In a sense the _Comic Writers_ are even better. The general exordium on

Wit and Humour belongs to the first class of Hazlitt’s critical

performances as defined above, and is one of the cleverest of them;

though it may perhaps have the faults of its class, and some of those of

its author. That on Comedy—the general part of it—incurs this sentence

in a heavier degree; for Aristotle or somebody else seems to have

impressed Hazlitt too strongly with the necessary _shadiness_ of Comedy,

and it is quite clear that of the Romantic variety (which to be sure

hardly anybody but Shakespeare has ever hit off) he had an insufficient

idea. He is again inadequate on Jonson; it is indeed in his criticism,

because of its very excellence, that we see—more than anywhere else,

though we see it everywhere—the truth of his master’s denunciation of

the “criticism which denies.” But his lecture or essay on the capital

examples of the comedy which he really liked—that of the Restoration—is

again an apex: and, as it happens, it is grouped for English students

with others—the morally excellent and intellectually vigorous but rather

purblind onslaught of Collier, the again vigorous but somewhat

Philistine following thereof by Macaulay, the practical confession of

Lamb’s fantastic and delightful apology, Leigh Hunt’s rather feeble

compromise—after a fashion which shows it off to a marvel. While as to

the chapter on the Eighteenth-century Novel it has, with a worthier

subject, an equal supremacy of treatment. You may differ with much of

it, but always agree to differ: except in that estimate of Lovelace

which unfortunately shows us Hazlitt’s inability to recognise a _cad_ in

the dress and with the manners of a fine gentleman.[487]

[Sidenote: The Age of Elizabeth.]

The _Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth_ (which succeeded the _Comic

Writers_, as these had succeeded the _Poets_) maintain, if they do not

even raise, the standard. Perhaps there is nothing so fine as the

Coleridge passage in individual and concentrated expression; nor any

piece of connected criticism so masterly as the chapter on the Novel.

But the level is higher: and nowhere do we find better expression of

that _gusto_—that amorous quest of literary beauty and rapturous

enjoyment of it—which, has been noted as Hazlitt’s great merit. His

faults are here, as always, with him and with us. Even the faithful Lamb

was driven to expostulate[488] with the wanton and, as it happens, most

uncritical belittlement of Sidney,[489] and (though he himself was

probably less influenced by political partisanship or political feeling

of any kind than almost any great writer of whom we know) to assign this

to its true cause. It is odd[490] that a critic, and a great critic,

should contrive to be inadequate both on Browne and on Dryden: and again

one cannot but suspect the combination to be due to the fact that both

were Royalists. But the King’s Head does not always come in: and it is

only fair to Hazlitt to say that he is less biassed than Coleridge by

the royalism itself of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the supposed

republicanism of Massinger. And in by far the greater part of the book—

nearly the whole of that part of it which deals with the dramatists—

there is no disturbance of this kind. The opening, if somewhat

discursive, is masterly, and with very few exceptions the lecturer or

essayist carries out the admirable motto—in fact and in deed the motto

of all real critics—“I have endeavoured to feel what was good, and to

give a reason for the faith that was in me when necessary and when in my

power.”[491] Two of his sentences, in dealing with Beaumont and

Fletcher, not merely set the key-note of all good criticism but should

open the stop thereof in all fit readers. “It is something worth living

for to write or even read such poetry as this, or to know that it has

been written.” Again, “And so it is something, as our poets themselves

wrote, ‘far above singing.’”[492]

[Sidenote: Characters of Shakespeare.]

The _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ is perhaps not as good as any of

these three courses of Lectures; but it should be remembered that it

came earlier in time, and that the critic had not “got his hand in.” The

notes are as a rule nearly as desultory as Coleridge’s, with less

suggestiveness; there is at least one outburst, in the case of _Henry

V._, of the usual disturbing influence; there is very much more

quotation than there need be from Schlegel; and there are other signs of

the novitiate. Yet the book contains admirable things, as in the early

comparison of Chaucer and Shakespeare, where, though Hazlitt’s defective

knowledge of Chaucer again appears, there is much else good. Among the

_apices_ of Shakespearian criticism is the statement that the poet “has

no prejudice for or against his characters,”[493] that he makes “no

attempt to force an interest: everything is left for time and

circumstance to unfold.”[494] There is perhaps something inconsistent

with this as well as with truth in the observation on _Lear_,[495] that

“He is here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination”; but, like

most of the greater critics, Hazlitt cares very little for superficial

consistency. The characters of Falstaff and Shylock are masterpieces in

his _bravura_ style, and one need perhaps nowhere seriously quarrel with

any critical statement of his except the astonishing one, that _All’s

Well that Ends Well_ is “one of the most _pleasing_” of the plays.

In the remaining volumes the literary articles or passages are only

occasional, and are often considerably adulterated with non-literary

matter. In _The Plain Speaker_, for instance, the opening paper on “The

Prose Style of Poets” holds out almost the highest promise, and gives

almost the lowest performance. Hazlitt, as is not so very uncommon with

him, seems to have deliberately set himself to take the other side from

Coleridge’s. That it happens also to be the wrong side matters very

little. But even his attack on Coleridge’s own prose style (open enough

to objection) has nothing very happy in it except the comparison, “To

read one of his disquisitions is like hearing the variations to a piece

of music without the score.” So, too, “On the Conversation of Authors,”

though intensely interesting, has no critical interest or very little—

the chief exception being the passage on Burke’s style. Far more

important is the glance at the theory of the single word in “On

Application to Study,”[496] and in that in “On Envy”[497] on the taste

of the Lake School.

[Sidenote: The Plain Speaker.]

Much of _The Plain Speaker_ is injured as a treasury of criticism,

though improved as a provision of amusement, by Hazlitt’s personal

revelations, complaints, agonies; but the critical _ethos_ of the man

was so irrepressible that it will not be refused. There is a curious

little piece[498] of critical blasphemy, or at least “dis-_gusto_” (the

word is wanted and is fairly choice Italian), in “On the Pleasure of

Hating,” and, almost throughout the series, the sharp flux and reflux of

literary admiration and political rage in respect of Scott is most

noteworthy. “On the Qualifications necessary to Success in Life”

contains yet another[499] of those passages on Coleridge which are like

nothing so much as the half-fond, half-furious, retrospects of a

discarded lover on his mistress—which are certainly like nothing else in

literature. But “On Reading Old Books” does not belie the promise of its

title, and is a complete and satisfactory palinode to the fit of

critical headache noted just now. One must not venture to cite from it;

it is to be read and re-read, and hardly any single piece, except the

immortal “Farewell to Essay-Writing,” gives us so much insight into

Hazlitt’s critical temperament as this. “On People of Sense” contains

many critical glances, and, unfortunately, one[500] of those on Shelley

which show Hazlitt at his worst. One might think that he who found

others so “far above singing” could not miss the similar altitude of the

author of _Prometheus Unbound_. But Shelley was a contemporary,

something of an acquaintance, a man of some means, a gentleman—so

Hazlitt must snarl[501] at him. Let us sigh and pass.

“Antiquity,” though on one side only, is almost throughout ours, and

therefore not ours: and there is not a little for us in “On Novelty and

Familiarity,” while “Old English Writers and Speakers” speaks for

itself, and is specially interesting for its glances on matters French

and its characteristically Hazlittian fling—one I confess with which I

have for once no quarrel—that “_’Tis pity She’s a Whore_ will no more

act than Lord Byron and Goethe together could have written it.”[502] It

puts one in charity for the absurd description,[503] contradicted by

his own remarks, of _Redgauntlet_s “the last and almost worst” of

Scott’s novels, and the prediction (alas! to be falsified) that “Old Sir

Walter will last long enough”—in the flesh, not in fame.[504] “Scott,

Racine, and Shakespeare” is not unworthy of its title, though it is

really on the first and last only. Racine is brought in perfunctorily,

and justice is done to him in neither sense.

_Table-Talk_, one of the greenest pastures of the Hazlittian champaign

generally, is among the least literary of the books, and yet so literary

enough. “On Genius and Common Sense” contributes its Character of

Wordsworth,[505] on whom Hazlitt is always interesting, because of the

extraordinary opposition between the men’s temperaments. The companion

on Shelley,[506] which is supplied by “On Paradox and Commonplace,” is

hardly less interesting, though, for the reasons above indicated, much

less valuable. “On Milton’s Sonnets,” however, is, as it ought to be, a

pure study and an admirable one.[507] “The Aristocracy of Letters”

carries its hay high on the horn, yet it is not negligible: and “On

Criticism,” which follows, really deserves the title, despite its

frequent and inevitable flings and runnings-amuck. The good-humoured,

though rather “home” description of “the Occult School”[508] (_v. supra_

on Lamb) is perfectly just. “On Familiar” Style is also no false

promiser, and yet another passage on Coleridge meets us in the paper “On

Effeminacy of Character.”

[Sidenote: The Round Table, _&c._]

Nor is the interesting “omnibus” volume, which takes its general title

from _The Round Table_, of the most fertile. The collection of short

papers, properly so called, was written earlier (1817) than most of the

books hitherto discussed, and therefore has some first drafts or

variants of not a little that is in them. In a note of it[509] occurs

the passage on Burke, which, with that on Scott in the _Spirit of the

Age_, is Hazlitt’s nearest approach to the sheer _delirium tremens_ of

the Gifford Letter: but he is not often thus. “The Character of Milton’s

Eve” is a fine critical paper of its kind, and “takes the taste out”

well after the passage on Burke. The long handling of _The Excursion_ is

very interesting to compare with that in the _English Poets_, as is the

earlier “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with similar things elsewhere.

“Pedantry” and others give something: and though no human being

(especially no human being who knows both books) has ever discovered

what made Hazlitt call _John Buncle_ “the English Rabelais,” the paper

on Amory’s queer novel is a very charming one. “On the Literary

Character” does somewhat deceive us: “Commonplace Critics” less so: but

to “Poetical Versatility” we must return. Of the remaining contents of

the volume, the well-known _Conversations with Northcote_ (where the

painter plays Hazlitt’s idea of an Advocatus Diaboli on Hazlitt) gives

less still. But there is a striking passage on Wordsworth,[510] a

paradox (surely?) on Tom Paine[511] as “a fine writer” (you might as

well call a good getter of coal at the face “a fine sculptor”), an

interesting episode[512] on early American nineteenth-century

literature; and not a few others, especially the profound self-criticism

(for no doubt Northcote had nothing to do with it) on Hazlitt’s

abstinence from society.[513] In _Characteristics_, one of the few

notable collections of the kind in English, CCXC, a most curious and

pretty certainly unconscious echo of Aristotle,[514] is our best

gleaning; while the 52d “Commonplace,” on Byron and Wordsworth, and the

12th and 11th “Trifles light as air,” on Fielding and on “modern”

critics, play the same part there.

[Sidenote: The Spirit of the Age.]

On the other hand, _The Spirit of the Age_ (with the exception of some

political and philosophical matter) is wholly literary; and may rank

with the three sets of _Lectures_ and the _Characters of Shakespeare_ as

the main storehouse of Hazlitt’s criticism. Here, too, there is much

repetition, and here, at the end of the Scott article, is the almost

insane outburst more than once referred to. But the bulk of the book is

at Hazlitt’s very best pitch of appreciative grasp. If he is anywhere

out of focus, it is in reference to Godwin’s novels—the setting of which

in any kind of comparison with Scott’s (though Hazlitt was critic enough

from the first to see that Godwin could by no possibility be the “Author

of _Waverley_”) is a remarkable instance of the disadvantage of the

contemporary, and, to some extent, the sympathiser. But the book

certainly goes far to bear out the magnificent eulogy of Hazlitt for

which Thackeray[515] took it as text, quite early in his career.

[Sidenote: Sketches and Essays.]

The _Sketches and Essays_ are again very rich, where they are rich; and

advertise the absence of riches most frankly where they are not. “On

Reading New Books”; not a little of “Merry England”; the whole of “On

Taste” and “Why the Heroes of Romances are insipid” speak for

themselves, and do not bewray their claim. “Taste,” especially,

contains[516] one of Hazlitt’s own titles to critical supremacy in his

fixing on Perdita’s primrose description as itself supreme, when “the

scale of fancy, passion, and observation of nature is raised” high

enough. [Sidenote: Winterslow.] And as for _Winterslow_, its first and

its last papers are “things enskied” in criticism, for the one is “My

First Acquaintance with Poets,” and the last “The Farewell to Essay

Writing.”

[Sidenote: _Hazlitt’s critical virtue,_]

These two last, the sentence on

“That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty”;

and (say) the paper referred to a little above on “Poetical

Versatility,” will serve as texts for some more general remarks on

Hazlitt’s critical character. We have said at the beginning of this

notice everything that need be said by way of deduction or allowance; we

have only hinted at the clear critical “balance to credit” which

remains; and these essays and passages will help to bring this out.

To take the “Poetic Versatility” first, it is an interesting paper, and

with the aid of those “characters” of poets, &c., which have been

indicated in the survey just completed, gives the best possible idea of

one (and perhaps the most popular) of Hazlitt’s forms of critical

achievement and influence. In it he eddies round his subject—completing

his picture of it by strokes apparently promiscuous in selection, but

always tending to body forth the image that presents itself to him, and

that he wishes to present to his readers. “Poetry dwells in a perpetual

Utopia of its own.” It “does not create difficulties where they do not

exist, but contrives to get rid of them whether they exist or not.” “Its

strength is in its wings; its element the air.” We “may leave it to time

to take out the stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself.” Poets

“either find things delightful or make them so,” &c. &c., some of the

etceteras drawing away from the everlasting, and condescending rather

lamentably to the particular.

