was the danger—present in fact from the first, impending from before the
very first—of fresh arbitrary rules being set up in the place of the old
ones,—of the old infinitely mischievous question, “Does the poet please
_as he ought to please_?” being juggled into the place of the simple
“Does he please?” No form of abstract inquiry can escape this danger:
and that is why, save in matter of the pure intellect, abstract
inquiries should always be suspected. Form your theory and conduct your
observations of the æsthetic sense, of “the Beautiful,” of the mediate
axioms of this or that literary kind, as carefully, as impartially, with
as wide a range and view, as you may—these perilous generalisations and
abstractions will always bring you sooner or later into contact and
conflict with the royal irresponsibility, or (as some may hold it) the
anarchic individualism of the human senses, and tastes, and artistic
powers. You will hamper your feet with a network of axioms and
definitions; you will burden your back with a whole Italian-image-man’s
rack-full of types. It is somewhat improbable that you will be a
Lessing: yet even a Lessing loses himself in inquiries as to what “_a_
jealous woman’s” revenge will be, what “_an_ ambitious woman’s revenge
will be.” Shakespeare (for that Shakespeare had very much to do with the
whole portraiture of Margaret, from the first gracious and playful scene
with Suffolk to the sombre and splendid triumph over Elizabeth
Woodville, I at least have no doubt) has shown us in Margaret of Anjou
the revenge and the other passions of a woman who is at once ambitious,
jealous, the victim perhaps not of actually adulterous but certainly of
rather extra-conjugal love, yet loyal to her husband’s position if not
to himself, a tigress to her enemies and to her young alike, a rival in
varying circumstance, an almost dispassionate sibyl reflecting and
foretelling the woes of her rivals. You can no more disentangle all
these threads, and get the passion of this type and the passion of that
separate, than Psyche could have done her task without the ants. Yet,
early and crude as is the work, it is all right, it is all there. And
Æsthetics are not the ants.
A much more dangerous result of addiction to the æsthetic side of
criticism, mainly or exclusively, is that you get by degrees away from
the literary matter altogether, and resign yourself to the separation
with all the philosophy of Marryat’s captain, when he gave orders first
that he should be called when the last ship of his convoy was out of
sight behind, and then when the first hove in sight again. I remember
once hearing a lecture, and a very interesting one, on Hegel’s idea of
tragedy as illustrated in Shakespeare, delivered by a most admirable
scholar, then professor in one great University, and now professor in
one than which there is no greater. It was very ingenious, very
stimulating; but I remember thinking at the close of it that it might
have been delivered just as well if we were in such an infinite state of
misery as to have not a line of an actual tragedy of Shakespeare, but
only abstracts and arguments, as with some of the ancients. In the
attraction to the æsthetic, the moral, the dramaturgic side and the
like, an absolute break of contact with the literary may come about. We
have seen that this is the case even with Lessing, and it is constantly
the case with German critics and with their English followers. The
“word,” the “expression,” sinks out of the plane of the critic’s
purview. His Æsthetics become Anæsthetics, and benumb his literary
senses and sensibilities.
Recurrence to one example of this may suffice. When I see Lessing called
“the King of Criticism” I always think, great as is my opinion of him,
of that judgment of _Soliman the Second_. Here is a thing which, on its
own lines and specification, is, and is practically allowed by the
critic to be, a masterpiece. But he will not accept those lines. It is a
satiric criticism of life, of the actual nature, morals, _mœurs, mores,
ethe_, of men; he wants it to be a didactic exhortation to what those
morals ought (according to him) to be. He does not find Soliman’s
butterfly veerings from the sentiment of Elvire to the mere
courtesanship of Delia, and from this latter to the grisettish or
soubrettish minxery of Roxelane, attractive or excusable. He does not
like this minxishness; there are even signs that he has a private
antipathy towards the _petit nez retroussé_ which plays so great a part
in the story. His criticism is in consequence not a criticism at all; it
is a mere explosion of unreasoning dislike—at best one of “nervous
impression,” as Flaubert said to Sainte-Beuve. And if, by a juggle of
words, it be retorted that Lessing is a dogmatic not an æsthetic critic,
this retort will fall blunted from the simple rectification that he is a
dogmatist of æsthetics and an æsthetician in dogma.
The benefits, therefore, of the rise of Æsthetics as a special study
were far from unmixed, though the influence of that rise was very great.
It is otherwise with the Study of Literature, to which we have also
given a short and summary chapter above. Here it was all but impossible
that extension of consideration—from modern and classical to mediæval,
from certain arbitrarily preferred modern languages to others—should
fail to do good. Prejudice, the bane of Criticism, received, in the mere
and necessary progress of this study, a notice to quit. This notice took
various forms and was exhibited and attended to in various ways.
England, France, and Germany exhibited these differences with a
difference itself very interesting. But they can be reduced to a few
heads with very little difficulty.
The first of these is the attempt to judge the work presented, not
according to abstract rules, derived or supposed to be derived from
ancient critical authority, nor according to its agreement or
disagreement with the famous work of the past. To some extent this
revolutionary proceeding was forced upon our students by the very nature
of the case—it was one of the inevitable benefits of the extension of
study, and especially of the return to mediæval literature. To attempt
to justify that literature, as Addison, with more or less seriousness,
had done, by showing that its methods were after all not so very
different from those of Homer, or even Virgil, was in some cases flatly
impossible, in most extremely difficult; while in almost all it carried
with it a distinct suspicion of burlesque. There was no need of any
_dislike_ of the classics; but it must have been and it was felt that
mediæval and later literature must be handled _differently_.[344] And
so—insensibly no doubt
at first—there came into Criticism the sovereign and epoch-making
recognition of the “leaden rule”—of the fact that literature comes first
and criticism after—that criticism must adjust itself to literature, and
not _vice versa_. Very likely not one of the men we are here discussing
would have accepted this doctrine _simpliciter_:[345] indeed it is the
rarest thing to find it accepted even a century and a half after their
time, except in eccentric and extravagant forms. But it lay at the root
of all their practice.
Further, that practice, deprived of the crutches and go-carts of rule
and precedent, was perforce obliged to follow the natural path and play
of the feelings and faculties—to ask itself first, “Do I like this?”
then, “How do I like it?” then, “What qualities are there in it which
make me like it?” Again, these questions may not have formulated
themselves quite clearly to any of our group. Again, it would be hard to
name many critics since who have at once fearlessly and faithfully kept
them before their eyes. But, again also, these were the questions which,
however blindly and stumblingly, they followed as their guiding stars,
and these have been the real questions of criticism ever since.
Postponing the discussion of the relationship of this new criticism to
the old, we may turn to another point of its _differentia_. This is that
students of mediæval literature especially were—again perforce and
whether they would or no—driven to make excursions into the region of
Literary History, and, what is more, of Comparative Literary History.
They found themselves face to face with forms—the ballad and the romance
being the chief of them—which were either not represented at all or
represented very scantily and obscurely in classical literature, while
they had been entirely and almost pointedly neglected by classical
criticism. They could not but see that, both in mediæval literature
proper and in modern, there were other forms and subvarieties of
literature, in drama,[346] in poetry, in prose, which differed extremely
from anything in ancient letters. In examining these, with no help from
Aristotle, or Longinus, or Horace, they could not but pursue the natural
method of tracing or endeavouring to trace them to their origins, and in
so doing they could not but become conscious, not merely of the history—
so long interrupted by a mist like that of Mirza’s vision—of English or
French or whatsoever literature itself, but also more dimly of the
greater map of European literature, as it spread and branched from the
breaking up of the Roman Empire onwards. And this study of Literary
History was in the main, this study of Comparative Literary History was
almost absolutely, again a new thing.
Nor were the actual critical results which, either expressly or
incidentally, came from the exercitations of these critics of less
importance. The turn of the tide may nowhere be seen so strongly as in
Joseph Warton’s audacious question whether Pope, the god of the idolatry
of the earlier part of the century in England, was a poet, or at least a
great poet, at all; in Lessing’s proposition to call the great
Corneille, just re-habilitated as he had been by Voltaire himself,
Corneille the Monstrous. These things indeed were, like all
revolutionary manifestos, extravagances, yet the extravagance was not
only symptomatic but to a great extent healthy. It was probably
impossible as a matter of tactics—it would certainly have been unnatural
as a matter of history and human nature—to refrain from carrying the war
into the enemies’ country, from laying siege to the enemies’ stronghold.
And this was invited by the ignorant and insulting depreciation which
had long been, and long continued to be, thrown upon one of the most
charming and precious divisions of the literature and thought of the
world.
But there were more sober fruits of the revolt. Hurd might
indeed have developed further that doctrine of Romantic as independent
of Classical Unity, which is one of the most important discoveries or at
least pronouncements of any time, which practically established a _modus
vivendi_ between all rational Neo-classic and all rational Romantic
criticism, and which has never yet been worked out as it deserves.
Percy’s _Essay on Alliterative Metre_, despite the comparative
narrowness of its basis, is both acute and successful; and falls in
interestingly with that more intelligent devotion to Prosody which has
up to the present time given better results than any “metacritic,” and
has plenty yet to give. Thomas Warton, though often a fanciful and
sometimes an insufficiently equipped critic, was a critic both alert and
sound. Diderot might with advantage have concentrated that “encyclopædic
head” of his on fewer subjects, have been less anarchic, more subject to
harmless convention. But there are few better examples in literature of
the “strong young devil shut up in an iron box” and made to do work—as
the Bulgarian peasant defined the locomotive to an English engineer who
went to the Balkans after the war of 1878. We have not feared to speak
of Lessing’s shortcomings, but though it is possible to speak
indiscreetly and unadvisedly of his merits in kind and point, who shall
overpraise them in degree? And the bent of almost all of them turned,
and turned most beneficially, especially in the case of Warton, to
History.
The necessary retrospect of the achievement of groups and countries can
be given at no excessive length. The Germans had begun criticism later
than any other of the great nations; and they had hardly passed the mere
“rhetoric” stage of it when France was leading Europe in the later
Neo-classic phase; when England was already, under the half-unknowing
leadership of Dryden, sighting the modern conditions; and when Italy and
Spain were passing into a sort of temporary dotage or trance on the
subject. But during the seventeenth century the influence of England had
been exchanged for that of France, and this latter, itself originally
recommended by Opitz with a view to the exhibition of Pléiade medicine,
had got this prescription changed, by a sort of legerdemain of Time the
Conjurer, for the very different one of Correctness _à la_ Boileau. Yet
the doses of Ronsardism had had great effect already, and the strong
romantic leaven in the Germans, their pupillary state, their
philosophical leanings—above all, that restless, irresistible, unwearied
craving for knowledge which characterised them—prevented them from
abiding in the faith of Gottsched for any length of time. We have traced
the gropings and tentatives, the successive stages of Bodmer and those
about him, the arrested promise of J. E. Schlegel, that Marcellus of
German criticism, and we saw how _Enfin Lessing vint_.
There can, for once, be no harm in attributing part at least of the
deserved prominence of this critic in German criticism to the fact that
he not only exhibited eminently the two great characteristics of his
countrymen in the department,—unwearied industry in study and
philosophic disposition of his results,—but combined with this
exhibition merits which they much more rarely possess—an intimate though
irregular appreciation, a great intellectual alacrity, and, above all, a
really good and pleasant style. He did not, unfortunately, help to
propagate these latter qualities so much as he helped to establish and
corroborate the former: but with the limitations noted above, he did a
great deal in almost all ways. The opinion which assigns to him,
everywhere in literature more or less, but in criticism most of all, the
principal share in that enormous dead-lift of German letters which marks
the middle of the eighteenth century, and which, _exceptis excipiendis_,
may be said to have made Goethe and Schiller possible, is unquestionably
right. And though he did not quite live to see the time when Germany had
begun to repay the enormous debts which, before his lifetime and during
its earlier part, she had accumulated towards the rest of Europe, he
almost saw this: and he had almost more to do than any other with the
counter-accumulation of the necessary funds.
Yet he himself was, as we have seen, a debtor: and to the old creditor,
France. The critical history, during this period, of France herself is
the most curious of the three divisions which here suffice. In Germany,
Neo-classicism, which had taken no deep root, was easily uprooted. In
England, though various causes, and especially the immense influence of
the “dead hand” of Addison and Pope, and the living one of Johnson, kept
back the Romantic growth in a salutary fashion, that growth itself was
as steady as it was slow. In the very year after Gray died, Coleridge
was born: and the lives and work of these two men mark one unhasting,
unresting line of Romantic progress. But in France (as the two parallel
views given in the second chapter of the last book, and the fourth
chapter of this, will have shown), although there is no real confusion,
the strands are most puzzlingly twisted during the whole of this
selfsame period, till those of the classical colour break and ravel away
into almost nothing just before the close. This is due, no doubt, in
part to the extreme strength of what we may call the Neo-classic
_establishment_ in France—to the fact that the strong places of
literature are held by classical garrisons, who take good care to let no
unorthodox recruit set foot in them if it can possibly be helped. But it
is due also to that essential classicality which has been noticed, and
fully acknowledged, in the French literary temper. It certainly exists:
and it accounts not merely for the stubborn resistance, until its sudden
_débâcle_, of Classicism itself, but also for the peculiarities of the
various greater critics whom we have noticed.
Of the three greatest of these (for Madame de Staël cannot, I think,
really make out her right to cut in) Joubert excels in aphoristic and
perennial quality, somewhat (not wholly) independent of time, and
Chateaubriand expresses more fully than any one the tendencies (even in
him much chequered by others) which he was to live to see triumphant
without being quite glad thereat. But Diderot is, in principle and
motive force, however eccentrically working, if not in actual expressed
example, the most considerable of the three, and perhaps the most
considerable single figure included in this Book. For in him, as was
said above, we first see as a pervading and guiding, if not explicitly
asserted, principle that Impressionism which (though the word has been
variously used[347]) is, in its simplest and most natural meaning,
perhaps more
appropriate to “Modern” criticism than any other single term. As we have
seen and put from many different sides, the general tendency of ancient
and of Neo-classic critics was always to separate the work as much as
possible from the worker, and (except as regarded oratory and partly
drama) still more from the hearer and reader—this being done for the
freedom of considering it, not so much in and by itself, as in relation
to ideal and _a priori_ schedules of its kind, quality, and appurtenant
rules. There had been partial and half-conscious revolts or declensions
from this in individuals, from Longinus to Castelvetro, and from
Castelvetro to Fontenelle. But Diderot is almost the first person who
habitually, naturally, as a matter of course, isolates the work _with
himself_, considers it in its form and pressure as printed on _him_. And
this is almost, or altogether, a new Covenant of Criticism.
