are made more
interesting by, her admiration for Shakespeare and the Germans. Her
assimilations, or her attempts to assimilate, the new aesthetic, the new
historical theories, the new wine generally, would have far less
interest if she had put away all fancy for the old bottles. And so she
figures worthily and interestingly in what we have called the French
Transition, with a quaint enough contrast to Diderot, who opens it, and
who taught her German teachers. She is a figure of far less originality,
strangeness, and charm, but she has a more definite gospel, she is much
less diffused and dissipated over the _orbis scientiarum_, she points
more clearly to a clearly marked out path, and so she is much more
likely to be followed by the multitude, if not by the elect.
[Sidenote: _Chateaubriand: his difficulties._]
But she does not figure in her place alone: for side by side with her,
and with a face looking still more forward, is another figure, not less
curious, not less blended in its composition, but to some at least far
more interesting and far greater. Chateaubriand is one of those literary
personages to whom it is peculiarly difficult to do justice, and to whom
accordingly justice has very seldom been done. I admit that it was long
before I could myself regard him through glasses sufficiently
achromatic, or divest him of his accidents with a satisfactory
thoroughness. His personality—that troublesome and disturbing factor
from which we are so fortunately free in the case of most ancient
writers, and with which we are so teasingly confronted in the case of
most modern—is a little enigmatic and more than a little unsympathetic.
He trails with him the trumpery of two different times—Classical
emphasis, arbitrariness, even to some extent prejudice, Romantic
tawdriness, inconsequence, gush. He has curious adulteries of pedantry
and foppishness—strange and indecent communions of ignorance and
knowledge. And yet he is, in literature, so great a man that one
sometimes hardly knows how to construct any definition of greatness
which shall keep him out of the highest class. He has, and has by
anticipation, all the gifts of Byron except the gift of writing verse:
he can write prose which is hardly inferior to Byron’s verse in the
qualities where verse and prose touch nearest, and not much below all
but Byron’s best in some where they are farther apart. And he has other
gifts to which Byron can lay no claim.
[Sidenote: _His Criticism,_]
The chief of these gifts is criticism—a department in which Byron, for
all his shrewdness, simply does not count, because of the waywardness,
egotism, and personal prejudice which tinge every one of his critical
utterances, eulogistic or depreciatory. Now Chateaubriand counts in
criticism for a very great deal. By those who allow indirect critical
influence to rank Rousseau as a great critic, Chateaubriand ought to be
ranked as a critic infinitely greater; by those who observe a more rigid
and legitimate calculus, he can, as we shall shortly show, be ranked
almost, if not quite, in the first class. When a French critic or
historian[192] pronounces him the father of modern criticism, the first
to start the comparative method, and so forth, he is, as we are all
inclined, and as French critics used to be extravagantly, and are still
rather excessively inclined to do, speaking as if what is true of his
own nation and literature were true universally. We must, of course, go
a long way back in time, and some way afield in place—to the middle of
the eighteenth century in the one case, to England and Germany in the
other—for the real first appearances (“origins” is always a misleading
word) of these things, and even if we cling to France we must deal with
the vaguer but far older claims of Diderot. But Chateaubriand represents
them powerfully. He represents them practically before Madame de Staël,
in a much more literary fashion, and with much more literary power, and
he represents them with a magic, with a contagious influence, to which
she cannot pretend. Further, he possesses that claim which is the first,
if not the sole claim for us, though it seems to be regarded by some
with jealousy, and almost with resentment, the claim of having actually
written criticism, and a great deal of it.
[Sidenote: _Indirect_]
The champions of the Indirect have, it must be confessed, not a little
to rely upon in Chateaubriand. He was so much more intensely _literary_
than Rousseau, and even than Madame de Staël, that _Atala_, _René_, _Les
Natchez_, _Le Dernier Abencérage_ still more, _Les Martyrs_ most of all,
and even not a few things in the _Mémoires d’Outre Tombe_, may without
violence be twisted into a literary bearing. All, in their different
degrees and ways, exhibit the author’s insatiable curiosity as to the
literature of different times, countries, religions, languages, and his
indefatigable industry in staining and twining his own literature with
the colours and the threads of these others. But it is quite unnecessary
to twist and infer, to force the “this must have” and the “we can see,”
when we have two such documents before us as the _Essai sur La
Littérature Anglaise_, and, above all, the _Génie du Christianisme_.