[Sidenote: _in set pieces,_]

Now there is no need to tell the reader—even the reader of this book, I

hope—that this, of these utterances, is a reproduction of Longinus (whom

Hazlitt most probably had not read), or that of Coleridge, whom most

certainly he had both read and heard.[517] “The man who plants cabbages

imitates too”: and it is only the foolishest folk of rather foolish

times who endeavour to be original, though the wisest of all times

always succeed in being so. The point with Hazlitt is that in these

circlings round his subject—these puttings of every possible way in

which, with or without the help of others, it strikes him—he gives the

greatest possible help to others in being struck. One of the blows will

almost certainly hit the nail on the head and drive it home into any

tolerably susceptible mind: many may, and the others after the first

will help to fix it. Of method there may not be very much—there is

rather more here than in most cases; but whether there is method or not,

“everything,” in the old military phrase, “goes in”; the subject and the

reader are carried by assault, mass, variety, repetition of argument,

imagery, phrase. Hazlitt will not be refused; he takes towns at a

hand-gallop, like Condé at Lerida—and he does not often lose them

afterwards.

[Sidenote: _and universally._]

In this phase of his genius, however, there is perhaps, for some tastes

at any rate, a little too much of what has been called _bravura_—too

much of the merely epideictic. It is not so in the other. Appreciate the

appreciation of the _Winter’s Tale_ passage; still more take to heart

(they will go to it without much taking where there is one) the “First

Acquaintance with Poets,” or still better the marvellous critical

swan-song of the “Farewell,” and there can be no more doubt about

Hazlitt. _Quia multum amavit_ is at once his best description and his

greatest glory. In all the range of criticism which I have read I can

hardly think of any one except Longinus who displays the same faculty of

not unreasonable or unreasoned passion for literature; and Longinus,

alas! has, as an opportunity for showing this to us, scarcely more than

the bulk of one of Hazlitt’s longest Essays, of which, long and short,

Hazlitt himself has given us, I suppose, a hundred. Nor, as in some

others (many, if not most of whom, if I named them, I should name for

the sake of honour), is a genuine passion made the mere theme of

elaborate and deliberate literary variations. As we have seen, Hazlitt

will often leave it expressed in one sentence of ejaculatory and

convincing fervour; it seldom appears at greater length than that of a

passage, while a whole lecture or essay in the key of rapture is

exceedingly rare. Hazlitt is desultory, irrelevant, splenetic, moody,

self-contradictory; but he is never merely pleonastic,—there is no mere

verbiage, no mere virtuosity, in him.

And the consequence is that this enthusiastic appreciation of letters,

which I have, however heretically, taken throughout this book to be

really the highest function of criticism, _catches_: that the critical

yeast (to plagiarise from ourselves) never fails to work. The order of

history, as always, should probably be repeated, and the influence of

Coleridge should be felt, as Hazlitt himself felt it, first: it is well

to fortify also with Longinus himself, and with Aristotle, and with as

many others of the great ones as the student can manage to master. But

there is at least a danger, with some perhaps of not the worst minds, of

all this remaining cold as the bonfire before the torch is applied. The

_silex scintillans_ of Hazlitt’s rugged heart will seldom fail to give

the vivifying spark from its own inward and immortal fire.[518]

[Sidenote: _Blake._]

There have been times—perhaps they are not quite over—when the admission

of William Blake[519] into the category of critics would have been

regarded as an absurdity, or a bad jest. Nothing is more certain,

however, than that the poet-painter expresses, with a force and

directness rather improved by that lack of complete technical sanity

which some of his admirers most unwisely and needlessly deny, the

opinions of the “Extreme Right,” the high-fliers of the Army of

Romanticism. He may often be thinking of painting rather than of poetry;

but this is sometimes expressedly not the case, and many of his most

pointed sayings apply to the one art just as well as to the other—if

indeed it would not be still more correct to say that, except when they

concern mere technique, they always apply to both. His work, despite the

attention which it has received from hands, sometimes of the most

eminent, during the last forty years, has never yet been edited in a

fashion making its chaos cosmic or the threading of its labyrinths easy:

and it may be well to bring together some of the most noteworthy

critical expressions in it. That which has been referred to in a former

passage,[520] “Every man is a judge of pictures who has not been

connoisseured out of his senses,”[521] is in itself almost a miniature

manifesto of the new school of criticism. For “connoisseurship”—the

regular training in the orthodox system of judgment by rule and line and

pattern—is substituted the impression of the natural man, unconditioned

except by the retirement that it _shall_ be impression, and not

prejudice.

[Sidenote: _His critical position and dicta._]

So, again, that remarkable expression of the Prophet Isaiah[522] when,

as Blake casually mentions, he and Ezekiel “dined with me”—an occasion

on which surely any one of taste would like to have completed the

quartette. The poet-host tells us that he asked, “Does a firm persuasion

that a thing is so make it so?” and that the prophet-guest answered,

“All poets believe that it does”—a position from which La Harpism and

the reluctance to “surrender disbelief” are at once crushed, concluded,

and quelled.

In the remarkable engraved page on Homer and Virgil,[523] Blake

adventures himself (not with such rashness as may at first seem) against

Aristotle (or what he takes for Aristotle), by laying it down that Unity

and Morality belong to philosophy, not poetry, or at least are secondary

in the latter; that goodness and badness are not distinctions of

“character” (a saying in which there is some quibbling but much depth as

well); that the Classics, not Goths or Monks, “desolate Europe with

wars” (a great enough dictum at the junction of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries); and that “Grecian wit is mathematical form,”

which is only “eternal in the reasoning memory,” while Gothic is “living

form, that is to say, eternal existence”—perhaps the deepest saying of

the whole, though it wants large allowance and intelligent taking.

The “Notes on Reynolds” are naturally full of our stuff.

[Sidenote: _The “Notes on Reynolds”_]

“Enthusiastic admiration is the first principle of knowledge.” [Sir

Joshua had stated just the contrary.]

“What has reasoning to do with the art of painting [or, we may safely

add, of poetry]?”

“Knowledge of ideal beauty is not to be acquired; it is born in us.”

“One central form ... being granted, it does not follow that all other

forms are deformity. All forms are perfect in the poet’s mind, ... they

are from imagination.”

“To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the great

distinction of merit.” [The “streak of the tulip” re-habilitated, and

with a vengeance!]

“Invention depends altogether upon execution.”

“Passion and expression are beauty itself.”

“Ages are all equal: but genius is always above its age.”

[Sidenote: _and Wordsworth._]

It is worth while to add to these the very remarkable annotations upon

Wordsworth’s Prefaces: “I don’t know who wrote these: they are very

mischievous, and direct contrary to Wordsworth’s own practice” [where if

Blake had added the words “when he is a poet,” he would simply have

given the conclusion of the whole matter], with the very shrewd addendum

that Wordsworth is not so much attacking poetic diction, or defending

his own, as “vindicating unpopular poets.”

[Sidenote: _Commanding position of these._]

Scanty as this critical budget may seem, its individual items are of

extraordinary weight, when we remember that some of them were written

before the _Lyrical Ballads_ themselves appeared, and all of them by a

man of hardly any reading in contemporary literature, and quite out of

the circle of Coleridgean influence. It is scarcely, if at all, too much

to say that they are almost enough to start, in a fit mind, the whole

system of Romantic criticism in its more abstract form, and sometimes

even in its particular and concrete applications. All the

eighteenth-century Dagons—the beliefs in official connoisseurship, in

the unapproachable supremacy of the ancients, in the barbarism and

foolishness of Gothic art and literature, in the superiority of the

general to the particular, in the necessity of extracting central forms

and holding to them, in the supremacy of reason, in the teachableness of

poetry, in the virtues of copying, in the superiority of design to

execution,—all are tumbled off their pedestals with the most irreverent

violence. That the critic’s applications in the sister art to Rubens, to

Titian, to Reynolds himself, are generally unjust, and not infrequently

the result of pure ignorance, does not matter; his own formulas would

often correct him quite as thoroughly as those of the classical school.

What is important is his discovery and enunciation of these formulas

themselves.

For by them, in place of these battered gods of the classical or

neo-classical Philistia, are set up Imagination for Reason, Enthusiasm

for Good Sense, the Result for the Rule; the execution for the mere

conception or even the mere selection of subject; impression for

calculation; the heart and the eyes and the pulses and the fancy for the

stop-watch and the boxwood measure and the table of specifications. It

is not necessary to argue the question whether Blake’s own poetical work

(we are not concerned with his pictorial) justifies or disconcerts the

theories under which it was composed; it may be very strongly suspected,

from utterances new as well as old, that approval of the theory and

approval of the practice, as well as disapproval in each case, are too

intimately bound up with each other to make appeal to either much of an

argument. But for our main purpose, which is purely historical, the

importance of Blake should, even in these few pages, have been put out

of doubt. In no contemporary—not in Coleridge himself—is the

counter-creed to that of the Neo-classics formulated with a sharper

precision, and withal a greater width of inclusion and sweep.

[Sidenote: _Sir Walter Scott commonly undervalued as a critic._]

There are more senses than one (or for the matter of that two) in the

famous proverb, “The better is the enemy of the good.” And in one of

them, though not the commonest, it is eminently true of the criticism of

Sir Walter Scott. No one, of course, would give to Scott any such

relative rank as a critic as that which is his due either as poet or as

novelist; but the extent to which his fame as poet and novelist has

obscured his reputation as critic is altogether disproportionate and

unfair. It is even doubtful whether some tolerably educated persons ever

think of him as a critic at all. For his so-called “Prose Works” (except

_Tales of a Grandfather_) are very little read, and as usual the

criticism is the least read part of them. Yet it is a very large part—

extending, what with the Lives of _Swift_ and _Dryden_, the shorter

“_Biographies_,” the _Chivalry, Romance, and Drama_, and the collection

or selection of _Periodical Criticism_, to ten pretty solid volumes,

while even this excludes a great amount of critical matter in the notes

and Introductions to the _Poems_, the Novels, the _Dryden_ and _Swift_

themselves, and other by-works of Sir Walter’s gigantic industry.

Mere bulk, however, it may be said, is nothing—indeed it is too often,

in work of which posterity is so shy as it is of criticism, a positive

misfortune and drawback. What makes the small account taken of Scott as

a critic surprising and regrettable is the goodness as well as the bulk

of his critical production. Perhaps it may be urged with some justice,

in defence of this popular neglect, that his want of attention to style

is particularly unfortunate here. He is notoriously a rather “incorrect”

writer; and he does not, as many so-called incorrect writers have known

how to do, supply the want of academic propriety by irregular

brilliances of any kind.

[Sidenote: _Injustice of this._]

Another charge sometimes brought against him—that he is too good-natured

and too indiscriminate in praise—will less hold water;[524] and indeed

is much too closely connected with the popular notion of the critic as a

sort of “nigger”-overseer, whose business is to walk about and

distribute lashes—a notion which cannot be too often reprobated. As a

private critic Scott _was_ sometimes too easy-going, but by no means

always or often in his professional utterances. And he had what are

certainly two of the greatest requirements of the critic, reading and

sanity. Sometimes some amiable prepossession (such as the narrower

patriotism in his relative estimate of Fielding and Smollett) leads him

a little astray; but this is very seldom—far seldomer than is the rule

with critics of anything like his range. Here, as elsewhere, he does not

much affect the larger and deeper and higher generalisations; but here,

as elsewhere, his power of reaching these has been considerably

underrated. And the distaste itself saves him—and his readers—from the

hasty and floundering failures of those who aim more ambitiously at

width, depth, and height. In the methodic grasp and orderly exposition

of large and complicated subjects (as in the _Romance_[525] and _Drama_

examples) he leaves nothing to desire. Sometimes, in his regular

reviews, he condescends too much to the practice of making the review a

mere abstract of the book; but I have known readers who complain

bitterly of any other mode of proceeding.

Moreover, in two most important divisions of the critic’s art Scott has

very few superiors. These are the appreciation of particular passages,

books, and authors, and the writing of those critical biographies which

Dryden first essayed in English, and of which Johnson is the

acknowledged master. The Prefaces to the Ballantyne Novels[526] are the

best among Scott’s good things in this kind on the small scale, as the

_Dryden_ and the _Swift_ are on the great: for evidences of the former

excellence the reader has only to open any one of the half-score volumes

referred to above. And those golden qualities of heart which accompanied

his genius are illustrated, as well as that genius itself, in his

frequent critical writing on other novelists. The criticism of creators

on their fellows is not always pleasant reading, except for those who

delight to study the weaknesses of the _verdammte Race_. Scott

criticises great and small among the folk of whom he is the king, from

the commonest romancer up to Jane Austen, with equal generosity,

acuteness, and technical mastery. Nor ought we, in this necessarily

inadequate sketch, to omit putting in his cap the feather so often to be

refused to critics—the feather of catholicity. Macaulay could not praise

the delightful lady, whom both he and Scott did their utmost to

celebrate, without throwing out a fling at _Sintram_, as if there were

no room for good things of different kinds in the great region of

Romance. In Scott’s works you may find,[527] literally side by side, and

characterised by equal critical sense, the eulogy of _Persuasion_ and

the eulogy of _Frankenstein_.[528]

[Sidenote: _Campbell: his_ Lectures on Poetry.]