The performance of England here was not so fruitful of great critical
personalities—for her greatest, Johnson, was in intention, though by no
means wholly in performance, on the other side. Nor, though the English
Æsthetics were influential abroad as well as at home, can they be ranked
very high. In the other chief branch, however, of that practical
operation which has been noticed, the rediscovery and revaluation of the
capital of the literature for critical purposes, England takes the most
important position of all—less by the excellence of the workers (though
this was not inconsiderable) than in consequence of the richness of
their material. The French, except from the antiquarian side, were still
neglecting, and even for the most part despising, their own old
treasures, which were themselves scarcely so great as those of England:
and the Germans, though not neglectful of what they had, had less, and
dealt with it in a less thoroughly literary spirit. But Gray, Percy,
Hurd, the Wartons (especially Thomas), and all the painful and
meritorious editors from Theobald to Tyrwhitt, were engaged,
independently in intention, but in fact systematically enough, not
merely in clearing away rubbish and bringing treasures to light, but in
combating the prejudices and doing away with the delusions and
ignorances which had led to the neglect and contempt of those treasures
themselves.
Even those other nations which directly contributed little or
nothing[348] to criticism during the time, contributed, as we have seen,
something also under this head by examination of their own literatures,
and something more by their adoption and following of English, or of
French, or (towards the end) of German also. Towards any wide
comparative study of literature, indeed, this period made but a far-off
approach: that could not come till later, though it is the glory of
Germany, in the second division of the time, with which we shall deal
presently, to have begun the attack itself, and made it something more.
But the study of the individual literature at different periods has very
much the same kind of widening and altering power as the study of
different literatures, and this at least was vigorously pursued.
For after all it is History which is at the root of the critical—as of
almost every other—matter. To judge you must know,—must know not merely
the so-called best that has been thought and done and written (for how
are you to know the best till you know the rest?), but to know all, or
something of all, that has been written, and done, and thought by the
undulating and diverse animal called Man. His undulation and his
diversity will play you tricks still, know you never so widely; but the
margin of error will be narrower, the more widely you know. The most
perfect critical work that we have—that of Aristotle and that of
Longinus—is due in its goodness to the thoroughness of the writers’
knowledge of what was open to them, in its occasional badness and lack
of perfection to the fact that everything was not open to them to know.
“The goodness of _our_ goodness when we’re good” is due to our knowing a
little more, and the more frequent badness of our badness when we are
bad to our not taking the trouble to know it thoroughly.
BOOK VIII
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM
“_To the young I would remark that it is always unwise to judge of
anything by its defects; the first attempt ought to be to discover its
excellences._”—COLERIDGE.
“_Il ne savait pas de quoi étaient faites les_ limites de l’art.”—
VICTOR HUGO.
“_Savoir bien lire un livre en le jugeant chemin faisant, et sans
cesser de le goûter, c’est presque tout l’art du critique._”—
SAINTE-BEUVE.
CHAPTER I.
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES.
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE—THE FORMER’S PREFACES—THAT TO ‘LYRICAL
BALLADS,’ 1800—ITS HISTORY—THE ARGUMENT AGAINST POETIC DICTION, AND
EVEN AGAINST METRE—THE APPENDIX: POETIC DICTION AGAIN—THE MINOR
CRITICAL PAPERS—COLERIDGE’S EXAMINATION OF WORDSWORTH’S VIEWS—HIS
CRITICAL QUALIFICATIONS—UNUSUAL INTEGRITY OF HIS CRITIQUE—ANALYSIS
OF IT—THE “SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF”—ATTITUDE TO METRE—EXCURSUS ON
SHAKESPEARE’S ‘POEMS’—CHALLENGES WORDSWORTH ON “REAL” AND “RUSTIC”
LIFE—“PROSE” DICTION AND METRE AGAIN—CONDEMNATION IN FORM OF
WORDSWORTH’S THEORY—THE ‘ARGUMENTUM AD GULIELMUM’—THE STUDY OF HIS
POETRY—HIGH MERITS OF THE EXAMINATION—WORDSWORTH A REBEL TO LONGINUS
AND DANTE—THE ‘PREFACE’ COMPARED MORE SPECIALLY WITH THE ‘DE
VULGARI,’ AND DANTE’S PRACTICE WITH WORDSWORTH’S—THE COMPARISON
FATAL TO WORDSWORTH AS A CRITIC—OTHER CRITICAL PLACES IN COLERIDGE—
THE REST OF THE ‘BIOGRAPHIA’—‘THE FRIEND’—‘AIDS TO REFLECTION,’
ETC.—THE ‘LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE,’ ETC.—THEIR CHAOTIC CHARACTER AND
PRECIOUSNESS—SOME NOTEWORTHY THINGS IN THEM: GENERAL AND PARTICULAR—
COLERIDGE ON OTHER DRAMATISTS—THE ‘TABLE TALK’—THE ‘MISCELLANIES’—
THE LECTURE ‘ON STYLE’—THE ‘ANIMA POETÆ’—THE ‘LETTERS’—THE
COLERIDGEAN POSITION AND QUALITY—HE INTRODUCES ONCE FOR ALL THE
CRITERION OF IMAGINATION, REALISING AND DISREALISING—THE
“COMPANIONS”—SOUTHEY—GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS CRITICISM—
REVIEWS—‘THE DOCTOR’—ALTOGETHER SOMEWHAT “IMPAR SIBI”—LAMB—HIS
“OCCULTISM” AND ALLEGED INCONSTANCY—THE EARLY ‘LETTERS’—THE
‘SPECIMENS’—THE GARRICK PLAY NOTES—MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS—‘ELLA’—THE
LATER ‘LETTERS’—UNIQUENESS OF LAMB’S CRITICAL STYLE AND THOUGHT—
LEIGH HUNT: HIS SOMEWHAT INFERIOR POSITION—REASONS FOR IT—HIS
ATTITUDE TO DANTE—EXAMPLES FROM ‘IMAGINATION AND FANCY’—HAZLITT—
METHODOF DEALING WITH HIM—HIS SURFACE AND OCCASIONAL FAULTS:
IMPERFECT KNOWLEDGE AND METHOD—EXTRA-LITERARY PREJUDICE—HIS RADICAL
AND USUAL EXCELLENCE—‘THE ENGLISH POETS’—THE ‘COMIC WRITERS’—‘THE
AGE OF ELIZABETH’—‘CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE’—‘THE PLAIN SPEAKER’—
‘THE ROUND TABLE,’ ETC.—‘THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE’—‘SKETCHES AND
ESSAYS’—‘WINTERSLOW’—HAZLITT’S CRITICAL VIRTUE, IN SET PIECES, AND
UNIVERSALLY—BLAKE—HIS CRITICAL POSITION AND DICTA—THE “NOTES ON
REYNOLDS” AND WORDSWORTH—COMMANDING POSITION OF THESE—SIR WALTER
SCOTT COMMONLY UNDERVALUED AS A CRITIC—INJUSTICE OF THIS—CAMPBELL:
HIS ‘LECTURES ON POETRY’—HIS ‘SPECIMENS’—SHELLEY: HIS ‘DEFENCE OF
POETRY’—LANDOR—HIS LACK OF JUDICIAL QUALITY—IN REGULAR CRITICISM—THE
CONVERSATIONS—‘LOCULUS AUREOLUS’—BUT AGAIN DISAPPOINTING—THE REVIVAL
OF THE POPE QUARRELS—BOWLES—BYRON—THE ‘LETTER TO MURRAY,’ ETC.—
OTHERS: ISAAC DISRAELI—SIR EGERTON BRYDGES—‘THE RETROSPECTIVE
REVIEW’—THE ‘BAVIAD’ AND ‘ANTI-JACOBIN,’ WITH WOLCOT AND MATHIAS—THE
INFLUENCE OF THE NEW ‘REVIEWS,’ ETC.—JEFFREY—HIS LOSS OF PLACE AND
ITS CAUSE—HIS INCONSISTENCY—HIS CRITICISM ON MADAME DE STAËL—ITS
LESSON—HALLAM—HIS ACHIEVEMENT—ITS MERITS AND DEFECTS—IN GENERAL
DISTRIBUTION AND TREATMENT—IN SOME PARTICULAR INSTANCES—HIS CENTRAL
WEAKNESS, AND THE VALUE LEFT BY IT.
[Sidenote: _Wordsworth and Coleridge._]
There are many differences, real and imaginary, partial and general,
parallel and cross, between ancient, and mediæval, and modern poetry;
but there is one, very striking, of a kind which specially
differentiates ancient and mediæval (except Dante) from modern. In the
former class of poets the “critic whom every poet must contain” was
almost entirely silent, or conveyed his criticism through his verse
only. It would have been of the very first interest to have an Essay
from the hand of Euripides justifying his decadent and sentimental
fashion of drama, or from that of Lucretius on the theory and practice
of didactic verse: but the lips of neither were unsealed in this
direction. Dante, on the other hand, as we have seen, was prepared and
ready to put the rationale of his own verse, his own beliefs about
poetry, into prose: so at the Renaissance were the poets of Italy and
France; so was Dryden, so was Pope.
In no instance, however, save perhaps that of the Pléiade and Du
Bellay’s _Défense et Illustration_, did a protagonist of the new poetry
take the field in prose so early and so aggressively as did Wordsworth
in his Preface to the second edition of _Lyrical Ballads_. In none,
without exception, was such an attack so searchingly criticised and so
powerfully seconded, with corrections of its mistakes, as in the case of
the well-known chapters of the _Biographia Literaria_ in which Coleridge
examined Wordsworth’s examination. These, it is true, came later in
time, but when the campaign, whereof the first sword had been drawn in
the _Lyrical Ballads_, and the first horn blown in the Preface of their
second edition, though far gone was not finished, when the final blows,
by the hands of Keats and Shelley, had still to be struck.
[Sidenote: _The former’s Prefaces._]
The _Preface_, with the little group of other prefaces and observations
which supplements it,[349] provides a bundle of documents unequalled in
interest except by the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ in the special class, while,
as it happens, it goes directly against the tenor of that precious
booklet. Wordsworth, there can be no doubt, had been deeply annoyed by
the neglect or the contemptuous reception of the _Lyrical Ballads_, to
which hardly any one had done justice except the future Archdeacon
Wrangham, while his own poems in simple language had offended even more
than _The Ancient Mariner_ had puzzled. To some extent I do not question
that—his part of the scheme being to make the familiar poetical, just as
it was Coleridge’s to make the unfamiliar acceptable, the uncommon
common—the refusal of “poetic diction” which he here advances and
defends was a _vera causa_, a true actuating motive. But there is also,
I think, no doubt that, as so often happens, resentment, and a dogged
determination to “spite the fools,” made him here represent the
principle as much more deliberately carried out than it actually was.
And the same doggedness was no doubt at the root of his repetition of
this principle in all his subsequent prose observations, though, as has
been clear from the first to almost all impartial observers,[350] he
never, from _Tintern Abbey_ onwards, achieves his highest poetry, and
very rarely achieves high poetry at all, without putting that principle
in his pocket.
[Sidenote: _That to_ Lyrical Ballads, 1800.]
That the actual preface begins with a declaration that he was rather
more than satisfied with the reception of his poems, and that the
appearance of a systematic defence is set down to “request of friends,”
is of course not in the least surprising, and will only confirm any
student of human nature in the certainty that pique was really at the
bottom of the matter. As a matter of fact, there is no more typical
example of an aggressive-defensive _plaidoyer_ in the whole history of
literature.
[Sidenote: _Its history._]
It begins with sufficient boldness and originality (indeed “W. W.” was
never deficient in either) with admission that “by writing in verse, an
author is supposed to make a formal engagement that he will gratify
certain habits of association,” and merely urging that these habits have
varied remarkably. The principle here is sound enough; it is in effect
the same which we have traced in previous “romantic” criticism from
Shenstone onwards; but the historical illustrations are unfortunate.
They are “the age of Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius” contrasted with
that of Statius and Claudian, and “the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont
and Fletcher” with that of Donne and Cowley or Dryden and Pope. The
_nisus_ of the school towards the historic argument, and, at the same
time, its imperfect education in literary history, could hardly be
better illustrated. For, not to quibble about the linking of Statius and
Claudian, the age of Catullus and Lucretius was most certainly _not_ the
age of Terence; and the English pairs are still more luckless. Donne
_and_ Cowley, Shakespeare _and_ Beaumont and Fletcher, are bad enough in
themselves: but the postponement of Donne to the twin dramatists, when
he was the elder of Fletcher probably by six or seven years, of Beaumont
by ten or twelve, is rather sad. However, it is not on history that
Wordsworth bases his attack.
[Sidenote: _The argument against poetic diction, and even against
metre._]
His object, he tells us, was to choose incidents and illustrations from
common life; to relate and describe them, as far as was possible, in a
selection of language really used by men; and at the same time to throw
over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things
should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect—a long but much
less forcible appendix examining why the life so chosen was not merely
“ordinary,” but “rustic and humble.” The kernel of his next paragraph is
the famous statement that all good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings,” and then, after a little divagation, he sets to
work to show how such a style as he was using was adapted to be the
channel of such an overflow. He utterly refuses Personification: he “has
taken as much pains to avoid what is called Poetic Diction as is
ordinarily taken to produce it”; he “has at all times endeavoured to
look steadily at the subject with little falsehood of description”; and
he has not only denied himself false poetic diction, but many
expressions in themselves proper and beautiful, which have been
foolishly repeated by bad poets till they became disgusting. A selected
sonnet from Gray[351] is then rather captiously attacked for the sake of
showing (what certainly few will admit) that, in its only part of value,
the language differs in no respect from that of prose: whence the
heretic goes farther and, first asserting that there is _no_ essential
difference between the language of Prose and that of Poetry, proceeds in
a note to object to the opposition of Poetry and Prose at all, and to
the regarding of the former as synonymous with metrical composition.
Then he asks what a poet _is_: and answers himself at great length,
dwelling on the poet’s philosophical mission, but admitting that it is
his business to give pleasure. He anticipates the objection, “Why, then,
do you not write in Prose?” with the rather weak retort, “Why should I
not add the charm of metrical language to what I have to say?” A little
later comes the other famous definition of poetry as “emotion
recollected in tranquillity,” with a long and exceedingly unsuccessful
attempt to vindicate some work of his own from the charge of being
ludicrous. And the Preface ends with two candid but singularly damaging
admissions, that there _is_ a pleasure confessedly produced by metrical
compositions very different from his own, and that, in order entirely to
enjoy the poetry which he is undertaking, it would be necessary to give
up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed.