[Sidenote: _and Direct._]
As a matter of fact, by far the larger part of this latter famous book,
the _revanche_ for Voltairianism, the manifesto of the whole earlier,
and not a little of the later nineteenth century, the main pillar of its
author’s fame,[193] is literary criticism pure and simple. It is so odd
a place to look for this that it sometimes escapes. Accounts of
Chateaubriand have been written (I am, I fear, guilty of one myself) in
which it has had no adequate recognition. But when we have once sighted
our panther,[194] she cannot escape us; and we may try here to do
justice to the real sweetness of her breath.[195]
[Sidenote: _The_ Génie du Christianisme.]
So odd a place: and that, too, in more ways than one. At first sight—and
perhaps too hasty or not thoroughly informed readers permanently—the
_Génie_[196] may appear an inextricable tangle, or a frank flinging
together of fragments without even the connection of being tangled. It
would be improved (and perhaps such a thing has been done) by a table
like that which Burton wisely prefixed to the _Anatomy_. One has to
realise the utter _terrassement_ in France of Christian doctrine and
practice—the all but total triumph of that purely secular education and
atmosphere for which a hundred years later some of our Nonconformists
pant—to appreciate the real art and the practical necessity of the
fashion in which Chateaubriand “lets everything go in” against
Philosophism. It seems temerity, but was probably wisdom, to begin, as
he begins, with the altitudes of faith and dogma. And he glides off from
them, cunningly but most naturally, to those ceremonies, sacramental and
other, for which the Republic had substituted unmeaning and unaffecting
civil functions. Then he once more attacks the _philosophes_ on their
own ground—on the subject of morals and that “virtue” which they had so
tediously dinned into the
public ear, but of which they had made so little private exhibition,—and
grapples courageously, though perhaps not rashly, considering the
extreme sciolism of most of his adversaries, with cosmology and
teleology, with physic and metaphysic, with Hell and Heaven themselves.
In all, his rhetoric serves him admirably, if nothing else does; but we
have as yet little or nothing to do with literature or with criticism.
It is quite different when we come to the “Second Part,” _Poétique du
Christianisme_, and here Chateaubriand begins to present his credentials
as a critic. Nor, with some digressions, does he again drop the
character throughout the book.
[Sidenote: _Its saturation with literary criticism._]
The proceeding[197] was probably more logical than it seems. On the one
hand the attack on religion had been overwhelmingly, and the attack on
civil order very largely, literary in its own character and weapons. In
the second, the everlasting _philosophe_-republican chatter about the
Greeks and the Romans had more than reconstituted the old classical and
“ancient” prejudice. Madame de Staël had not shared this latter; but she
had failed to share it principally because of her perfectibilism, which
had put down the merits of the ancients chiefly to their republican
constitutions. Here were a whole host of things for Chateaubriand to
deal with; and in every case the literary way was an obvious line of
attack, as well as one intensely congenial to the new champion. He is no
perfectibilist, of course; in fact, one of the appendices of the _Génie_
is a _Letter to Fontanes_[198] on the second edition of the _De la
Littérature_, combating its views. But his championship of “modern”
literature is based upon its Christianisation, and he compares famous
ancient with famous modern poets on purpose to show first, how
Christianity has enabled the latter to rise to nobler heights; secondly,
how some at least of the best points of the ancients themselves are to
be found in contact with Christian ethics. Like his feminine opponent,
he has some not quite cleanly rags of classicism and Gallicism about
him. A too sanguine hope may be dashed when it finds him talking about
the “bad taste” of Dante, and the “defects” of his age. But Romanticism,
no more than its far-off godmother Rome, was to be built in a day.