Campbell’s critical work is chiefly concentrated in two places, one of

them accessible with some difficulty, the other only too accessible

after a fashion. The first is the _Lectures on Poetry_, which, after

delivering them at the Royal Institution during the great vogue of such

things in 1820, he refashioned later for the _New Monthly Magazine_ when

he was its editor, so that they are only to be had by one of the least

agreeable of all processes, the rummaging _for a purpose_ in an old

periodical.

[Sidenote: _His_ Specimens.]

The accessibility of the other place—the critical matter contributed to

the well-known _Specimens of the British Poets_, and to some extent the

actual selections themselves—is greater because they are in nearly all

the second-hand book-shops, where from sixpence to a shilling a volume

will buy—well bound often and in perfectly good condition—matter which,

at any proper ratio of exchange, is worth a dozen times the money. This

worth consists of course mainly in the matter selected: but the taste

which selected it must figure for no small increment, and the purely

critical framework is, to say the least, remarkably worthy of both.

Campbell, a very puzzling person in his poetry, is by no means a very

easily comprehensible or appraisable one in his critical attitude. In

the general arrangement of this he is distinctly of the older fashion,

as the fashions of his time went. Like his style, though this is a very

fair specimen of the “last Georgian,” still in a manner the standard and

staple of the plainer English prose, his opinions are a thought

periwigged and buckrammed. He demurs to the “Romantic Unity” of Hurd

earlier and Schlegel later; and when in his swashing blow (and a good

swashing blow it is of its kind) on the side of Pope in the weary

quarrel, he tries to put treatment of artificial on a poetical level

with treatment of natural objects, we must demur pretty steadily

ourselves. But, on the other hand, he distinctly champions (and was, I

believe, the first actually so to formulate) the principle that “in

poetry there are many mansions,” and, what is more, he lives up to it.

He really and almost adequately appreciates Chaucer: it is only his

prejudice about Unity and the Fable that prevents him from being a

thorough-going Spenserian; and when we come to the seventeenth century

he is quite surprising. Again, it is true, his _general_ creed makes him

declare that the metaphysicians “thought like madmen.” But he is juster

to some of them than Hazlitt is; he has the great credit of having

(after a note of Southey’s, it is true) re-introduced readers to the

mazy but magical charms of _Pharonnida_; and he admits Godolphin and

Stanley, Flatman and Ayres. If the history of the earlier part of his

Introductory Essay is shaky, it could not have been otherwise in his

time; and it shows that the indolence with which he is so often charged

did not prevent him from making a very good use of what Warton and

Percy, Tyrwhitt and Ritson and Ellis, had provided.

This indolence, however, is perhaps more evident in the distribution of

the criticism, which, if not careless, is exceedingly capricious.

Campbell seems at first to have intended to concentrate this criticism

proper in the Introduction (to which nearly the whole of the first

volume is allotted), and to make the separate prefaces to the selections

mainly biographical. But he does not at all keep to this rule; the main

_Introduction_ itself is, if anything, rather too copious at the

beginning, while it is compressed and hurried at the end: not a few of

the minor pieces and less prominent poets have no criticism at all;

while, in the case of those that have it, it is often extremely

difficult to discover the principle of its allotment. Yet, on the whole,

Campbell ought never to be neglected by the serious student; for even if

his criticism were solely directed from an obsolete standpoint, it would

be well to go back to it now and then as a half-way house between those

about Johnson and those about Coleridge, while as a matter of fact it

has really a very fair dose of universal quality.[529]

[Sidenote: _Shelley: his_ Defence of Poetry.]

There are several critical passages in Shelley’s _Letters_, but, as

formally preserved, his criticism is limited to the _Defence of Poetry_,

which, despite its small bulk, is of extreme interest.[530] It is almost

the only return of its times to that extremely abstract consideration of

the matter which we found prevalent in the Renaissance, and which in

Shelley’s case, as in the cases of Fracastoro or of Sidney, is

undoubtedly inspired by Plato. It seems to have been immediately

prompted by some heresies of Peacock’s: but, as was always its author’s

habit, in prose as well as in verse, he drifts “away, afar” from what

apparently was his starting-point, over a measureless ocean of abstract

thinking. He endeavours indeed, at first, to echo the old saws about men

“imitating natural objects in the youth of the world” and the like, but

he does not in any way keep up the arrangement, and we are almost from

the outset in contact with his own ardent imagination—of which quality

he at once defines poetry as the expression. Again, the poetic faculty

is “the faculty of approximation to the beautiful.” Once more we have

the proud claim for poetry that poets are not merely the authors of

arts, but the inventors of laws, the teachers of religion. They

“participate in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” They are not

necessarily confined to verse, but they will be wise to use it. A poem

is the very image of life, expressed in its eternal truth. “Poetry is

something divine,” the “centre and circumference of knowledge,” the

“perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things,” the “record of

the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” All which

(or all except the crotchet about verse) I for one do most powerfully

and potently believe: though if any one says that, as generally with

Shelley, one is left stranded, or rather floating, in the vague, denial

is not easy. One can only wish oneself, as Poins wished his sister, “no

worse fortune.”[531]

[Sidenote: _Landor._]

In the course of this History we have seen not infrequent examples of

Criticism divorced from Taste—a severance to which the peculiarities of

classical and neo-classical censorship lent but too much encouragement.

It must be obvious that the general tendency of the criticism which we

are calling Modern inclines towards the divorce of Taste from Criticism—

to the admission of the monstrous regiment of mere arbitrary enjoyment

and liking, not to say mere caprice. But it is curious that our first

very distinguished example of this should be found in a person who, both

by practice and in theory, had very distinct “classical” tendencies—who,

in fact, with the possible exception of Mr Arnold, was the most

classical of at least the English writers of the nineteenth century.

[Sidenote: _His lack of judicial quality._]

Landor’s[532] critical shortcomings, however, are the obvious and

practically inevitable result of certain well-known peculiarities of

temperament, moral rather than intellectual, and principles of life

rather than of literature. With him, as with King Lear (whom in more

ways and points than one he resembled, though, luckily, with the tragedy

infinitely softened and almost smoothed away), the dominant is

_impotentia_—the increasing and at last absolute incapacity of the

intellect and will to govern the emotions and impulses. Now, as

criticism is itself an endless process of correcting impressions—or at

least of checking and auditing them till we are sure that they are

genuine, co-ordinated, and (with the real if not the apparent

consistency) consistent—a man who suffers from this _impotentia_ simply

cannot be a real critic, though he may occasionally make observations

critically sound.

[Sidenote: _In regular Criticism._]

The rule and the exceptions hold good with Landor unfailingly. He was an

excellent scholar; his acquaintance with modern literatures, though much

smaller and extremely arbitrary, was not positively small, and his

taste, in some directions at least, was delicate and exquisite. But of

judicial quality or qualities he had not one single trace, and, even

putting them out of the question, his intelligence was streaked and

flawed by strange veins of positive silliness. We need not dwell too

much on his orthographical and other whims, which have been shared by

some great ones—the judgments are the things. In the very first

paragraph of his very first regular criticism we find the statement that

the Poems of Bion and Moschus are not only “very different” from those

of Theocritus but “very inferior.” Inferior in what? in bulk certainly:

but in what else are the _Adonis_ and the _Bion_ itself inferior to

anything Theocritean? A critic should have been warned by his own

“different” not to rush on the “inferior,” which is so often

fallaciously consequent. I shall not be accused of excessive

Virgil-worship, but what criticism is there in the objection to _me

ceperat annus_ as “scarcely Latin” (really! really! Mr Landor, you were

not quite a Pollio!), and in the flat emendation of _mihi coeperat_; or

in the contemptuous treatment of that exquisite piece containing

ὁ θὴρ δ' ἔβαινε δειλῶς,

φοβεῖτο γὰρ Κυθήρην,

a phrase which, for simplicity, pictorial effect, and suggestion, is

almost worthy of Sappho? Such a sentence as that of Politian’s poems,

“one only has any merit,” is simply disabling: mere schoolboy prejudice

has evidently blinded the speaker. Yet it occurs in his best critique,

that on Catullus.

[Sidenote: _The Conversations._]

These set criticisms, however, are few, and Landor was evidently not at

ease in them. The literary “Conversations,” it may be said, are the true

test. And it is at least certain that these conversations supply not a

few of those more excellent critical observations which have been

acknowledged and saluted. Especially must we acknowledge and salute

one[533] which, though of considerable length, must be made an exception

to the rule of “not quoting.” Nowhere, in ancient or modern place, is

the education of the critic outlined with greater firmness and accuracy;

and those who, by this or that good fortune, have been put through some

such a process, may congratulate themselves on having learnt no vulgar

art in no vulgar way.

[Sidenote: _Loculus aureolus._]

l would seriously recommend to the employer of our critics, young and

old, that he oblige them to pursue a course of study such as this;

that, under the superintendence of some respectable student from the

University, they first read and examine the contents of the book—a

thing greatly more useful in criticism than is generally thought;

secondly, that they carefully write them down, number them, and range

them under their several heads; thirdly, that they mark every

beautiful, every faulty, every ambiguous, every uncommon expression.

Which being completed, that they inquire what author, ancient or

modern, has treated the same subject; that they compare them, first in

smaller, afterwards in larger portions, noting every defect in

precision and its causes, every excellence and its nature; that they

graduate these, fixing _plus_ and _minus_, and designating them more

accurately and discriminately by means of colours stronger or paler.

For instance purple might express grandeur and majesty of thought;

scarlet, vigour of expression; pink, liveliness; green, elegant and

equable composition; these, however, and others as might best attract

their notice and serve their memory. The same process may be used

where authors have not written on the same subject, when those who

have are wanting or have touched on it but incidentally. Thus Addison

and Fontenelle, not very like, may be compared in the graces of style,

in the number and degree of just thoughts and lively fancies; thus the

dialogues of Cicero with those of Plato, his ethics with those of

Aristotle, his orations with those of Demosthenes. It matters not if

one be found superior to the other in this thing and inferior in that:

the qualities of two authors are explored and understood and their

distances laid down, as geographers speak, from accurate survey. The

_plus_ and _minus_ of good and bad and ordinary will have something of

a scale to rest upon: and after a time the degrees of the higher parts

in intellectual dynamics may be more nearly attained, though never

quite exactly.

[Sidenote: _But again disappointing._]

Yet in close context with this very passage comes an idle “splurt”

(evidently half-due to _odium anti-theologicum_) at Coleridge—a thing

exactly of the kind which such discipline as has been just recommended

should check. And everywhere, especially in the long Miltonic examen

between “Southey and Landor,” the effects of Landor’s character appear

side by side with a sort of peddling and niggling censorship which one

might have thought not natural to that character at all, and which

perhaps is a _damnosa hereditas_ from the worse kind of classical

scholarship. Even on Boileau[534] he manages to be unfair; and at his

objection to one of Milton’s most exquisite and characteristic lines—

“Lancelot and Pelleas and Pellinore”—

one can but cover the face. Caprice, arbitrary legislation, sometimes

positive blindness and deafness,—these are Landor’s critical marks when

he quits pure theory, and sometimes when he does not quit it.

[Sidenote: _The revival of the Pope quarrels._]

With him we leave the “majorities”—those who, whether greater or lesser

critics, were great either as such or in other paths of letters. Some

smaller, but in some cases not so small, persons remain, with one or two

examples—one specially famous—of what we have called “the Adversaries.”

And first we must touch (if only in order to deal with yet another of

the majorities themselves, who has seemed to some to be a critic) on the

“Pope a Poet” quarrel.

[Sidenote: _Bowles._]

We have seen[535] that this quarrel, originally raised by Joseph Warton,

was even by him latterly waged as by one _cauponans bellum_; but a

lazily and gingerly waged war is generally a long one, and this instance

did not discredit the rule. Johnson’s intervention[536] in it, in his

_Life_ of Pope, was sensible and moderate—indeed, with certain necessary

allowances, it is fairly decisive. But Pope, among his other

peculiarities, has had the fate of making foes of his editors, and this

was the case with the Reverend William Lisle Bowles, who revived the

fainting battle,[537] not to any one’s advantage or particular credit,

and to his own dire tribulation. Bowles is one of those not

uninteresting people, in all divisions of history, who, absolutely

rather null, have not inconsiderable relative importance. The influence

of his early sonnets on Coleridge, and through Coleridge on the whole

Romantic revival in England, is well known, and not really surprising.

In the remainder of his long and on the whole blameless life, he

committed a great deal of verse which, though not exactly bad, is

utterly undistinguished and unimportant. His theory of poetry, however,

though somewhat one-sided, was better than his practice: and it was

rather as a result of that dangerous thing Reaction, and from a lack of

alertness and catholicity, than from positive heresy, that he fell foul

of Pope. In his edition he laid down, and in the controversy following

he defended,[538] certain “invariable principles of Poetry,” of which

the first and foremost was that images, thoughts, &c., derived from

Nature and Passion, are always more sublime and pathetic than those

drawn from Art and Manners. And it was chiefly on this ground that he,

of course following his leader Warton, but using newer material and

tactics, disabled, partially or wholly, the claims of Pope. Hereupon

arose a hubbub. Campbell in the _Specimens_[539] took a hand; Byron

wrote a _Letter to John Murray_[540] in defence of his favourite, and in

ridicule of Bowles; auxiliaries and adversaries ran up on both sides.

