These exercitations are diversified and illustrated by constant

expressions and _aperçus_ of real critical power, showing, if, as we

have said, necessarily not complete, yet very considerable, and for the

time remarkable knowledge. Chateaubriand knows all about _Ossian_; and

he corrects Madame de Staël’s amiable and ignorant enthusiasms with a

politeness which must have been insufferable to the good lady. He has

the right phrase exactly[210] for that singular failure of a genius the

Père Lemoyne—a phrase which may not improbably have suggested Flaubert’s

gorgeous _Tentation_, and which is, as it were, a keynote or

_remarque_-index in relation to the critical imagination of modern

times. He has not merely this altered tone in _excelsis_, but also in

details:—as witness the very remarkable note at i. 260, on the effects

of a particular vowel (whether “first discovered” or not does not

matter). On the very same part his open-mindedness is shown in the warm

and just praise given to André Chénier—dead and unpublished—and a little

later in a delicate protest against the inconsistency of Rivarol’s

translation of _Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante_. The characters

of the ancient historians are sketched with a masterly brevity in III.

iii. 3, and there is an astonishing moderation and justice, as well as a

sort of chivalry, in his frequent encounters with Voltaire.

[Sidenote: _and general importance._]

But the greatest glory of Chateaubriand is that he is, if not the

creator, the first brilliant exponent of what we have called above the

Critical Imagination—the first great practitioner of imaginative

criticism since Longinus himself. Lessing and Diderot had no doubt shown

the way to this, but the first was not quite enthusiastic enough, and

the second was enthusiastic to and over the verge of dithyramb. The

Schlegels and Goethe had practised in it; but the two former were not

great enough men of letters, and the most ambitious attempts of Goethe,

such as that in _Wilhelm Meister_, are spoilt by deplorable

longwindednesses and pedantries. Chateaubriand is one of the very first

to take the new stream, _remis atque velis_, plying the oars of the

intellect, and catching the wind of the spirit. His occasional

delinquencies in the use of the phrase _mauvais goût_; his deference to

the old opinion that the hero of tragedy must necessarily be what we

called then in English “a high fellow”; other things of the same kind;

do not matter in the very least. Every one of them could be set off

against a corresponding expression of freedom from neo-classic

prejudice; and there would remain a mighty balance of such utterances on

the credit side.[211]

[Sidenote: _Joubert—his reputation._]

The critical position of Joubert, acclaimed soon after the posthumous

publication of his work[212] by the greatest critical authorities, has

sometimes been questioned in later days, but quite idly. Readers of

these pages must have seen, if indeed they did not know it long before,

that a large body of critical, as of other opinion, is merely

negligible. It does not rest upon any solid knowledge or argument; it is

in many cases not even the expression of a genuine personal preference,

illusion, or impression of any kind. Sometimes the critic does not like

the other critics who have expressed approval of the author; sometimes

he does not like some individual utterance or group of utterances of the

author’s own; more often he simply wishes “to be different”—to blame

where his predecessors have praised, and to extol to the skies what they

have disapproved or left unnoticed. In all such cases the verdict need

not even be seriously fought before any court of cassation; it is

self-quashed.

The remarkable body of judgment by French critics[213] from Sainte-Beuve

downwards, which is prefixed to the usual editions of the

_Correspondance_, especially if it be supplemented by Mr Arnold’s famous

essay, is almost “document” enough of Joubert’s worth; but we cannot

here avoid full examination of him, especially as hardly one of these

critics has taken our exact point of view. We can neglect the great body

of Joubert’s miscellaneous _Pensées_ and concentrate ourselves on those

affecting literature, which practically begin[214] under the heading _De

l’Antiquité_, appear both here and in the subsequent headings with

general titles, and of course constitute the substance of “On Poetry,”

“On Style,” “On the Qualities of the Writer,” and “Literary Judgments.”

[Sidenote: _His literary_ αὐτάρκεια.]

In literature, with an exception to be noticed presently, his time

exerts remarkably little influence on Joubert. This is not the case

elsewhere; in his religious, political, moral, social judgments we feel—

and it could not be but that we should feel—the pressure, and the

shadow, and the sting, of the Revolution everywhere. But the literature

is—as literature is but too seldom and ought always to be—presented

(except in one way) with a sort of _autarkeia_. Joubert was born in

mid-eighteenth century, and he died just as the Romantic movement was in

full bud and had begun to burst, with the _Odes et Ballades_. But he is

neither a hard and fast classic, nor a revolter of the extreme kind

against classicism, nor, like those not uninteresting contemporaries of

his whom we shall group after him, blown hither and thither by the wind

of this or that doctrine. He betrays, indeed, the enfranchising and

widening influence of Diderot; but he has worked this out quite

independently, and with a “horizontality” and comparative range of view

in which the early Romantics themselves (except Sainte-Beuve) were

conspicuously lacking, and which even Sainte-Beuve never fully attained.

[Sidenote: _The Law of Poetry._] The famous, the immortal, ninth

“Pensée” of the Poetry section,[215] “Rien de qui ne transporte pas

n’est poésie: La lyre est en quelque manière un instrument ailé,” is

positively startling. It is, of course, only Longinus, dashed a little

with Plato, and transferred from the abstract Sublime to the sublimest

part of literature Poetry. But generations had read and quoted Longinus

without making the transfer; and when made it is _en quelque manière_

(to use the author’s judicious limitation, which some people dislike so

much), final. Like other winged things, and more than any of them,

poetry is itself hard to catch; it is difficult to avoid crushing and

maiming it when you think to catch it. But this is as nearly perfect a

definition by resultant, by form, as can be got at.

[Sidenote: _More on that subject._]

Of course all the utterances are not at this level. The fault of the

“Pensée” itself in general, is that, in human necessity, it will miss,

or only go near ten times (perhaps a hundred) for once that it hits; and

it is easy enough for a hostile critic in turn to hit the misses. But it

is the hits that count; and, as for them, how astonishing is it to come

across at this date (No. xxv.), “Les beaux vers sont ceux qui s’exhalent

comme des sons ou des parfums,” where you have, put perfectly, all the

truth that exists in the “symbolist” theory of some seventy years later!

Again (xxxviii.) “Dans le style poétique chaque mot retentit comme le

son d’une lyre bien montée, et laisse toujours après lui un grand nombre

d’ondulations”—where the great quality of the best nineteenth-century

poetry, of that poetry of which hardly anything had been written in

France and Germany, and of which Joubert could hardly know what had

already been written in England—the contingent, additional music

superadded to meaning,—is hit off perfectly once more. Then there is the

second best known and most famous passage (xli.), forbidding the “lieu

trop réel,” the “population trop historique,” and enjoining the “espèce

de lieu fantastique,” in which the poet can move at pleasure; and that

other fatal saying (xlvi.), “On ne peut trouver de poésie nulle part

quand on n’en porte pas en soi,” and the reiteration (xlix.) of the

capital doctrine as to the beauty of words—of words even detached from

context. Taking them together, these ten pages of Joubert contain more

truth—more stimulating, suggestive, germinal truth—about poetry, than

any other single treatise from Aristotle down to the present day. This

is the way a man must think of poetry if he is to be saved; though not

every clause of the Joubertian creed is thus Athanasian.

[Sidenote: _On Style._]

The Style section is equally astonishing. I think I first read Joubert

about thirty years ago; I know his ancestors and his successors much

better now; but he astonishes me just as much as ever. In another rather

longer[216] stretch you have the best things in Aristotle, Longinus, and

others—some at least of which he pretty certainly had neither read nor

heard of—revised and applied; you have the principles and the practice

of Hugo, Gautier, Saint-Victor, Flaubert, of Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, put

plumply or by suggestion beforehand in eighteen pages.

Here is everything: the necessity of choice which is the condition of

good style, and which works so differently in ancient and modern times;

the powers of “the word” in all their varied bearings; the excellence of

archaism rightly understood, and the occasional charms of the _kuria_ as

a rest and interval for refreshment; the right to reinvest an old word

with new meaning; the “science of names”; the placing of words; the

freedom which the reader possesses of improving on his author by keeping

his word and adding to his sense; the difference between musical and

pictorial style; the impossibility of literature when words are used

with an absolutely fixed value; the unpardonable sin of mere purism; the

natural and justifiable idiosyncrasy of dictionary and even grammar in

good writers, with the due guards against its excess; the variety of

degree in which ancient authors are to be followed; the value and the

danger of idioms. These and a hundred other things will all be found,

sometimes of course (the fault of the form again) put too absolutely;

sometimes, though very rarely, intermixed with things more dubious—but

always present at short, at all but the shortest notice. Never, I think,

did any critical writer enter so much into the marrow of things in so

limited a space: the section is a sort of _Tinctura Fortior_, as the

pharmacopœias say, or even like those older “drop-cordials” of story,

where a vial the size of the little finger contained the virtue of a

whole pharmacy.

[Sidenote: _Miscellaneous Criticisms._]

These two sections form the _aureus libellus_ of Joubert—if I knew a

wealthy and sensible, intelligent and obliging bibliophile, they should

be printed on vellum and adorned by the greatest decorative artists of

the age, and bound in the simplest but the most perfect coat obtainable.

We decline slightly with the two remaining chapters—though there is

still plenty of gold to be found—and the decline is continuous. In the

section “Des Qualités de L’écrivain et des Compositions Littéraires” we

once more approach the merely philosophic side, and it is Joubert

himself who has left us, apropos of _Corinne_, the memorable proposition

that sometimes “un besoin de philosopher gâte tout.”[217] A fine

distinction (not so expressed) between realist and idealist

literature[218] is an instance of the consolation which is constantly

occurring; but we must look for relapses. What do we learn by being

told[219] that “Homer, Euripides, and Menander” (O groves of Blarney!)

had more _facilité pour le beau_ than Hesiod and Sophocles; Æschylus,

Dante, and La Bruyère less than Fénelon and J. J. Rousseau? The context

indeed shows (not by any means in so many words) what gloss is to be put

on _facilité_ and what on _beau_ to get out Joubert’s meaning; but the

result is not worth the trouble. And when we find afterwards that _la

facilité est opposée au sublime_ we agree, but, recurring, ask whether

Homer is less sublime than Hesiod? The sub-sections on criticism (§ cxl.

_sq._) are excellent, and a fairly severe winnowing would leave a

residue not much less valuable than in the other two: but the winnowing

is necessary.

[Sidenote: _His individual judgments more dubious._]

The fact may prepare the wary reader for some further inequality in the

last section of “Jugements Littéraires,” with which should be taken

certain letters to Molé in the _Correspondance_. To prevent

disappointment and even puzzlement it is here necessary to remember

Joubert’s “time, country, and circumstance.” He was a man, let it be

repeated, of the mid-eighteenth century by birth; a Frenchman, and not,

it would seem, by any means widely acquainted with foreign languages and

literatures, except classics. He always speaks as if he could only read

Milton in translations; his knowledge of Shakespeare, though he admired

him, is derived from the same untrustworthy source; of any large part of

English literature he necessarily knows nothing at all. Accordingly—in a

fashion which is nearly unique in this history, but which is priceless

in its unicity—the disadvantages which have been powerless to affect his

general conceptions recover their hold upon him, to some extent, in

particulars. He is still sound on what the _general_ merits of poetry

and of literature should be; but he sees those merits in the wrong

place. At first sight, to an English reader who is not thoroughly broken

to the ways of our difficult art, it may seem impossible, inconceivable,

a bad joke, that the author of the aphorisms above quoted as to the

necessity of “transport,” the power of words, and all the rest of it,

should admire Delille and not admire Milton. But remember, he understood

the _words_ of Delille—they had, feeble as they were, the power to

excite, according to his own true and profound theory, that poetry which

was ready to answer and magnify them in his own soul. He did not

understand the _words_ of Milton, and they could not touch him; while he

is certainly not to blame for not being touched by the words of Louis

Racine.

[Sidenote: _The reason for this._]

This is the most striking instance, the most astounding at first, the

most illuminative afterwards; and it will give us a key to all the rest.

It must for instance be a fresh stumbling-block, and no small one, to

find Joubert, who could prefer Delille to Milton, quite cool, almost

harsh, to Racine, saying that Racine is “the Virgil of the ignorant,”

that those whom he suffices are “poor souls and poor wits.” But the way

round the obstacle is perfectly clear to the practised traveller in our

country. Racine’s was not the poetry of Joubert’s own time and

generation; Delille’s was. His language, his words, his imagery could

convey whatsoever of poetry was in them—though it might not be very

much—to Joubert’s ears and wit and soul better than Racine’s could. And

once more, as those ears and wit and soul were exquisitely sensitive to

even a trace of poetry that _did_ reach them, the difficulty becomes no

difficulty at all, but, on the contrary, a real paradox of the most

illuminating and helpful kind, constantly to be remembered, and

especially good against those estimable doctrinaires who will have a

hard and fast hierarchy in poetry, a “best, better, good, not so good,

bad,” arranged in rigid classes. _That is poetry to a man which produces

on him such poetical effects as he is capable of receiving._ The reader

takes it, as the writer makes it, _poeticamente_. You may possibly—it is

not certain, but it is possible—_educate_ his poetic sense; say to it,

“Friend, come up higher.” You may certainly remove merely mechanical

obstacles, such as Joubert’s ignorance of English. But until something

of this kind is done, it is better that the man should even excessively

admire Burns or Béranger, Macaulay or Moore, than that he should

simulate admiration of Shelley, or Hugo, or Heine. It would be pleasant

to dwell on this, which has never, I think, been dwelt upon, or

expounded fully before; but words to the wise must be here, as always,

our motto: the hints given can easily here, as elsewhere, be expanded by

those who have the wits and the inclination.

[Sidenote: _Additional illustrations._]

Some further instances, however, may and must be given of the working of

this curious state of things, which makes a critic equal to the very

greatest we have met in abstract appreciation of poetry and literature,

the inferior of many we have met—if not of most who were good critics at

all—in his appreciation of individuals. There is the germ of a most

important general censure on “Naturalism” (a thing once more far ahead)

in his remark on Boccaccio, that he “adds nothing to the story,” that he

“respects the tale as he would respect a truth,” a position interesting

to compare with the constant protests of the Goncourts and their fellows

against what has been called “_dis_realising.”[220] “Boileau est un

grand poète, mais dans la demi-poésie,” though a little epigrammatic, is

true enough. His few remarks on Molière argue, as we should expect, a

rather lukewarm admiration; but he is among the highest praisers of La

Fontaine, ranking him as (of course this is before the nineteenth

century) fuller of poetry than any other French author. (Note again that

this means, “fuller of poetry _which can bring itself into contact with

Joubert’s mind_.”) He admits that his beloved Delille has only “sounds

and colours” in his head, but then they are the sounds and colours that

Joubert can see and hear, and he knows rightly that sounds and colours

make more than half of poetry. As for the ancients, he remarks with

great truth, that Cicero, whom nevertheless he admired much, has “more

taste and discernment than real criticism.” And then we find the

moralist in the remark, that Catullus unites the “two things which make

the worst mixture in the world, _mignardise_ and coarseness,” and that

“ses airs sont jolis, mais son instrument est baroque,” another curious

instance of the inability of the Latin race to value the second greatest

poet of Latin. Joubert, you see, did not like the indecency of Catullus,

and he did not like his “bitterness,” as Quintilian calls it; and the

dislike barred the poetic contact. On the other hand, he could see and

feel Tacitus. That Pascal is “exempt from all passion” seems an odd

judgment, though I could, I think, explain it. He is excellent on

Bossuet and Fénelon: less so, I think, on Malebranche.