[Sidenote: _Survey and examples._]
And we very soon see that for all these remains of “the old man,” and
for all a certain necessary ignorance (he thinks there is nothing
mediæval before Dante but “a few poems in barbarous Latin),” despite
also such antiquated arbitrarinesses as the admission as a fault in the
Milton whom he so much admires, and in the Dante whom he admires rather
less, that “the marvellous is the _subject_ and not the _machine_ of the
poem”—we very soon see on what side Chateaubriand is fighting. He
hazards at the very opening the doctrine—shocking to the whole French
eighteenth century, and contrary to Aristotle—that the Epic is not only
larger in bulk, but higher, greater, more varied, more universal indeed,
in kind and range, than the drama. And perhaps this is as much a
dividing principle of criticism as anything else. I hold myself, as has
been made obvious, with those who think that the drama is only
accidentally literary, though it has been so now and again, for long
periods, in the very highest degree; while the epic is literary or
nothing—it is, with lyric, the beginning of all literature. But, however
this may be, the whole drift of his criticism is anti-neoclassic. Again
and again he contrasts passages and long scenes from Homer and Milton,—
not to show how superior Homer is, as the French neoclassics would have
done, as Addison had done—not even to show how superior Milton himself
is—not to defend Milton by Homer’s example,—but to show how they are
_differently_ excellent. A most interesting and novel critical
suggestion is that of trying to realise how a modern poet _would have_
done what an ancient poet _has_ done, the whole lesson of the
comparative method being here in little.
I shall hardly be expected, though I should much like, to analyse and
represent the whole of these twelve books, to which something has even
to be added from the six last. The turning of the tables on the
_Henriade_[199] (which is treated most politely), with a sincere lament
that, while the finest places of its author’s poems are inspired by
religion, he has not more fully inspired himself therewith in this
particular poem (the subject of which so obviously requires it!) is
ingeniously malicious. We may take mediocre interest in the contrasts of
Lusignan and Andromaque, Guzman and Iphigénie,[200] but they are full of
delicate and acute critical observation, which shows itself again in the
comparison of Virgil and Racine.[201] So too we may dispute the epigram
that “la barbarie et le polythéisme ont produit les héros d’Hómère; la
barbarie et le Christianisme ont enfanté les chevaliers du Tasse”;[202]
but the whole passage where this occurs is connected with the
all-important devotion to Chivalry. When he comes to passion we may
again desiderate something different from the comparison of Dido and
Phèdre.[203] But this was what was wanted “for _them_”; and there is no
fault to find with the treatment of Pope’s handling of Héloise.[204]
With the author’s ecstacies over _Paul et Virginie_,[205] few people now
living can sympathise; but once more _Paul et Virginie_ was good “for
_them_.” Virginie is only a victim of nasty prudishness when you compare
her to Nausicaa, but she might easily be taken for a mirror of purity in
the age of Madame de Warens and Madame de Puisieux. The fine passage on
“Le Vague des Passions” which serves to introduce _René_ is of great
critical importance, though it may have been partly suggested by
Bossuet.
The paradox of the beginning of the book on the Marvellous[206]—that
mythology belittled nature and made description abortive—is at least
exceedingly ingenious, as is what follows on Allegory; but
Chateaubriand’s account of the history of modern descriptive poetry
itself suffers from want of knowledge.[207] Still, in attacking the
position that pagan mythology was a more poetic subject than Christian,
it must be admitted that he is excellent on Angels,[208] and that his
comparison of Venus in the Carthaginian woods and Raphael in Eden, is
one of the best of those companion-pieces in which he so delights, and
which are such engaging criticism. We cannot follow him through dreams
and through “machines,” through Hell and through Tartarus; nor even give
much space to the bold, elaborate, and often admirably critical
comparison of Homer and the Bible.[209] But these things, like the
others mentioned before, all illustrate the range, the height, the
Pisgah quality—or rather that still higher quality of the mountain view
in _Paradise Regained_—to which Chateaubriand’s criticism can justly
pretend. These thirty pages are perhaps his most elaborate and ambitious
critical attempt, and they deserve to be thoroughly studied.
Hardly less remarkable is the Third Part, which deals with a sort of
clash of influences—that of Christianity on the Fine Arts, and that of
the Fine Arts, Christianity, and Literature on each other. The
wonderfully prophetic instinct of the writer is shown in what he says of
the Gregorian chant, as well as of Gothic architecture, and he brings
them very close to letters; but of course he comes closer still in
dealing with History, Oratory, and the like. And he manages, in a
surprising fashion, not to keep very far from it, even in his last part,
that of “Worship.”
[Sidenote: _Single points of excellence,_]