[Sidenote: _The appendix: Poetic Diction again._]
There is an appendix specially devoted to “Poetic Diction” in which
Wordsworth develops his objection to this. His argument is curious, and
from his own point of view rather risky. Early poets wrote from passion,
yet naturally, and so used figurative language: later ones, without
feeling passion, imitated them in the use of Figures, and so a purely
artificial diction was formed. So also metre was early added, and came
to be regarded as a symbol or promise of poetic diction itself. To which
of course it is only necessary to register the almost fatal demurrer,
“Why, if the early poets used figurative language different from
ordinary, may not later ones do so? or do you mean that Greek shoemakers
of Homer’s time said _koruthaiolos_ and _dolichoskion_?” Again, “How
about this curious early ‘superadding’ of metre? Where is your evidence?
and supposing you could produce any, what have you to say to the further
query, ‘If the metre was superadded, what could have been the reason,
except that some superaddition was felt to be wanted?’”
[Sidenote: _The Minor Critical Papers._]
It is proof of the rather prejudiced frame of mind in which Wordsworth
wrote that, in some subsequent criticisms of particulars, he objects to
Cowper’s “church-going bell” as “a strange abuse”—from which we must
suppose that he himself never talked of a “dining-room,” for it is
certain that the room no more dines than the bell goes to church. The
later papers on “Poetry as a Study,” and “Poetry as Observation and
Description,” are also full of interesting matter, though here, as
before, their literary history leaves much to desire, and though they
are full of examples of the characteristic stubbornness with which
Wordsworth clings to his theory. The most remarkable example probably of
this stubbornness is the astonishing note to the letter on the
last-named subject (addressed to Sir George Beaumont), in which, after
attributing to the poet Observation, Sensibility, Reflection,
Information, Invention, and Judgment, he adds, with a glance at his
enemy, Metre—“As sensibility to harmony of numbers _and the power of
producing it_ are _invariably_ attendants on the faculties above
specified, nothing has been said upon those requisites.” Perhaps there
is no more colossal _petitio principii_, and at the same time no more
sublime ignoring of facts, to be found in all literature, than that
“invariably.”
[Sidenote: _Coleridge’s examination of Wordsworth’s views._]
Interesting, however, as the Preface and its satellites are in
themselves, they are far more interesting as the occasion of the much
longer examination of the main document which forms the centre, and as
criticism the most valuable part, of the _Biographia Literaria_[352] of
Coleridge, Wordsworth’s fellow-worker in these same _Lyrical Ballads_.
That Wordsworth was himself not wholly pleased with this criticism of
his criticism, we know: and it would have been strange if he had been—
nay, if a much less arrogant and egotistical spirit than his had taken
it quite kindly. But Coleridge was on this occasion entirely within his
right. The examination, though in some parts unsparing enough, was
conducted throughout in the most courteous, indeed in the most
eulogistic, tone; the critic, especially after the lapse of so many
years,[353] could not be denied the right of pointing out the limits of
his agreement with a manifesto which, referring as it did to joint work
of his and another’s, might excusably be supposed to represent his
conclusions as well as those of his fellow-worker.
As to his competence for the task, there could even then be little, and
can now be no, dispute. Wordsworth himself, though he has left some
valuable critical dicta, had by no means all, or even very many, of the
qualifications of a critic. His intellect, save at his rare moments of
highest poetical inspiration, was rather strong than fine or subtle; and
it could not, even at those moments, be described as in any degree
flexible or wide-ranging. He carried into literature the temperament of
the narrowest theological partisan; and would rather that a man were not
poetically saved at all, than that he were saved while not following “W.
W.’s” own way. His reading, moreover, was far from wide, and his intense
self-centredness made him indifferent about extending it: while he
judged everything that he did read with reference to himself and his own
poetry.
[Sidenote: _His critical qualifications._]
In all these respects, except poetical intensity, Coleridge was his
exact opposite. But for a certain uncertainty, a sort of
Will-o'-the-Wispishness which displays itself in some of his individual
critical estimates—and for the too well-known inability to carry out his
designs, which is not perhaps identical, or even closely connected, with
this uncertainty,—he might be called, he may perhaps even in spite of
them be called, one of the very greatest critics of the world. He had
read immensely, and much of his reading had been in the philosophy of
æsthetics, more in pure literature itself. The play of his intellect—
when opium and natural tendency to digression did not drive it devious
and muddle it—was marvellously subtle, flexible, and fine. He could take
positions not his own with remarkable alacrity; was nothing if not
logical, and few things more than historical-literary. Further, such
egotisms as came into play in this particular quarrel all made for
righteousness in his case, while they were snares to Wordsworth. It may
be ungracious, but is not unfair, to say that Wordsworth’s contempt for
poetic diction, and his belittling of metre, arose very mainly from the
fact that, in his case, intense meaning was absolutely required to save
his diction from stiffness on the one hand and triviality on the other,
while he had no very special metrical gifts. Coleridge, though he
certainly had no lack of meaning, and could also write simply enough
when he chose, was a metrist[354] such as we have not more than five or
six even in English poetry, and could colour and harmonise language in
such a way that, at his best, not Shakespeare himself is his superior,
and hardly any one else his equal. The old, the true, sense of _Cui
bono?_ comes in here victoriously. It was certainly to Wordsworth’s
interest that diction and metre should be relegated to a low place.
Coleridge, though he had personal reasons for taking their part, could
do well without them, and was not obliged to be their champion.
[Sidenote: _Unusual integrity of his critique._]
However all this may be, there is no doubt about the importance of the
discussion of Wordsworth’s literary theories, in chaps. xiv. to xxii. of
the _Biographia_. Some have held that Coleridge could not write a book;
more have laid it down that he never did write one. Certainly the title
is to be allowed to the _Biographia_ as a whole only by the most elastic
allowance, while large parts of it are at best episodes, and at worst
sheer divagations. But, if books were not sacred things, it would be
possible, and of no inconsiderable advantage, to sub-title this part of
the book _A Critical Enquiry into the Principles which guided the
Lyrical Ballads, and Mr Wordsworth’s Account of Them_, to print this
alone as substantive text,[355] and to arrange all the rest as notes and
appendices.
[Sidenote: _Analysis of it._]
The examination begins with an interesting, and (whether Epimethean or
not) quite probable and very illuminative account of the actual plan of
the _Ballads_, and the principle on which the shares were allotted. He
and his friend, he tells us, had, during their neighbourly intercourse
in Somerset, often talked of the two cardinal points of poetry, the
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to
the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by
the modifying colours of imagination. And he illustrates this finely, by
instancing the sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, of
moonlight or sunset, communicate to familiar objects.
[Sidenote: _The “suspension of disbelief.”_]
The _Ballads_ were to illustrate both kinds: and the poets were to
divide the parts generally on the principle of Coleridge endeavouring to
make the unfamiliar credible,[356] and Wordsworth the familiar charming.
And with a charity which, I fear, the _Preface_ will not bear, he
proceeds to represent its contentions as applying _only_ to the
practical poetical attempt which Wordsworth, in accordance with the
plan, was on this occasion making. He admits however, that Wordsworth’s
expressions are at any rate sometimes equivocal, and indicates his own
standpoint pretty early and pretty decisively by calling the phrase
“language of real life” _unfortunate_. And then he proceeds to state his
own view with very frequent glances—and more than glances—at his
companion’s.
[Sidenote: _Attitude to metre._]
From the first, however, it is obvious that on one of the two cardinal
points—the necessity or non-necessity of metre in poetry—he is, though
hardly to be called in two minds, for some reason or other reluctant to
speak out his one mind. The revival of this old heresy among such men as
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, is the more to be wondered at, in that
their predecessors of the eighteenth century had by no means pronounced
on the other side in theory, and that therefore they themselves had no
excuse of reaction. No one who, at however many removes, followed or
professed to follow the authority of Aristotle, could deny that the
subject, not the form, made poetry and poems. But just as the tyranny of
a certain poetic diction led Wordsworth and others to strike at all
poetic diction, so the tyranny of certain metres seems to have induced
them to question the necessity of metre in general. At any rate
Coleridge’s language, though not his real drift, is hesitating and
sometimes almost self-contradictory. He will on the same page grant that
“all compositions to which this charm of metre is superadded, whatever
their contents, may be called poems,” and yet lay down that a poem is
“that species of composition which is opposed to works of science by
proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth,” and (after
adding to this a limitation, doubtless intended to take in metre, but
nebulous enough to justify Peacock himself,[357]) will once more clear
off his own mist by saying that if any one “chooses to call every
composition a poem which is rhyme or measure or both, I must leave his
opinion uncontroverted.”
That he himself saw the muddle is beyond doubt, and the opposite page
contains a curious series of _aporiæ_ which show the difficulty of
applying his own definition.[358] The first (_i.e._, fourteenth) chapter
ends with a soft shower of words, rhetorically pleasing rather than
logically cogent, about the poet “bringing the whole soul of man into
activity”; “fusing the faculties, each into each, by the synthetic and
magical power of imagination,” reconciling differences and opposites.
“Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery,
emotion its life, and imagination the soul.” In the fifteenth and
sixteenth the author turns with evident relief from the definition of
the perhaps indefinable to an illustration of it by discussing _Venus
and Adonis_. Here, though it would be pleasant, it would be truancy to
follow him.
This study, however, is by no means otiose. It leads him to make a
comparison between the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and that of “the present age,” a comparison of which not the
least notable point is a reference to the _De Vulgari Eloquio_.[359]
[Sidenote: _Excursus on Shakespeare’s_ Poems.] Coleridge seems only to
have known it in the Italian translation; but it is much that he should
have known it at all: and though he does not try to bring out its
diametrical opposition to Wordsworth, that opposition must have been,
consciously or unconsciously, in his mind. And then he comes back to
Wordsworth himself.
[Sidenote: _Challenges Wordsworth on “real” and “rustic” life._]
He now (chap. xvii.) strikes into a line less complimentary and more
corrective than his earlier remarks. It is true, he says, that much of
modern poetic style is false, and that some of the pleasure given by it
is false likewise. It is true, further, that W. W. has done good by his
sticklings for simplicity. But Coleridge cannot follow him in asserting
that “the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in
language taken from the mouths of men in real life.” And he proceeds to
show, by arguments so obvious and so convincing that it is unnecessary
to recapitulate them, that a doctrine of this kind is neither adequate
nor accurate—that Wordsworth’s own poems do not bear it out, and
(pushing farther) that poetry must be “_dis_realised” (he does not use
the word) as much as possible. He proceeds, cautiously and politely, but
very decidedly, to set the puerilities and anilities[360] of _The Idiot
Boy_ and _The Thorn_ in a clear light, which must have been extremely
disagreeable to their arrogant author; and goes on to pull W. W.'s
arguments, as well as his examples, to shreds and thrums. If you
eliminate, he says (and most truly), a rustic’s poverty of thought and
his “provincialism and grossness,” you get nothing different from “the
language of any other man of common-sense,” so that he will not help you
in the least; his speech does not in any degree represent the result of
special and direct communing with nature. Nay, “real” in the phrase
“real life” is itself a wholly treacherous and equivocal adjective. Nor
will you do any good by adding “in a state of excitement.”
[Sidenote: _“Prose” diction and metre again._]
In the next chapter, the eighteenth, Coleridge carries the fray farther
still into the enemy’s country, hitting the blot that though W. W.'s
_words_ may be quite ordinary, their arrangement is not. And after
wheeling about in this way, he comes at last to the main attack, which
he has so often feinted, on Wordsworth’s astounding dictum that “there
neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of
prose and metrical composition.” After clearing his friend (and patient)
from an insinuation of paradox, he becomes a little “metaphysical”—
perhaps because he cannot help it, perhaps to give himself courage for
the subsequent accusation of “sophistry” which he ventures to bring. Of
course, he says, there are phrases which, beautiful in poetry, are quite
inappropriate in prose. The question is, “Are there no others which,
proper in prose, would be out of place in metrical poetry and _vice
versa_?” And he has no doubt about answering this question in the
affirmative, urging the origin of metre (for which, as we saw,
Wordsworth did not attempt to account), and its effects of use and
pleasure. He will not admit the appeal to nursery rhymes; and he
confesses (a confession which must have given W. W. dire offence) that
he should have liked _Alice Fell_ and the others much better in prose.
On the whole, Coleridge still shows too great timidity. He is obviously
and incomprehensibly afraid of acknowledging pleasure in the metre
itself. But—in this differing more signally from Wordsworth than from
Wordsworth’s uncompromising opponents—he says, “I write in metre,
_because_ I am about to use a language different from that of prose.”
And, though on grounds lower than the highest, he finally plucks up
courage to declare that “Metre is the proper form of poetry: and poetry
[is] imperfect and defective without metre.” ’Twill serve, especially
when he brings up in support, triarian fashion, “the instinct of seeking
unity by harmonious adjustment,” and “the practice of the best poets of
all countries and of all ages.”
[Sidenote: _Condemnation in form of Wordsworth’s theory._]
It is perhaps an anti-climax, though a very Coleridgean one, when he
proceeds to criticise (very justly) Wordsworth’s criticism of Gray, and
some passages both of his own and others: but we can have no quarrel
with him when he ends the chapter, too verbosely indeed, but
unanswerably, with the following conclusion of the whole matter: “When a
poem, or part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in
the figures and contexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of
which no reason can be assigned, except that it differs from the style
in which men actually converse,—then and not till then can I hold this
theory to be either plausible or practicable, or capable of furnishing
either such guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and
more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the
author’s own mind from considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth
and nature of things, confirmed by the authority of works whose fame is
not of one country and of one age.”
[Sidenote: _The_ Argumentum ad Gulielmum.]
He has now (chaps. xix., xx.) argued himself into more confidence than
he had shown earlier, and seems disposed to retract his concession that
W. W.'s limitations were _not_ intended to apply to all poetry. He sees,
indeed, from the criticism on Gray, and from Wordsworth’s references to
Milton, that this concession was excessive, but still he thinks the
general notion too monstrous for Wordsworth to have held. And he
swerves, once more, to point out the especial beauty of beautiful
diction and beautiful metre _added_ to fine or just thought, and
introduces interesting but rather superfluous examples of this from all
manner of poets down to Wordsworth himself. These last lead him to the
very just conclusion, “Were there excluded from Mr W.'s poetic
compositions all that a literal adherence to the theory of his Preface
would exclude, two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry
must be erased.”[361] Which indeed is once more a conclusion of the
whole matter.[362]
[Sidenote: _The study of his poetry._]
After an odd, a distinctly amusing, but despite its title a, for our
purpose, somewhat irrelevant, excursus on “the present mode of
conducting critical journals,”[363] Coleridge concludes with a pretty
long[364] and a very interesting examination of Wordsworth’s poetry. He
brings out his defects, his extraordinary declension from the felicitous
to the undistinguished, his matter-of-factness of various kinds (this
part includes a merciless though most polite censure of _The
Excursion_), his undue preference for dramatic [perhaps we should say
dialogic] form, his prolixity, and his introduction of thoughts and
images too great as well as too low for the subject. The excellences are
high purity and appropriateness of language; weight and sanity of
thoughts and sentiments; strength; originality and _curiosa felicitas_
in single lines and paragraphs; truth of nature in imagery; meditative
pathos; and, lastly, imagination in the highest and strictest sense of
the word.