On his own eighteenth century one turns to him with much interest, but

the utterances are too detailed for us to linger on them. They have the

perspicacity (if sometimes a little of the injustice) of an escaped

pupil of the _philosophes_. He is very valuable on Rousseau, but that “a

Voltaire is good for nothing at any time,” though he had acknowledged

many literary gifts and graces in this Voltaire, is not merely unjust,

but _saugrenu_. Still it certainly raises the point of law, whether

“good for nothing” literature, which is good literature, is not good for

something.

[Sidenote: _General remarks._]

A few more general remarks may perhaps be made on this critic, who

contrasts so remarkably with all the rest of the critics of the Empire,

and not least remarkably with his friend Chateaubriand and with Madame

de Staël, beside whom alone of this numerous group he can be placed. It

will be seen that while he is free from “Corinne’s” hasty

generalisations and indigestible “philosophy of literature,” while he

has a less extended knowledge of literatures (though probably a much

more accurate one) than hers, he actually far transcends her in real

philosophy of view, that he takes a sight of all poetry, all literature,

and their qualities, which is aquiline alike in sweep and searchingness.

Further, that though his knowledge is again more accurate than

Chateaubriand’s, it is more circumscribed, and that he cannot relish

some particular things which Chateaubriand could, yet that once more he

excels his friend in clearness, ideality, comprehension, and depth. That

finally (though the matter of this is to come), in comparison with all

the other Empire critics, from Fontanes and Geoffroy downwards, a

similar _distinguendum_ has to be observed. One Joubert—the Joubert of

the general views and of the sections on style and poetry—is far over

their heads, out of their sight and reach. The other Joubert—the Joubert

of the particular judgments—is very much nearer them, though he is

sometimes, not always, their superior.

What is certain, however, is, that this particular kind of doubleness

(we have seen others more common) is extraordinarily rare—that though

faint touches of it may appear here and there, they are not more than

faint. Joubert’s descriptions of poetry and his admiration of Delille

are no parallel to Longinus’ definitions of the Sublime and his failure

fully to admire the _Odyssey_. There is no conflict of the higher and

the lower rule, but only an unexampled—yet when we come to think of it,

perfectly natural—inability to get the higher rule into play. If one

could have had not merely the gift of tongues, but the gift of

conferring it, it would have been perhaps the most interesting

experiment possible in the critical sphere to have made Joubert a

thorough proficient in English, and _then_ to have seen whether he

failed to see the beauties of Milton. Meanwhile he remains isolated. I

do not think Mr Arnold’s comparison of him to Coleridge a very happy

one, though there are no doubt certain resemblances—the Coleridgean

depreciation of French poetry in relation to the Joubertian of English

is the most striking of these, and might seem sufficient. I do not think

Coleridge depreciated French poetry because he could not hear it: Mr

Arnold himself practically admitted that _he_ did, and he is therefore

himself a better parallel. And Coleridge had the excuse, which Mr Arnold

had not, that French had, in literature accessible to him, hardly tried

the whole compass of its lyre at all. But this is a digression, only

excused by its helping to point the assertion that there is no one like

Joubert—for Mr Arnold himself knew French very well indeed.

[Sidenote: _The other “Empire Critics.”_]

To all these three remarkable writers the term “Empire Critics,” which

has obtained a certain solid position in critical history from the use

made of it by Sainte-Beuve,[221] might, as far as chronology goes, be

applied. But they are not the writers who are generally denoted by the

term, these being rather a group extending from Fontanes through

Ginguené, Garat, Geoffroy, Dussault, Feletz, Lemercier, Marie-Joseph

Chenier, Hoffman, and others, down to Villemain and Cousin, who belong

in part even to the Second Empire, but still represent an older

tradition than the men strictly of 1830. They have been of late somewhat

forgotten and neglected, despite Sainte-Beuve’s weighty pleas for

them;[222] and perhaps in hardly a single case (I am not forgetting the

once mighty name of Villemain himself) do they supply us with a critic

of the highest class. But they are extremely important to history; we

cannot really understand the criticism of the last seventy years itself

without them. And I do not regret the time that I have myself spent on

them, though I do not propose, as Agamemnon would say, to equal my

treatment of them to that time itself.

[Sidenote: _Fontanes._]

The novice in these matters who goes from Sainte-Beuve’s repeated and

respectful notices of Fontanes to the latter’s _Œuvres_[223] may be a

little puzzled, even if he take due heed to the fact that these Works

are, as far as the criticism goes at any rate, only “selected.” There is

not very much in bulk; and what there is may not seem, according to the

severe Arnoldian standard, “chief and principal.” An introduction and

some notes to his translation of the _Essay on Man_, articles on

Chateaubriand, on Madame de Staël, on the “emphatic” Thomas, &c.:—“we

can do all these for ourselves if we want them, which we mostly do not,”

is likely to be the verdict of the impatient.

But it should not be allowed to stand. Fontanes shows us, in a manner

made more historically important by the fact that for a long time he was

a sort of Minister of Literature to Napoleon, that turning, that

transition, which is the subject of this whole chapter. He still, and

naturally, has a great deal of the eighteenth century in him; but he can

see the vacuity and the frigidity of eighteenth-century “emphasis.” He

is responsible[224] for teaching Victor Hugo that Voltaire taught _us_

to admire Shakespeare, one of the most remarkable mare’s-nests in

critical history. But, his eyes perhaps sharpened a little by personal

friendship, he perceived to a very large extent, if not fully, the

importance of the _Génie du Christianisme_. So there may have been mixed

motives in his different reception of Madame de Staël’s theories; but

there is a singular and satisfactory compound of eighteenth-century good

sense and nineteenth-century catholicity in his dealing with her

fantasticalities about North and South. He is himself rather rhetorical

at times, but seldom to the loss of sobriety; and he is altogether a

good sample, a good tell-tale, of the attitude of the inhabitants of a

landslip—as we may call it—who see their old marks changing relation and

bearing, who do not wholly like it, but who are capable of adapting

themselves, at any rate to some extent, to the change.

[Sidenote: _Geoffroy._]

Another interesting and representative person is Geoffroy,[225] who

incurred the strictures of Joubert, and has had them “passed on” by Mr

Arnold. Geoffroy—the pillar for many years of the _Année Littéraire_ and

of the _Débats_, the “Folliculus” of Luce de Lancival—has received from

Gosse (M. Etienne, not Mr Edmund) the praise of having “toujours marché

dans la même route et à la lueur du flambeau qu’il avait choisi dès le

commencement.” In other words _immutatus et immutabilis_—an attribution

magnificent in some relations of life; not, perhaps, as we have before

noted, in criticism. Geoffroy’s road and torch might have been better

chosen.

He, too, feels his time—if he is by no means a Romantic before or at the

birth of Romanticism, he is hardly more of a Voltairian. But he is first

of all “against” everything and everybody—a child of Momus.[226] He is

doubtful about Corneille and Molière; even Racine is not “perfect” for

him. But his most characteristic passage is perhaps one which occurs at

page 137, vol. ii., of his work cited below. It is a real _point de

repère_, because it is one of the last authoritative expressions of a

sentiment—no doubt not yet extinct, but for a long time kept to some

extent in check—the French belief in the absolute superiority of French

literature and the impossibility of a foreigner being a judge of it—the

impertinence even of his attempting to judge it. Geoffroy rates Blair in

the most approved pedagogic fashion for expressing the opinion—now

probably entertained by the majority of Frenchmen themselves—that

_Phèdre_ is a greater play than _Iphigénie_, and for assigning the

reason that _Iphigénie_ is too French. He blames the Edinburgh professor

roundly for “meddling with our authors”; the opinions are not disputable

opinions merely—they are “errors”; Blair and Edinburgh “ought to be

ashamed” of them; they show that the critic “knows nothing about the

matter.” Similar things are, of course, said to-day in England as well

as in France; but _they_ only show the temper of the particular critic,

not the theory of prevailing criticism. Yet Geoffroy, if only from

cross-grainedness, helped in the unsettling of the merely traditional

view of literature: and so did service.

[Sidenote: _Dussault._]

His contemporary and fellow-worker on the _Débats_, Dussault, is of a

different type.[227] He is much more amiable in his judgments—has,

indeed, the credit of being a sort of maker of things pleasant all

round; but he is in principle much more reactionary—he is perhaps the

most so of this group of critics, till they were exacerbated by the

Revolters, to whom he himself refers as _anarchistes littéraires_. He is

a staunch Bolæan; and if he has to admit (as with the growth of literary

history it was by his time almost impossible for any one not to admit)

that the _Art Poétique_ is not complete, _c’est du moins bien écrit_.

But he goes far beyond this elsewhere; and on the 26th of April, 1817—

the very year when a certain _enfant sublime_ presented himself as a

competitor for an Academic prize—he asks, undoubting of the fact,

“Pourquoi la constitution du Parnasse est elle si solide et si durable?”

That the disciples of the Greek and Latin Muses should have anything to

learn by going to “Runes” and such like things is _nullement possible_.

Fairy tales are “absurd.” Even the _avant-courriers_ of the French

classic age meet with no mercy; and Balzac himself is credited merely

with “bad taste.”

[Sidenote: _Hoffman, Garat, &c._]

Of another member of the staff of the _Débats_ in its early days,

Hoffman, I know less than of these.[228] He was, like most of the group,

a dramatist, and as might be expected, and as was the case with all of

them, the double employments reacted not quite beneficially on each

other. Like Geoffroy (with whom, however, he was at variance, and who

told him in effect, with characteristic sweetness, to go back to his

dramatic gallipots and leave criticism alone) he frowned on the youth of

Romanticism, and seems generally to have been of the race and lineage of

Rymer. Garat, not very weighty as a politician, possesses little more

worth, if any, as a critic, though he had vogue as an _éloge_-writer.

Daunou, who wrote noticeable notices on Ginguené and others, began his

career by a critical essay, two years before the Revolution, on the

influence of Boileau, and was during all his life more or less concerned

with criticism. But he was more of a historian and student of the

political sciences than of a literary critic of the pure breed. Etienne,

Fiévée, Legouvé the elder, the two Lacretelles, Andrieux,[229] and

others, we must also pass by, though I have matter for speaking of all

of them: but Ginguené, M. J. Chénier, Népomucène Lemercier, and Feletz

are not to be thus dismissed.

[Sidenote: _Ginguené._]

The first was an older man than most of the group—in fact, he was over

forty at the date of the Revolution, from the tender mercies of which he

was only saved by Thermidor. But he ranks in literature, and especially

in critical literature, chiefly by his _Histoire Littéraire

d’Italie_,[230] which did not begin to appear till the second decade of

the nineteenth century had opened, and was one of the earliest of these

comprehensive surveys of literature—other than the writer’s own or than

that of antiquity—which have had almost more to do than anything else

with the formation of modern criticism. He has been accused of relying

too much on Tiraboschi for his material; but the vice of looking rather

at the commentators than at the texts was an old one, inherited from

classical scholarship, and is by no means extinct a hundred years after

Ginguené's time; and he is rather less tinged with it than we might

expect. His judgments on such—to a Frenchman of the eighteenth century—

dangerous writers as Dante and La Casa have considerable merit.

[Sidenote: _M. J. Chénier._]

Marie-Joseph Chénier, in other respects besides his relations to his

ill-fated and illustrious brother, appears to have been an unpopular and

disputable person: nor, putting his considerable satiric power aside,

can he be called a great man of letters. But, I think, his _Tableau de

la Littérature Française depuis 1789_,[231] has been rather undervalued.

It is not, of course, free from the common defects of these surveys,

especially when taken _à bout portant_; it notices much that we do not

want noticed at all, belittles important things, takes refuge in stock

phrases and _clichés_ so as to get the business over. But it is often

acute and very much less one-sided and hide-bound than La Harpe or

Geoffroy—recognising, for instance, in opposition to the latter, that

Blair is “always just” to French writers. And it supplies us, written as

it was just before the dawn of Romanticism (for Chénier died in 1811),

with some interesting and necessarily unbiassed views. People, he

says,[232] do not read Le Bossu at all, and they read Bouhours very

little. He greatly prefers Diderot and Marmontel (though he thinks them

“paradoxical”) to Batteux; and if he is complimentary to Voltaire and

even to Thomas, rejoices in Fénelon and Corneille. He cannot, or will

not, understand Chateaubriand;[233] but he takes frequent opportunity,

under the guise of noticing translations, to refer to and estimate

English and German literature. In short, he is open to the reproach of

“not knowing where he is,” but the very evidences of this are useful to

us.

[Sidenote: _Lemercier._]

Still more relatively, and very much more intrinsically interesting, is

Népomucène Lemercier—that singular first sketch of a Victor Hugo, who,

naturally enough, would have none of Victor Hugo himself when he

appeared, and who, in a cruel trick of Fate and Death, was actually

supplanted by Hugo in his Academic Chair. It is unfortunate that

Lemercier’s _Cours de Littérature Générale_[234] is not a very common

book. It has something of the excessive generalisation of the

eighteenth-century—men were struck by the effect of measured sounds and

wrote poetry, &c.; and he still sticks to Kinds a good deal. But his

independence is unmistakable. He slights the unities superbly; has what

is, I think, the finest passage on Shakespeare written by a Frenchman up

to his day, on “The English Aeschylus;” condemns _la pernicieuse manie

de critiquer opiniâtrement_; qualifies and redeems his tendency to begin

“in the air” with “_the_ chimerical,” “_the_ marvellous,” “_the_

allegoric,” &c., by invariably condescending upon particulars in the

true critical way; and, as became the author of the _Panhypocrisiade_

and _Pinto_, defends Aristophanes against La Harpe. Unfortunately he

followed (intentionally or not) Aristotle in confining himself to Drama

and Epic. But he is a really stimulating and germinal writer, and

represents the morrow among his own contemporaries.