Whether Bowles was most happy or unhappy in the turmoil I am unable to

say, but he was certainly put in a great state of agitation, and

showered Pamphlets with elaborate titles, which one may duly find, with

their occasions and rejoinders, in the library of the British Museum. At

last dust settled on the conflict, which, however, is itself not quite

settled to the present day, and in fact never can be, because it depends

on one of the root differences of poetical taste. However, it probably

helped the wiser sort to take the _via media_, even such a Romantic as

Hazlitt vindicating Pope’s possession of “the poetical point of view,”

and did, for the same sort, a service to the general history of

criticism by emphasising the above-mentioned difference. Bowles himself,

if he had been less fussy, less verbose, less given to “duply and

quadruply” on small controversial points, and more a man of the world

and of humour, might not have made by any means a bad critic. As it was,

he was right in the main.

[Sidenote: _Byron._]

We must, however, I suppose, say something, if only in this connection,

of Byron as a critic. I do not think it necessary to say very much; and

I shall not, as I could most easily do, concatenate here the innumerable

contradictions of critical opinion in his _Letters_, which show that

they were mere flashes of the moment, connected not merely by no

critical theory but by no critical taste of any consistency, flings,

“half-bricks” directed at dog or devil or divinity, according to the

mood in which the “noble poet” chose to find himself. [Sidenote: _The_

Letter to Murray, _&c._] Let us confine ourselves to that unquestionably

remarkable _Letter to John Murray_ on Bowles and Pope, which is

admittedly his critical diploma-piece. There are of course very good

things in it. Byron was a genius; and your genius will say genial things

now and then, whatsoever subject he happens to be treating. But he

cannot in the very least maintain himself at the critical point: he is

like the ball in the fountain, mounting now and then gloriously on the

summit of the column and catching the rays that it attracts and

reflects, much more often lying wallowing in the basin. Never was such

critical floundering. He blasphemes at one moment the “invariable

principles of poetry,” about which the amiable but somewhat ineffectual

Bowles prated; he affirms them at the next, by finding in his way, and

blindly picking up, the secret of secrets, that the poet who _executes_

best is the highest, whatsoever his department; and he makes his

affirmation valueless, by saying, almost before we have turned the page,

that Lucretius is ruined by his ethics, and Pope saved by them. Even

setting ethic against ethic, the proposition is at least disputable: but

what on earth has Ethic to do with Execution, except that they both

occur in the dictionary under E? There are other excellent things in the

letter, and yet others the reverse of excellent; but I have not the

least intention here of setting up a balance-sheet after the manner of

Robinson Crusoe, of ranging Byron’s undoubtedly true, though not novel,

vindication of the human element as invariably necessary to poetry,

against his opinion of Shelley, and of Keats, and of the English poetry

of his greatest contemporaries generally, as “all Claudian,” and against

the implied estimate of Claudian himself. This would be a confusion like

his own, a parallel _ignoratio elenchi_, a _fallacia a fallacioribus_.

Suffice it to say, that to take him seriously as a critic is

impossible.[541]

[Sidenote: _Others: Isaac Disraeli._]

Of the work which—sometimes of the inner citizenship of the critical

Rome and at the worst of its “utmost last provincial band”—was done by a

great number of individuals and in no small number of periodicals,

dictionaries, and what not, we cannot speak here as fully as would be

pleasant,—the historian must become a “reasoned cataloguer” merely, and

that by selection. Two contemporary and characteristic figures are those

of Isaac Disraeli and of Sir Egerton Brydges. Both had the defects of

the antiquarian quality. Rogers, though unamiable, was probably not

unjust when, in acknowledging the likelihood of Isaac Disraeli’s

collections enduring, he described him as “a man with half an

intellect.” In formation and expression of opinion, Lord Beaconsfield’s

father too often wandered from the silly to the self-evident and back

again, like Addison between his two bottles at the ends of the Holland

House gallery: and his numerous _collectanea_ would certainly be more

useful if they were more accurate. But the _Curiosities_, the

_Amenities_, the _Quarrels_, and all the rest show an ardent love for

literature itself, and a singularly wide knowledge of it: they are well

calculated to inoculate readers, especially young readers, with both.

[Sidenote: _Sir Egerton Brydges._]

Brydges’s work, less popular, is of a higher quality. His extensive

editing labours were beyond price at his date; in books like the

_Censura Literaria_ much knowledge is still readily accessible, which

can only be picked up elsewhere by enormous excursions of reading at

large; and his original critical power was much higher than is generally

allowed. Such enthusiastic admiration of Shelley as is displayed in the

notes to his Geneva reprint of the English part of Phillips' _Theatrum

Poetarum_ in 1824,[542] is not often shown by a man of sixty-two for a

style of poetry entirely different from that to which he has been

accustomed. And it shows, not merely how true a training the study of

older literature is for the appreciation of newer, but that there must

have been something to train.

[Sidenote: The Retrospective Review.]

Moreover, this first period of enthusiastic exploration did not merely

produce the lectures of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the unsurpassed

essays of Lamb, the hardly surpassed ones of Leigh Hunt. It produced

also, by the combined efforts of a band of somewhat less distinguished

persons, a periodical publication of very considerable bulk and of

almost unique value and interest. It is not for nothing that while old

magazines and reviews are usually sold for less than the cost of their

binding, and not much more than their value as waste-paper, _The

Retrospective Review_[543] still has respectable, though of course not

fantastic, prices affixed to it in the catalogues. It was started in

1820, under the editorship of Henry Southern,[544] a diplomatist from

the Cantabrigian Trinity, and of the antiquary afterwards so well known

as Sir Harris Nicolas. Opening with a first volume of extraordinary

excellence, it kept up for seven years and fourteen volumes, on a

uniform principle. The second series, however, which was started after I

know not what breach of continuity,[545] was less fortunate, and extends

to two volumes only, though these contain much more matter apiece than

the earlier ones. It is not uncommon to find these two volumes, and even

some of the first series, wanting in library sets, which librarians

should do their best to complete; for though, toward the end, the purely

antiquarian matter encroached a very little upon the literary, there is

not a volume from first to last which does not contain literary matter

of the highest interest and value.[546]

The proud-looked and high-stomached persons who pronounce the best in

this kind but shadows, and regard old criticism as being—far more than

history in its despised days—“an old almanack,” will of course look

prouder and exalt their stomachs higher at the use of such terms. So be

it. Some day people will perhaps begin to understand generally what

criticism is, and what is its importance. Then more—as some do already—

will appreciate the interest and the value of this work of Nicolas,

Palgrave, Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, and other good men. It would be

perfectly easy to make fun of it. The style may be to modern tastes a

little stilted when it is ambitious, and a little jejune when it is not—

in both cases after the way of the last Georgian standard prose.

Although there is much and real learning, our philologers might

doubtless exalt _their_ stomachs over the neglect of their favourite

study: and the fetichists of biography might discover that many a Joan

is called Jane, and many a March made into February. These drawbacks and

defects are more than compensated by the general character of the

treatment. While not despising bibliography, the writers as a rule do

not put it first, like Sir Egerton Brydges: nor do they indulge in the

egotistical _pot-pourri_ of “Chandos of Sudeley.” They have the enormous

advantage, in most cases, of coming quite fresh to their work,—of being

able to give a real “squeeze” direct from the original brass, with the

aid of their own appreciation, unmarred and unmingled by reminiscences

of this essay and that treatise, by the necessity of combating this or

that authority on their subject. They look at that subject itself, and

even when they show traces of a little prejudice—as in the opposite

cases of the man who is rather hard on Dryden and the man who is, for

the nineteenth century, astonishingly “soft” on Glover—the impression is

obviously genuine and free from forgery.

What is more, these Reviewers give themselves, as a rule, plenty of

room, and supply abundant extracts—things of the first importance in the

case of books, then as a rule to be found only in the old editions, and

in many cases by no means common now. The scope is wide. The first

volume gives, _inter alia_, articles on Chamberlayne (one for

_Pharonnida_ and one for _Love’s Victory_), on Crashaw and Dryden, on

Rymer and Dennis and Heinsius, on Ben Jonson and Cyrano de Bergerac, on

the _Urn Burial_, and on such mere curiosities as _The Voyage of the

Wandering Knight_. The papers throughout on Drama, from the Mysteries

onward, and including separate articles on the great Elizabethan minors,

were, till Pearson’s reprints thirty years ago, the most accessible

source of information on their subjects, and are still specially

notable; as are also the constituents of another interesting series on

Spanish Literature. The _Arcadia_ balances Butler’s _Remains_ in vol.

ii. Vaughan and Defoe, _Imitations of Hudibras_, and that luckless

dramatist and mad but true poet, Lee,[547] have their places in the

Third, where also some one (though he came a little too early to know

the _Chansons de gestes_, and so did not put “things of Charlemagne” in

their right order) has an interesting article on the Italian compilation

_La Spagna_. I should like to continue this sampling throughout the

sixteen volumes, but space commands only a note on the rest in

detail.[548]

Nor are they afraid of more general discussion. In the above-mentioned

article on John Dennis there is a long passage which I do not remember

to have seen anywhere extracted, dealing in a singularly temperate and

reasonable fashion with the “off-with-his-head” style of criticism put

in fashion by the _Edinburgh_; and others will be easily found. But they

do not as a rule lay themselves out much for “preceptive” criticism. It

is the _other_ new style of intelligent and well-willing interpretation

to which they incline, and they carry it out with extraordinary ability

and success. To supply those who may not have time, opportunity, or

perhaps even inclination to read more or less out-of-the way originals

with some intelligible and enjoyable knowledge of them at second-hand;

to prepare, initiate, and guide those who are able and willing to

undertake such reading; to supply those who have actually gone through

it with estimates and judgments for comparison and appreciation—these

may be said to be their three objects. Some people may, of course, think

them trivial objects or unimportant; to me, I confess, they seem to be

objects extremely well worth attaining, and here very well attained. The

papers in the _Retrospective Review_, be it remembered, anticipated

Sainte-Beuve himself (much more such later English and American

practitioners as Mr Arnold, who was not born, and Mr Lowell, who was but

a yearling when it first appeared) in the production of the full

literary _causerie_, the applied and illustrative complement, in regard

to individual books, authors, or small subjects, of the literary history

proper. When people at last begin to appreciate what literary history

means, there will probably be, in every country, a collection of the

best essays of this kind arranged from their authors’ works conveniently

for the use of the student. And when such a collection is made in

England, no small part in it will be played by articles taken from the

_Retrospective Review_.

[Sidenote: _The_ Baviad _and_ Anti-Jacobin,]

For the last subdivision of this chapter we must go a little backwards.

The phenomena of English criticism in the last decade of the eighteenth

century are curious: and they might be used to support such very

different theories of the relations of Criticism and Creation, that

their most judicious use, perhaps, is to point the moral of the

riskiness of _any_ such theories. During this decade one great

generation was dying off and another even greater was but coming on.

Except Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, and Burke’s last and best work

(which were both entirely of the past, and in the former case, at least,

presented a purely personal product), and the _Lyrical Ballads_ (which

were wholly of the future), with the shadowy work of Blake (hardly of

any time or even any place), nothing of extraordinary goodness appeared.

But a great deal appeared of a most ordinary and typical badness, and

this seems to have excited a peculiar kind of irregular or Cossack

criticism to carry on a guerilla war against the hosts of dreary or

fantastic dulness. Criticism had at this time little of a standing army:

the old _Critical_ and _Monthly_ Reviews were sinking into dotage

(though such a man as Southey wrote in the former), and the new class of

comparatively independent censorship, which put money in its purse and

carried its head high, was to wait for the _Edinburgh_ and the next

century. But Hayley and Sir James Bland Burges and the Della Cruscans;

but Darwin even, and even Godwin; nay, the very early antics of such men

as Coleridge and Southey themselves, with some things in them not so

antic perhaps, but seeming to their contemporaries of an antic

disposition—were more than critical flesh and blood could stand.

[Sidenote: _with Wolcot and Mathias._] The spirit which had animated

Rivarol[549] on the other side of the Channel came to animate Wolcot

(who had indeed showed it for some time[550]) and his enemy Gifford, and

the greater wits of the _Anti-Jacobin_, and even the pedantic and

prosaic Mathias.

Now the result of dwelling upon the works of that Pindar who was born

not in Bœotia but in Devonshire, and on the ever-beloved and delightful

_Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_, if not also on its prose, would no doubt

be far more agreeable to the reader than much of what he actually finds

here: and to dwell on them would fall in with some of the writer’s

oldest and most cherished tastes. Nay, even the _Baviad_ and _Mæviad_,

out of proportion and keeping as is much of their satire, and the

_Pursuits of Literature_ itself,—despite its tedious ostentation of

learning, its endless irrelevance of political and other

note-divagation, and its disgusting donnishness without the dignity of

the better don,—give, especially in the three first cases, much marrowy

matter in the texts, and an abundance of the most exquisite

unintentional fooling in the passages cited by the copious notes.