[Sidenote: _High merits of the examination._]
In fact this chapter, which forms in itself an essay of the major scale,
is one of the patterns, in English, of a critical study of poetry. None,
I think, had previously exhibited the new criticism so thoroughly, and
very few, if any, have surpassed or equalled it since, although it may
be a little injured on the one hand by its limitation to a particular
text, and by the restrictions which the personal relations of the critic
with his author imposed on Coleridge; on the other, by his own
tendencies to digression, verbosity, and intrusion of philosophical
“heads of Charles I.” In fact, there is no other critical document known
to me which attacks the chief and principal things of poetry proper—
poetic language and poetic numbers—in so satisfactory a manner, despite
the economy which Coleridge displays on the latter head. Some of the
ancient and most of the Renaissance discussions shoot too far and too
high, and though the arrows may catch fire and give a brilliant and
striking illumination, they hit no visible mark. The discussions of
Lessing in the _Laocoön_ concern an interesting but after all quite
subordinate point of the relation of poetry to other arts; nearly all of
those in the _Dramaturgie_ deal with a part of literature only, and with
one which is not, in absolute necessity or theory, a part of literature
at all. But here we have the very _differentia_ of poetry, handled as in
the Περὶ Ὕψους or the _De Vulgari_ itself, but handled in a more full,
generally applicable, and philosophically based manner than Dante’s
prose admitted of, and in a wider range than is allowed by the special
purpose of Longinus.
[Sidenote: _Wordsworth a rebel to Longinus and Dante._]
With both these great lights of criticism Coleridge agrees almost as
thoroughly as Wordsworth disagrees with them: and it is proper here to
fulfil the promise which was made[365] of a consideration of
Wordsworth’s work in reference to Dante specially, but with extension to
Longinus as well.
The collision of Wordsworth with Longinus appears in the very title of
the famous little treatise. Fight as we may about the exact meaning of
ὕψος, it must be evident, to poets and pedlars alike, that it never can
apply to the “ordinary language of real life”; struggle as
Wordsworthians may, they never can establish a _concordat_ between the
doctrine of the _Preface_ and the doctrine of the “beautiful word.” But
as Longinus was not specifically writing of Poetry, and as in reference
to Poetry he was writing from his own point of view only, on a special
function or aspect of Poetry and Rhetoric alike, he does not meet the
Apostle of the Ordinary full tilt and weapon to weapon. I have said that
I do not know whether, when Wordsworth wrote the _Preface_, he knew the
_De Vulgari_ or not. If Coleridge had known it at the time, he probably
would have imparted his knowledge in the celebrated Nether Stowey talks:
but his own reference, itself not suggestive of a very thorough
appreciation, is twenty years later. And as Wordsworth was a perfectly
fearless person, and had not a vestige of an idea that any created thing
had authority sufficient to overcrow W. W., he would pretty certainly
have rebuked this Florentine, and withstood him to his face, if he had
known his utterances.
[Sidenote: _The_ Preface _compared more specially with the_ De Vulgari,]
But, on the other hand, Dante himself might almost have been writing
with the _Preface_ before him (except that had he done so Wordsworth
would probably have been at least in Purgatory), considering the
directness, the almost rude lie-circumstantial of the antidote. “Take
the ordinary language, especially of rustic men,” says Wordsworth.
“Avoid rustic [“silvan”] language altogether,” says Dante, “and even of
‘urban’ words let only the noblest remain in your sieve.” “If you have
Invention, Judgment, and half a dozen other things,” every one of which
has been possessed in more or less perfection by most of the great
writers of the world whether in prose or poetry, “metrical expertness
will follow as a matter of course,” says Wordsworth. “You must, after
painfully selecting the noblest words and arranging them in the noblest
style, further arrange them in the best line that experience and genius
combined can give you, and yet further build these lines into the
artfullest structure that art has devised,” says Dante. “Poetry is
spontaneous utterance,” says he of Cockermouth. “Poetry, and the
language proper for it, is a regular ‘panther-quest,’ an elaborate and
painful toil,” says the Florentine.
[Sidenote: _and Dante’s practice_]
And their practice is no less opposed than their theory; or rather the
relation of the two, to theory and practice taken together, is the most
astonishing contrast to be found in Poetry. Dante never falsifies his
theory for a moment. You cannot find a line, in _Commedia_ or _Vita
Nuova_ or anywhere else, where the “panther-quest” of word, and phrase,
and line-formation, and stanza-grouping is not evident; you will be put
to it to find one where this quest is not consummately successful. And,
in following word and phrase and form, Dante never forgets or starves
his meaning. He may be sometimes obscure, but never because there is no
meaning to discern through the gloom. He may be sometimes technical; but
the technicality is never otherwise than the separable garb of a
“strange and high” thought and intention. Matter and form with him admit
no divorce: their marriage is not the marriage of two independent
entities, but the marriage of soul and body. He has no need of the
alternation of emotion and tranquillity, of the paroxysm succeeded by
the notebook (or interrupted by it and succeeded by the fair copy),
because his emotion and his tranquillity are identical, because the tide
of his poetry is the tide “too full for sound or foam,” at least for
splash or spoondrift. He is methodical down to the counting of syllables
in poetic words: and yet who has more poetic madness than he?
[Sidenote: _with Wordsworth’s._]
The difference in Wordsworth is almost startling; it looks as if it had
been “done on purpose.” He does obey his theory, does accept the
language of ordinary life.[366] But when he does so, as (almost)
everybody admits, he is too often not poetical at all—never in touch
with the highest poetry.[367] And (which is extremely remarkable and has
not, I think, been remarked by Coleridge or by many other critics) even
in these poems he has not the full courage of his opinions. In no single
instance does he venture on the experiment of discarding the merely
“superadded charm” of metre, of which he has such a low opinion. He
never in one single instance relies on the sheer power of “spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings” on the impetus of “emotion recollected in
tranquillity,” _without_ metre. In the form of poetry, which he affects
to despise, he is even as these publicans.
These are two sufficiently striking points; but they are not so striking
as the third. Wordsworth _is_ a great poet; he _has_ moments of all but
the sublimest—for this argument we need certainly not grudge to say of
the sublimest—poetry. He can bathe us in the light of setting suns, and
introduce us even to that which never was on sea and land;[368] he can
give us the full contact, the full ecstasy, the very “kiss of the
spouse.” But in no single instance, again, does he achieve these
moments, except—as Coleridge has pointed out to some extent, and as can
be pointed out without shirking or blenching at one “place” of poetry—at
the price of utterly forgetting his theory, of flinging it to the tides
and the winds, of plunging and exulting in poetic diction and poetic
arrangement.
[Sidenote: _The comparison fatal to Wordsworth as a critic._]
So we can only save Wordsworth the poet—in which salvage there is
fortunately not the slightest difficulty—at the expense of Wordsworth
the critic. Even in these curious documents of critical suicide there
are excellent critical utterances _obiter_, and some even of the
propositions in the very argument itself are separately, if not in their
context, justifiable. He might, if he could have controlled himself,
have made a very valuable exposure, not merely of false poetic diction,
but of that extremely and monotonously _mannerised_ poetic diction
which, though not always bad in its inception and to a certain extent,
becomes so by misusage and overusage. He might have developed his
polemic against the personification of Gray and others with real
advantage. He might have arranged a conspectus of the sins of
eighteenth-century poetic diction, which would have been a most valuable
pendant to Johnson’s array of the extravagances of the Metaphysicals. He
might—if he had carried out and corrected that theory of his of the
necessity of antecedent “powerful feelings” in the poet—have produced a
“Paradox of the Poet” which would have been as true as Diderot’s on the
Actor, and have had far greater value. But he did none of these things;
and what he did do is itself not even a paradox—it is a paralogism.
[Sidenote: _Other critical places in Coleridge._]
How much better Coleridge comes out of this affair has already been
partly said. But these concluding chapters[369] of the _Biographia_,
though certainly his capital critical achievement, are very far from
being his only one. Indeed, next to his poetical, his critical work is
Coleridge’s greatest: and with all his everlasting faults of
incompleteness, digression, cumbrousness of style,[370] and what not, it
gives him a position inferior to no critic, ancient or modern, English
or foreign. But it is scattered all over his books, and it would not be
ill done if some one would extract it from the mass and set it together.
In surveying such examples of it as are here most important, we shall
take the convenient Bohn edition of Coleridge’s Prose, following the
contents of its volumes, but supplementing them to no small extent with
the very interesting and only recently printed notes which Mr Ernest
Coleridge published as _Anima Poetæ_, and with a glance at the
_Letters_.
[Sidenote: _The rest of the_ Biographia.]
Coleridge himself, at the very beginning of the _Biographia_, has
indicated the discussion of the question of Poetic Diction as the main
point which he had in view; but, with all its gaps and all its lapses,
the whole book is among the few which constitute the very Bible of
Criticism. The opening, with its famous description of the author’s
education in the art under the merciless and yet so merciful ferule of
Boyer or Bowyer; the reference to Bowles—so little important in himself
and on Arnoldian principles, so infinitely important to “_them_,” and so
to history and to us, the “us” of every subsequent time; the personal
digressions on himself and on Wordsworth and on Southey—are among “the
topmost towers of Ilion,” the best illustrations of that “English
fashion of criticism” of which, as has been said, Dryden laid the
foundations nearly a century and a half earlier by uniting theory with
elaborate, and plentiful, and apparently indiscriminate, examples from
practice.
[Sidenote: The Friend.]
One seldom feels inclined to be more angry[371] with Coleridge’s habit
of “Prommy pas Payy”[372] than in reference to that introduction to the
_Ancient Mariner_—dealing with the supernatural, and with the difference
between Imagination and Fancy—to which he coolly refers the reader as if
it existed,[373] just before the actual examination of Wordsworth’s
theories in the _Biographia_, and after the long digressions, Hartleian,
biographical proper, and what not, which fill the second division of the
book. But that one does well to be angry is not quite so certain. The
discussion would probably have been the reverse of methodical, and it is
very far from unlikely that everything good in it is actually cast up
here, or there, on the “Rich Strand” of his actual work. To return to
that work,[374] there is little criticism in the extraordinary
mingle-mangle of religion, politics, and philosophy, of “Bell and Ball:
Ball and Bell,” Maria Schoening and Dr Price, called _The Friend_,
whichever of its two forms[375] be taken. At the beginning there are one
or two remarks which seem to promise matter of our kind, and there is
some good Shakespeare comment at p. 299: but that is about all.
[Sidenote: Aids to Reflection, _&c._]
Neither should we expect (save on the principle that in Coleridge the
unexpected very generally happens) anything in the _Aids to Reflection_
or the _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_, though in the first there
are some of the usual girds at anonymous reviewing, and the second is
important enough for that equivocal if not bastard variety of our kind
which has “Biblical” or “Higher” tacked before it. But the three
remaining volumes[376] are almost compact of our matter, while there is
not a little of it, and of the very best quality, in the _Anima Poetæ_.
[Sidenote: _The_ Lectures on Shakespeare, _&c._]
The great storehouse next to the _Biographia_ is, of course, the
_Lectures on Shakespeare_ with their satellite fragments, unsatisfactory
as are the conditions under which we have all these things. There is
perhaps no more astounding example of the tricks of self-deception than
Coleridge’s statement to Allsop that he had “_written_” three volumes of
five hundred pages each, containing a complete critical history of the
English drama, and “requiring neither addition, omission, nor
correction—nothing but mere arrangement.” What we actually have of his
whole critical work, outside the _Biographia_, consists of perhaps
one-third that amount of his own and other people’s notes of Lectures,
very rarely consecutive at all, requiring constant omission because of
repetition, and defying the art of the most ingenious _diaskeuast_ to
get them into anything like order, and of a smaller but still
considerable mass of _Marginalia_, pocket-book entries, and fragments of
the most nondescript kinds. And we know from indisputable testimony by
persons who actually heard the _Lectures_ which these notes represent,
that if we possessed reports _in extenso_ by the most accurate and
intelligent of reporters, things would be not so very much better,
because of Coleridge’s incurable habit of apology, digression,
anticipation, and repetition. That he found a written lecture an
intolerable trammel, and even notes irksome, if he stuck close to them,
we can readily believe. Many, if not most, lecturers would agree with
him. But it is given to few people, and certainly was not given to him,
to speak _ex-tempore_ on such subjects in a fashion which will bear
printing. And his lectures have, as we have said, only very rarely had
even the chance of standing this.
[Sidenote: _Their chaotic character_]
Nevertheless, we are perhaps not in reality so very much worse off.
Extreme method in criticism is something of a superstition, and, as we
have seen, the greatest critical book of the world, that of Longinus,
has, as we possess it, very little of this, and does not appear ever to
have had very much. The critic does his best work, not in elaborating
theories which will constantly break down or lead him wrong when they
come into contact with the myriad-sided elusiveness of Art and Humanity,
but in examining individual works or groups of work, and in letting his
critical steel strike the fire of mediate axioms and _aperçus_ from the
flint of these. It does the recipient rather good than harm to have to
take the trouble of selecting, co-ordinating, and adjusting such things
for himself; at any rate, he escapes entirely the danger of that deadly
bondage to a cut-and-dried scheme which was the curse of the Neo-classic
system. And there is no critic who provides these examinations and
_aperçus_ and _axiomata media_ more lavishly than Coleridge.[377]
[Sidenote: _and preciousness._]
I remember still, with amusement after many years, the words of, I
suppose, a youthful reviewer who, admitting that an author whom he was
reviewing had applied the method of Coleridge as to Shakespeare, &c.,
with some skill and even some originality, hinted that this method was
quite _vieux jeu_, and that modern criticism was taking and to take an
entirely different line. And I have been grateful to that reviewer ever
since for giving me a mental smile whenever I think of him. That his new
critical Evangel—it was the “scientific” gospel of the late M.
Hennequin, if “amid the memories long outworn Of many-_volumed eve and_
morn” I do not mistake—has itself gone to the dustbin meanwhile does not
matter, and is not the cause of the smile. The risibility is in the
notion that any great criticism can ever be obsolete. We may, we must,
we ought sometimes to differ with Aristotle and Longinus, with
Quintilian and Scaliger, with Patrizzi and Castelvetro, with Dryden and
Johnson, with Sainte-Beuve and Arnold. But what is good in them—and even
what, though not so intrinsically good, is injured only by system and
point of view, by time and chance and fatality—remains a possession for
ever. “The eternal substance of their greatness” is of the same kind
(although it be less generally recognised or relished) as the greatness
of creation. _La Mort n’y mord_.