[Sidenote: _Feletz._]

Our last critic, before we come to those who in a way stand for both

Empires, is a curious contrast both to the critic of the type of

Geoffroy and to the critic of the type of Lemercier. Charles Marie

Dorimont, Abbé de Feletz,[235] who died in the very middle of the

nineteenth century at the age of eighty-three, was with Geoffroy

himself, Dussault, and Hoffman, one of the _Débats_ Four, and like them

was something of an anti-Romantic. But he was a man of amiable temper,

of many friends and of much addiction to society, so that he rather

flicked than lashed. His information as to the foreign subjects which he

often affected was not exhaustive, and the praise, as well as the blame,

of his not quite novel remark that in the _pièces difformes et barbares_

of Shakespeare there are _beautés veritables_, are both weakened by the

fact that he thinks Falstaff is hanged on the Stage in the _Merry

Wives_. But he reviews novels obviously by preference, can like _Joseph

Andrews_, and can enjoy Miss Edgeworth. In which things a door, great

and effectual, is opened, though Feletz doubtless knew it not.[236]

[Sidenote: _Cousin._]

Of the remarkable pair[237]—united in their lives, their careers and

their reputation—who, being first known under the first Empire, died in

the same year a little before the close of the second, Cousin concerns

us less than may be generally thought. He touched not a few literary

subjects,[238] but always preferably, and for the most part exclusively,

from the philosophical, social, or some other non-literary side.

[Sidenote: _Villemain_:] With Villemain it is different. He, too, was a

politician, a historian, and what not, but he was a man of letters, and

a man of critical letters, first of all. His second Academic prize, as a

very young man, was gained by a paper on “The Advantages and

Disadvantages of Criticism;” of the fifteen volumes of his collected

works[239] the greater part consists of literary history or estimate; he

was Professor of “Eloquence Française,” that is to say French

Literature; he was for a long period of years almost autocratic in the

distribution of prizes and promotions at the Academy, of which he was

“Secrétaire Perpetuel;” and it has long been, and to some extent still

is, the correct and orthodox thing to speak of him as having initiated

the modern critical movement in France, and shared with the Schlegels

the credit of initiating that of Europe generally.

[Sidenote: _his claims_:]

From all this men must come to the fifteen volumes with high

expectations—a little chequered perhaps in the case of the wary by some

cautions of Sainte-Beuve’s.[240] To describe the result as unmixed

disappointment would be unfair. The mere dates and contents of the books

taken together establish the fact that the debt owed by literary and

critical history to Villemain is great, and one of those which will

never be written off the _grand livre_ of the subject. That between

1816, the year of his appointment as Professor, and 1828, that of the

first publication of his _Cours de la Littérature Française_, French

students first, and then French readers, had presented to them for the

first time a survey of their literature, which included a historical

view of its own origins and earlier achievements, and something like a

comparative view of the achievements of other nations, is a thing the

greatness of which is not likely to be denied or minimised here.

Villemain’s style is always correct and agreeable, and he did much to

establish, for French criticism in the nineteenth-century, that repute

for “honeying the cup,” which has become something of a superstition.

Sainte-Beuve, in the passage just referred to, may give him a little too

much credit for acuteness and wit in his individual observations, but he

has both.

[Sidenote: _Deductions to be made from them._]

Unluckily, however, the entries on the other side of the sheet are

numerous and grave. There is not merely the fault, which his great

successor justly brings against him—a fault from which, by the way,

Sainte-Beuve himself was by no means free—that Villemain is afraid of

_concluding_, that he seldom or never gives you a clear, “grasped,”

summed-up view of his whole subject or man. Very few critics do. But in

details also his work is too often unsatisfactory. His numerous

“Reports” on academic competitions, which give opportunity for excellent

criticism, are elegant, but hollow and rhetorical, as is his rather

famous _Tableau de l’Eloquence Chrétienne au IVème Siècle_. His notices

of various ancient and modern writers are much boiled down from others,

with the result, not usual in physical boiling-down, of being not thick

but thin—those of Lucretius, and of the tempting and almost virgin

subject of the Greek Romances, especially so. Comparative and liberal as

he is, his judgment of Shakespeare will not stand beside Lemercier’s (he

says definitely that Shakespeare does _not_ provide, in the same

proportion as the Greeks, “universal beauties”), and his estimate of

Milton is beggarly beside Chateaubriand’s. With all his reputation for

rehabilitating mediæval literature, he seems to have known it little: he

is not merely very superficial on Chaucer, which might be pardonable in

a Frenchman, but actually sweeps the mighty volume of the _Chansons de

geste_ away at one stroke by the words “we had no poetry at once rude

and vigorous.” He is sound upon _Ossian_—that craze was dying and could

survive even rudimentary comparative study of literature in no one of

talent; and his thirty-ninth and fortieth lectures in the _Cours_ on

Criticism itself deserve to be very well spoken of. But on the whole he

is disappointing. We must, of course, make allowance—very large

allowance—for a pioneer who begins early, who finds others, during the

course of his long life, extending his own explorations far beyond his

own limits, and who, from other engagements, from routine, or from sheer

disenchantment or worse, declines to follow them; we must increase it

for his industry in other matters; we must give him his just part and

royalty in the accomplishment of those who followed, and not a few of

whom he actually taught, while all owed him something indirectly. But

intrinsically and absolutely I do not find him a very great or even a

very good critic. He is deficient in enthusiasm, in originality, in

grasp: nor does he quite make up the deficiency by erudition and method.

[Sidenote: _Beyle._]

Two remarkable persons, one standing apart a little—as he, like his

disciple Mérimée, always and in all things did—the other a polyhistoric

talent just short of genius, have yet to be mentioned: and these are

Henri Beyle and Charles Nodier. Beyle was, in a sense, nothing if not

critical; and the spirit of criticism pervades all his work, both the

earlier and better known novels and nondescripts, and the posthumous

volumes (deserving very much the same alliteration), which have more

recently been made known by the devoted labours of M. Stryienski. But

the “place” for his literary criticism is, of course, _Racine et

Shakespeare_, published in 1822, ere yet the Romantic party (to which

Beyle himself never belonged) was fully formed, but when the principles

“atmosphered” by Diderot, and held in various ways and degrees from

Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael onward, had already begun to influence

Frenchmen at large.

[Sidenote: _Racine et Shakespeare._]

The book itself[241] is a very curious one. Originally making its bow as

a couple of review articles, it received all sorts of accretions,

internal and appended, and, in its latest form especially, is something

of a _potpourri_. The title so far applies to the whole that the author

is generally supporting the _methods_ of Shakespeare against the

_methods_ of Racine: but a very small portion of the book is directly

occupied with either. And an unwary reader, expecting to find a

straightforward and consistent Romantic propaganda, may be almost

hopelessly puzzled, not merely by Beyle’s zigzag digressions striking in

all directions like forked lightning, but by such things as his constant

and sustained polemic against Molière, who has generally been the one

writer of the _grand siècle_ (or with Corneille one of the two writers)

taken under Romantic protection. In fact no book can better illustrate

the confusion and yeastiness of thought in that early Romantic period,

and the unconquerable, even when perverse, idiosyncrasy and

individuality of Beyle himself. Much of the piece is an attack upon

verse-tragedy _as_ verse, for here, as elsewhere, this partisan of the

greatest of all poets distinctly frowns on poetry as such. He bases

himself on Scott almost as much as on Shakespeare, yet he is terribly

disturbed by Sir Walter’s politics, and recurs again and again, more in

sorrow than in anger, but with singular lack of humour,[242] to the

story of the glass that George IV. drank out of, and that Scott first

pocketed and then sat upon. Politics, indeed, run very high throughout,

and one is never quite sure that Beyle’s dislike of Racine and Molière

is not mainly (he would himself admit it as partly) based on dislike of

an absolute monarchy and a courtly state of society. Here he divagates

into a long controversy with the unfortunate _perruque_ Auger: elsewhere

into an almost totally irrelevant excursus on Lord Byron, Italy, and the

wickedness of the English aristocracy. Yet he cannot help being

critically valuable almost everywhere, and he generally “says true

things,” though he constantly “calls them by wrong names.” How forcible

and original is the definition of Scott’s[243] form of novel as “a

romantic tragedy [or, we may add, ‘a romantic comedy’], with long

inserted descriptions.” His battle[244] early in the piece with a

“Classic” on the dramatic _illusion parfaite_ and _illusion imparfaite_,

is conducted in a masterly and victorious manner, though some of us

would like to challenge the victor to another duel, on the point whether

_theatrical_ illusion is not always, and of necessity, even less than

“imperfect,” and whether to obtain perfect “illusion” you must not

_read_ and read only.[245] Excellently acute too, for his time, though

to ours it may seem a truism, is his attribution of most critical errors

to _l’habitude choquée_:[246] and though there is both exaggeration and

undue restriction in saying that “Romanticism is the art of giving

people themselves pleasure, Classicism that of giving them what pleased

their grandfathers,”[247] we know what he means. He is very sound on

taste and fashion; and his severity on Voltaire is refreshing, because

it cannot be attributed, as it is the fashion to attribute severities on

that patriarch, to the _odium theologicum_. The whole, even in its

singularities and shortcomings, is an invaluable testimony to the set of

the current at the time:[248] but its words are not lightly to be taken

as other than “words to the wise,” and they are not invariably the words

_of_ the wise.

[Sidenote: _His attitude here_]

Beyle’s attitude in this tract has been commented on in a fashion very

illuminative (if you apply the proper checks in each case) by two

persons of unsurpassed competence, but not of quite unsurpassed

disinterestedness, Mérimée and Sainte-Beuve. The former[249] says

plumply, “Pour lui la poésie était lettre close,” and quotes the famous

_boutade_ in _De l’Amour_, that “Verse was invented as an aid to

memory.” His objection, says his disciple, to Racine (who “met with his

sovereign displeasure”) was that he had no character or local colour:

his reasons of preference for Shakespeare, that poet’s knowledge of the

human heart, the life and individuality of his characters, his command

of the nicest shades of passion and sentiment. Sainte-Beuve, on his

side,[250] affects rather to pooh-pooh the whole matter, as if it were a

battle of kites and crows, where the blood (if any) has been long

absorbed, the torn feathers blown away, and the dust settled to

quietness. Beyle was a fairly early, but excited and not quite judicious

partaker in it. He was unjust to La Harpe (Sainte-Beuve defending La

Harpe is rather good!), too much on the side of the _Edinburgh Review_

(this is better,[251] the “Blue and Yellow” as a Romantic organ!). One

remembers, of course, at once that both these great men of letters were,

if not exactly deserters and traitors in regard to Romanticism, at any

rate Romantics whose first love had grown pretty cold. Yet we must not

forget to notice that Sainte-Beuve practically confirms Mérimée on

Beyle’s “exclusion of poetry” in judging even Shakespeare.

[Sidenote: _and elsewhere._]

Nor do we need these great accuser-compurgators. The singular

self-revelations which have been communicated so lavishly of late years,

tell us, sometimes on every page, sometimes at longer, but never at very

long, intervals, of Beyle’s abiding interest in literature, and of its

curious character, Most part of the letters[252] which he, as little

more than a boy, wrote to his younger sister, Pauline, is occupied with

literary and educational advice, nearly as surprising in its meticulous

and affectionate pedagogism as the writer’s almost contemporary

_Journal_ is in very different ways. In both, and elsewhere, we find the

ever-growing passion for Shakespeare, from the dramatic and

psychological side, the ever-growing distaste for Racine, the admiration

of Corneille, and the contempt of Voltaire—the latter an excellent

subject for separate and careful study, inasmuch as we have in it

Beyle’s Romanticism engaging and overcoming his anti-religiosity. Among

the most curious documents noted here—where I think I have noted some

that are curious—is the letter to Pauline of May 12, 1807, from Berlin,

where Beyle has just discovered _Lenore_ “across the veil which covers

the genius of the German tongue from” him, and thinks it very touching.

Indeed Beyle in point of criticism is _polypidax_: though the streams

are, as it were, underground for the most part, they gush out in the

most apparently unlikely places. I have dozens of noted passages, for

instance, in that singular and most readable book the _Mémoires d’un

Touriste_,[253] certainly not a probable title-source of our matter, and

some even in the _Promenades dans Rome_. He resembled Hazlitt in the way

in which his criticism was liable to be distorted and poisoned by

extra-literary prejudice, more particularly of the anti-clerical kind. I

never knew a man so tormented with the idea of something in which he did

not—or said he did not—believe, as Beyle is with the idea of Hell. It

sometimes makes him very nearly silly, and constantly makes him lose

occasions of combined magnanimity and pure literary judgment, as

wherever he speaks of Joseph de Maistre.[254] But, as in Hazlitt’s case

also, you seldom or never find a literary judgment of Beyle’s, free from

prejudice, which is not sound.

[Sidenote: _Nodier._]

For those who like _Vitae Parallelae_, with a spice, or more than a

spice, of contrast, Nodier[255] makes an excellent pendant to Beyle: and

while his influence was much more rapid, it was wider also, if not

deeper. Nodier began his romantic and “xenomaniac” excursions with the

century, writing on Shakespeare in 1801 and on Goethe in 1802. I have

chased in the catalogues, but without bagging, a collection of early

reviews of his, published by Barginet of Grenoble in 1822, which ought

to be of very considerable interest for our purpose. It is well known

how, especially after his appointment to the librarianship of the

Arsenal in 1823, his abode became a rallying-place, and he himself a

sort of Nestor-Ulysses of Romanticism, while his delightful fantastic,

or half-fantastic stories (the best of them to my thinking is _Inès de

las Sierras_), which are Sterne _plus_ Hoffmann _plus_ something else,

form no small part of the choicest outcome of the movement. But in

criticism proper, Nodier, though a great propelling and inspiring force,

has left rather inadequate recorded examples of this force in

application. This is partly due to the fact that his intense interest in

pure bibliography, and in the “curiosities of literature,” drew him, as

similar interests have often drawn others, a little away from that

severer altar on which burns the fire of pure literary and critical

appreciation. His principal book of this kind, perhaps his principal

non-creative work, _Mélanges tirés d’une Petite Bibliothèque_,[256]

shows this very clearly: and it may rather be feared that Nodier would

have preferred a perfectly worthless book, of which he possessed an

unique copy, or an extremely eccentric one, of which hardly anybody had

ever heard, to the greatest work which everybody knew and had on their

shelves. But still he did like much of the best of what was known, and,

fortunately, directed his liking most to that of the best which was not

so well known as it ought to be. And so there are few more

characteristic names—and few names of more power—than his in the French

Transition.