Unfortunately so to dwell would be itself out of keeping and proportion

here. The things[551] are among the lightest and best examples of the

critical _soufflé_, well cheesed and peppered. Or (if the severer muses

and their worshippers disdain a metaphor from Cookery, that Cinderella

of the Fine Arts) let us say that they exemplify most agreeably the

substitution of a sort of critical _banderilla_, sometimes fatal enough

in its way, for the Thor’s hammer of Dryden and the stiletto of Pope.

But they are only symptoms—we have seen things of their kind before,

from Aristophanes downwards—and we must merely signal and register them

as we pass in this adventure, keeping and recommending them nevertheless

for quiet and frequent reading _delectationis causa_. The infallibility

and vitality of the _Anti-Jacobin_, in particular, for this purpose, is

something really prodigious. The _Rovers_ and the _New Morality_ and the

_Loves of the Triangles_ seem to lose none of their virtue during a

whole lifetime of the reader, and after a century of their own

existence.

[Sidenote: _The influence of the new_ Reviews, &c.]

There is, however, one point on which we not only may but must draw

special attention to them. There can be little doubt that these light

velitations of theirs prepared the way and sharpened the taste for a

very considerable refashioning and new-modelling of the regular

critical-Periodical army which followed so soon. In this new-modelling

some of them—Gifford, Canning, Ellis—were most important officers, and

there can be no doubt at all that many others transferred, consciously

or unconsciously, this lighter way of criticising from verse to prose,

or kept it up in verse itself such as _Rejected Addresses_, which in

turn handed on the pattern to the _Bon Gaultier Ballads_ in the middle,

and to much else at the end, of the nineteenth century. Part of the

style was of course itself but a resharpening of the weapons of the

Scriblerus Club; but these weapons were refurbished brightly, and not a

little repointed. The newer critic was at least supposed to remember

that he was not to be dull. Unfortunately the personal impertinence

which, though not pretty even in the verse-satirist, is by a sort of

prescription excusable or at least excused in him, transferred itself to

the prose: and the political intolerance became even greater.[552]

[Sidenote: _Jeffrey._]

It is not the least curious freak of the whirligig of time, as shown

working in this history, that not a century ago one of the chief places

here would have seemed inevitably due to Francis Jeffrey, while at the

present moment perhaps a large majority of readers would be disposed to

grudge him more than a paragraph, and be somewhat inclined to skip that.

[Sidenote: _His loss of place and its cause._]

We cannot “stint his sizings” to that extent. Yet it is also impossible

to give him much space, more particularly because his interest has

shrunk to, and is very unlikely ever greatly to swell from, that of a

kind of representative position. Jeffrey is no mere English La Harpe, as

some think: he does not exemplify the Neo-classical “Thorough,” the

rigour of the Rule, after the fashion which makes that remarkable person

so interesting. On the contrary, he is only the last and most noteworthy

instance of that mainly Neo-classic inconsistency which we pointed out

and on which we dwelt in the last volume. Except that he looks more

backward than forward, Jeffrey often reminds us rather of Marmontel. He

has inherited to the fullest extent the by this time ingrained English

belief that canons of criticism which exclude or depreciate Shakespeare

and Milton “will never do,” as he might have said himself: but he has

not merely inherited, he has expanded and supplemented it. He has not

the least objection to the new school of students and praisers of those

other Elizabethan writers, compared with whom Shakespeare would have

seemed to La Harpe almost a regular dramatist, and quite a sane and

orderly person. He has a strong admiration for Ford. He will follow a

safe fellow-Whig like Campbell in admiring such an extremely

anti-“classical” thing as Chamberlayne’s _Pharonnida_. He uses about

Dryden and Pope language not very different from Mr Arnold’s, and he is

quite enthusiastic (though of course with some funny metrical qualms)

about Cowper.

[Sidenote: _His inconsistency._]

But here (except in reference to a man like Keats, who had been

ill-treated by the Tories) he draws the line. There may have been

something political in the attitude which the _Edinburgh_ assumed

towards the great new school of poetry which arose between 1798 and

1820. But politics cannot have had everything to do with the matter, and

it cannot be an accident that Crabbe is about the only contemporary poet

of mark, except Byron, Campbell, and Rogers, whom Jeffrey cordially

praises. Above all, the reasons of his depreciation of poets so

different as Scott and Wordsworth, and the things of theirs that he

specially blames, are fatal. There is plenty to be said against Scott as

a poet, and plenty to be said against Wordsworth. _The Lay of the Last

Minstrel_ is far from faultlessly perfect: but the beauty of its

subject, its adaptation of antique matter and manner, and its new

versification, are almost beyond praise from the poetical point of view.

It is exactly these three things that Jeffrey most blames. There are

scores and hundreds of things in Wordsworth which are helplessly exposed

to the critical arrows: but a man who pronounces the _Daffodils_ “stuff”

puts himself down once for all, irrevocably, without hope of pardon or

of atonement, a person insensible to poetry as such, though there may be

kinds and forms of poetry which, from this or that cause, he is able to

appreciate.[553]

[Sidenote: _His criticism on Madame de Staël._]

Once more, as in Leigh Hunt’s case (though on the still smaller scale

desirable), we can take a “brick of the house” with advantage and

without absurdity. Indeed I hardly know anywhere a single Essay which

exhibits a considerable critic so representatively as is done for

Jeffrey by his article on Madame de Staël’s _De La Littérature_, which

appeared in the _Edinburgh_ for November 1812 and stands after the

Tractate on Beauty in the forefront of his Collected Works.[554] He was

in the full maturity of his critical powers; as a woman (for Jeffrey was

quite a chivalrous person), and as a kind of foreign and female Whig,

his author was sure of favourable treatment; the “philosophic”

atmosphere of the book appealed to his education, nationality, and

personal sympathies; and he had practically most of the knowledge

required.[555]

And the article is a very good article,—polite in its mild exposure of

Madame de Staël’s hasty generalisations, extremely clever and capable in

its own survey of literature—Jeffrey was particularly good at these

surveys and naturally inclined to them—sensible, competent, in the

highest degree readable. It would not be easy, unless we took something

of Southey’s on the other side, better to illustrate the immense advance

made by periodical criticism since the _Edinburgh_ itself had shown the

way.

Yet there are curious drawbacks and limitations which explain why

Jeffrey has not kept, and why he is perhaps not very likely to recover,

his pride of place. Part of his idiosyncrasy was a very odd kind of

pessimism, which one would rather have expected from a High Tory than

from a “blue and yellow,” however symbolical these colours may be of

fear. To Jeffrey—in the second decade of the new flourishing of English

poetry, which had at least eighty good years to run; in the very year of

the new birth of the novel; with Goethe still alive and Heine a boy in

Germany; with the best men of the great French mid-nineteenth century

already born—it seems that “the age of original genius is over.” Now,

when a man has once made up his mind to this, he is not likely to be

very tolerant of attempts on the age’s part to convince him that he is

wrong. But even his judgments of the past exhibit a curious want of

catholicity. The French vein, which is so strong in him, as well as the

general eighteenth-century spirit, which is so much stronger, appears in

a distinct tendency to set Latin above Greek. He commends the Greeks

indeed for their wonderful “rationality and moderation in imaginative

work,” suggesting, with a mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, that the

reason of this is the absence of any models. Having no originals, they

did not try to be better than these. His criticism of the two

literatures is taken from a very odd angle—or rather from a maze and web

of odd angles. “The fate of the Tarquins,” he says, “could never have

been regarded at Rome as a worthy occasion either of pity or horror.”

And he does not in the least seem to see—probably he would have

indignantly denied—that in saying this he is denying the Romans any

_literary_ sense at all. In Aristophanes he has nothing to remark but

his “extreme coarseness and vulgarity”; and “the immense difference

between Thucydides and Tacitus” is adjusted to the advantage of the

Roman. He actually seems to prefer Augustan to Greek poetry, and makes

the astonishing remark that “there is nothing at all in the whole range

of Greek literature like ... the fourth book of Virgil,” having

apparently never so much as heard of Apollonius Rhodius.[556]

That of mediæval literature he says practically nothing is not

surprising, but it must be taken into account: and his defence of

English Literature against his author, though perfectly good against

_her_, is necessarily rather limited by its actual purpose, and suggests

somehow that other limitations would have appeared if it had been freed

from this.

[Sidenote: _Its lesson._]

In short, though we cannot support the conclusion further, the very word

“limitation” suggests the name of Jeffrey, in the sphere of criticism.

He seems to be constantly “pulled up” by some mysterious check-rein,

turned back by some half-invisible obstacle. Sometimes—by no means quite

always—we can concatenate the limiting causes,—deduce them from

something known and anterior, but they are almost always present or

impending. As Leigh Hunt is the most catholic of critics, so Jeffrey is

almost the most sectarian: the very shibboleths of his sectarianism

being arbitrarily combined, and to a great extent peculiar to

himself.[557]

[Sidenote: _Hallam._]

Let us conclude the chapter with a figure scarcely less representative

of the anti-enthusiast school of critics, and much more agreeable than

either Gifford or Jeffrey. To the English student of literary history

and of literary criticism, Henry Hallam must always be a name _clarum et

venerabile_; nor—as has been so often pointed out in these pages, and as

unfortunately it seems still so often necessary[558] to point out—need

disagreement with a great many of his own critical judgments and belief

that—for those who merely swallow such judgments whole—he is not the

safest of critical teachers, interfere with such due homage. [Sidenote:

_His achievement._] For Hallam was our first master in English of the

true comparative-historical study of literature—the study without which,

as one main result of this volume should be to show, all criticism is

now unsatisfactory, and the special variety of criticism which has been

cultivated for the last century most dangerously delusive. His

Introduction to the _Literature of Europe_, with its sketch of mediæval

and its fuller treatment of Renaissance and seventeenth-century

Literature, is the earliest book of the kind in our language: it is not

far from being, to this day, the best book of the kind in any.

[Sidenote: _Its merits_]

A first attempt of its sort (it cannot be said here with too much

frankness and conviction) can even less than any other book be

faultless: and it is almost a sufficient proof of Hallam’s greatness

that his faults are not greater. Some things, indeed, that seem to me

faults may not even seem to be so at all to others. He was aware that he

must “pass over or partially touch” some departments of at any rate

so-called literature; but his preference or rejection may seem somewhat

remarkable. Few will quarrel, at least from my point of view, with the

very large space given to mere “scholars,” but it is surely strange that

a historian should have thought History of secondary importance, while

according ample space not only to Philosophy and Theology, but even to

Anatomy and Mathematics. A more serious and a more indisputable blemish

is the scanty and second-hand character of his account of mediæval

literature, which he might almost as well have omitted altogether. It

cannot be too peremptorily laid down that second-hand accounts of

literature are absolutely devoid of any value whatever:—the best and

latest authorities become equally “not evidence” with the stalest and

worst. [Sidenote: _and defects._] Hallam was aware of this principle to

some extent, and he almost states it, though of course in his own more

measured way, and with reference to quotation mainly, in his preface.

But his first chapter is really nothing but a tissue of references to

Herder and Eichhorn, Meiners and Fleury, with original remarks which do

not console us. The account of Boethius at the very beginning is a

pretty piece of rhetoric, but, as the Germans would say, not in the

least “ingoing.” It is a horrible heresy to say[559] that “It is

sufficient to look at any extracts” from the Dark Ages “to see the

justice of this censure,” for no collection of extracts will justify the

_formation_ of any critical opinion whatsoever, though it may support,

or at least illustrate, one formed from reading whole works.

[Sidenote: _In general distribution and treatment._]

Further, in a note of Hallam’s[560] I think may be found the origin of

Mr Arnold’s too exclusive preference for “the best and principal” things

and his disparagement of the historic estimate, though I trust that Mr

Arnold[561] would not have shared Hallam’s contempt, equally superfine

and superficial, for the “barbarous Latin” of the Dark Ages. Finally, it

is difficult to conceive a more inadequate reference to one of the most

epoch-making of European poems (which is at the same time in its earlier

part one of not the least charming) than the words “A very celebrated

poem, the _Roman de la Rose_, had introduced an unfortunate taste for

allegory in verse, from which France did not extricate herself for

several generations.” It is all the worse because nothing in it is

positively untrue.

It may be said to be unjust to dwell on what is avowedly a mere

overture: but unluckily, when Hallam comes to his subject proper, all

trace of second-hand treatment does not disappear. The part played by

direct examination becomes very much larger; and the writer’s reading is

a matter of just admiration, nor does he ever for one moment pretend to

have read what he has not. But he has no scruple in supplementing his

reading at second-hand, or even in doubling his own frequently excellent

judgments with long quoted passages from writers like Bouterwek.

Further, the surprise which has been hinted above as to his admissions

and exclusions, and at his relative admissions in point of departments,

may perhaps after a time change into a disappointed conviction that his

first interest did not lie in literature, as literature, at all; but in

politics ecclesiastical and civil, juristics, moral and other

philosophy, and the like. I am inclined to think that Bacon, Descartes,

Hobbes, and Grotius have, between them, more space than is devoted to

all Hallam’s figures in _belles lettres_ from Rabelais to Dryden.