Of such matter Coleridge provides us with abundance everywhere, and
perhaps most on Shakespeare. He acknowledges his debts to Lessing, and
was perhaps unduly anxious to deny any to the Schlegels; but he has made
everything that he may have borrowed his own, and he has wealth untold
that is not borrowed at all. He can go wrong like other people. His
favourite and constantly repeated denunciation of Johnson’s couplet—
“Let Observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru”—
as “bombast and tautology,” as equivalent to “let observation with
extensive observation survey mankind extensively,” is not only unjust
but actually unintelligent,[378] and probably due only to the horror of
eighteenth-century personification, intensified in Coleridge by the fact
that in his own early poems he had freely indulged therein.
[Sidenote: _Some noteworthy things in them: general,_]
But on the very opposite page[379]—in the very corresponding lines which
shut up on this carping when the book is closed—we read, “To the young I
would remark that it is always unwise to judge of anything by its
defects: the first attempt ought to be to discover its excellences.” I
have found nothing better for the motto of this Book; I cannot imagine
anything better as a corrective of the faults of Neo-classic critics—as
a “Take away that bauble!” the stop-watch. Again, observe the admirable
separation of poet and dramatist in Lecture vii. of the 1811
course;[380] the remarks (suggested perhaps by Lessing, but in no
respect an echo of him) on poetry and painting in the Ninth;[381] and
the altogether miraculous “character” of Ariel which follows.[382] The
defences of Shakespeare’s puns are always consummate[383]—in fact, “Love
me, love my pun,” should be one of the chief articles of a Shakespearian
Proverb-book. In the notes referring (or supposed to refer) to the
course of 1818, variations of the _Biographia_ (published the year
before) were sure to occur and do; one of the most noteworthy being the
expansion and application of the idea of “suspension of disbelief.”[384]
Note, too, the acuteness in the censure[385] (with half-apologies) of
the absurd stage-directions which characterised German, and characterise
Scandinavian, drama.
[Sidenote: _and particular._]
Of the separate notes on Shakespeare’s Plays it is impossible to say
much here: and indeed it is not necessary. They are to be read—if
possible in conjunction with the plays themselves—by everybody: to
digest them into a formal treatise would be perhaps impossible, and, as
hinted above, would not be a testimonial to their value if it were
possible. But their great merit, next to their individual felicity, is
the constant cropping up of those _aperçus_ of a more general, though
not too general, cast which have been noticed.
[Sidenote: _Coleridge on other dramatists._]
Coleridge never admires Shakespeare too much; but the Devil’s Advocate
may perhaps make something of a count against him that he is often apt
to depress others by a comparison, which is not in the least necessary.
On Ben Jonson he is rather inadequate than unjust; but he is certainly
unjust to Beaumont and Fletcher, and I almost fear that his injustice,
like his more than justice to Massinger, may be set down to
extra-literary causes. It is extraordinary that such a critic should
have used the language that he uses of Florimel in _The Maid of the
Mill_.[386] Her devices to preserve her honour are extravagant: this
extravagance, as compared with the perfect _naturalness_ of Shakespeare,
is the constant note of “the twins”; and if Coleridge had confined
himself to bringing it out, there would have been no more to be said.
But his remarks are here not merely unjust, they are silly. And yet
here, too, we could find the priceless _obiter dicta_, that on words
that have made their way despite precisian objection,[387] those on
metre[388] almost always, and others.
[Sidenote: _The_ Table Talk.]
The motes fly thick for us in the _Table Talk_; and as they are clearly
headed and indexed in the edition referred to, there is the less need of
additional specification, while there is, here as everywhere, a good
deal of repetition.[389] But one must point in passing to the striking
contrast of Schiller’s “material sublime”[390] (and Coleridge was not
inclined to undervalue Schiller[391]) with Shakespeare’s economy of
means; the pertinent, though by no means final, question, “If you take
from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?”[392] the
remarks on Spenser’s “swan-like movement”;[393] a remarkable cluster of
literary dicta in the entry for Midsummer-Day 1827 (when H. N. says that
his uncle talked “a volume”), to be supplemented by another sheaf on
July 12; the contrast of Milton and Shakespeare;[394] the remarks on
Rabelais;[395] the wonderfully pregnant one as to the “three silent
revolutions in England”;[396] those on Latin Literature;[397] on the
evolutionary quality of genius;[398] another great _obiter dictum_,[399]
that “Great minds are never in the wrong, but in consequence _of being
in the right imperfectly_,” which is truest of all in criticism itself;
yet another,[400] “To please me, a poem must be either music or sense:
if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it”; and, above
all, that on Tennyson[401]—one of the _loci classici_ of warning to the
greatest critics to distrust themselves when they are judging the poetry
of the “younger generations.” And if we cannot help reproachfully
ejaculating “Æschylus!” when he denies[402] sublimity to the Greeks, let
us again remember that Æschylus was strangely _occulted_ to the whole
Neo-classic age, and that it is very much Coleridge’s own doing that we
of the last two or three generations have re-discovered him.
[Sidenote: _The_ Miscellanies.]
The few contributions, shortly supplemented from MS., to Southey’s
_Omniana_ give little, but the volume now entitled _Miscellanies,
Æsthetic and Literary_, is very nearly all ours. Much of it, however, is
repetition in apparent title, and a good deal of the rest does not quite
answer expectations. The general _Essays on the Fine Arts_ with which it
opens (and of which the author, who had lost them, entertained that
perhaps rather exaggerated idea which we usually entertain of lost
loves, books, fishes, &c.) possess in abundance Coleridge’s uniquely
stimulating quality, but, perhaps in not much less abundance, his
extreme desultoriness and want of definition, save of the most
indefinite character. The essay on the _Prometheus_ which follows
excites (though hardly in the wary mind, Estesianly “alphabeted,” as he
would himself say) great expectations. But it is scarcely too much to
say that on this—the most purely poetical of all extant Greek dramas, a
miracle of sublimity and humanity mingled, and the twin pillar, with the
_Agamemnon_, of its author’s claim to be one of the greatest poets of
the world—Coleridge has not a word to say that even touches the poetry.
He is philosophico-mythological from the egg to the apple; and one is
bound to add that he here shows one of his gravest drawbacks as a
critic. The new fragments, however, of the 1818 lectures are full of
good matter, on Cervantes especially, perhaps a little less specially on
Dante, on Robinson Crusoe very particularly indeed, on Rabelais and
Sterne and Donne: while these are taken up and multiplied in interest by
the “Marginalia,” with which the literary part of the book concludes,
and which contain, on Daniel and Chapman and Selden, Browne and Fuller,
Fielding and Junius, some of the best known and nearly of the best of
their author’s critical work. Here also, and here only, do we find much
on Milton, Coleridge’s rather numerous lectures on him having left
surprisingly little trace. He is, though a fervent admirer, not quite at
his happiest.
[Sidenote: _The Lecture_ On Style.]
But the most interesting piece that the book contains is the Lecture on
Style, with its satellite note (a small but sparkling star) on the
“Wonderfulness of Prose.”[403] The author’s definition of his most
elusive subject is indeed not only not satisfying, but (unless you
remember his own dictum about being “right incompletely”) demonstrably
and almost astoundingly _un_satisfactory. “Style is of course nothing
but the art of conveying the meaning appropriately and with
perspicuity.” One feels inclined in one’s haste to say, “That is just
what it is _not_”; one must cool down a little before one can modify
this to “Style begins exactly where” the art, &c., “leaves off,” and one
can perhaps never come nearer to an accommodation than “The necessary
preliminary to Style, and one essential ingredient of it,” is “the art,”
and so forth.[404] It was no doubt this side of the matter that
Coleridge was looking at, and at this he stopped, as far as his general
way of looking at the thing went. But the main interest of the piece
does not lie here. He bases his definition on, and tries to adjust it
to, a survey of English style, which is probably one of the first of the
kind ever attempted, after the notion of the Queen Anne men being the
crown and flower of English had been given up. And though his history,
as was natural, is sometimes shaky, and his conclusions are often to be
disputed and even overthrown, the whole is of the highest value, not
merely as a _point de repère_ historically, but as an introduction to
the consideration of Style itself.
[Sidenote: _The_ Anima Poetæ.]
But the book of Coleridge which, next to the _Biographia_, is of most
importance to the student of his criticism, is perhaps the
long-posthumous _Anima Poetæ_. Mr Ernest Coleridge, in his preface to
the _Anima_ itself, says that the _Biographia_ is now little read. I
hope he is wrong: but if he is right it would explain many things.
This volume—a collection of extracts from Coleridge’s pocket-books—
appeared[405] more than sixty years after the poet’s death, and the
notice taken of it was comparatively small. That it contains passages of
ornate prose superior to anything in the previously published writings
is interesting, but for our purpose almost irrelevant: it is not so that
it gives the fullest and clearest side-lights on Coleridge’s criticism
that we have. The earliest years (and pages) are not very fertile,
though I subjoin some references[406] which will assist the reader in
looking them up. But from p. 119 for some fifty pages onward (it is
significant that the time of writing, 1805-8, corresponds with
Coleridge’s absence in Malta, &c., from which we have little or no
published work) the entries are “diamondiferous.” On French poetry
(mistaken but so informingly!);[407] on Cowper;[408] on the absurdity of
calling etymology (how much more philology!) a “science”;[409] on the
attitude to poetry and to books;[410] on Leibnitz’s “profound sentence”
that “men’s intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_”;[411] on
the “instinctive passion in the mind for one word to express one act of
feeling” (Flaubert fifty years before date); on pseudo-originality,—
Coleridge is at his very acme. The _yeast_ of criticism—the reagent
which, itself created by the contact of the critical with the creative,
re-creates itself in all fit media—has never been more remarkably
represented than here.
And great as are these passages, there are many others (though not so
many in close context) to match them. See the entry (which I venture to
think has been wrongly side-headed as “A plea for poetic license” at the
foot of p. 165) as to the desire of carrying things to a greater height
of pleasure and admiration than they are susceptible of—the old “wish to
write better than you can,” the “loss of sight between this and the
other style.”[412] See the astonishing anticipation of the best side of
Ruskinism in the note on architecture and climate;[413] and that on
poetry and prose and on the “esenoplastic” power;[414] and that on
somebody (Byron?) who was “splendid” everywhere, but nowhere
poetical;[415] and that on scholastic terms;[416] and that on the slow
comprehension of certain (in this case Dantean) poetry.[417] They are
all _apices criticismi_—not easy reading, not for the running man, but
for him who reads them fitly, certain to bear fruit if he reads them
early, to coincide with his own painful and struggling attainments if he
reads them late.
[Sidenote: _The_ Letters.]
Nor must the _Letters_[418] be omitted in any sufficient survey of
Coleridge’s criticism. That at one early period[419] he apparently
thought Schiller more sublime than Milton is not in the least to his
discredit. He was twenty-two; he was, I think, demonstrably in love with
_three_ ladies[420] at once, and extremely uncertain which of two of
them he should marry—a state of mind neither impossible nor unnatural,
but likely to lead to considerable practical difficulties, and to upset
the judgment very decidedly. His minor critical remarks at this very
time on Southey’s poems are excellent. That Bowles should be “divine”
and Burke “sad stuff”[421] does not matter—we can explain both
statements well enough. But how many men of three- or four-and-twenty
(or for that matter of three- or four-and-seventy) were there, are
there, have there ever been, who could ask, “Why pass an _Act of
Uniformity_ against poets?”[422] one of the great critical questions of
the world, and never, so far as I remember, formulated so pertinently
before. It is odd that he should have forgotten (if he knew) Sidney, in
his singular and pedantic complaint that to give the name Stella to a
woman is “unsexing” it, and his supposition that “Swift is the
authority.”[423] But another astonishing critical truth is that “Poetry
ought not always to have its _highest_ relish”;[424] and yet another in
the contrast[425] of himself with Southey, “I think too much to be a
poet; he too little to be a great poet,” unjust as the application is in
the first half; and yet again on metre itself “_implying_ a
passion,”[426] a passage worth comparing with, and in some points better
than, the _Biographia_ (with which compare also pp. 386, 387). Nor these
alone, but many others later—the criticism on Wordsworth’s “Cintra”
pamphlet;[427] that on the inadequacy of one style for all
purposes;[428] the remarks on stage illusion,[429]—might be cited.
[Sidenote: _The Coleridgean position and quality._]
When the first volume of this history was published, an excellent
scholar said to me, “How will you ever finish that book? Why, Coleridge
himself would take a volume!” There is something to be said for the
hyperbole. In this and that critic, of these many ages which we have
essayed to survey, we may find critical graces which are not in him; but
in all, save two, we shall find corresponding deficiencies. In all the
ancient critics, save these two, the limitation of the point of view,
the hamper of the scheme, are disastrously felt, nor is either Aristotle
or Longinus quite free from them. In the greatest of the
sixteenth-century Italians these limitations recur, and are repeated in
most of those of the seventeenth and eighteenth. Dante is of the
greatest, but he touches the subject very briefly and from a special
side. Dryden is great, but he is not fully informed, and comes too early
for his own point of view. Fontenelle is very nearly great, but he has
the same drawbacks, and adds to them those of an almost, perhaps a
quite, wilful eccentricity and capriciousness. Lessing is great, but he
has fixed his main attention on the least literary parts of literature;
while Goethe later is great but a great pedant.[430] Hazlitt is great;
but Coleridge was Hazlitt’s master, and beside the master the pupil is
insular and parochial in range and reading if not in spirit. In
Sainte-Beuve himself we want a little more theory; some more enthusiasm;
a higher and more inspiriting choice of subjects. And in Mr. Arnold the
defects of Fontenelle reappear without Fontenelle’s excuse of
chronology.
So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge.
The defects of the modern, as contrasted with the ancient, man of
letters are prominent in Coleridge when we compare him with these his
fellows: and so we cannot quite say that he is the greatest of the
three. But his range is necessarily wider: he takes in, as their date
forbade them to take, all literature in a way which must for centuries
to come give him the prerogative. It is astonishing how often, when you
have discovered in others of all dates, or (as you may fondly hope)
found out for yourself, some critical truth, you will remember that
after all Coleridge in his wanderings has found it before, and set it by
the wayside for the benefit of those who come after. For all, I believe,
of these later days—certainly for all whose mother-tongue is English—
Coleridge is the critical author to be turned over by day and by night.
Never take him on trust: it is blasphemy to the Spirit of Criticism to
do that with any critic. Disagree with him as often as you like, and as
you can stand to the guns of your disagreement. But begin with him,
continue with him, come back to him after excursions, with a certainty
of suggestion, stimulation, correction, edification. _C’est mon métier à
moi d'être professeur de littérature_, and I am not going to _parvify_
my office. But if anybody disestablished us all (with decent pensions,
of course), and applied the proceeds of our Chairs to furnishing the
boxes of every one who goes up to the University with a copy of the
_Biographia Literaria_, I should decline to be the person chosen to be
heard against this revolution, though I should plead for the addition of
the _Poetics_ and of Longinus.