CHAPTER V.

ÆSTHETICS AND THEIR INFLUENCE.

THE PRESENT CHAPTER ITSELF A KIND OF EXCURSUS—A PARABASIS ON

“PHILOSOPHICAL” CRITICISM-MODERN ÆSTHETICS: THEIR FOUNT IN

DESCARTES AND ITS BRANCHES-IN GERMANY: NEGATIVE AS WELL AS

POSITIVE INDUCEMENTS-BAUMGARTEN-‘DE NONNULLIS AD POEMA

PERTINENTIBUS’-AND ITS DEFINITION OF POETRY-THE ‘ALETHEOPHILUS’-THE

‘ÆSTHETICA’-SULZER-EBERHARD-FRANCE: THE PÈRE ANDRÉ, HIS ‘ESSAI SUR

LE BEAU’-ITALY: VICO-HIS LITERARY PLACES-THE ’DE STUDIORUM

RATIONE’-THE ’DE CONSTANTIA JURISPRUDENTIS’-THE FIRST ‘SCIENZA

NUOVA’-THE SECOND-RATIONALE OF ALL THIS-A VERY GREAT MAN AND

THINKER, BUT IN PURE CRITICISM AN INFLUENCE MALIGN OR

NULL-ENGLAND-SHAFTESBURY-HUME-EXAMPLES OF HIS CRITICAL OPINIONS-HIS

INCONSISTENCY-BURKE ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL-THE SCOTTISH

ÆSTHETIC-EMPIRICS: ALISON-THE ‘ESSAY ON TASTE’-ITS CONFUSIONS-AND

ARBITRARY ABSURDITIES-AN INTERIM CONCLUSION ON THE ÆSTHETIC MATTER.

[Sidenote: _The present chapter itself a kind of excursus._]

It was announced at the very opening of this History that it would not

deal, except incidentally and under _force majeure_, with those vaguer

problems of general Criticism or metacriticism which, during the last

two centuries, have taken the general name of Æsthetics. [Sidenote: _A

parabasis on “philosophical” criticism._] But some of my critics have

not been content with this announcement, and it is perhaps permissible

in this place to notice certain exceptions which have been taken to the

absence of—or rather to the pretty definite abstention from—

“philosophical” discussions and speculations in this book. For while in

Italy I have been pronounced _digiuno di filosofia_, the huntsmen have

been up in America against my “confusion of thought” and my writing

about Criticism without defining what criticism is.

As for the first point, I may perhaps be allowed to say that “divine

Philosophy” has been by no means such a stranger or stepmother to me as

some of my critics seem to suppose. I have duly sojourned in her courts,

and have found them the reverse of unamiable: I have eaten of her bread

and found it both palatable and nourishing. But it is Philosophy herself

who teaches us, by the mouth of not her least but, as some have thought,

her greatest exponent, not to shift or mix the Kinds. And, to my

possibly heretical judgment, the “kind” of Criticism seems one into

which such “general ideas” as my critics desiderate can only be

introduced by a most doubtful and perilous naturalisation. I suppose it

would be generally granted that no “philosophical” critics stand higher

than Plato and Coleridge: Aristotle himself has, in comparison with

them, but contented himself with middle axioms and empirical

observation. And the result of this is that—again to my possibly

heretical thinking—Plato has actually left us nothing in pure criticism

but an often mischievous theory: while Coleridge is just so much the

more barren in true criticism as he expatiates further in the regions of

sheer “philosophy.”

Nor should I, if I chose to take up the quarrel, in the least lack other

arms or armour of offence and defence, sufficiently proofmarked by

Philosophy herself. I hold that the province of Philosophy is occupied

by matters of the pure intellect: and that literary criticism is busied

with matters which, though not in the loosest meaning, are matters of

sense. I do not know—and I do not believe that any one knows, however

much he may juggle with terms—why certain words arranged in certain

order stir one like the face of the sea, or like the face of a girl,

while other arrangements leave one absolutely indifferent or excite

boredom or dislike. I know that we may generalise a little; may “push

our ignorance a little farther back”; may discover some accordances of

sound, some rhythmical adjustments, some cunning and more or less

constant appeals to eye and ear which, as we coolly say, “explain”

emotion and attraction to some extent. But _why_ these general things

delight man he knows no more than, in his more unsophisticated stage,

why their individual cases and instances do so. I do not think that my

own doctrine of the Poetic (or the literary) Moment—of the instant and

mirific “kiss of the spouse”—is so utterly “unphilosophical”: but I do

know that that doctrine, if it does not exactly laugh to scorn theories

of æsthetic, makes them merely facultative indulgences. And just as

physiology, and biology, and all the ’ologies that ever were ’ologied,

leave you utterly uninformed as to the real reason of the rapture of the

physical kiss, so I think that æsthetics do not teach the reason of the

amorous peace of the Poetic Moment.

But I began this book with no intention of writing a treatise on

_Momentary_ (or _Monochronous_) _Apolaustics_, and except that it might

have seemed discourteous to offer no explanation of (I can hardly call

this any apology for) a feature, or the lack of one, which has disturbed

well-willing readers, I should have preferred to keep such questions out

altogether. Nor can I see that there is any “confusion of thought,” any

contradiction, or even any want of “architectonic” in the plan which I

have actually pursued. A man may surely write a _History of England_

without including in it an abstract treatise on politics, and describe

an interesting country without philosophising on the architecture of its

buildings, the family story of its tribes, or the chemical constitution

of its natural products. I set before myself and my readers at the

outset the promise of a simple survey of the actual critical opinions,

actually expressed, in “judging of authors,” by the actual critics of

recorded literature. To the survey of these I have added another of the

chief reasons which they alleged for their tastes when they alleged any:

and when, as naturally happens, these opinions and tastes, and the

attempted explanations of them, appeared in groups or schools, I have

adapted my survey, by means of the Interchapters of the book, to the

summary consideration of these also. I have not thought it incumbent on

me either to express, or to refrain from expressing, agreement or

disagreement with their views: but where (as in the case of the Subject

theory, of Boileau’s Good-Sense-worship and other things) it seemed to

me that certain views and theories could be actually demolished by

argument, I have endeavoured to show how. Where it is a simple question

of taste, my own _Haupt-theorie_ forbids my attempting anything of the

sort.

I am, I confess, unable to see that either Logic or Architectonic is

outraged by this preannounced and methodical limitation of proceeding. I

have given, or attempted to give, my “Atlas” of the actual facts with

what accuracy and clearness I could. The complement of Theory I do not

pretend to supply, and I cannot see that anybody has a right to demand

it. Whoso wants to take it let him make it: my facts ought to help him

in the making, and if they do not, he and not the facts must bear the

blame. This book has attempted to provide, in an orderly arrangement,

and, as far as might be in the space, exhaustively, what has called

itself and has been called Criticism (certain varieties being, for

reasons given, excluded or less fully treated) from the beginnings of

Greek literature, as we have them, to the present day. Of these

provisions I think I may say—without prejudice to any further use of

them that any one may choose to make—_his utere mecum_: and I will just

add that had anybody offered me the same provision thirty years ago, I

should have been profoundly thankful, and have been spared many a weary

hour of gleaning here and groping there.

I shall even be so very bold as to say that what I have actually done,

or attempted to do, seems to me in the true sense both _philosophoteron_

and _spoudaioteron_ than what my censors would have liked me to do. Any

tolerably clever undergraduate, reading for Greats, could sketch (in

after-life amusing himself, and perhaps impressing others, by

accumulating arguments in support, or in destruction, of his

undergraduate hypothesis) explanations of the distaste of the ancients

for “appreciative” criticism, of the critical silence of the Middle

Ages, of the French and English attitude of sixteenth-seventeenth

century criticism and sixteenth-seventeenth century creation, of the

time of bondage to Good Sense, of the avatars and phases of Taste. I

would undertake myself to make a complete set in a Long Vacation, with

arguments _pro_ and _con_ in the “best and most orgilous” manner. But I

should not believe one of them, and I should mutter _O vix sancta

simplicitas!_ if anybody were taken in by them. In what I have given

there is no possibility of taking in, and no need to believe or

disbelieve. Here are the simple facts, disengaged by a certain amount of

hard labour from their more or less accessible sources and quarries, and

ranged, whether ill or well, yet at any rate with some system, and in

such a fashion that they must be reasonably easy to master. I may not be

an architect, but think I may claim to be a tolerable quarryman and a

purveyor of the stone in fairly convenient arrangement, workably

rough-hewed. And your most gifted architect will find himself put to it

to make his Beauvais or his Batalha, his Salisbury or his Strasburg,

from stone unquarried or unshaped to his hand. I have, in short,

endeavoured to give a tolerably complete collection of facts which have

never been collected before. If my facts are inconvenient to any

philosophy, so much the worse for it: if they are convenient, let it

take them and welcome.

At any rate—with what results of success or failure, of advantage or

disadvantage to the work, the reader, not the writer, must judge,—my

initial undertaking of abstinence has, I think, been fairly discharged.

The point, however, at which we have arrived is one of those where the

_force majeure_ makes itself felt. In the Book where we aim at

exhibiting the process of change which is so noticeable as between the

general criticism of the eighteenth and the general criticism of the

nineteenth centuries, and at examining to some extent the causes of that

change, we could not possibly omit an influence so powerful for good or

for evil as that of the constitution—as a regular branch of philosophy—

of inquiries into the principles of Beauty, into the æsthetic sense,

into the psychological aspects of the appeal of art generally. We shall

still deal in the most economical and temperate fashion with these

matters: but we cannot here abstain from them entirely. Indeed it might

be open to anybody to urge that large passages occurring elsewhere in

this volume, and even to some extent in the last, properly belong to the

present chapter—that Lessing, Diderot, Du Bos are strayed sheep of this

fold. But one remarkable person in France, another in Italy, and two

still more remarkable groups in Germany and England, will find better

place here than anywhere for something like individual notice: and

others must be at least the subject of reference and glance.

[Sidenote: _Modern Æsthetics: their fount in Descartes and its

branches._]

With the minor differences which, occurring in all matters of opinion,

nowhere multiply so fast and subdivide themselves so minutely as in

questions of philosophy, there has been of late a general agreement to

trace the germ of the modern division of Æsthetics to Descartes.[257] To

discuss this at any length would be quite improper here: but no one who

has the least acquaintance with the Cartesian philosophy can fail to see

how naturally—nay, how inevitably—both the general principle of that

philosophy in its reduction and rallying of everything to conditions of

abstract idea and thought, and its particular insistence on clearness of

definition and the like in Method, should lead to a reconsideration and

further exploration of the idea of Beauty, literary and other. There is

also no doubt that, in the next generation or generations, the

developments of Cartesianism and the revolts against it might, nay,

must, affect powerfully these applications of abstract thought to the

remoter principles of literature. We have seen that Locke in England,

Philistine as he himself was in regard to letters, and especially to

poetry, had a very strong influence upon Addison,—an influence which he

continued to exercise, both through Addison and independently, almost

throughout the English eighteenth century. There is no doubt that in

France the Père André, whom we shall mention presently, was a direct

descendant of Descartes through Malebranche. In Italy the singular and

solitary figure of Vico, though it exercised at first no influence, has

been claimed as having a new and powerful influence to exercise in this

direction as in others. And it is not disputable that Descartes begat

Leibnitz or that Leibnitz begat Wolff, to whose philosophical system

almost all competent judgment agrees in tracing the direct origin of

German æsthetic, in Breitinger, in Baumgarten, and the rest.

[Sidenote: _In Germany: negative as well as positive inducements._]

It is, I think, Herr von Antoniewicz, the very learned and able editor

of J. E. Schlegel, who accounts[258] for the strong abstract and

æsthetic tendency of German eighteenth-century criticism, both then and

since, by the fact that the originators of it had nothing to look back

upon, nothing to “tie themselves on to,” and that they therefore struck

out into the deep, _ripæ ulterioris amore_, as we may say, to tag his

saying. This is ingenious, and it becomes more illuminative when we

compare the facts with the corresponding facts in English criticism. We,

too, though we had in Dryden and Jonson a good deal more than the

Germans had, possessed little critical starting-point. But we had, what

the Germans had not, abundance of really great writers upon whom to fix

practical and real critical examinations. It is half pathetic and half

ludicrous to see the efforts that Bodmer and Gottsched and their

contemporaries make to provide themselves with subjects of the kind out

of people like Besser and Neukirch and Amthor, like Lohenstein and

Hofmanswaldau, even like the excellent Opitz: and we cannot wonder that

they, or at least others, dropped off these unsucculent subjects into

the pure inane. But the fairer Callipolis of English criticism could

feed and grow fat on Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton,

and Dryden always, and by degrees on all the recovered wealth of older

English literature. The Germans had nothing (save Luther and a few more

not of the absolutely first class or even a very high second) but that

mediæval literature and those ballads which naturally they did not reach

at once. And even these, much good as they did them, had not the

inestimable _alterative_ value of older as compared with newer English

literature.

[Sidenote: _Baumgarten._]

On the other hand, they had, as we have said, an unconquerable desire

and a dogged determination to learn and to improve themselves: the very

poverty of their own literature drove them to compare and abstract

others; and they possessed, in the Wolffian philosophy, a strong and

serviceable instrument of method. Breitinger, with whom we have dealt

sufficiently in his general critical aspect, may perhaps have the credit

of the first distinct and extensive attempt to busy himself with the

theory of art and letters: to Baumgarten is always attributed that of

having put the name “Æsthetic” into currency, and of having got the

thing—if it may be called a thing—into formal and regular shape. He used

the word in a thesis, _De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus_,[259] as

early as 1735, about midway between the time when the Zürich men turned

their attention seriously to poetry and imagination in the abstract, and

the issue of their main body of work in 1740-41. But it was not till

fifteen years later, at the exact middle of the century, that he began

to publish his _Æsthetica_,[260] redacted from lectures delivered in the

interval.

[Sidenote: De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus,]

The thesis itself is to the expert a sufficient announcement of the new

departure, which of course is only an old one re-fashioned. Baumgarten

takes us right back to the most abstract criticism of the Italian

Renaissance—the “idea of a poem,” the skeleton of poetic thought,

method, expression, strung together by a new science of the sense of

beauty. A poem is _oratio sensitiva perfecta_. What is poetical is that

which contributes to this perfection.

[Sidenote: _and its definition of poetry_.]