[Sidenote: _In some particular instances._]

I could support this with a very large number of _pièces_ if it were

necessary; but a few must suffice, and in those few we shall find a

further count against Hallam arising. Note, for instance, his

indorsement of Meiners' complaint that Politian “did not scruple to take

words from such writers as Apuleius and Tertullian,” an indorsement

which in principle runs to the full folly of Ciceronianism, and with

which it is well to couple and perpend the round assertion elsewhere

that Italian is—even it would seem for Italians—an inferior literary

instrument to Latin. Secondly, take the astounding suggestion that the

_Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_ “surely” have “not much intrinsic merit,”

and the apparent dismissal of them as “a mass of vapid nonsense and bad

grammar.” As if the very vapidity of the nonsense did not give the

savour, and the badness of the grammar were not the charm! Here again

another judgment (on the _Satire Menippée_) clinches the inference that

Hallam’s taste for humour was small. If he is not uncomplimentary, he is

strikingly inadequate, on Marot: and in regard to the Pléiade he simply

follows the French to do evil, and as elsewhere puts himself under the

guidance of—La Harpe! Few “heroic enthusiasts” will read his longer and

more appreciative notice of Spenser without perceiving “some want, some

coldness” in it; fewer will even expect not to find these privations in

that of Donne. But the shortest of his shortcomings are reached in his

article on Browne, and in part of that on Shakespeare. In the latter the

famous sentence on the Sonnets is not, I think, so unforgivable as the

slander on Juliet;[562] in the former one can simply quote in silence of

comment. “His style is not flowing, but vigorous; his choice of words

not elegant, and even approaching to barbarism in English phrase: yet

there is an impressiveness, an air of reflection and serenity, in

Browne’s writings which redeem many of his faults.”[563] The sentence

that “_Gondibert_ is better worth reading than _The Purple Island_,

though it may have less of that which distinguishes a poet from another

man”—in other words, that an unpoetical poem is better worth reading

than a poetical one—is sufficiently tell-tale. It is not surprising,

after it, that Hallam speaks respectfully of Rymer—a point where

Macaulay, so often his disciple, fortunately left him.

[Sidenote: _His central weakness,_]

Something, it has been said, will inevitably emerge from these

utterances on a tolerably intelligent consideration. Hallam has abundant

erudition, much judicial quality, a shrewdness which generally guides

him more or less right in points of fact; sense; fairness; freedom from

caprice—even (except as regards the Middle Ages, and especially mediæval

Latin and its ancestors back to the late Silver Age) a certain power of

regarding literature impartially. But he has, as is so often done (he

alludes to the fact himself somewhere), spoken his own doom in words

which he applies (with remarkable injustice as it happens) to

Fontenelle. He has “cool good sense, and an incapacity, by natural

privation, of feeling the highest excellence in works of taste.”

[Sidenote: _and the value left by it._]

In short, “The Act of God”: and for such acts it is as unreasonable as

it is indecent to blame their victims. But at the same time we may carry

our forbearance to natural privations too far by accepting blind men as

guides in precipitous countries, or using as a bloodhound a dog who has

no scent. And therefore it is impossible to assign to Hallam a high

place as a critic. He may be—he is—useful even in this respect as a

check and a reminder of the views which once were taken by men of wide

information, excellent discipline, literary disposition, and (where it

was not seared or paralysed) positive taste; but he will not soon

recover any other value. Even thus he is to a critic that always

critically estimable thing a _point de repère_, and in the kindred but

not identical function of literary historian, the praise which was given

to him at the opening of this notice may be maintained in spite of, and

not inconsistently with, anything that has been said meanwhile.[564]

Nay, more, Specialism has made such inroads upon us—has bondaged the

land to such hordes of robber-barons—that we may not soon expect again,

and may even regard with a tender _desiderium_, the width, the justice,

the far-reaching and self-sufficing survey and sovereignty of Hallam.

CHAPTER II.

MIL-HUIT-CENT-TRENTE.

THE ‘GLOBE’—CHARLES DE RÉMUSAT, VITET, J. J. AMPÈRE—SAINTE-BEUVE: HIS

TOPOGRAPHY— THE EARLIER ARTICLES—3‘PORTRAITS LITTÉRAIRES’ AND

‘PORTRAITS DE FEMMES’— THE ‘PORTRAITS CONTEMPORAINS’—HE “ARRIVES”—

PORT-ROYAL, ITS LITERARY EPISODES—ON RACINE— ‘CHATEAUBRIAND ET SON

GROUPE LITTÉRAIRE’— FAULTS FOUND WITH IT—ITS EXTRAORDINARY MERITS,

AND FINAL “DICTA”— THE ‘CAUSERIES’ AT LAST—THEIR LENGTH, ETC.—

BRICKS OF THE HOUSE—HIS OCCASIONAL POLEMIC— THE ‘NOUVEAUX LUNDIS’—

THE CONCLUSION OF THIS MATTER— MICHELET AND QUINET—HUGO—‘WILLIAM

SHAKESPEARE‘— ‘LITTÉRATURE ET PHILOSOPHIE’—THE ‘CROMWELL’ PREFACE,

AND THAT TO THE ‘ORIENTALES’— CAPITAL POSITION OF THIS LATTER—THE

“WORK”— NISARD: HIS ‘ÆGRI SOMNIA’—HIS ‘ESSAIS SUR LE ROMANTISME’—

THEIR “CULPA MAXIMA”—GAUTIER—HIS THEORY: “ART FOR ART’S SAKE,” ETC.—

HIS PRACTICE: ‘LES GROTESQUES’—‘HISTOIRE DU ROMANTISME,’ ETC.—

UBIQUITY OF FELICITY IN HIS CRITICISM—SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN— PLANCHE—

WEIGHT OF HIS CRITICISM—MAGNIN—MÉRIMÉE.

[Sidenote: _The Globe._]

It is well known, even to not very careful students of French

literature, that the famous term which has been taken as the title of

this chapter is something of a misnomer,—that the still more famous

“representation of _Hernani_” was in effect the shouting after the

battle, not the battle itself. The pains which have been spent above on

the Empire Critics, greater and smaller, must have been most

ill-bestowed if they have not shown that the working of the world-spirit

had done already much of what had to be done—that the _i_'s only had to

be dotted and the _t_'s crossed, by the end of the third decade of the

nineteenth century. The crossing and dotting was done, as usual, with

some violence, and it attracted corresponding attention; but the letters

had been shaped long before. Dubois and Pierre Leroux had founded the

famous _Globe_—object of the admiration of Goethe and cradle of the

talent of Sainte-Beuve and others—in 1824. It furnishes comfort and

support to those who believe that criticism is nothing if not

philosophical, by the very strong philosophical colour which it took on.

Jouffroy was one of its chief pillars; and attention has often been

drawn to his tractate in it, _Comment les dogmes finissent_ (as to which

it can only be remarked that no dogma has ever died yet, and that every

dogma, as a natural product of something in human nature, is immortal

till human nature perishes), as a symptom and symbol of its literary as

of its other doctrines. [Sidenote: _Charles de Rémusat, Vitet, J. J.

Ampère._] We are here, however, only concerned with its strictly (if not

merely) literary contributors, Sainte-Beuve himself, Charles de Rémusat,

J. J. Ampère, Vitet, and the rest. Of Sainte-Beuve we shall have plenty

to say presently; the rest need not delay us long. The extraordinarily

brilliant talents of Charles de Rémusat[565] were always touching

literature: but philosophy and politics constantly drew him away from

the Muses proper, though whether he talks of Abelard or of Anselm, of

Bacon or of Channing, he is never negligible. Vitet became a politician

and an antiquary chiefly, but has left at least one remarkable literary

document in his well-known essay on the _Chanson de Roland_.[566] As for

J. J. Ampère, he supplemented and furthered the study of foreign

literatures, which Villemain had made almost obligatory, by an unusual

frequentation of foreign countries; and besides some excellent work on

the literary history (especially in mediæval times) of his own language,

wrote many books of literary travel.

On the whole, however (for Sainte-Beuve grew out of and far above his

_Globe_ stage), the _general_ interest of the reviewing in this paper is

superior to that of its component parts as criticisms and its individual

authors as critics. Those who now read Goethe’s remarks on it to

Eckermann[567] may, if they neglect the historic estimate, be a little

puzzled at the great German’s enthusiasm. He was right, however, as, in

a general way, he usually was. These young men took literature with a

wider knowledge and purview of it than the old critics had brought to

bear, and with very much less subservience to particular theory as to

what the book _ought to be_, and a more obliging though quite

independent attention to what it _was_. Their “eclecticism” (which was

philosophically the tone or ticket of their paper) adapted itself

especially well to these literary exercitations: indeed Eclecticism is

never so well justified of any of her necessarily mixed family as in

literature. But their greatest is their greatest by so far, that we may

well turn to him.

[Sidenote: _Sainte-Beuve: his topography._]

Sainte-Beuve was not infrequently seized with an amiable and very

convenient fancy for constructing small retrospective guides and clues

to the mighty maze of his fifty or sixty volumes of critical essays. The

most definite and important, written in September 1861, just at the

beginning of the _Nouveaux Lundis_, and appended to the second volume of

the Garnier edition of _Portraits Littéraires_, distributes his whole

career under heads. First comes his novitiate in the _Globe_ up to 1827;

then the Romantic campaign of the _Ronsard_, the _Tableau du Seizième

Siècle_, and the articles of 1828-29; then the nearly twenty years’

stretch of his contributions (preserved in the _Portraits Littéraires_

themselves and the _Portraits Contemporains_) to the _Revue des Deux

Mondes_, with _Port-Royal_ as a solid cut-and-come-again accompaniment;

then _Chateaubriand et son Groupe_; then the _Causeries du Lundi_

properly so called, and, lastly, the series which he was beginning as he

wrote. The work of the first period of which he speaks with some

disdain—_ce ne sont que des essais sans importance_—he never actually

republished; but towards the end of his life he repented and intended to

do so, and such part of it as could be recovered appeared posthumously,

with a good many waifs and strays of other kinds, as _Premiers Lundis_.

If to these we add the _Étude sur Virgile_[568] and perhaps the _P. J.

Proudhon_,[569] we shall nearly have exhausted his available stores, and

quite, I think, those of critical interest.[570]

[Sidenote: _The earlier articles._]

The earliest detachment of this great army, as presented in that

_régiment de marche_ the _Premiers Lundis_ (made up of all sort of

things from these raw recruits to the poor old veterans of Senate-speech

more than forty years later), might deserve their author’s modest or

merciless sentence from the severe point of view of his greatest pupil.

They are certainly not “chief and principal things” in themselves.

Sainte-Beuve was very young (barely twenty) when he began to write them,

and, as we have said, it is nearly impossible for a very young critic to

be a very good critic, though it is deplorably possible for a rather old

one to be more than rather bad. Some of them are so short as to give no

room for much display of individual and original talent. Sometimes they

deal with things ephemeral, and now forgotten, in a merely journalist

fashion. Sometimes, as in the dealing with Scott’s _Napoleon_,

inevitable and insuperable prejudices and preoccupations come in. One

may even admit frankly that, _nonnunquam_, there are symptoms which lead

one to understand, after a fashion, the charges of dulness[571] and of

_galimatias_ which were brought against Sainte-Beuve by persons from

Balzac[572] downwards, and which have sometimes seemed mere spiteful

lunacy to readers of the _Causeries_ at their most brilliant period

only. But to the expert there is unmistakable and not merely fancied

_quality_ even here. There is already the indefinable, but in previous

critics so unfortunately rare, desire to appreciate, to understand.

There is almost always a sober judgment; not seldom a delicate if rather

tentative subtlety. Above all, there are signs of something very

different from the sham omniscience which is such a temptation to the

young reviewer,—of a range and width of reading, classical, modern,

foreign, most surprising and most unusual at the time.

The _Tableau_,[573] with its associated selection of Ronsard, and some

other matter appended to its later editions, is quite a landmark in

French literary history. It turned (or rather marked the turning of) the

tide in regard to sixteenth-century literature, interested the youth of

the day in the _Pléiade_, stimulated the new prosodical movements, did

much else. But its author’s powers were immature: and there is not a

great deal of the highest critical importance in its individual

utterances and judgments. Perhaps the most noteworthy is the statement

in the _Preface_ that “L’Art consacre et purifie tout ce qu’il touche”—a

companion axiom to the Preface of the _Orientales_, which neither critic

nor poet would have fully indorsed in their later days, though many of

their followers would.

[Sidenote: Portraits Littéraires _and_ Portraits de Femmes.]

The _Portraits Littéraires_, with its satellite or tow-boat the

_Portraits de Femmes_, appears to have been a sort of favourite with

Sainte-Beuve. He rearranged it early from the original _Critiques et

Portraits Littéraires_;[574] he sifted out the _Portraits de Femmes_, as

if to concentrate special attention on them; he added from time to time

appetising and really important bonuses and _primes_ of appendices,

_Pensées_, personal confidences, and the like. A good deal of his

best-known work is in the four volumes (including the _Femmes_) as they

are now[575] current: and probably the collection meets the taste, of

the general reader at least, as well as any other of his numerous

collections, if not better. This, I venture to think,—using a phrase of

an author who would probably not have agreed with me in this particular

instance,—is because the general reader “does not want criticism,” or

does not want it first of all. Sainte-Beuve, who knew everything, and

cared not to conceal it, knew, as the general reader does not know, that

the _causerie_, whether in volume- or essay-form, of mingled biography

and criticism, was of English, not French invention: and he confesses

that he longed to imitate it. He did so, and carried it even beyond

Johnson: but he was frequently tempted to let the biography and the

personality rather swamp the criticism, and I think he has done so here.