[Sidenote: _He introduces once for all the criterion of Imagination,
realising and disrealising._]
And if any one is still dissatisfied with particular critical
utterances, and even with the middle axioms interspersed among them, let
him remember that Coleridge—not Addison, not the Germans, not any other—
is the real introducer into the criticism of poetry of the realising and
disrealising Imagination as a criterion. Even now, a hundred years after
his earliest day as a critic, the doctrine, though much talked of, is
apparently little understood. Even such a critic as the late Mr Traill,
while elsewhere[431] admitting that “on poetic _expression_” Coleridge
“has spoken the absolutely last word,” almost apologised[432] for his
putting on a level “lending the charm of imagination to the real” and
“lending the force of reality to the imaginary.” He confessed that,
“from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet’s office
there can be no comparison”—where indeed I might also “say ditto to Mr
Burke,” but in a sense opposite to his. And if, on such a mind and such
an appreciation as Mr Traill’s, this one-sided interpretation of “the
_esenoplastic_ faculty” had hold, how much more on others in increasing
measure to the present day? The fallacy is due, first, to the hydra-like
vivacity of the false idea of _mimesis_, the notion that it is not
re-presentation, re-creation _adding_ to Nature, but copying her; and,
secondly, to the Baconian conception of poetry as a _vinum dæmonum_, a
poison with some virtue as a medicine. What power these errors have all
our history has shown,—all Histories of Criticism that ever can be
written will show if they are written faithfully. But Coleridge has
provided—once for all, if it be not neglected—the safeguard against this
in his definitions of the two, the co-equal, the co-eternal functions of
the exercise of the poetic Imagination.
[Sidenote: _The “Companions.”_]
In the title of the present chapter I have used the word “companions” in
a double sense—the first and special application of it being that in
which it is technically applied to the Companions of the Prophet—to the
early coadjutors of Mahomet in his struggle with the Koreish. Of these
the chief are Southey, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt, with perhaps as an
even closer ally—though unknowing and unknown—William Blake. Then follow
companions in the wider sense—associates in the work, who varied from
nearly complete alliance, as with Scott, to very distant and lukewarm
participation, as in Campbell, and (in literary position) from the
captaincy of Scott again and of Shelley to the more than respectable
full-privateship of the contributors to the _Retrospective Review_. As
for the “Adversaries,” they can be more briefly dealt with, for their
work was mostly “wood, hay, stubble”; but Gifford and Jeffrey at least
could not be excluded here, and a few more may deserve notice. So let
the inquiry proceed in this order.
[Sidenote: _Southey._]
It may seem at first sight curious, and will perhaps always remain a
little so, that we have no collected examples, nor many uncollected but
singly substantive pieces, of strictly critical work, from the most
widely read and the most industrious of the whole literary group of
1800-1830 in England—from a man who, for eleven years at least, wrote
reviews almost wherever he could place them without hurting his
conscience, and who for another five-and-twenty was a pillar of one of
the greatest of critical periodicals. But Southey’s earlier reviewing is
for the most part not merely whelmed in the dust-bins of old magazines,
but, as his son and biographer complains, extremely difficult to trace
even there; and his later was, by choice or by chance (more I think by
the former than by the latter), mainly devoted to subjects not purely
literary. If that great _Bibliotheca Britannica_[433] (which so nearly
existed, and which is a thing lacking in English to this present day, a
hundred years later) had come actually into existence, it would hardly
have been necessary to look beyond that: as it is, one has the pleasing
but rather laborious and lengthy duty of fishing out and piecing
together critical expressions from _The Doctor_ and other books to some
extent, and from the two parallel collections of the _Life and
Correspondence_[434] and the _Letters_[435] to a still greater. The
process is necessary for a historian of criticism, and the results, if
hardly new to him, are interesting enough; but they cannot claim any
exhibition at all correspondent to the time taken in arriving at them.
Nor will any such historian, if he be wise, complain, for Southey is
always delightful, except when he is in his most desperately didactic
moods: and the Goddess of Dulness only knows how even the most egregious
of her children, unless from pure ignorance, has managed to fix on him
the title of “dull.”
[Sidenote: _General characteristics of his Criticism._]
That “a man’s criticism is the man himself” is almost truer than the
original bestowal of the phrase; and it is nowhere truer than with
Southey. That astonishing and almost godlike _sanity_ which
distinguished him, in almost all cases save as regards the
_Anti-Jacobin_, Mr Pitt, the Roman Catholic Church, and my Lord Byron
(who, by the way, lacked it quite as conspicuously in regard to
Southey), is the constant mark of his critical views. Except his
over-valuation of Kirke White,[436] which was undoubtedly due to his
amiable and lifelong habit of helping lame dogs, I cannot, at the moment
or on reflection, think of any critical estimate of his (for that of
himself as a poet is clearly out of the question) which is flagrantly
and utterly wrong; and I can think of hundreds which are triumphantly
right. In respect of older literature, in particular,[437] his
catholicity is free from the promiscuousness of Leigh Hunt, and his
eclecticism from the caprice of Charles Lamb: while, prejudiced as he
can be, I do not remember an instance in which prejudice blinds or
blunts his critical faculty as it does Hazlitt’s. On all formal points
of English poetry he is very nearly impeccable. He may have learnt his
belief in substitution and equivalence from Coleridge; but it is
remarkable that his defences of it to Wynn[438] are quite early, quite
original, and quite sound, while Coleridge’s own account long after, in
the preface to _Christabel_, is vague and to some extent incorrect. He
knew, of course, far more literary history than any one of his
contemporaries—an incalculable advantage—and he could, sometimes at
least, formulate general critical maxims well worth the registering.
[Sidenote: _Reviews._]
Of his regular critical work, however, which can be traced in the
_Annual_ and _Quarterly Reviews_ from the list given by his son at the
end of the _Life_, some notice must be taken, though the very list
itself is a tell-tale in the large predominance of Travels, Histories,
and the like over pure literature. That he should have made a rule for
himself after he became Laureate not to review poetry (save in what may
be called an eleemosynary manner) is merely what one would have expected
from his unvarying sense of propriety; but there were large ranges of
_belles lettres_ to which this did not apply. The articles which will
best repay the looking up are, in the _Annual_, those on _Gebir_,
Godwin’s _Chaucer_, Ritson’s _Romances_, Hayley, Froissart, _Sir
Tristram_, Ellis’s _Specimens_, Todd’s _Spenser_, and _Ossian_; in the
_Quarterly_, those on Chalmers’s _Poets_, Sayers, Hayley again, Camoens,
and Lope de Vega, with some earlier ones on Montgomery (James, not
Robert).[439]
[Sidenote: The Doctor.]
_The Doctor_ also must have its special animadversion, for this
strangely neglected and most delightful book is full of critical matter.
Its showers of mottoes—star-showers from the central glowing mass of
Southey’s enormous and never “dead” reading—amount almost in themselves
to a critical education for any mind which is fortunate enough to be
exposed to them when young, while the saturation of the whole book with
literature can hardly fail to produce the same effect. It is lamentable,
astonishing, and (the word is not too strong) rather disgraceful that,
except the “Three Bears” story, the appendix on the Cats, and perhaps
the beautiful early passages on the Doctor’s birthplace and family, the
book should be practically unknown. But it by no means owes its whole
critical value to these borrowed and reset jewels. The passages of
original criticism—direct or slightly “applied”—which it contains are
numerous and important. The early accounts of the elder Daniel’s
library[440] and of Textor’s dialogues[441] are valuable; the passage on
“Taste and Pantagruelism”[442] much more so. On Sermons,[443] on
Drayton,[444] on the Principles of Criticism,[445] on the famous
verse-tournament of the Poitiers Flea,[446] on the Reasons for
Anonymity,[447] on Mason[448] (for whom Southey manages to say a good
word), on Bowdlerising and Modernising, and (by an easy transition)
Spenser[449]—the reader will find nuggets, and sometimes whole pockets,
of critical gold, the last-mentioned being one of the richest of all. It
is to Southey’s immortal honour (an honour not sufficiently paid him by
some Blakites) that he recognised and quoted at length[450] the
magnificent “Mad Song,” which is perhaps Blake’s most sustained and
unbroken piece of pure poetry. His discussion on Styles[451] is of great
value: while the long account[452] of the plays of Langeveldt
(Macropedius), and of our kindred English Morality _Everyman_, shows how
admirably his more than once projected Literary Histories would have
been executed.
[Sidenote: _Altogether somewhat_ impar sibi.]
Still, I am bound to say that he conveys to my mind the impression of
not quite having his soul bound up in the exercise of his critical
function. He was a little too fond of extending his love of books to
those which, as Lamb would say, are no books—of giving the children’s
bread unto dogs. Occasionally, moreover, that want of the highest
enthusiasm and sympathy, the highest inspiration, which—after the rather
ungracious and ungrateful suggestion of Coleridge—it has been usual to
urge against him, and which cannot be wholly disproved, does appear.
Some would say that this was due to his enormous reading, and to the
penal servitude for life to what was mostly hack-work, which fate and
his own matchless sense of duty imposed upon him. I do not think so; but
of course if it be said that no one with the more translunary fancies,
the nobler gusts, could have so enslaved himself, an authority[453] who
takes so high a ground must be allowed his splendid say. Anyhow, and on
the whole, we must return to the position that Southey does not hold a
very high position among English critics, and that it is easier to give
plausible reasons for the fact than entirely to understand it.[454]
[Sidenote: _Lamb._]
In criticising the criticism of Charles Lamb[455] one has to walk
warily; for is he not one of the most justly beloved of English writers,
and are not lovers apt to love more well than wisely? I shall only say
that if any be an “Agnist,” I more. Ever since I can remember reading
anything (the circumstance would not have seemed trivial to himself), I
have read and revelled in, and for nearly forty years I have possessed
in fee, a copy of the original _Elia_ of 1823, in the black morocco coat
which it put on, at least seven years before Lamb’s death, in 1827. I
have also read its contents, and all other attainable _Agnalia_, in
every edition in which I have come across them, with introductions by
“Thaunson and Jaunson,” in and on all sorts of shapes and types and
papers and bindings. I have never wearied of reading them; I am sure I
never shall weary as long as eye and brain last. That Lamb is one of the
most exquisite and delightful of critics, as of writers, is a
proposition for which I will go to the stake; but I am not prepared to
confess him as one of the very greatest in his critical capacity.
[Sidenote: _His “occultism”_]
The reasons for this limitation are to be found in two passages of his
friend Hazlitt—a ruthless friend enough, but one who seldom goes wrong
in speaking of friend or foe, unless under the plain influence of a
prejudice which here had not the slightest reason for existing. The
passages (referred to again elsewhere) are that on “the Occult School”
in the “Criticism”[456] and one in the “Farewell.”[457] The first speaks
of those “who discern no beauties but what are concealed from
superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part
of mankind.” “If an author is utterly unreadable they can read him for
ever.” “They will no more share a book than a mistress with a friend.”
“Nothing goes down with them but what is caviare to the multitude,” &c.
The other, in which Lamb is actually named, contrasts his “surfeit of
admiration,” the antiquation of his favourites after some ten years,
with the “continuity of impression” on which Hazlitt prided himself.
[Sidenote: _and alleged inconstancy._]
I am inclined to think that both these charges—made with what is (for
the author) perfect good-humour, and only in the first case slightly
exaggerated, as was almost permissible when he was dealing ostensibly
with a type not a person—are quite true. One would not indeed have them
false; it would be most “miserably wise” economy to exchange Lamb, as he
is, for a wilderness of consistent, equitable, catholic mediocrities. As
Hazlitt himself admits, _this_ “Occult Criticism” does not or need not
come from any affectation or love of singularity: indeed, some occult
critics “smack of genius and are worth any money.” The Lothario part of
the indictment, the desertion after enjoyment, is perhaps less easy to
authenticate as well as to defend; but I think it existed, and was
indeed a necessary consequence of the other tendency. If you love merely
or mainly as a collector, and for rarity,—if not only thus but because
others do _not_,—the multiplication of the object or of the taste must
necessarily have a disgusting effect. “The bloom is _off_ the rye.” And
I should say that, beyond all reasonable question, there is a distinct
character of _eccentricity_ in the strict sense, of whim, of
will-worship, about many, if not most, of Lamb’s preferences. There is
no affectation about him; but there is what might be affectation in
another man, and has been affectation in many and many another. Take the
most famous instances of his criticism—the defence of Congreve and
Wycherley, the exaltation of Ford, the saying (productive of endless
tribulation to the matter-of-fact) that Heywood is “a prose
Shakespeare,” the enthusiasm shown towards that rather dull-fantastic
play _A Fair Quarrel_, while the magnificence of the same author’s
_Changeling_ was left to Leigh Hunt to find out—these and other things
distinctly show the _capriccio_. Lamb, not Hunt, is really the “Ariel of
Criticism,” and he sometimes pushes tricksiness to a point which would,
we fear, have made his testy Highness of Milan rather angry. It was
probably in conversation rather than in writing that his fickleness
showed itself: we can never conceive Lamb _writing_ down anything that
he had ever written up. But something of disillusionment must, as has
been said, almost necessarily have resulted from the peculiarly
whimsical character of his inamoration. Canon Ainger has noted, as the
distinguishing features of Lamb’s critical power, “width and
versatility.” One differs with the Master[458] of the Temple unwillingly
and _suo periculo_: but neither term seems to me quite appropriate.
“Width” implies continuity, and there is little of this in Lamb:
“versatility” implies a power of turning to what you will, and Lamb, I
think, loved, not as he would but as he could not help it at the time.
[Sidenote: _The early Letters._]
But he wants nothing save method and certainty (in response—not even
this in touch), and he has critical graces of his own which make him all
but as great as Coleridge or Hazlitt, and perhaps more delightful than
either. In his very earliest critical utterances, in the Letters to
Coleridge and Southey especially, much of this delightfulness displays
itself as well as its two parents—Lamb’s unconquerable originality of
thought and feeling, and his unsurpassable quaintness and piquancy of
phrase. The critic is, as is inevitable from his youth, and from the as
yet very imperfect reading which he frankly confesses, a little
uncertain and inadequate. His comparative estimates of Coleridge and
Southey, Southey and Milton, Southey and Cowper, and of all or most of
these poets and others in themselves, exhibit an obviously unregulated
compass—a tendency to correct impression rather overmuch, because the
first striking off of it has been hasty. But this soon disappears: and
though the eccentricity above noted rather increases than lessens with
years, the critic’s real virtues—those just indicated—appear ever and
ever more distinctly and more delightfully.