The most fatal, and I am sure the most unintentionally fatal, criticism

of Baumgarten, and incidentally of the entire division of critical or

quasi-critical literature to which his work belongs, is contained in a

remark of Herr Braitmaier’s (ii. 9) that part of the thesis “is written

with very little understanding of poetry.” The question is whether the

whole is not—whether this and other things like it might not have been

said by a man who could not distinguish between Tupper and Tennyson,

between Hugo and Delille. Look at this _oratio sensitiva perfecta_—which

sent the good Herder into ecstasies as a new poetic spell, germ, and

what not. Like other abstract definitions, including that of Coleridge

himself, to which we shall come later, it omits or misses the

_differentia_ of Poetry altogether. It lets in the prose-poetry or the

prose-better-than-poetry heretics by a wide and unclosable door:[261] it

excludes the very quality which some of those who love poetry most love

in it. What is “perfection” but the attainment, in the highest degree,

of that which is elsewhere attained in degrees high, less high, low, or

lowest? There are therefore _orationes sensitivæ_ which have the

qualities of poetry but are not poetry. This is hard to admit. Poetry

should be itself: not a “bestment” of something else.

[Sidenote: _The_ Aletheophilus.]

In the _Aletheophilus_, which followed (1741), Baumgarten expanded and,

at the same time, condescended a little. A poem is now a “lively”

oration instead of “sensitive” words, and so lively that it demands

metrical expression. Herein he seems to his severer critics to have

derogated. “Liveliness,” they say, was in _sensitiva_, only better:

“metre” was in _perfecta_ by implication. One can only say that _we_

prefer to take it explicitly. And Baumgarten, like all other theorists

with hardly an exception, grudges the admission of metre after all. He

calculates that it gives only a very small proportion of the charm of

poetry. True, the admission of it at all—with the further prescription

of “thoughts that burn,” “brilliant order,” “regular,” that is to say,

pure, neatly adjusted, adequate, and charming “expression,” does

something to dress up the bare skeleton of the _perfecta sensitiva

oratio_. But it does more to show what a bodiless skeleton it is.

[Sidenote: _The_ Æsthetica.] The _Æsthetica_ itself,[262] which had been

preceded by a sort of pilot-engine in the shape of a redaction of

Baumgarten’s professorial lectures by his pupil, G. F. Meier,[263]

expands, after a rather Vossian pattern, the principles of the two

earlier books, dwelling much on “perfection,” on the innate disposition

of the soul towards beautiful thoughts, and the like. He is perhaps most

justly thanked for his insistence on _sensitiva_—on the sensual as well

as intellectual appeal of poetry. But his illustration from actual

ancient poetry is not rich: and that from modern almost

non-existent.[264]

To Baumgarten we have given some place as to a pioneer even in a branch

of criticism which we do not intend to pursue. His followers, Sulzer and

Eberhard, must have less room, and Moses Mendelssohn, between them, is

elsewhere treated.

[Sidenote: _Sulzer._]

The well-known _Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste_[265] of Sulzer,

to which the often quoted _Zusätze_ of Blankenberg belong as supplement,

is in reality a painful compound of Dictionary and Bibliography, wherein

you go from _Copiren_ to _Corinthische Ordnung_, and from _Menuet_ to

_Metalepsis_. Such things, invaluable for their time, are almost

necessarily thrown into the wallet at his back by Time himself. But they

serve as a text for a repetition of the sober truth that the immense

reputation and the really solid achievement of Germany since have been

not a little due to the provision of them by her eighteenth-century

writers. Mere knowledge will not do everything: and it is peculiarly

liable to degenerate into a simple rag-bag and marine-store accumulation

of things that are _not_ knowledge. But the average man can do very

little without it; he can sometimes do quite surprising things with it.

And while the less than average man is without it mainly negligible, it

would be wofully easy to provide examples in which persons, certainly or

possibly much above the average in ability, have made shipwreck by

neglecting it.

[Sidenote: _Eberhard._]

The _Handbuch der Æsthetik_[266] of Eberhard may deserve a line here,

because, though beginning in the orthodox æsthetic manner with general

Principles of Beauty, it works them down to specific Rhetoric and Poetry

with rather more condescension, and a great deal more ingenuity, than

usual.

[Sidenote: _France: the Père André_, his Essai sur le Beau.]

To pass to France, the _Essai sur le Beau_ of the Père André[267] is

almost a famous book, and undoubtedly exercised a great deal of

influence over the time; nor must we deny that that influence had

literary effects. But even a not hasty reader might be excused—if he

came across the book having never previously heard of it—for saying that

its connection with Literature is almost non-existent. The very word

does not occur in the Index, which is rather fuller than in most French

books of the time: and though “Eloquence” and “Poetry” do, the remarks

in reference to them are of the most meagre character. There must be

Unity: and the poet must please the imagination (Addison had at least

taught them to use the word) as well as the intellect. Even “pleasure”

is to be used with jealous care as a criterion of Beauty—the love of

this is to be “disinterested.” But beyond these vague, as one might have

thought barren, and in the last case theoretical generalities, André has

next to nothing for the student of Literary Criticism, who may make what

he can of the table of the Beautiful, as—

Arbitrary, Moral, National, Spiritual,

Essential, Musical, Sensible, Visible.

And it is well if this student has the grace to refrain from amplifying

this table after the pattern and in the spirit of the twenty-eighth

chapter of the Third Book of Rabelais.

[Sidenote: _Italy: Vico._]

In Italy, the illustrious author[268] of the _Scienza Nuova_[269] had,

before Baumgarten, before even Breitinger, and long before André, turned

the powers of his profound and original thought to the question of

_sapienza poetica_. He lays at least as much stress as Baumgarten

himself upon the _sensitiva_: discerns natural and diametrical

opposition between Metaphysics and Poetry; but still admits a Science,

“new” in this as in other respects, of Poetry, or at least a _logica

poetica_ which compares curiously with Breitinger’s “Logic of

Imagination” and other things. There does not appear to be any suspicion

or any likelihood of indebtedness: it is only one of the innumerable

instances of things being “in the air” and of the birds of the air

carrying them to different places and persons. With him, poetry, like

everything else, is an item or factor in human _history_, though,

following his strong metaphysical turn, he deals largely with the

relations to soul and sense, &c.

[Sidenote: _His literary places._]

In arranging, according to our usual fashion, the actual deliverances of

Vico as actually presented, we find them in four successive places

presenting as many stages of his thought—the _De Studiorum Ratione_

(1708), the _Constantia Jurisprudentis_ (1721), the first _Scienza_

(1725), and the second (1730).

[Sidenote: _The_ De Studiorum Ratione.]

The first named is early, and it presents the author’s thought in a

somewhat embryonic condition, but as true to the future development as

an embryo ought to be. Its importance for us consists first in the

starting[270] from Bacon, which of itself will give us something of an

inkling of Vico’s attitude to literature, though the Italian fortunately

discarded whatever was contemptuous or hostile in the Englishman’s

position. More important still is the erection[271] of a “Nova Critica”

which is opposed and preferred to “Topica” in relation to literature

itself. “Critica est ars veræ orationis; Topica [here evidently used in

one of the full senses of ‘Rhetoric’] autem copiosæ.”[272] And most, the

paragraph[273] on Poetry itself, where Vico, deserting Bacon, proclaims

it not a _vinum dæmonum_ but a “gift of the Most Highest,” declares the

great characteristic of the Poet to be Imagination, but (true to his own

line) insists on Truth being still most necessary to him. That the new

Physic will be very convenient to Poetry by supplying it with fresh and

accurate images may raise a smile: but after all it has not proved quite

vain.

[Sidenote: _The_ De Constantia Jurisprudentis.]

_De Constantia Jurisprudentis_ may seem a surprising title; but Vico was

thoroughly of the opinion of a later jurist, Mr Counsellor Paulus

Pleydell, about the necessity of “history and literature” to his

profession, and the sub-title _De Constantia Philologiæ_ takes away even

the titular shock. Philology is here no mere charwoman, with the

charwoman’s too frequent habit of doing even the mean work she does

badly; but a mighty goddess of knowledge, presiding over not merely the

history of words but the history of things. History was Vico’s real

darling: and that view of poetry as the earliest attainable history,

which, true enough in a way, was to lead him into heresy afterwards,

distinctly appears here. It is only at the twelfth chapter of this

section[274] that he comes to talk “De Linguæ Heroicæ sive de Poeseos

Origine,” and handles his subject very much as we should expect from his

text, that “Poetry is the first language of men.” Still, he goes into a

good deal of detail, and his description[275] of the iamb as the

“middleman” (_tradux_) between heroic verse and prose, though not likely

to be historically correct, has a certain truth logically. And he

appends to this, in a very long note, a discussion of Homer himself,

which is not yet polytheist.

[Sidenote: _The first_ Scienza Nuova.]

These earlier treatises take away almost all oddity from the appearance

in the first _Scienza_ of an entire Book,[276] the Third, occupied with

New Principles of Poetry. Hotch-potch as this book may seem—ranging as

it does from theogony to chronology, and from both to heraldry and the

science of medals, from elaborate discussions of “fables” generally to a

discovery of the Laws of War and Peace in poetry itself, from the

greatness of Homer to the truth of the Christian Religion,—all these

apparent oddities are waxed if not welded together by Vico’s general

idea of the Poet as the earliest and truest historian, philosopher, and

authority for the New Science of Humanity. Indeed he often reminds us of

Shelley in the _Defence of Poetry_, and I daresay Shelley really knew

him.[277]

[Sidenote: _The Second._]

It is not, however, till the second _Scienza_ that these sketches and

studies take the form of an elaborate treatise, _Della Sapienza

Poetica_, filling one whole book on the general subject, and another,

_Della Discoverta del Vero Omero_, no less than three hundred

pages.[278] Here Vico becomes more than ever “Thorough.” After

preliminaries on science generally, on poetical science, and on the

Deluge, we have a Metaphysic of Poetry, a Logic of Poetry, an Ethic,

Economic, Politic, Physic (specified down as Cosmography, Astronomy,

Chronology, and Geography)—all of Poetry!

In these bold speculations many striking and really critical sayings

occur. That it is the first principle of poetry to give life, and its

own life, to everything[279] nobody need deny; nor that poetry is at

once “impossible and credible,”[280] a near coasting of the Coleridgean

Land of Promise, the explorer starting of course, as Coleridge did, from

the Aristotelian doctrine of the “plausible impossible” and the

absurdity rendered imperceptible by poetic speech. That “too much

reflection hurts poetry”[281] is less unmixedly true, though most

certainly not unmixedly false.

[Sidenote: _Rationale of all this._]

All this is extremely interesting, but with an interest so different

from that of purely literary criticism that I can quite understand how a

man like Signor Croce, taking his start from it, ostracises purely

literary criticism itself. Of this last indeed[282] there is little or

nothing in Vico. He does not conduct—I am not aware of any one who ever

_has_ conducted—the argument for Homeric disintegration on literary

grounds: his occasional comparisons of Dante with Homer are equally

unliterary. I have not yet found a place where he deals with any author

in a purely literary spirit. The zeal of his New Science of Humanity has

eaten him up. A poem is a historical document, a poet is not merely an

early historian but an early theologian, philosopher, jurist, moralist,

panto-pragmatist, _panepistemon_, _panhistor_. Very like; but for most

of these purposes a Tupper would be quite as valuable as a Tennyson, and

we see that a cloud of unsubstantial Homerids were quite as valuable to

Vico as the One Poet of Helen and Nausicaa, of Achilles and Odysseus.

[Sidenote: _A very great man and thinker, but in pure Criticism an

influence malign or null._]

For us, therefore, the main importance of Vico, though undoubtedly

great, is of a dubious not to say a sinister character. It establishes

him in a position by no means dissimilar to that of Plato,—a position of

enormous influence, epoch-making and original, which influence has

chiefly spent itself in ways outside of, or counter to, that which we

are pursuing. If Vico had contented himself with developing, in the

direction of literature, the theory of cyclical progression which he in

common with other great thinkers held, and if he had had literary

knowledge enough to apply it, the results might have been wholly good.

But it does not appear that he had this knowledge, and, whether he had

it or not, he used what he had in very different lines. I think that

Professor Flint has established beyond all doubt Vico’s claim to the

anticipation of the so-called “Wolfian” method with Homer.[283] But, as

I have explained from the very outset, this so-called criticism also is

not the species of criticism with which we here busy ourselves at all:

and its methods are entirely separate and partly hostile. Yet there is

no question about the importance which this so-called criticism has

assumed in the last two centuries, and in this, as in other matters,

Vico is an origin.

So is he, I think, likewise in the extension of literary criticism by

including in it investigations into psychology, not merely individual

but national, into manners, religion, and what not. This extension,

continued by the Germans of the later eighteenth century and immensely

popularised and developed during the nineteenth, of course now seems to

some the orthodox and only legitimate process of the kind. To me, as my

readers by this time must be well aware, it does not seem so. I

therefore deplore the exercise of Vico’s genius in this direction, and I

do not purpose to admit its results into these pages more than I can

help. But once more I recognise his greatness, if in some respects as

that of a great heresiarch. And it would be really “unphilosophical” to

leave him without pointing out, what has not, so far as I know, been

pointed out before, how noteworthy he is as exemplifying the corruption

of a thing accompanying quite early stages of its growth. We have

throughout maintained that the Historical method is the salvation of

Criticism, and in this very period we are witnessing its late

application to that purpose. Vico is the very apostle, nay, more, the

prophet, of the Historical method itself. Yet here, as elsewhere, the

postern to Hell is hard by the gateway of the Celestial City.

[Sidenote: _England._]

We may give a somewhat full account of some English writers whose

criticism trembles on the verge of æsthetic or oversteps it, partly on

the general principles announced in the preface to the last volume,

partly because some of them at least do touch actual criticism rather

more nearly than, say, Baumgarten and Vico; but also because, in the

great _prepollence_ of English literature during the eighteenth century,

some of them likewise—notably Shaftesbury and Burke—exercised a very

considerable influence upon foreign countries. As for Hume, he is a

particularly interesting example of a man pushing freedom of thought to

the utmost limit in certain directions, but apparently content to dwell

in the most hide-bound orthodoxy of his time as to others.[284]

[Sidenote: _Shaftesbury._]

There are few writers of whom more different opinions have been held, in

regard to their philosophical and literary value, than is the case with

Shaftesbury. His criticism has been less discussed, except from the

purely philosophical or at any rate the technically æsthetic side; but

difference is scarcely less certain here when discussion does take

place. It is difficult to put the dependence of that difference in an

uncontentious and non-question-begging manner, because it concerns a

fundamental antinomy of the fashion in which this curious author strikes

opposite temperaments. To some, every utterance of his seems to carry

with it in an undertone something of this sort: “I am not merely a

Person of Quality, and a very fine gentleman, but also, look you, a

philosopher of the greatest depth, though of the most elegant exterior,

and a writer of consummate originality and _agudeza_. If you are

sensible people you will pay me the utmost respect; but alas! there are

so many vulgar and insensible people about, that very likely you will

not.” Now this kind of “air” abundantly fascinates some readers, and

intrigues others; while, to yet others again, it seems the affectation,

most probably of a charlatan, certainly of an intellectual coxcomb, and

they are offended accordingly. It is probably unjust (though there is

weighty authority for it) to regard Shaftesbury as a charlatan; but he

will hardly, except by the fascination aforesaid or by some illegitimate

partisanship of religious or philosophical view, escape the charge of

being a coxcomb; and his coxcombry appears nowhere more than in his

dealings with criticism.[285] From the strictest point of view of our

own definition of the art, he would have very little right to entrance

here at all, and would have to be pretty unceremoniously treated if he

were allowed to take his trial. His concrete critical utterances—his

actual appreciations—are almost Rymerical; with a modish

superciliousness substituted for pedantic scurrility. “The British

Muses,” quoth my lord, in his _Advice to an Author_,[286] “may well lie

abject and obscure, especially being as yet in their mere infant state.