In the _Portraits de Femmes_ especially, be it gallantry, gossip-loving,

or God knows what, though there may be much interest, there is

uncommonly little criticism, even on La Rochefoucauld, who presents

himself in the middle of the galaxy with a singular and sultanesque

intrusion. On some of the subjects, such as Mme. de Longueville, there

could be none: even on Mme. de Sévigné and Mme. de Staël, where the

opportunities were infinite, there is little; and where there is most,

as in the case of Pauline de Meulan (Mme. Guizot), it is where we care

least about it. Of history and life plenty, and therefore of amusement

much; of criticism very little.

Life and its farrago—of which I desire not to speak disrespectfully more

than of any other equator, but which are not my subject—have rather less

exclusive hold in the _Portraits Littéraires_ proper and segregated, but

still a greater hold than literature. In those days Sainte-Beuve, as he

himself more than once confesses, was even more of a philosopher than of

a _littérateur_. There are of course exceptions, where the past

greatness of the author takes the future greatness of the critic by

storm beforehand, and forces acquaintance and recognition from its

destined brother. Even in these cases one often feels that the critic

“is not ready”—that the hour has not fully come. The early and strongly

“Romantic” articles on the great classics of the seventeenth century,

which open the first volume, are not merely wrong with the crudity of

early partisanship, as he himself represents them. Indeed in this

respect they are hardly wrong at all. But they are not right in the

right way. Except the very remarkable piece, “Du Génie Critique et de

Bayle,” where the vocation asserted itself, there is hardly one of them

(if even this is) worthy of Sainte-Beuve. The “Diderot,” to make a move

forward, is capital on the man, a little short of capital on the writer.

The best critical thing in the volume is the “Nodier”—much later in date

(1840) than the rest of its contents. The second volume, which has

something of this advantage, in point of time, contains much better

things:—the well-known “Molière,” the long (some would say the

disproportionately long) “Fontanes,” the “Joseph de Maistre,”[576] the

“Naudé,” and a delightful paper on Aloysius Bertrand of _Gaspard de la

Nuit_,[577] which combines the old Romantic enthusiasm with the acquired

craftsmanship. The third, better still in this latter respect, has less

interesting subjects, except in the case of the “Theocritus” and the

“Mlle. Aissé,” which is again a “Portrait de Femme,” hardly at all

literary. A sacred shame invades me at even appearing to speak

disrespectfully of this book. Compared with anything not of its

author’s, and not of that author’s at a future time, it would be very

great: but its greater younger brothers are its enemies.

[Sidenote: _The_ Portraits Contemporains.]

Still not of these is the _Portraits Contemporains_. One feels inclined

to say at the beginning, and perhaps not disinclined to repeat the

saying at the end, that the title announces an attempt foredoomed to

failure.[578] It is almost inevitable that a contemporary portrait in

literature should fail to be a likeness, should be at best a _charge_,

from one point of view or another. Sainte-Beuve himself in one place

(with a naïveté more characteristic of him than those who have not read

him very long and very carefully may think, but seldom so openly

expressed) admits that his sitters had an awkward trick of falsifying

his presentations. He had traced out for them, more or less early in

their career, that career as they _ought_ to pursue it; but lo! they

would follow their own stars, and not his tracings and indications. This

is one danger, and a common, if not universal one, with its result,—not

often realised in Sainte-Beuve’s own case, but constantly in that of

smaller critics,—that the prophet loses his temper with these

disobedient ducklings, and rates them, not because they behave badly,

but because they behave in a way different from that which he expected

and wished. But more dangerous still, and less to be avoided even by the

staunchest and most vigilant censors, are those insidious, innumerable,

ineluctable personal or partisan differences and prejudices which dazzle

and trouble the contemporary’s eyes: and, worst perhaps of all, that

incurable “too-nearness,” that hopeless lack of the firm perspective of

the past, which clings to him, and will not let him attain to clearness

and the Whole. Accordingly the _Portraits Contemporains_ are, with the

_Portraits Littéraires_, the most unequal of Sainte-Beuve’s work, and

all the more often disappointing because of the contemporaneity.

That reserve, indeed, which was made at the end of the notice of the

_Portraits Littéraires_ is even more imperatively called for here, and

it is most important that while recognising that the real Sainte-Beuve—

the plenilune—is as yet but crescent, we should recognise his brightness

and his crescency. It is, for instance, not merely hasty, but

fundamentally uncritical, to exclaim at the length, the fulness, the

cordiality, with which figures like Fontanes, Fauriel, Daunou are

treated; and to contrast, with abomination, the hesitancy, the grudging,

the reserves, in the case not merely of Hugo,[579] but of Vigny,

Lamartine, even Musset, the roughness on Balzac, the comparative respect

paid to Sue, and the comparatively cavalier treatment long accorded to

Gautier. Even in regard to the great stone of stumbling, it is

necessary, for us who were born later, to remember that however ardent

in the _chevelu_ and _gilet rouge_ and _hierro!_ manner we may think we

should have been if we had been born earlier, the Hugo of the time

before the _Châtiments_, and the _Contemplations_, and the _Legénde_,

great as he is, is not the Hugo of that glorious trinity. As for the

Empire Critics, no impatience at their disproportionate allowance ought

to prevent acknowledgment of Sainte-Beuve’s rare equity and true

critical spirit towards the immediate predecessors with whom he did

_not_ agree—a thing, as we have seen, deplorably rare in criticism.

Indeed, save in that Supreme Court of Critical History where the dignity

of the place excuses the personal insignificance of the judge, and puts

the greatest author on his defence, apology for these five volumes would

be needless, and almost impertinent. They certainly need not fear assay

either of pieces or of passages. In the First, where most of the dubious

places occur, where the judgment is most immature, and the

style most inclined to the jargonish,[580] the “Senancour,” and in part

the “Lamennais,” demand special notice, while the opening of the

“Béranger,” with its sketch of the _causerie_ method, is of extreme

interest, and the frequent references to English writers[581] show us

already the largeness of the critic’s equipment. The Second is perhaps

to be more cordially welcomed for the miscellanies at its end (including

the striking critical imaginations put into the mouths of Diderot and

Hazlitt) than for any of its more imposing constituents. The “Balzac”

article, though it is in the main just, has a harshness and a touch of

personal rudeness about it which are very unusual in Sainte-Beuve, and

not quite explicable. The novelist might certainly be excused for

thinking it wantonly uncivil. It is a little distressing, too, to read

the hostile appendix which Sainte-Beuve ill-advisedly put to his

“Montalembert” paper. But “_Misères que tout cela!_” The “Ballenche” and

the “Villemain,” the “Mme. Desbordes-Valmore” and the “Ulric

Guttinguer,”[582] nearly, if not quite, take the taste out. In vol.

iii., an extremely interesting opening on Vinet, and a good close on

Mérimée, hold between them things even better and sometimes well known—

the “Töpffer,” the “Xavier de Mestre,” the “Jasmin,” the “J. J. Ampère”—

and show, in the “Magnin” and elsewhere, that admirably _horizontal_

view of all periods of French literature which Sainte-Beuve was almost

the first to take, and in which he has had far too few followers,

whether in regard to French literature or others.

This reappears in the “Fauriel,”[583] which takes up nearly a third of

vol. iv., and is there accompanied by an excellent paper on Barante, a

longer but much less capital one on Thiers, two of Sainte-Beuve’s best

known pieces on Leopardi and Parny, and one—for us—of peculiar interest

on Daunou, containing perhaps the most vivid, and at the same time

delicate, sketch in existence of the latest type of Neo-classic critic

in France, before M. Brunetière’s revival sixty years later,—a type

without La Harpe’s exaggeration and caricature, with a certain mildness

and toleration towards the newer things, but secretly and _saturatedly_

convinced that Reason is the Goddess of Literature, that fine verse _is_

“almost as good as fine prose,” and that fineness in both consists of

absolute good sense, logical connection, grammatical impeccability, and

a horror of the _verbum inusitatum_. In this, too, the later and more

perfect manner is increasingly present throughout; and, naturally, still

more so in the Fifth, where the dates bring us to the very eve of the

great period itself, and the essays are sometimes hardly distinguishable

from the work thereof. The very best of these, perhaps, are the three

classical pieces (for Sainte-Beuve was never prudish about titles, and

not more than half of the Portraits in this volume deal with

contemporaries in any sense) on Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and Meleager,

in which, not for the first time, but for the first time in nearly or

quite his full force, he once more makes a new departure in criticism by

handling antiquity in true _causerie_ style. But the “Desaugiers,” the

“Louise Labé,” and the “Casimir Delavigne” are also noteworthy, while

the paper on Gautier’s _Les Grotesques_, a little meticulous and

pedagogic in parts, and written in avowed protest of a mild kind, is

still more so.[584]

[Sidenote: _He “arrives.”_]

In fact, by about 1845[585] he had very nearly developed his full

powers, and he was shaking off the awkward transition state when he had

ceased to be _romantique à plusieurs_ (he never was _à tous_) _crins_,

and not yet become himself, and himself only. He had almost accomplished

the _causerie_, the mixture of biography, and criticism, and “talk about

it,” which Dryden, I maintain, is the first to have actually hit upon,

which Johnson had strengthened but a little stiffened in the _Lives_,

and which he himself re-fashioned by taking hints of depth and insight

from Coleridge and the English Companions, touches of grace and

_engouement_ out of a score of French eighteenth-century critics, from

Fontenelle and Diderot down to Fontanes and Daunou, adding knowledge of

literary history, and a not too peremptory theory of time and _milieu_,

from the Germans and the ambient air, enthusiasm from the still

smouldering hearth of the deserted _cénacle_, and that magic and

indefinable dose, that “little of my own sauce,” as Mrs Tibbs has it,

which genius provides, and of which it keeps the secret. His ability to

concoct this mixture, or rather to produce this new organism, had been

by this time almost fully shown; but the final proof was given, and the

new kind was definitely named and sent abroad, only after the

composition of the most substantive work (except _Port-Royal_) which he

had yet attempted, and the best—itself displaying the gifts he had now

acquired in the fullest measure. Probably the critical moment was

hastened, as so often happens, by an external catastrophe, the upset of

the July Monarchy, and by that transplantation into Belgium for a time

which, though he has put the best face on it, was certainly an exile,

and by no means wholly a voluntary one.

[Sidenote: _Port-Royal,_]

We must, however, first take some notice of _Port-Royal_, which, either

by cause or coincidence, was also the product of a journey, if not an

exile, being originally delivered in the form of lectures at Lausanne.

It[586] is, of course, the most important and substantive single work of

its author—the only one, in fact, to which the older and more exacting

definition of a _book_ would have shown itself complaisant. It occupied,

with completions and revisions, twenty years of his life; it contains

perhaps the most elaborate and masterly exposition of that system of

combined literary, historical, and social inquiry into the life of a

period which he did so much to introduce, and so much more to establish

as a literary Kind; and it expresses and registers notably those changes

of opinion which made him, in the last two decades of his life, an

exponent of an almost entirely _irreligious_ view of life itself. With

this aspect of it we do not here concern ourselves; but the book has far

too much which does directly concern us, in the strictest construction

of our own plan, not to receive detailed attention.

[Sidenote: _its literary episodes._]

I do not know that those “older and more exacting definitions,” which

have been just referred to, would pass, without demur, the features

which make it of this importance to us. It is true that many, if not

most, of the more distinguished men of letters of that century which, in

the general judgment, has been regarded as the greatest century of

letters in France, had more or less connection with Port Royal: nay,

more, that not a few of the Port Royalists of the outer and even inner

circles were great men of letters themselves. But whether this entirely

justifies (to take examples from the first two volumes only) the

inclusion in the book of analyses of _Polyeucte_ and _Saint-Genest_,

which would be ample for extensive monographs on Corneille and Rotrou

respectively,—of an elaborate study of the elder Balzac of which the

same may be said,—is a very arguable point. Still, the inclusion gives

us the book; and, even if it did not, I am not inclined to be

strait-laced on these points, or to chicane about the relation of the

episodes to the epic.

Let us then be as kind to Sainte-Beuve as he was to himself, and admit

what (feeling, I suppose, uneasy) he pleads at vol. ii. p. 107, “Nous

voici, ce semble, bien loin de Port Royal; pas si loin que l’on croit”—

that the spirit of the two plays is quite Port-Royalist, that Balzac

wrote letters to M. de Saint-Cyran (so he did to most people, but no

matter), that Pascal, Nicole, Racine come in of course; that even the

_Mémoires de Grammont_ are not quite extraneous, for was not _la belle_

Hamilton herself (despite her _nez retroussé_ and her Cupid’s-bow mouth)

educated there? We are, in short, to take our literary goods as we find

them, and as fate and the author provide: and they certainly provide

them in plenty. No detailed examinations of Sainte-Beuve’s are more

careful than those of the two plays. If he is a little hard, in the

text, on that Christian (and semi-Gascon) Socrates, and writer of most

handsome letters, who dwelt on the banks of the Charente, he repairs it

in an appendix. The references to minor Louis XIII. literature (though

injured by Sainte-Beuve’s dislike to quaintness) are never to be missed:

and it is needless to say the same of the whole dealing with Pascal, and

of the chapters devoted to the famous labours of the Port-Royalists

themselves, in literary and philosophical education. Tillemont, if not

exactly a lion in literature, is one of the greatest of lion’s providers

therein, and Nicole cannot be denied the title of man of letters.