[Sidenote: _The_ Specimens.]
In a certain sense they never appear to greater advantage than in the
brief notes included in the _Specimens of Dramatic Poets_ (1808).
Everything necessary to excite Lamb’s critical excellence united here,—
actual merit, private interest (for, though the study of the minor as
well as of the major Elizabethans had been progressing steadily, and
“Dodsley” had gone through several editions, yet the authors were
caviare to the general still); presence of the highest excellence; and,
as we see from the _Letters_, years of familiarity and fondness on the
part of the critic.
The _Notes_ themselves pretend to no method, and fulfil their pretence
very strictly. Lamb is distinctly inferior to both his great friends and
rivals in _grasp_. His appreciation is tangential—though in a different
sense from that in which Hazlitt applies the word to Coleridge. Lamb is
not so much desultory or divagatory as apt to touch his subject only at
one (sometimes one very small) point. The impact results in a spark of
the most ardent heat and glowing light, but neither heat nor light
_spreads_ much. Sometimes, as is inevitable in this style of criticism,
he can be only disappointing: one is inclined to be pettish with him for
seeing nothing to notice in the vast and shadowy sweep of _Tamburlaine_
save an interesting evidence that Pistol was not merely jesting. Nor is
perhaps Barabbas “a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to
please the rabble.” But you must get out of this mood if you are to
enjoy Lamb. How he makes it all up, and more than up, on _Faustus_, and
(when he comes to Dekker) on _Old Fortunatus_! “Beware! beware!” is the
cry here also, lest we steal too much of his honeydew. Fortunately it
has been so widely used, even for the vulgar purpose of sweetening
school-editions, that it has become generally accessible. The famous
passage on the Witches, which Hazlitt loved to quote, is perhaps as
characteristic as any: the Webster and Chapman notices are perhaps
critically the best.
Next in order of time come the articles contributed to the _Reflector_,
especially the magnificent paper on “The Tragedies of Shakespeare” and
their actableness. I may be prejudiced in favour of this, by caring
myself infinitely to read the drama, and not caring at all to see it
acted; but this objection could not be made to Lamb, who was notoriously
a playgoer, and an eager though unfortunate aspirant to the honours of
the boards. The piece, of course, shows some traces of the _capriccio_,—
especially in the confession of being utterly unable to appreciate “To
be or not to be,” because of its being “spouted.” Shakespeare himself
might have taught Lamb better, in a certain passage about age and
custom. To learn, to hear, nay, direst curse of all! to _teach_ “To be
or not to be” leaves it perfect Cleopatra. But Lamb must be Lamb and
keep his Lambish mind: and he keeps it here to great purpose. The _Lear_
passage, the best known and the most generally admitted as forcible, is
not more so than those on the _Tempest_ and on _Macbeth_. They all come
to that position of the true critic (as I believe it to be), which has
been indicated elsewhere, that drama _may_ be literature but is not
bound to be—that they are different things, and that the points which
drama need not have, and perhaps to which it cannot do full justice, are
in literature of the greatest importance.
[Sidenote: _The Garrick Play Notes._]
It is natural, though they were written so long afterwards, to take the
“Notes on the Garrick Plays” with these other forerunners and
suggesters; nor do I think that so much of the “first sprightly running”
is lost as has sometimes been thought. How Lamb-like and how pleasant is
the phrase on Day’s quaint _Parliament of Bees_—“the very air seems
replete with humming and buzzing melodies.” (Most obvious, of course:
only that nobody had _met_ it before!) And the imploration to Novello to
set the song from Peele’s _Arraignment_; and the fine and forcible plea
for the minor Elizabethans in the note to _The Two Angry Women of
Abingdon_ (a play, by the way, every fresh reading of which makes one
more thoroughly agree with Lamb). The fewness and slightness of these
notes should not be allowed to obscure their quality.
[Sidenote: _Miscellaneous Essays._]
It was seldom that the bee-like nature of Lamb’s own genius could settle
long on a single flower; and his regular “studies” are few, and not
always of his very best. The actual state of the paper on _The
Excursion_, after its mangling by Gifford, illustrates the wisdom of
that editorial counsel, “Always keep a copy,” which the contributor
(alas! we are all guilty) doth so unwisely neglect; and the two best
that we have among the miscellaneous essays are those on Wither and on
Defoe’s secondary novels. It is difficult to say which is the better:
but the singular unlikeness of the two subjects (except that both Wither
and Defoe are eminently _homely_) shows what I presume Canon Ainger
meant by the “versatility” of the critic’s genius. Both are admirable,
but most characteristically “promiscuous.” The Defoe piece avowedly
gives stray notes; but the “Wither,” though it has a beginning, has very
little middle, and no end at all.
[Sidenote: Elia.]
As for _Elia_ itself, it is fortunately too well known to need any
analysis or much detailed survey. In the first and more famous
collection the literary element is rather a saturation than a separable
contingent. Except the “Artificial Comedy” paper, there is none with a
definitely literary title or ostensible subject: while this itself
starts in the closest connection with the preceding paper on Actors, and
is dramatic rather than literary. But the “saturation” is unmistakable.
As one turns the beloved and hundred-times-read pages, the constant
undercurrent of allusion to books and reading strikes one none the less—
perhaps indeed the more—for familiarity, whether it is at some depth, as
in places, or whether it bubbles up to and over the surface, as in
“Oxford in the Vacation,” and the book-borrowing close of “The Two Races
of Men,” and that other close of that “New Year’s Eve” which so
unnecessarily fluttered Southey’s orthodoxy, and not a little of “All
Fool’s Day”; and in quotations everywhere. But in the _Last Essays_ Lamb
exhibits the master-passion much more openly. The “Detached Thoughts on
Books and Reading” of course lays all concealment aside,—it is a regular
_affiche_, as are also “The Genteel Style in Writing” and (most of all)
“On Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney”—the valiant and triumphant sally
against Hazlitt—with not a little of “Old China” itself. Everywhere
there is evident the abiding, unfailing love of “the book.”
[Sidenote: _The later_ Letters.]
And if we recur to the _Letters_ we shall find the most abundant proof
of this quality. How admirable are those criticisms[459] of the second
edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ which, because they are not “neat” praise,
roused the poetic irritability, not merely of Wordsworth, whose views
respecting the reception of his own verse were always Athanasian, but of
Coleridge, who had, at any rate, intervals of self-perception! How sound
the judgment of Mrs Barbauld and of Chapman (a pleasing pair) to
Coleridge himself on Oct. 23, 1802![460] How sure the touch of the
finger on that absurdity in Godwin’s _Chaucer_ which has been so
frequently copied since, “the fondness for filling out the picture by
supposing what Chaucer did and how he felt”![461] The choicest of his
observations are naturally those to Coleridge, almost _passim_: but the
vein is so irrepressible that he indulges it even in writing to
Wordsworth, though he knew perfectly well that the most favourable
reception could only be a mild wonder that people could think or talk of
any literature, and especially any poetry, other than “W. W.’s” own.
Even his experiences in 1800 could not prevent him from handling[462]
the Poems of 1815 with the same “irreverent _parrhesia_” which he uses
immediately after[463] also to Southey on _Roderick_ as compared with
_Kehama_ and _Madoc_. His famous appreciation of Blake[464] (of whom
'tis pity that he knew no more) is one of the capital examples of
pre-established harmony between subject and critic. That he could not,
on the other hand, like Shelley, is not unsusceptible of explanations by
no means wholly identical, though partly, with those which account for
Hazlitt’s error. Lamb did not like the word “unearthly” (he somewhere
objects to its use) and he did not like the thing unearthliness. The
regions where, as Mr Arnold has it, “thin, thin, the pleasant human
noises sound,” were not his haunt. Now Blake always has a homely
domestic everyday side close to his wildest prophetisings,[465] and
Shelley has not. On the other hand, how completely does he grasp even
Cervantes in the few _obiter dicta_ to Southey on Aug. 19, 1825,[466]
and how instantly he seizes the “charm one cannot explain” in _Rose
Aylmer_.[467] And his very last letter concerns a book, and a book on
poetry, Phillips’s _Theatrum Poetarum_.
[Sidenote: _Uniqueness of Lamb’s critical style_]
His love was, as we said, “of the book,” perhaps, rather than, as in
Hazlitt’s case, “of literature.” The Advocatus Diaboli may once more
suggest that to Lamb the book was a very little too much on a level with
the tea-pot and the engraving—that he had a shade in excess of the
collector’s feeling about him. But the Court will not call upon the
learned gentleman to say anything more on that head. It is time to
acknowledge, without reservations or provisos, the unique quality of
“Elia’s” critical appreciation. Very much of this quality—if a quality
be separable into parts—arises from his extraordinary command of
phrase,—the phrase elaborate without affectation, borrowed yet
absolutely individual and idiosyncratic, mannered to the _n_th, but
never mannerised, in which, though he might not have attained to it
without his great seventeenth-century masters, he stands original and
alone. In no critic perhaps—not even in Mr Pater—does style count for so
much as in Lamb; in none certainly is it more distinctive, and, while
never monotonous, more homogeneous, uniform, instantly recognisable and
self-bewrayed. The simulative power—almost as of the leaf-insect and
suchlike creatures—with which he could imitate styles, is of course most
obvious in the _tour de force_ of the Burton counterfeits. But in his
best and most characteristic work it is not this which we see, but
something much nobler, though closely allied to it. It is not Browne, or
Fuller, or Burton, or Glanvill, but something like them, yet different.
And though it has more _outré_ presentation in some of his miscellaneous
writing than in his criticism, yet it is never absent in the most
striking pieces of this, and gives them much of their hold on us.
[Sidenote: _and thought._]
Still, those who, however unnecessarily (for no one surely is going to
deny it save in a mood of paradox or of monomania), insist that style
must be the body of thought—nay, that this body itself must think (in
Donne’s phrase), and not merely live, will find no difficulty in
claiming Lamb as theirs. Nothing of the kind is more curious than the
fact that, strongly marked as are his peculiarities and much as he may
himself have imitated, he is not imitable; nobody has ever, except in
the minutest shreds—rather actually torn off from his motley than
reproducing it—written in Lamb’s style save Lamb. And accordingly no one
(though not a few have tried) has ever criticised like Lamb. It is very
easy to be capricious, fantastic, fastidious—as easy as to wear yellow
stockings and go cross-gartered, and as effective. To Lamb’s critical
attitude there go in the first place that love for the book which has
been spoken of; then that faculty of sound, almost common-sense, “taste”
which is shown in the early letters to Coleridge and Southey; then the
reading of years and decades; and, lastly, the _je ne sais quoi_ that
“fondoos” the other things, as the old Oxford story has it—a story to be
constantly borne in mind by the critic and the historian of
criticism.[468] Even the other ingredients are not too common,
especially in conjunction: the _je ne sais quoi_ itself is here, and
nowhere else.
[Sidenote: _Leigh Hunt: his somewhat inferior position._]
Leigh Hunt[469] claims less space from us than either of his friends
Hazlitt and Lamb. This is not because he is an inconsiderable critic,
for he is by no means this. As has been said, he has the immense and
surprising credit of having first discovered the greatness of the tragic
part of Middleton’s _Changeling_, as an individual exploit, and in more
general ways he has that, which Macaulay duly recognised in a well-known
passage,[470] of being perhaps more _catholic_ in his tastes as regards
English Literature than any critic up to his time. He has left a very
large range of critical performance, which is very rarely without taste,
acuteness, and felicity of expression; and he has, as against both the
greater critics just named, the very great advantage of possessing a
competent knowledge of at least one modern literature[471] besides his
own, and some glimmerings of others. He has the further deserts of being
almost always readable, of diffusing a pleasant sunny atmosphere, and of
doing very much to keep up the literary side of that periodical
production which, for good or for evil, was, with the novel, the great
literary feature of the nineteenth century. These are not small merits:
and while they might seem greater if they were not thrown somewhat into
the shade by the superior eminence of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the
superior attractiveness of Lamb, they retain, even in the vicinity of
these, claims to full acknowledgment.
[Sidenote: _Reasons for it._]
A severely critical estimate, however, will discover in Leigh Hunt—
perhaps in very close juxtaposition and in a sort of causal relation to
these merits themselves—something which is not quite so good. Even his
catholicity may be set down in part, by the Enemy, to a certain loose
facility of liking, an absence of fastidiousness and selection. If Lamb
goes too far towards the ends of the English literary earth for the
objects of his affection, Hunt is rather too content to find them _in
triviis et angiportis_. He does not exactly “like grossly,” but he likes
a little promiscuously. The fault is no very bad one; and it becomes
exceedingly venial—nay, a positive virtue in time and circumstance—when
we compare it with the unreasonable exclusiveness of the Neo-classic
period. But it is a kind of criticism which inclines rather too much to
the uncritical.
[Sidenote: _His attitude to Dante._]
A further objection may be taken by applying that most dangerous of all
tests, the question “What does he _dis_like?” For the twentieth time
(probably) let us repeat that in criticism likes and dislikes are free;
and that the man who, however unfortunately, still honestly dislikes
what the consensus of good criticism approves, is entitled to say so,
and had much better say so. But he gives his reasons, descends upon
particulars, at his peril. Leigh Hunt, to do him justice, is not like Mr
Rymer—it is not his habit “no wise to allow.” But it is certainly a pity
that one of his exceptions should be Dante, and it is certainly a much
greater pity that among the reasons given for unfavourable
criticism[472] should be because Dante “puts fabulous people with real
among the damned,” because Purgatory is such a very disagreeable idea,
and because the whole poem contains “absurdities too obvious nowadays to
need remark.”
This, however, was merely an exceptional outburst of that “Liberal”
Philistinism and blundering which, it is only fair to say, had been
provoked by plentiful exhibition of the same qualities on the other
side, and which was more particularly excusable in Leigh Hunt (humanly,
if not critically, speaking), because nobody, not even Hazlitt, had
received worse treatment from that side than himself. But it does
something affect his critical position; for even Hazlitt managed, in
some queer fashion, to distinguish between the prostitute baronet, Sir
Walter Scott, and “the Author of _Waverley_,” between that wicked Mr
Burke and the author of the great speeches and treatises. But the main
reasons why Hunt must go with shorter measure than others, is the
combination of abundance in quantity with a certain want of distinction
in quality, which mars his writings. Not even the largest space here
possible would enable us to go through them all, and we should be able
to select but a few that are of unquestionably distinctive and
characteristic _race_. It is, indeed, rather in his favour that you may
dip almost anywhere into him with the certainty of a wholesome,
pleasant, and refreshing critical bath or draught. He is very rarely
untrustworthy; and when he is, as in the _Dante_ case, he tells the fact
and its secret more frankly even than Hazlitt himself. But it would be
unjust to refer to no samples of him, and a few of the most
characteristic shall therefore be given.