They have scarce hitherto arrived to anything of stateliness or person,”

and he continues in the usual style with “wretched pun and quibble,”

“false sublime,” “Gothick mode of poetry,” “horrid discord of jingling

rhyme,” &c. He speaks of “that noble satirist Boileau” as “raised from

the plain model of the ancients.” Neither family affection, nor even

family pride, could have induced him to speak as he speaks of

Dryden,[287] if he had had any real literary taste. His sneers at

Universities,[288] at “pedantick learning,” at “the mean fellowship of

bearded boys,” deprive him of the one saving grace which Neo-classicism

could generally claim. “Had I been a Spanish Cervantes, and with success

equal to that comick author had destroyed the reigning taste of Gothick

or Moorish Chivalry, I could afterwards contentedly have seen my

burlesque itself despised and set aside.”[289] Perhaps there is not a

more unhappily selected single epithet in the whole range of criticism

than “the _cold_ Lucretius.”[290]

On the other hand, both in the more speciously literary parts of his

desultory discourses _de quodam Ashleio_, and outside of them, he has

frequent remarks on the Kinds;[291] he is quite copious on

Correctness;[292] and there can be no doubt that he deserves his place

in this chapter by the fashion in which he endeavours to utilise his

favourite _pulchrum_ and _honestum_ in reference to Criticism, of which

he is a declared and (as far as his inveterate affectation and mannerism

will let him) an ingenious defender. The main _locus_ for this is the

Third Miscellany, and its central, or rather culminating, passage[293]

occurs in the second chapter thereof. The Beautiful is the principle of

Literature as well as of Virtue; the sense whereby it is apprehended is

Good Taste; the manner of attaining this taste is by a gradual rejection

of the excessive, the extravagant, the vulgar.[294] A vague enough

gospel, and not over well justified by the fruits of actual appreciation

quoted above;[295] but not perhaps much vaguer, or possessing less

justification, than most metacritic.

[Sidenote: _Hume._]

The position of Hume in regard to literary criticism has an interest

which would be almost peculiar if it were not for something of a

parallel in Voltaire. If the literary opinions of the author of the

_Enquiry into Human Nature_ stood alone they would be almost negligible;

and if he had worked them into an elaborate treatise, like that of his

clansman Kames, this would probably, if remembered at all, be remembered

as a kind of “awful example.” In their context and from their author,

however, we cannot quite “regard and pass” Hume’s critical observations

as their intrinsic merit may seem to suggest that we should do: nay, in

that context and from that author, they constitute a really valuable

document in more than one relation.

[Sidenote: _Examples of his critical opinions._]

It cannot be said that Hume does not invite notice as a critic; on the

contrary, his title of “_Essays: Moral, Political,_[296] and Literary”

seems positively to challenge it. Yet his actual literary utterances are

rather few, and would be almost unimportant but for the considerations

just put. He tells us criticism is difficult;[297] he applies[297] (as

Johnson did somewhat differently) Fontenelle’s remark about “telling the

hours”; he illustrates from Holland the difference of excellence in

commerce and in literature.[298] He condemns—beforehand, and with the

vigour and acuteness which we should expect from him—the idea of

attempting to account for the existence of a particular poet at a

particular time and in a particular place.[299] He is shocked at the

vanity, at the rudeness, and at the loose language of the ancients.[300]

He approaches, as Tassoni[301] and Perrault[302] had approached, one of

the grand _cruces_ of the whole matter by making his Sceptic urge that

“_beauty_ and worth are merely of a relative nature, and consist of an

agreeable sentiment produced by an object on a particular mind”;[303]

but he makes no detailed use or application whatever of this as regards

literature. His Essay on _Simplicity and Refinement in Writing_[304] is

psychology rather than criticism, and he uses his terms in a rather

curious manner. At least, I myself find it difficult to draw up any

definitions of these qualities which will make Pope the _ne plus ultra_

of justifiable Refinement, and Lucretius that of Simplicity; Virgil and

Racine the examples of the happy mean in both; Corneille and Congreve

excessive in Refinement, and Sophocles and Terence excessive in

Simplicity.[305] The whole is, however, a good rationalising of the

“classical” principle; and is especially interesting as noticing, with

slight reproof, a tendency to too great “affectation and conceit” both

in France and England—faults for which _we_ certainly should not indict

the mid-eighteenth century. The Essay _On Tragedy_ is more purely

psychological still. And though _On the Standard of Taste_ is less open

to this objection, one cannot but see that it is Human Nature, and not

Humane Letters, in which Hume is really interesting himself. The vulgar

censure on the reference to Bunyan[306] is probably excessive; for it is

at least not improbable that Hume had never read a line of _The

Pilgrim’s Progress_, and was merely using the tinker’s name as a kind of

type-counter. But this very acceptance of a conventional judgment—

acceptance constantly repeated throughout the Essay—is almost startling

in context with the _alleszermalmend_ tendency of some of its

principles. A critic who says[307] that “It is evident that none of the

rules of composition are fixed by reasonings _a priori_,” is in fact

saying “Take away that bauble!” in regard to Neo-classicism altogether;

and though in the very same page Hume repeats the orthodox cavils at

Ariosto, while admitting his charm on the next, having thus set up the

idol again, he proceeds once more to lop it of hands and feet and tumble

it off its throne by saying that “if things are found to please, they

cannot be faults; let the pleasure which they produce be ever so

unexpected and unaccountable.” The most dishevelled of Romantics, in the

reddest of waistcoats, could say no more.

In his remarks upon the qualifications and functions of the critic,

Hume’s anthropological and psychological mastery is evident enough: but

it is at least equally evident that his actual taste in literature was

in no sense spontaneous, original, or energetic. In comparing him, say,

with Johnson it is not a little amusing to find his much greater

acquiescence in the conventional and traditional judgments. Indeed,

towards the end of his Essay[308] Hume anticipates a later

expression[309] of a perennial attitude of mind by declaring, “However I

may excuse the poet on account of the manners of his age, I never can

relish the composition,” and by complaining of the want of “humanity and

decency so conspicuous” even sometimes in Homer and the Greek tragedies.

That David, of all persons, should fail to realise—he did _not_ fail to

perceive—that the humanity of Homer _was_ human and the decency of

Sophocles _was_ decent, is indeed surprising.

[Sidenote: _His inconsistency._]

Such things might at first sight not quite dispose one to regret that,

as he himself remarks,[310] “the critics who have had some tincture of

philosophy” have been “few,” for certainly those who have had more

tincture of philosophy than Hume himself have been far fewer. But, as is

usually the case,[311] it is not the fault of philosophy at all. For

some reason, natural disposition, or want of disposition, or even that

necessity of clinging to _some_ convention which has been remarked in

Voltaire himself, evidently made Hume a mere “church-going bell”—pulled

by the established vergers, and summoning the faithful to orthodox

worship—in most of his literary utterances. Yet, as we have seen, he

could not help turning quite a different tune at times, though he

himself hardly knew it.

[Sidenote: _Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful._]

At the close of Burke’s _Essay_[312] he expressly declines “to consider

poetry as it regards the Sublime and Beautiful more at large”; but this

“more” refers to the fact that his Fifth Part had been given to the

Power of Words in exciting ideas of the kind. Most of what he says on

this head is Lockian discussion of simple and compound, abstract and

concrete, &c., and of the connection of words with images, as

illustrated by the cases—so interesting in one instance to the English,

and in the other to the whole, eighteenth century—of Blacklock the blind

poet, and Saunderson the blind mathematician. There is, however, a not

unacute contention[313] against the small critics of that and other

times, that the exact analytical composition necessary in a picture is

not necessary in a poetic image. But one may doubt whether this notion

was not connected in his own mind with the heresy of the “streaks of the

tulip.”[314] It serves him, however, as a safeguard against the mere

“imitation” theory: and it brings (or helps to bring) him very near to a

just appreciation of the marvellous power of words as words. His remarks

on the grandeur of the phrase “the Angel of the Lord” are as the shadow

of a great rock in the weary glare of the _Aufklärung_, and so are those

which follow on Milton’s “universe of Death.” Nor is it a trifling thing

that he should have discovered the fact that “very polished languages

are generally deficient in Strength.”

In the earlier part there are interesting touches, such as that of

“_degrading_” the style of the _Æneid_ into that of _The Pilgrim’s

Progress_, which, curiously enough, occurs actually in a defence of a

taste for romances of chivalry[315] and of the sea-coast of Bohemia.

Part I. sect. xv., on the effects of tragedy, is almost purely ethical.

In the parts—the best of the book—which deal directly with the title

subjects (Parts II. and III.), an excellent demonstration[316] is made

of the utter absurdity of that scheme of physical proportion which we

formerly laughed at:[317] but the application, which might seem so

tempting, to similar arbitrariness in judging of literature, is not

made. Still more remarkable is the scantiness of the section on “The

Beautiful in Sounds”[318] which should have brought the writer to our

proper subject. Yet we can hardly regret that he says so little of it

when we read that astonishing passage[319] in which the great Mr Burke

has “observed” the affections of the body by Love, and has come to the

conclusion that “the head reclines something on one side; the eyelids

are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination

towards the object; the mouth is a little opened and the breath drawn

slowly with now and then a low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the

hands fall idly to the sides”—a sketch which I have always wished to

have seen carried into line by the ingenious pencil of Charles

Kirkpatrick Sharpe.[320] A companion portrait of the human frame under

the influence of poetic afflatus, in writer or in reader, would indeed

have been funny, but scarcely profitable. In fact, the most that can be

said for Burke, as for the generality of these æsthetic writers, is that

the speculations recommended and encouraged could not but break up the

mere ice of Neo-classic rule-judgment. They almost always go directly to

the effect, the result, the event, the pleasure, the trouble, the

thrill. That way perhaps lies the possibility of new error: but that way

certainly lies also the escape from old.

[Sidenote: _The Scottish æsthetic-empirics: Alison._]

The trinitarian succession of Scottish æsthetic-empirics—Gerard, Alison,

Jeffrey—could not with propriety be omitted here, but the same propriety

would be violated if great space were given to them. They connect with,

or at least touch, Burke and Smith on the one hand, Kames on the other:

but they are, if rather more literary than the first two, very much less

so than the third. All, in degrees modified perhaps chiefly by the

natural tendency to “improve upon” predecessors, are associationists:

and all display (though in somewhat decreasing measure as a result of

the time-spirit) that sometimes amusing but in the end rather tedious

tendency to substitute for actual reasoning long chains of only

plausibly connected propositions, varied by more or less ingenious

substitutions of definition and equivalence, which is characteristic of

the eighteenth century. Gerard, the earliest, is the least

important:[321] and such notice of Jeffrey as is necessary will come

best in connection with his other critical work. Alison, as the central

and most important of the three, and as representing a prevailing party

for a considerable time, may have some substantive notice here.

[Sidenote: _The_ Essay on Taste.]

The _Essay on Taste_, which was originally published in 1790, and which

was sped on its way by Jeffrey’s Review (the original form of the

reviewer’s own essay) in 1811, had reached its sixth edition in 1825,

and was still an authority, though it must by that time have begun to

seem not a little old-fashioned, to readers of Coleridge and Hazlitt. It

is rather unfortunately “dated” by its style, which—even at its original

date something of a survival—is of the old “elegant” but distinctly

artificial type of Blair: and, as has been hinted already, it abuses

that eighteenth-century weakness for substituting a “combined and

permuted” paraphrase of the proposition for an argument in favour of the

fact. There is a very fair amount of force in its associationist

considerations, though, as with all the devotees of the Association

principle down to Mill, the turning round of the key is too often taken

as equivalent to the opening of the lock. But its main faults, in more

special connection with our subject, are two. [Sidenote: _Its

confusions_] The first is a constant confusion of Beauty or Sublimity

with Interest. Alison exhausts himself in proving that the associations

of youth, affection, &c., &c., cause _love_ of the object—a truth no

doubt too often neglected by the Neo-classic tribe, but accepted and

expressed by men of intelligence, from the Lucretian _usus concinnat_

down to Maginn’s excellent “Don’t let any fool tell you that you will

get tired of your wife; you are much more likely to get quite

unreasonably fond of her.” But love and admiration, though closely

connected, are not the same thing, and love and interest are still

farther apart. Another confusion of Alison’s, very germane indeed to our

subject, is that he constantly mixes up the beauty of a thing with the

beauty of the description of it.

The most interesting point, however, about Alison is his halting between

two opinions as to certain Neo-classic idols. His individual criticisms

of literature are constantly vitiated by faults of the old

arbitrariness, especially as to what is “low.” There is an astonishing

lack of critical imagination in his objections to two Virgilian lines—

“Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem

. . . . . . . .

Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces”—

as “cold,” “prosaic,” “tame,” “vulgar,” and “spiritless.” As if the

image of the busy town after the country beauty were not the most poetic

of contrasts in the first: and as if the City of the Seven Hills did not

justly fire every Roman mind![322]

[Sidenote: _and arbitrary absurdities._]

These, however, might be due to “the act of God,” to sheer want of the

quality on which the essay is written. A large part of the second volume

exhibits the perils of that Castle Dangerous, the “half-way house,”

unmistakably and inexcusably. Alison is dealing with the interesting but

ticklish subject of human beauty, and, like Burke, is justly sarcastic

on the “four noses from chin to breast,” “arm and a half from this to

that” style of measurement. But he is himself still an abject victim of

the type-theory. Beauty must suit the type; and its characteristics must

have a fixed qualitative value—blue eyes being expressive of softness,

dark complexions of melancholy, and so on. But here he is comparatively

sober.[323] Later he indulges in the following: “The form of the Grecian

nose is said to be originally beautiful, ... and in many cases it is

undoubtedly so. Apply, however, this beautiful form to the countenance

of the Warrior, the Bandit, the Martyr, or to any which is meant to

express deep or powerful passion, and the most vulgar spectator would be

sensible of dissatisfaction, if not of disgust.” Let us at least be

thankful that Alison has freed us from being “the most vulgar

spectator.” Why the Warrior, why the Martyr, why the deep and powerful

man, should not have a Grecian nose I fail to conceive: but the

incompatibility of a Bandit and a straight profile lands me in

profounder abysses of perplexity. The artillery and the blue horse must

yield their pride of place: the reason in that instance is, if not

exquisite, instantly discernible. But nothing in all Neo-classic

arbitrariness from Scaliger to La Harpe seems to me to excel or equal

the Censure of the Bandit with the Grecian Nose as a monstrous Bandit, a

disgustful object, hateful not merely to the elect but to the very

vulgar.[324]

[Sidenote: _An interim conclusion on the æsthetic matter._]

Let us hear the conclusion of this whole æsthetic matter. Any man of

rather more than ordinary intelligence—perhaps any man of ordinary

intelligence merely—who has been properly educated from his youth up (as

all men who show even a promise of ordinary intelligence should have

been) in ancient and modern philosophy, who knows his Plato, his

Aristotle, and his neo-Platonists, his Scholastics, his moderns from

Bacon and Hobbes and Descartes downwards, can, if he has the will and

the opportunity, compose a theory of æsthetics. That is to say, he can,

out of the natural appetite towards poetry and literary delight which

exists in all but the lowest and most unhappy souls, and out of that

knowledge of concrete examples thereof which exists more or less in all,

excogitate general principles and hypotheses, and connect them with

immediate and particular examples, to such an extent as the Upper Powers

permit or the Lower Powers prompt. If he has at the same time—a happy

case of which the most eminent example up to the present time is

Coleridge—a concurrent impulse towards actual “literary criticism,”

towards the actual judgment of the actual concrete examples themselves,

this theory _may_ more or less help him, need at any rate do him no

great harm. _Mais celà n’est pas nécessaire_, as was said of another

matter; and there are cases, many of them in fact, where the attention

to such things has done harm.

For after all, once more Beyle, as he not seldom did, reached the

_flammantia mœnia mundi_ when he said, in the character of his “Tourist”

_eidolon_, “En fait de beau chaque homme a sa demi-aune.” Truth is not

what each man troweth: but beauty is to each man what to him seems

beautiful. You may better the seeming:—the fact is at the bottom of all

that is valuable in the endlessly not-valuable chatter about education

generally, and it excuses, to a certain extent, the regularity of

Classicism, the selfish “culture” of the Goethean ideal, the

extravagances of the ultra-Romantics. But yet

“A God, a God, the severance ruled,”

and you cannot bridge the gulfs that a God has set by any

philosophastering theory.[325]

Yet although all this is, according to my opinion at least, absolutely

true; although literary criticism has not much more to do with æsthetics

than architecture has to do with physics and geology—than the art of the

wine-taster or the tea-taster has to do with the study of the papillæ of

the tongue and the theory of the nervous system generally, or with the

botany of the vine and the geology of the vineyard; although, finally,

as we have seen and shall see, the most painful and earnest attention to

the science of the beautiful appears to be compatible with an almost

total indifference to concrete judgment and enjoyment of the beautiful

itself, and even with egregious misjudgment and failure to enjoy,—yet we

cannot extrude this other _scienza nuova_ altogether, if only because of

the almost inextricable entanglement of its results with those of

criticism proper. And it is more specially to be dealt with in this

particular place because, beyond all question, the direction of study to

these abstract inquiries did contribute to the freeing of criticism from

the shackles in which it had lain so long. Any new way of attention to

any subject is likely to lead to the detection of errors in the old: and

as the errors of Neo-classicism were peculiarly arbitrary and

irrational, the “high _priori_ way” did certainly give an opportunity of

discovering them from its superior height—the most superfluous groping

among preliminaries and foundations gave a chance of unearthing the

roots of falsehood. As in the old comparison Saul found a kingdom when

he sought for his father’s asses, so it was at least possible for a man,

while he was considering whether poetry is an _oratio sensitiva

perfecta_, or whether there is a separate Logic of Phantasy, to have his

eyes suddenly opened to the fact that Milton was not merely a fanatic

and fantastic, with a tendency to the disgusting, and that Shakespeare

was something more than an “abominable” mountebank.

CHAPTER VI.

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE.

BEARINGS OF THE CHAPTER—ENGLAND—THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE—OF SPENSER—

CHAUCER—ELIZABETHAN MINORS—MIDDLE AND OLD ENGLISH—INFLUENCE OF

ENGLISH ABROAD—THE STUDY OF FRENCH AT HOME AND ABROAD—OF ITALIAN—

ESPECIALLY DANTE—OF SPANISH—ESPECIALLY CERVANTES—OF GERMAN.

[Sidenote: _Bearings of the chapter._]

Both in the last volume and in the present Book, repeated notice has

been taken of the importance, as it seems to the present writer, of the

widened and catholicised study of literature during the earlier

eighteenth century. Not a few of the persons who have had places of more

or less honour in the foregoing chapters—the twin Swiss schoolmasters,

Lessing and the Germans almost without exception, almost all the English

precursors, and some, though fewer, in other countries—have owed part of

their position here to their share in this literary “Voyage round the

World.” Some further exposition and criticism of the way in which the

exploration itself worked may be looked for in the following

Interchapter. Here we may give a little space to some such explorers

who, though scarcely worthy of a place among critics proper, did good

work in this direction, and to the main lines and subjects on and in

regard to which the explorations were conducted.

[Sidenote: _England._]

The most interesting and directly important of the great literary

countries in regard to this matter is undoubtedly England. Curiosity in

Germany was much more widespread and much more industrious;[326] but in

the first place the notable German explorers have already had their

turn, and in the second, the width too often with them turned to

indiscriminateness, and the industry to an intelligent hodman’s work.

France, by providing such pioneers as Sainte-Palaye, and by starting the

great _Histoire Littéraire_, contributed inestimably to the stimulation

and equipment of foreign students; but it was some time before this work

reacted directly on her own literature. We have spoken of Spain, where

for a time the adherents of the older literature were, like their

ancestors in the Asturias, but a handful driven to bay, instead of as in

other countries an insurrectionary multitude gaining more and more

ground; and the traditional Dante-and-Petrarch worship of Italy did at

this time little real good. Both directly and indirectly—at home and,

chiefly in the Shakespeare direction, abroad—England here deserves the

chief place.

Her exercises on the subject may be advantageously considered under

certain subject-headings: Shakespeare himself, Spenser, Chaucer, minor

writers between the Renaissance and the Restoration, Middle English, and

Anglo-Saxon. It is not necessary here to bestow special attention on

Milton-study,[327] despite its immense influence both at home and

abroad, because it was continuous. From Dryden to the present day,

Milton has always been with the guests at any feast of English

literature, sometimes, it is true, as a sort of skeleton, but much more

often as one whom all delight more or less intelligently to honour.

[Sidenote: _The study of Shakespeare._]

It is not mere fancy which has discerned a certain turning-point of

importance to literature, in the fact that between the Fourth Folio and

the first critical or quasi-critical edition (Rowe’s) there intervened

(1685-1709) not quite a full quarter of a century. The successive

editions of Rowe himself, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, and Johnson

not merely have a certain critical interest in themselves, not merely

illustrate the progress of criticism in a useful manner, but bring

before us, as nothing else could do, the way in which Shakespeare

himself was kept before the minds of the three generations of the

eighteenth century.[328]

[Sidenote: _Of Spenser._]

Spenser’s fortunes in this way coincided with Shakespeare’s to a degree

which cannot be quite accidental. The third folio of the _Faerie Queene_

appeared in 1679, and the first critical edition—that of Hughes—in 1715.

But the study-stage—not the theatrical, considering a list of adapters

which runs from Ravenscroft through Shadwell up to Dryden—had spared

Shakespeare the attentions of the Person of Quality.[329] Before Hughes

he had received those of Prior, a person of quality[330] much greater;

but Prior had spoilt the stanza, and had travestied the diction almost

worse than he did in the case of the _Nut-Browne Maid_. He would not

really count in this story at all if his real services in other respects

did not show that it was a case of “time and the hour,” and if his

remarks in the Preface to _Solomon_ did not show, very remarkably, a

genuine admiration of Spenser himself, and a strong dissatisfaction with

the end-stopped couplet. And so of Hughes’ edition: yet perhaps the

import of the saying may escape careless readers. At first one wonders

why a man like Prior should have taken the trouble even to spoil the

Spenserian stanza; why an editor like Hughes should have taken the much

greater trouble to edit a voluminous poet whose most ordinary words he

had to explain, whose stanza he also thought “defective,” and whose

general composition he denounced as “monstrous” and so forth; why all

the imitators[331] should have imitated what most of them at any rate

seem to have regarded as chiefly parodiable. Yet one soon perceives that

_mens agitat molem_, that the lump was leavened, that, as in one case at

any rate (Shenstone’s), is known to be the fact, “those who came to

scoff remained to pray.” They were dying of thirst, though they did not

know how near the fountain was; and though they at first mistook that

fountain and even profaned it, the healing virtues conquered them at

last.

[Sidenote: _Chaucer._]

The same coincidence does not fail wholly even with Chaucer, of whom an

edition, little altered from Speght’s, appeared in 1687, while the very

ill-inspired but still intentionally critical attempt of Urry came out

in 1721, Dryden’s wonderful modernisings again coming between. But

Chaucer was to wait for Tyrwhitt, more than fifty years later (1775)

before he met any full scholarly recognition, and this was natural

enough. There had been no real change in English prosody since Spenser,

any more than since Shakespeare: and the archaism of the former was

after all an archaism not less deliberate, though much better guided by

genius, than that of any of his eighteenth-century imitators. To the

appreciation of Chaucer’s prosody one simple but, till turned, almost

insuperable obstacle existed in the valued final _e_, while his

language, his subjects, and his thought were separated from modern

readers by the great gulf of the Renaissance,—a gulf indeed not

difficult to bridge after a fashion, but then unbridged.

[Sidenote: _Elizabethan minors._]

Invaluable as the study of Shakespeare was in itself, its value was not

limited to this direct gain. Partly to illustrate him and partly from a

natural extension, his fellow-dramatists were resorted to,—indeed Ben

Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher had never lost hold of the acting

stage. A few of the greatest, Marlowe especially, were somewhat long in

coming to their own; but with others it was different, and the

publication of Dodsley’s _Old Plays_, at so early a date as 1744, shows

with what force the tide was setting in this direction. Reference was

made in the last volume to the very remarkable _Muses’ Library_ which

Oldys began even earlier, though he did not find encouragement enough to

go on with it,[332] and the more famous adventure of the _Reliques_ was

followed up in the latter part of the century by divers explorations of

the treasures of the past, notably that of the short-lived Headley.[335]

[Sidenote: _Middle and Old English._]

Nay, about the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the

eighteenth it looked as if early Middle English and Anglo-Saxon

themselves might come in for a share of attention, as a result of the

labours of such men as Hearne and Hickes. But the Jacobite antiquary was

interested mainly in the historical side of literature, and Hickes,

Wanley, and the rest were a little before their time, though that time

itself was sure to come. And before it came the all but certain

forgeries of Macpherson, the certain forgeries of Chatterton, the sham

ballads with which, after Percy’s example, Evans and others loaded their

productions of the true, all worked (bad as some of the latter might be)

for good in the direction of exciting and whetting the literary appetite

for things not according to the Gospel of Neo-Classicism.

[Sidenote: _Influence of English abroad._]

The study of English literature abroad was somewhat limited in range,

but it had an almost incalculable effect. That German criticism would

have been made anyhow is certain enough; but in actual fact it would be

impossible to find any actual influences in its making more powerful

than the influence of Milton upon the Zürichers, and the influence of

Shakespeare upon Lessing, and all men of letters after him. These two

great (if not exactly twin) brethren, from the date of their

introduction by that strongest of ushers Voltaire, exercised, as we have

seen, in France an influence constantly (at any rate in the case of

Shakespeare) increasing, though rejected again and again with horror and

contumely by those who seemed to be pillars. Of older English writers

few except Bacon and Locke had much influence abroad—and what they

exercised was not literary. But the writers of the eighteenth century

were extremely powerful. Callières very nearly lived to see the time

when France herself, forgetting all about the trinity of _nations

polies_, respectfully read, and even sedulously imitated, the people to

whom he had thoughtfully given permission to write in Latin in order

that they might have some literary chance. Nor was this a mere passing

_engouement_: nor was it limited to the great Queen Anne men, Addison,

Pope, and Swift, who were themselves (at least the first two) in many

ways germane to French taste, and had borrowed much from France.

Thomson, an innovator and sower of revolution in his own country, was

warmly welcomed in France: about Richardson the whole Continent went

mad. Sterne excited the strongest interest both in France and Germany.

The odd French taste for the lugubrious sententiousness of Young was

rather later, and so was the well-known and slightly ludicrous adoration

of _Ossian_. But throughout the century, until the French Revolution,

English literature was not merely the subject of respectful study and

imitation in Germany but of quite lively interest in France, of an

interest almost startling when it is contrasted with the supercilious

blindness (for a man who cannot use his eyes may use his eyebrows) of

the age of Boileau.[336]

[Sidenote: _The study of French at home and abroad._]

For the moment—and the fact connects itself sharply and decisively with

the delay of their critical reconstruction—the French busied themselves

less, at least in appearance, with the exhumation and investigation of

their own literature. Nowhere was more solid work really done; nowhere

were the foundations of mediæval study, in particular, laid once for all

with such admirable thoroughness. But for a long time the workers cast

their bread upon the waters: and the waters in turn cast it mostly upon

alien shores. The mighty industry of Ducange—in method and quality as

well as time of the seventeenth century, in effect scarcely to bear full

fruit till the nineteenth—had been entirely included within the

seventeenth itself. That of Sainte-Palaye, which has been alluded to,

dates from the third quarter of the eighteenth. The magnificent

_Histoire Littéraire de La France_, not finished yet, but unresting as

unhasting, was begun as early as 1733; of the Frères Parfait we have

also spoken; Barbazan’s invaluable collection of the _Fabliaux_ appeared

in 1756. But, except it may be here and there on a man of genius like

Fontenelle, those publications had no general literary effect. How

little they had may perhaps best be gauged by the fact that the

travestied and rococo _Corps d’Extraits de Romans_ of the Comte de

Tressan, published long after all of them, _had_ such an effect, and did

rather more harm than good. Still, the two giants of the French

Renaissance, earlier and later, Rabelais and Montaigne, always kept a

hold, and did for France something, though less, of the good which the

great quartette—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton—did for

England. Ronsard, as we have seen, kept, in the worst of times, the

respect and the appreciation of men so different in date and character

as Fénelon and Marmontel: while, if the celebrated “worship of

Lubricity” had something to do with the resuscitation of others by

Prosper Marchand, &c., let this be counted for righteousness even to the

slippery goddess who has so little!