[Sidenote: _Examples from_ Imagination and Fancy.]
Fortunately there is an extremely favourable example of his criticism
which fills a whole book to itself, and is written under something like
a general scheme. This is the volume—modestly sub-titled “Selections,”
but containing a very large proportion of comment and original matter—
which he called _Imagination and Fancy_,[473] and intended to follow up
with four others, though only one, _Wit and Humour_,[474] was ever
written. The plan was begun late (1844); but as we have seen in almost
every instance, a man’s critical work very rarely declines with years,
unless he actually approaches dotage: and the book is, on the whole, not
merely the most favourable but the most representatively favourable
example of Leigh Hunt’s criticism. It opens by a set Essay on the
question “What is Poetry?” from which, perhaps, any one who knew the
author’s other work, but not this, might not expect very much, for Hunt
had not an abstract or philosophical head. He acquits himself, however,
remarkably well. His general definition that Poetry is “the utterance of
a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its
conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the
principle of variety in uniformity,” is not bad; but these things are
never very satisfactory. It will be seen that Hunt, like Coleridge,
though with a less “Cimmerian” obscurity of verbiage, “dodges” the frank
mention of “metre” or “verse”; but this is not because he is in any way
inclined to compromise. On the contrary, he says[475] (taking, and
perhaps designedly, the very opposite line to Wordsworth) that he “knows
of no very fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry.” But the
strength of the “Essay,” as of the whole book, is in the abundant and
felicitous illustration of the various points of this definition by
commented selections from the poets themselves.
That catholicity which has been said to be his main critical virtue will
be found (without any of the vice which has been hinted as sometimes
accompanying it) in the very list of the authors selected from—Spenser,
Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Dekker,
and Webster, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats: while the less
“imaginative” poets are by no means neglected, and in particular Leigh
Hunt brings out, often as no one had ever done before, that sheer
poetical quality of Dryden to which the critics of 1800-1830 had been as
a rule unjust. But the comment (and one cannot say more) is usually
worthy of the selection. The fullest division of all is that on Spenser—
indeed Leigh Hunt’s appreciation of this at once exquisite and
magnificent poet is one of the very best we have, and would be the best
of all if it had been a little more sensitive to Spenser’s “brave_st_
translunary things,” to the pervading exaltation and sublimation of
thought and feeling which purifies the most luscious details, and unites
the most straggling divagations in a higher unity. But, short of this,
it would be difficult to have a better detailed eulogium, _pièces en
main_, of the subject; nor does Hunt fail to make out something of a
case against, at least, the exaggeration of Lessing’s attack on the _ut
pictura poesis_ view. But his limitations appear in his complete
misunderstanding of Coleridge’s exact and profound observation that
Spenser’s descriptions are “not in the true sense of the word
_picturesque_, but composed of a wondrous series of images as in
dreams.” What Coleridge meant, of course, is that sequence rather than
strict “composition” is Spenser’s secret—that his pageants _dissolve
into_ one another. But in these finesses Hunt is seldom at his ease. So,
again, he blasphemes one of the most beautiful lines of _The Tempest_—
“The fringed curtains of thine eye advance”—
as “elaborate nothingness, not to say nonsense” [how nothingness can in
any case be sense he shall tell us], “pompous,” “declamatory,” and
disapproved of by—Pope!
One really blushes for him. Could he possibly be unaware that when a
person is about to look at anything, the natural gesture is to lower the
head and thrust it a little forward, raising or depressing the eyelids
at the same time? or be insensible to the exquisite profile image of
Miranda with the long eyelashes projected against the air? And he was
the author of _A Criticism of Female Beauty_! But if he sometimes
misunderstands, he seldom misses good things such as (it is true Warton
put him on this) the Medea passage of Gower.[476] Ben Jonson made him
uncomfortable, which is again a pity; and on Beaumont and Fletcher he is
at almost his very worst: but he is sounder than some greater ones on
Ford and Massinger, and his great “catch” of De Flores deserves yet a
third mention. He is at his very best and pleasantest, too, where most
men fail—where they are even often very _un_pleasant—on his
contemporaries, Coleridge, and Shelley, and Keats. When you have said
such a thing as this[477] of Coleridge, “Of pure poetry, ... consisting
of nothing but its essential self, ... he was the greatest master of his
time,” you had better “stand down.” Your critical claim is made out: you
may damage but can hardly increase it. Yet it is only in the severe
court of critical history that one would wish to silence Hunt: for, in
truth, nine-tenths of his criticism is admirable, and most admirably
suited to instruct and encourage the average man. Impressionism and
Rulelessness are almost as fairly justified of him, their child, as of
any other that I can think of. They scarcely ever lead him wrong in
liking; and he mentions what he dislikes so seldom that he has only
occasional chances of being wrong there.
[Sidenote: _Hazlitt._]
But the greatest of the “Cockney critics” (_quelle Cocaigne!_) has yet
to come. There is “a company of warm young men,” as Dryden has it, who
would doubtless disdain the inquiry whether Coleridge or Hazlitt is the
greatest of English critics; and it is quite certain that this inquiry
might be conducted in a sufficiently futile sense and manner. There are
others, less disdainful, who might perhaps be staggered by the
acknowledgment _in limine_ that it is possible to answer the question
either way—nay, for the same person to give both answers, and yet be
“not unwelcome back again” as a reasonable disputant. I have myself in
my time, I think, committed myself to both propositions; and I am not at
all disposed to give up either—for reasons which it will be more proper
to give at the end than at the beginning of an examination of Hazlitt
himself. That he was a great critic there will probably now be little
dispute, though Goethe is said not to have found much good in him;
though persons of worship, including Mr Stevenson, have thought him
greater as a miscellaneous essayist; and though you may read writings of
considerable length upon him in which no attempt is made to bring out
his critical character at all.
[Sidenote: _Method of dealing with him._]
His critical deliverances are so numerous and so voluminous that the
“brick of the house” process, which we have frequently found applicable,
has in his case to be given up, or at least considerably modified—for it
is too much the principle of the present History to be given up
altogether. Fortunately there is no difficulty in the modification.
Hazlitt is not, like Coleridge, remarkable for the discovery and
enunciation of any one great critical principle, or for the emission
(_obiter_ or otherwise) of remarkable mediate _dicta_, or for
_marginalia_ on individual passages or lines, though sometimes he can do
the last and sometimes also the second of these things. What he is
remarkable for is his extraordinary fertility and felicity, as regards
English literature, in judgments, more or less “grasped,” of individual
authors, books, or pieces. As, by preference, he stops at the passage,
and does not descend to the individual line or phrase, so, by preference
also,[478] he stops at the individual example of the Kind, and does not
ascend to the Kind itself, or at least is not usually very happy in his
ascension. But within these limits (and they are wide enough), the
fertility and the felicity of his criticism are things which strike one
almost dumb with admiration; and this in spite of certain obvious and in
their way extremely grave faults.
The most obvious, though by far the least, of these,—indeed one which is
displayed with such frankness and in a way so little delusive as to be
hardly a fault at all, though it is certainly a drawback,—is a sort of
audacious sciolism—acquiescence in ignorance, indifference about
“satisfying the examiners”—for half a dozen different names would be
required to bring out all the sides of it.
[Sidenote: _His surface and occasional faults: Imperfect knowledge and
method._]
His almost entire ignorance of all literatures but his own gives him no
trouble, though it cannot be said that it does him no harm. In treating
of comic writers, not in English only but generally, he says[479] (with
perfect truth) that Aristophanes and Lucian are two of the four chief
names for comic humour, but that he shall say little of them, for he
knows little. Would all men were as honest! but one cannot say, “Would
all critics were as ignorant!” In his _Lectures on the English Poets_ he
is transparently, and again quite honestly, ignorant of mostly all the
earlier minorities, with some not so minor. He almost prided himself
upon not reading anything in the writing period of his life; and he
seems to have carried out his principles so conscientiously that, if
anything occurred in the course of a lecture which was unknown to him,
he never made the slightest effort to supply the gap. His insouciance in
method was equal to that in regard to material; and when we find[480]
Godwin and Mrs Radcliffe included, with no satiric purpose, among “The
English Comic Writers,” they are introduced so naturally that the
absurdity hardly strikes us till some accident wakes us up to it. If
inaccuracies in matters of fact are not very common in him, it is
because, like a true critic, he pays very little attention to such
matters, and is wholly in opinion and appreciation and judgment, and
other things where the free spirit is kept straight, if at all, by its
own instinct. But he does commit such inaccuracies, and would evidently
commit many more if he ran the risk of them oftener.
[Sidenote: _Extra-literary prejudice._]
The last and gravest of his drawbacks has to be mentioned, and though it
may be slurred over by political partisanship, those who admire and
exalt him in spite of and not because of his politics, are well entitled
to call attention to it. To the unpleasantness of Hazlitt’s personal
temper we have the unchallengeable testimony of his friends Lamb, who
was the most charitable, and Hunt, who with all his faults was one of
the most good-natured, of mortals. But what we may call his political
temper, especially when it was further exasperated by his personal, is
something of the equal of which no time leaves record. Whenever this
east wind blows, the true but reasonable Hazlittian had better, speaking
figuratively, “go to bed till it is over,” as John Hall Stevenson is
said to have done literally in the case of the literal Eurus. Not only
does Hazlitt then cease to be a critic,—he ceases to be a rational
being. Sidney and Scott are the main instances of its effect, because
Sidney could not have annoyed, and Scott we know did not in any way
annoy, Hazlitt personally. Gifford is not in this case, and he was
himself so fond of playing at the roughest of bowls that nobody need
pity him for the rubbers he met. But Hazlitt’s famous _Letter_ to him,
which some admire, always, I confess, makes me think of the
Doll’s-dressmaker’s father’s last fit of the horrors in _Our Mutual
Friend_, and of the way in which the luckless “man talent” fought with
the police and “laid about him hopelessly, fiercely, staringly,
convulsively, foamingly.” Fortunately the effect was not so fatal, and I
know no other instance in which Hazlitt actually required the strait
waistcoat.[481] But he certainly did here: and in a considerable number
of instances his prejudices have made him, if not exactly _non compos
mentis_, yet certainly _non compos judicii_.
[Sidenote: _His radical and usual excellence._]
Fortunately, however, the wind does not always blow from this quarter
with him, and when it does the symptoms are so unmistakable that nobody
can be deceived unless he chooses to be, or is so stupid that it really
does not matter whether he is deceived or not. Far more usually it is
set in a bracing North or fertilising West, not seldom even in the
“summer South” itself. And then you get such appreciations, in the best,
the most thorough, the most delightful, the most _valuable_ sense, as
had been seldom seen since Dryden, never before, and in him not
frequently. I do not know in what language to look for a parallel
wealth. Systematic Hazlitt’s criticism very seldom is, and, as hinted
above, still seldomer at its best when it attempts system. But then
system was not wanted; it had been overdone; the patient required a
copious alterative. He received it from Hazlitt as he has—virtue and
quantity combined—received it from no one else since: it is a “patent
medicine” in everything but the presence of quackery. Roughly speaking,
Hazlitt’s criticism is of two kinds. The first is very stimulating, very
interesting, but, I venture to think, the less valuable of the two. In
it Hazlitt at least endeavours to be general, and takes a lesson from
Burke in “prodigious variation” on his subject. The most famous, the
most laboured, and perhaps the best example is the exordium of the
_Lectures on the English Poets_, with its astonishing “amplification” on
what poetry in general is and what it is not. A good deal of this is
directly Coleridgean. I forget whether this is the lecture which
Coleridge himself, when he read it, thought that he remembered “talking
at Lamb’s”; but we may be quite sure that he had talked things very like
it. Much in the “Shakespeare and Milton” has the same quality, and may
have been partly derived from the same source: the critical character of
Pope[482] is another instance, and probably more original. For Hazlitt
had not merely learnt the trick from his master but had himself a genius
for it; and he adorned these disquisitions with more _phrase_ than
Coleridge’s recalcitrant pen usually allowed him, though there seems to
have been plenty in his speech.
The Pope passage is specially interesting, because it leads us to the
second and, as it seems to me, the chief and principal class of
Hazlitt’s critical deliverances—those in which, without _epideictic_
intention, without, or with but a moderate portion of, rhetoric and
amplification and phrasemaking, he handles separate authors and works
and pieces. I have said that I think him here unsurpassed, and perhaps
unrivalled, in the quantity and number of his deliverances, and only
surpassed, _if so_, in their quality, by the greatest things of the
greatest persons. These deliverances are to be found everywhere in his
extensive critical work, and it is of a survey of some of them,
conditioned in the manner outlined above, that the main body of any
useful historical account of his criticism must consist. The four main
places are the Lectures on _The English Poets_ (1818), on _The English
Comic Writers_ (1819), on _Elizabethan Literature_ (1820), and the book
on _Characters of Shakespeare_ (1817). We may take them in the order
mentioned, though it is not quite chronological, because the
chronological dislocation, in the case of the second pair, is logically
and methodically unavoidable.
[Sidenote: The English Poets.]
How thoroughly this examination of the greater particulars (as we may
call it) was the work which he was born to do is illustrated by the
sketches (at the end of the first Lecture on _The English Poets_[483])
of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_, the _Decameron_, Homer,
the Bible, Dante, and (O Groves of Blarney!) _Ossian_. Hazlitt’s faults
(except prejudice, which is here fortunately silent) are by no means
hidden in them—irrelevance, defect of knowledge, “casualness,” and other
not so good things. But the _gusto_,[484] the spirit, the inspiriting
quality, are present in tenfold measure. Here is a man to whom
literature is a real and live thing, and who can make it real and alive
to his readers—a man who does not love it or its individual examples “by
allowance,” but who loves it “with personal love.” Even his
Richardsonian digression[485]—horrible to the stop-watch man—is alive
and real and stimulating with the rest. The Dante passage is a little
false perhaps in parts, inadequate, prejudiced, what you will in others.
But it is criticism—an act of literary faith and hope and charity too—a
substance; something added to, and new-born in, the literary cosmos. He
is better (indeed he is here almost at his very best) on Spenser than on
Chaucer, but why? Because he _knew_ more about Spenser, because he was
plentifully read in sixteenth- and hardly read at all in
fourteenth-century literature. And so always: the very plethora of one’s
notes for comment warning the commentator that he is lost if he indulges
rashly. Where Hazlitt is inadequate (as for instance on Dryden) he is
more instructive than many men’s adequacy could be, and where he is not—
on Collins, on the Ballads, and elsewhere—he prepares us for that
ineffable and half-reluctant outburst—a very Balaam’s blessing—on
Coleridge,[486] which stands not higher than this, not lower than that,
but as an _A-per-se_, consummate and unique.
[Sidenote: _The_ Comic Writers.]