With the eternal exception of Germany, French literature during this

time was not much studied abroad in its older divisions, and had not

much assistance to offer, in the direction of which we are now speaking,

in its more modern. When a man like Sterne touched the former, it was

probably for the reasons so handsomely palliated in the last sentence of

the last paragraph: and few others touched it at all. The influence of

the modern literature of France, exaggerated as it may have been, had

yet been considerable enough to deprive it of all value as an

_alterative_ save in the cases of exceptional and outlying writers like

La Fontaine and Fontenelle, and to some extant Marivaux, the last of

whom had himself already derived much from England, if he was to give

much back to her.[337] In other parts of Europe this influence was no

doubt still very great: it conditioned, as we have seen, the powerful

action of Lessing, both in the way of attraction and in that of

repulsion. But of the persons who attracted and inspired Lessing,

Diderot, however unlike Bentham, had something of the Benthamic fate of

requiring transportation and transformation before he could be really

operative; and the gospel of Marmontel was altogether too inconsistent

and transitional to be very effective. Rousseau, of course, to mention

him yet once more, is epoch-making enough in himself. But Rousseau is,

on the purely literary side, rather an immense propelling force than an

origin: and it is not to be forgotten, though it often has been, that

the _Confessions_ and the _Rêveries_, the most important of his works as

literature, did not appear till after his death. As for _La Nouvelle

Héloïse_, it is a question whether it is nearly so much a literary

origin as _Manon Lescaut_, its elder by a generation.

[Sidenote: _Of Italian._]

The effect of Italian literature in Italy was, it has been said, not at

the time great; the contrast between the study of Shakespeare at this

time in England and the study of Dante in Italy has, I have no doubt,

defrayed the expense of many a literary-historical comparison.[338] But

Italian—though it had lost something of the prerogative importance which

it had once, and justly, and for a long time held—retained a great, and,

as regards the products of its best time, a wholly salutary, influence

over the rest of Europe. That rather treacherous turning of French

critics on their Italian masters, which Hurd so acutely noticed, had,

like other things evil, its soul of goodness in it. Ariosto, and Tasso,

and Petrarch, though not Dante, had entered so thoroughly into the

_corpus_ of European literature that they could not be driven out by any

scoffs of Boileau or scorns of Voltaire. And when people began to

examine them for themselves there was, with the different set of tide

and wind which we have seen throughout this book, a very good chance,

almost a certainty, of a healthy voyage back. There was all the more

chance of this that the strong Renaissance admixture in the authors of

the _Orlando_ and the _Gerusalemme_, the at least not strongly mediæval

character of Petrarch, made them more suitable for eighteenth-century

consumption than the pure milk of the mediæval word. The argument which

Hurd himself put about Spenser and Milton—“_These_ were no barbarians;

_these_ were men of real learning, of polished and statesman-like

society; and _they_ liked romance”—was applicable with even greater

force to the Captain of the Garfagnana and the friend of Leo X., to the

familiar (if also victim) of princes and princesses at Ferrara, and the

Laureate elect of Rome.

[Sidenote: _Especially Dante._]

There can indeed be no doubt that throughout the eighteenth century it

was from these two poets that men drew most of their ideas of Romance

itself. Dryden, on the eve of that century, betrays the fact in his own

case by his designation of our own Guenevere under her Italian name of

Ginevra. Scott, at its close and far beyond it, wide as was his

knowledge of the true and real mediæval romance itself, is still haunted

by the Italians. While as for Petrarch (to put out of question the fact

that he is of all time, if not of the highest of all time), he means the

sonnet; and the sonnet is anti-classical from centre to circumference.

Even if Dante was somewhat neglected, the fact of Gray’s attraction to

Nicholls at their first meeting, because he found that the young man

read that Florentine, is evidence for exception as well as for rule. At

any rate, a man who studied Italian, whether he were Englishman or

Frenchman, German or from Mesopotamy, might always, and must certainly

not seldom, be brought into contact with the _Commedia_. And when that

contact is established in a fitting soul, “A drear and dying sound,

Affrights the Flamens” of Neo-classicism “at their service quaint.” You

read no more in Boileau that day, nor any day thereafter by preference

and as a disciple.

[Sidenote: _Of Spanish._]

So also in Spain the home study of the home literature—though as above

noted its results were not by any means nugatory—was far inferior to the

effect of the study of that literature abroad. The general and

half-blind impulse towards collection and reproduction, however, was

especially important,—hardly even in England, putting the works of the

very greatest out of the question, did anything appear more precious

than the _Poesias Anteriores_: and Spain had, in three different

divisions and directions, inestimable and inexhaustible treasures for

the foreign student, especially for the foreign student who felt the

gall and the cramp of the classical strait-waistcoat and wished to cast

it off. The first of these in order of time was the ballad matter

provided by the _Cancioneros_. The second was the Spanish drama, and the

reflections which it had drawn from native poets and critics. The third

was the work of Cervantes and the picaresque novel.

The first of these were valuable not only as all the ballads of Europe

were valuable, not merely because of the diametrical opposition of their

tone and spirit to that of the “classical” poetry, but because of their

remarkable _differentia_ as ballads themselves. In the first place,

they[339] are the only _Southern_ ballads available,—for Italy, though

not infertile in folk-song, does not appear to have had any ballads

proper, and those of Modern Greece are of very doubtful earliness, and

were not known till long afterwards. In the second place, the

part-Oriental part-African admixture, which makes _cosas de España_ so

interesting and so powerful, appears in them to the full. And, lastly,

there is a certain _largeur_ about them—a national quality, whether

excited by conflict with Charlemagne or by conflict with the Moors,

which is lacking in all other ballads known at least to the present

writer. Even the split between North and South Britain is a case of mere

family misunderstanding, compared with the secular stand of the great

Peninsula, at bay against Christian invaders from the North and Paynim

foes in the household. And it is not unnoteworthy that, with the

exception of _Chevy Chase_, not one of the very best of ballads in

English is inspired by the quarrel of Englishman and Scot.

The influence of the Spanish drama and of the more or less conscious

fight waged in Spain itself over its principles had also, especially in

Germany, great play, and should have had greater. It reached a climax no

doubt in the somewhat capricious and ill-informed, the certainly

intemperate, will-worship of the Schlegels, which we have not yet

discussed: but as we have seen, Lessing was aware of it, and there is no

doubt that it had great effect on at least the “Sturmers-and-Drangers.”

It ought, we say, probably to have had much more influence than it

actually exercised; but with the decay of Spanish political power the

study of the Spanish language had been steadily going out in Europe,

never, as yet, to revive. The valuable and interesting Spanish critical

discussions on the subject were almost unknown; and the theatre itself

was never thoroughly studied, till the investigations of Schack, a

German, and Ticknor, an American, in the middle of the nineteenth

century. Yet it is not necessary to spend many words on showing the

immense germinal and alterative power which this study had, and in

particular the value which it possessed as seconding the influence of

the English drama, with just sufficient difference to make the seconding

a real reinforcement, and not a mere repetition of attack by the same

troops. The obsession of the sealed pattern, the illusion of the

undeviating rule, might in a Frenchman (for strongest instance) survive

the reading, or at least the hearing, of the “barbarian” Shakespeare:

but it must have been seriously shaken by such writers of a “polished”

nation as Tirso, and Lope, and Calderon, not to speak of minors like

Alarcon and Rojas.

[Sidenote: _Especially Cervantes._]

Yet there can be no doubt that the greatest debt owed by the eighteenth

century, at least, to Spanish goes to the credit of one great man in the

main, and of a compartment of literature to which that great man, though

transcending it, belonged, in the second—in other words, to Cervantes

and the Spanish novel. The “picaresque” variety of this novel had early

affected both France and England: and it had virtue enough in it to

affect successive generations, directly or indirectly, from that of

Scarron and Head, through that of Le Sage, down to that of Smollett.

Abundance of things may be said against the picaresque style: but of one

credit nobody can possibly deprive it—that it was the first kind in

Europe to combine the ordinary life of the _fabliau_ (and in part the

_novela_) with the length, the variety, the quasi-epic conformation and

powers of the Romance. And while all the best of this quality appeared

in _Don Quixote_ itself, that mighty book left out almost all the bad

and weak concomitants, and added merit and powers of which the

_Lazarillos de Tormes_ and the _Marcos de Obregon_ had not a vestige. As

we have seen, Cervantes was something of a Neo-classic himself in

critical principles, and something (though not so much as has been

thought) of an enemy of Romance in purpose. But his performance was

fatal to his teaching in more ways than one or two: while he certainly

gave Fielding the idea of the modern novel even as a matter of theory

and schedule.

[Sidenote: _Of German._]

If we say less here of Germany it is not because there is less to say,

but because, in the first place, much of it has been and much more will

be said, elsewhere; and because, in the second, we should have to give

an abstract of the German literary history of the century. It was not

till very late—till almost the eve of the nineteenth—that German

literature had much effect abroad, or indeed that there was much German

literature to have any effect. But quite early the Germans began to

study their own older writers; and early and late they, as we have seen,

simply flung themselves on the literature of other countries. It is

indeed open to any one to contend that from the first (some century and

a half ago) to the present day they overdosed themselves with this as

with other studies,—that, taking to it before Germany had really

acquired a continuous and important literary idiosyncrasy of its own,

they have always lacked the _pou sto_, and have wasted their labour in

consequence. But this is another and for us an irrelevant question. That

they form no exception to the rule illustrated in this chapter, and that

they not only took the medicine in huge doses themselves, but prepared

it and handed it on to others, as if they wished to be the literary

apothecaries of Europe, this is undeniable.[340]

INTERCHAPTER VII.

It becomes somewhat more difficult to twist and twine the threads of our

Interchapters as we come to the complexity and diversity of modern

times; but, in the same proportion, each web or yarn becomes more

important as link and guide-rope of the whole History.

The present period—or stage, for it has more logical than chronological

unity—may seem at first sight extremely confused; composed as it is of

constituents separated from their countrymen, their contemporaries, and

in some cases even their fellow-workers, whom we have dealt with

formerly. But these constituents have in reality the greatest of all

unities, a unity (whether conscious or unconscious does not matter a

jot) of _purpose_.

“One port, methought, alike they sought,

One purpose hold where’er they fare.”

The port was the Fair Haven of Romanticism, and the purpose was to

distinguish “that which is established because it is right, from that

which is right because it is established,” as Johnson himself formulates

it. And now, of course, the horse-leeches of definition will ask me to

define Romanticism, and now, also, I shall do nothing of the sort, and

borrow from the unimpeachable authority of M. Brunetière[341] my reason

for not doing it. What most of the personages of this book sought or

helped (sometimes without at all seeking) to establish is Romanticism,

and Romanticism is what they sought or helped to establish.

In negative and by contrast, as usual, there is, however, no difficulty

in arriving at a sort of jury-definition, which is perhaps a good deal

better to work to port with than the aspiring but rather untrustworthy

mast-poles of “Renascence of Wonder” and the like. We have indeed seen,

throughout the last volume, that the curse and the mischief of

Neo-classicism lay in the tyranny of the Definition itself. You had no

sooner satisfied yourself that Poetry was such and such a thing, that it

consisted of such and such narrowly delimited Kinds, that its stamped

instruments and sealed patterns were this and that, than you proceeded

to apply these propositions inquisitorially, excommunicating or

executing delinquents and nonconformists. The principal uniformity amid

the wide diversities of the new criticism was that, without any direct

concert, without any formulated anti-creed, they all tended to remove

the bolts and the bars, to antiquate the stipulations, to make the great

question of criticism not “What have you proposed to do, and how have

you proposed to do it?” but “What is this that you have _done_? and is

it good?” But they never, in any instance, formulated the abolition of

restrictions, as, for instance, we shall find Hugo doing in the Preface

to the _Orientales_. They had almost invariably some special mediate or

immediate object in view—in Hurd’s case to get rid of the

disqualification of the “Gothic,” in Lessing’s to get rid of the

domination of French. Even Diderot’s Impressionism—the most important

and pregnant phenomenon of the whole—is a matter of practice, not of

theory, of infinite local explorations, not of a Pisgah-sight. The whole

tendency, as we have indicated in the sub-title of the book, is rather

to dissolve what exists than to put anything definite in its place.

The survey of their actual accomplishment,[342] therefore, may be best

executed, for the purpose of corresponding with and continuing those

formerly given, by first considering more generally the main new

critical engines—Æsthetic inquiry and the Study of Literature—which have

formed in detail the subjects of the last two chapters; then by

summarising, as usual, the most significant performances of national

groups and individuals; and, lastly, by indicating, as best may be done,

the point to which the stage has brought us.

The advantages and importance of the wider and more abstract æsthetic

inquiry in reconstituting or reorganising criticism should be pretty

obvious. The worst fault of the later Neo-classicism, in its corruption,

was that it tended to become wholly _irrational_—a mere reference to

classification; that even its appeal to Nature, and to Reason herself,

had got utterly out of _rapport_ with real nature, with true reason. Now

the construction of a general theory of the Sublime and Beautiful—

however partial or however chimerical the inquiry into the appeals of

different arts and different divisions of the same art—could not but

tend—however indirectly, however much in some cases against the very

will of the inquiry—to unsettle, and sometimes to shatter, the

conventional hypotheses and theories. “Why?” and “Why not?” must force

themselves constantly on such an inquirer; and, as has been said more

than once or twice, “Why?” and “Why not?” are battering-rams,

predestined, automatic, irresistible, to conventional judgments of all

sorts. It was, indeed, not impossible for a person sufficiently stupid,

or sufficiently ingenious, to construct an æsthetic which, somehow or

other, should fit in with the accepted ideas.[343] But what stupid

people do does not count for much in the long-run, despite the

proverbial invincibility of stupidity for the time. And the ingenious

person, unless his perverseness were truly diabolical, must sometimes

hit upon truth which would explode all his convention.

At the same time Æsthetics have proved, and might by an observer of

sufficient detachment have from the first been seen to be likely to

prove, a very dangerous auxiliary