Malebranche comes in as an opponent, Racine as a pupil, though as an

ungrateful pupil: and on all these and others Sainte-Beuve indulges in

literary excursus of all but his best kind.

[Sidenote: _On Racine._]

The Racine passage is the best worth dwelling on of these, because what

Frenchmen say on Racine is always interesting. We know, of course,

beforehand that Sainte-Beuve will be, to a certain extent,

_juste-milieu_,—that he will neither be of those who denounce with rage,

nor deplore with pity or contempt, the poor foreigners who cannot hear

the celestial music of the great _doucereux_, nor of those who approach

more or less nearly to the view of the poor foreigners themselves. But

the piece is specially interesting because it is perhaps the most

distinct general retractation of the critic’s ultra-Romantic creed, and

because it expresses much the same views as those (very probably derived

from it) of Mr Arnold. You must not, says Sainte-Beuve, attempt to judge

Racine by _passages_; there Hugo, Lamartine, even much lesser moderns

will beat him. You must judge the whole, and take into consideration the

support which each part gives to, and in turn derives from, the others.

Nay, more, Racine is “moins imprévu, moins éclatant, moins héroïque,

moins transportant” than Corneille, but more “equal,” &c. “L’unité,

l’ensemble chez Racine se subordonne tout.” Sainte-Beuve even thinks

that he could have done the many poetic things that he did not do as

well as those which he did, and that in them (here we may all agree) “on

aurait le même Racine.” But did he not lose something under the

desperate hook of Boileau? Perhaps. “Il n’avait pas un démon déterminé.”

You can understand him at once as you cannot Shakespeare or Molière. He

presents the perfection of poetic style, _même pour ceux qui n’aiment

pas essentiellement la poésie_. And the critic, with what some, I

suppose, would call a touch of his “perfidy,” adds, “Là, c’est le point

faible, s’il en est un.” Let us rather say that, while all reasonable

praise of Racine may be read in the lines of this criticism, all

reasonable dispraise of him may be read between those lines.

[Sidenote: Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire.]

The great critical truth, that not merely is the tongue of the critic

loosed but his eyes are opened by the death of his subject, has seldom

been better illustrated than by the volumes entitled _Chateaubriand et

son Groupe Littéraire_, originally delivered as lectures at Liége when

Sainte-Beuve had left France to the March-haredom of the Second

Republic. Of course we must remember that he had had more than twenty

years of critical practice wherein to grow in critical wisdom and

stature; that in the last sixteen or seventeen, especially, since he had

shed his Saint-Simonian and Lamennaisian crotchets, he had (losing some

fancy and enthusiasm with them) acquired immensely greater knowledge,

critical delicacy, critical insight in most ways; and that, accordingly,

the _Portraits_ and other pieces of the ’Forties are, in almost every

respect except romantic and poetic _furia_, superior to those of the

’Thirties. But this will not entirely account for the excellence of the

_Chateaubriand_, which is a sort of central “broad” in the stream of

Sainte-Beuve’s criticism, from which it flows thereafter ever deeper,

wider, and clearer. The book indeed is not—what book, and especially

what critical book, is?—to be praised unreservedly or with very slight

reserves. The common accusations of “envy,” “treachery,” “malignity,”

“intolerance of greatness,” and the like, brought against Sainte-Beuve,

are exaggerated at the best, and at the worst simply silly. They come

partly from the general dislike and suspicion of the critic, who is a

critic wholly or mainly, partly from unintelligent, if not quite

ungenerous partisanship, partly from the most polluted of all sources,

personal and spiteful gossip. But, as nearly always happens, there is

some shred of justification for them, and the matter is important enough

to be dealt with once for all here.

[Sidenote: _Faults found with it._]

Rarely—so rarely that it is an almost unknown event—shall a man

practise, as Sainte-Beuve had for years and decades been practising,

criticism of his contemporaries and in many cases friends, without

exciting ill-feeling. But that ill-feeling becomes still more certain,

and its complexion is likely to be darker, when the criticism is of the

peculiar character which it is Sainte-Beuve’s greatest claim in the

general view (not quite in mine) to have perfected, if not actually

invented. It is true that, in the case of his living subjects, he moves

about, among the extra-literary personal traits, which it is his delight

to assemble and to group beside the literary details in heightening or

contrasting light, with a cat-like dexterity. But even cats sometimes

upset things: and the things among which Sainte-Beuve moved were much

more ticklish and unstable than the objects of the cat’s legerde_pied_.

Moreover, he actually had, as some, though by no means all other great

critics have had, a certain predilection for the secondary. He never

quite attains to the Longinian soundness of view on the

faults-and-beauties question; and it is particularly unfortunate that

the two greatest men of letters of his own time and country,

Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, were men who specially require a

Longinian judgment. Nor am I disposed to deny that his attitude towards

the great _Beltenebroso_ of French Literature “doth something smack;

doth a little grow to.” Sainte-Beuve’s strange Bonapartism—the strangest

instance[587] of that most incomprehensible of political faiths—may have

had a little to do with this: but one suspects, putting gossip aside,

something more. There was, no doubt, much injustice in the too famous

“Mérimée était gentilhomme: Sainte-Beuve ne l'était pas,” but there was

an infinitesimal something in it.[588]

Again, to pass to a less “scabrous” subject, the scheme of the book

leaves a very little to desire: it may be argued, with some justice,

that Sainte-Beuve might better have proceeded entirely by the

planet-and-satellite method which he has partly adopted, instead of

sometimes mixing planet and satellite up, and sometimes keeping them

separate.

[Sidenote: _Its extraordinary merits,_]

But the critical merits of the book are quite extraordinary. I know

nothing earlier even approaching it as a comprehensive review of a great

writer; and the details are even more admirable than the admirable

_ensemble_. As for the latter, whatever may be Sainte-Beuve’s

insinuations, whatever his want of cordiality for Chateaubriand the man

and the politician,[589] it is impossible to charge him with the least

inadequacy as regards Chateaubriand the writer. Like others, he dwells a

little too much on the obligatory “images”; but unlike others, he does

not limit Chateaubriand’s powers to them; and he is more likely to be

thought by foreign critics excessive than grudging in his assignment and

recognition of those powers. He does the amplest justice to the immense

advance, in intensity and range, of “René” over Bernardin and Jean

Jacques. He sees perfectly well that the best and most characteristic

part of Byron is only Chateaubriand in English, in verse, with a few

more yataghans, and with no crucifixes. He has here gone nearer, I

think, to a real “grasp” of the writer, and the whole writer (alas! not

of nothing but the writer) than in any other instance.

As for the details, one simply punctuates the book with bravo!s, if

reading merely for enjoyment, and the note-book is never out of one’s

hand if one is reading for reference. It “enfists” you, as the French

say, at once, and it never lets the grasp go, but tightens it ever again

and again. Take the admirable conclusion of the second Lecture,[590]

with its indication of the way in which Chateaubriand combines the

appeal of ancient poetry, of mediæval romance, and of the new fancy for

nature, and turn, or rather come (for there should be no turning or

skipping in this book) to the justification of the last point in the

Fourth.[591]

[Sidenote: _and final_ dicta.]

But it is at the end of the Seventh lecture, in the special critique of

_Atala_, that Sainte-Beuve first, I think, shows the wonderful critical

mastery which was to distinguish him for the remaining twenty years of

his life; and the proofs multiply as we turn the pages. In whom

elsewhere—even in Coleridge—shall we find two such sentences, on the

_verso_ and _recto_ of the same leaf,[592] showing such different kinds

not merely of mastery but of supremacy as those that follow—the last of

the Eighth lecture, and, save for a mere bow to the audience, the first

of the Ninth? He has, in the first, been contrasting _Paul et Virginie_

(for which he, like almost all Frenchmen, has an affection

incomprehensible to us), and he has to admit the transcendence of its

successor. “Elle [Atala] gardait,” he says, “son ascendant troublant: au

milieu de toutes les reserves qu’une saine critique oppose, la flamme

divine y a passé.... On y sent le philtre—le poison qui, une fois connu,

ne se guérit pas; on emporte avec soi la flèche empoisonnée du désert.”

_Dixit!_ There are critics who feel the philtre and who carry the arrow

with them, and there are those who do not.

The other passage is, “Savoir bien lire un livre en le jugeant chemin

faisant, et sans cesser de le goûter, c’est presque tout l’art du

critique. Cet art consiste encore à comparer.... Faites cela, et

laissez-vous faire.” How different this cool prescription from the

enthusiasm of the last, and yet how equal in its finality!

I could bestow much more of my tediousness on the reader in regard to

this wonderful book: but its allotted space is nearly filled. Once only

do I find a pettiness, in fact a falsity, where[593] he carps at the

phrase, “A combien de rivages n’ai-je pas vu depuis se briser les mêmes

flots que je contemple ici,” in the truly Rymerian note, “Tout les flots

se ressemblent: mais ce ne sont pas les _mêmes_ flots, les _mêmes_

vagues qu’il voyait se briser en des lieux si divers.” The _poète mort

jeune_ in Sainte-Beuve (to use his own famous words) was _bien mort_

when he wrote this: and the critic had _not_ “felt the philtre.” Does

not the greater part of the power of the Angel of the Sea arise from

this very mysterious sense of the unity of wave from Pole to Equator,

and from coral to iceberg? The lands are broken, separated, isolated:

the “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea” is one and indivisible, an

unbroken link between the live self that sees it here and the dead self

that saw it far away and long ago.

But he seldom slips or nods thus. For happier things, note his

sketch[594] of the three manners in Chateaubriand, where he compares

Fontenelle’s notice of Corneille’s,[595] and might have compared

Milton’s; the confession that French is not “une langue qui aurait eu

l’accent et qui se souvenait d’avoir étée scandée”; the profound remarks

on the Kinds of Criticism;[596] the almost profounder remarks on the

different kinds of description.[597] I could multiply these instances

almost endlessly, but it is enough to say, or repeat, that if we had

nothing else of Sainte-Beuve’s it would place him in the first rank of

the critics of the world, and that it is perhaps the earliest book that

definitely does so.

[Sidenote: _The_ Causeries _at last_.]

Although the rest of Sainte-Beuve’s life certainly did not fail to

justify the immortal and invariable law that the gods never yet gave all

things to man at once, yet in the main it was exceptionally fortunate,

and the fortune was of the kind most important to our purpose. For once,

a man who could do a thing supremely was allowed to do it, under

conditions, if not absolutely ideal, yet exceptionally favourable. Had

he resisted the temptations of professorships and senatorships, he would

have been able, without any interruption, to devote himself entirely to

literary work of his own choosing, in his own house, without let or

hindrance, publicity or disturbance, without even the pressure (so

galling to some temperaments) of any fixed time and place of duty,

except the easily adjustable necessities of having his “copy” and his

proofs duly ready. Even of the avocations which he permitted himself,

the actual interference with his vocation was trifling. The reward in

mere money, though of course ludicrous in comparison with the rewards of

other professions or even arts, was a competence; and it freed him

completely from one of the most disagreeable penances of the working man

of letters, the necessity of stepping out of his proper sphere in order

to keep himself within it.

With this amiability of the Destinies, and with the man himself so

perfectly prepared as we have seen him to be, it is scarcely surprising

that the work should be altogether exceptional. It would require a

really “encyclopædic head” either to affirm or deny, with competence,

the proposition that it is the most complete and four-square batch of

work ever done by any craftsman: but I do not know where to look for its

rival, in any branch at least of literature. Criticism may or may not be

the lowest of such branches; it may or may not be unworthy even to be

called a branch. But of it, and barring the previous question, we shall

certainly look in vain anywhere for such an example, in quality and

quantity combined, as is presented by the _Causeries du Lundi_ and the

_Nouveaux Lundis_.

[Sidenote: _Their length, &c._]

I do not know whether the length of the average _causerie_ was directly

conditioned by the fact of its appearance in a daily newspaper[598]

instead of a Review, or whether Sainte-Beuve’s experience and instinct

combined, induced him to make it rather shorter, but much more uniform

in length, than his _Deux Mondes_ articles. This length is pretty

exactly twenty pages—a few articles being a little longer and a few a

little shorter, but the greater number coming very close to the score

of, say, 350 words each. It may be a superstition based on this great

practitioner’s practice, but I think the majority of his successors have

found that this length—say, from six to eight thousand words—is

singularly normal for the treatment of an average subject of the larger

literary kind. It ought not to weary the reader; it does not cramp the

writer; and it does not tempt him to undue expatiation. Occasionally

Sainte-Beuve, of course, doubled or trebled or even further multiplied

_causeries_ where the subject demanded it; but at first he did this very

seldom, and he never made it the rule. In selecting his subjects he

naturally preferred a new book when he could get it, if only as a “peg”:

and he had plenty of choice. His rejections, however, were sometimes

disappointing, particularly so in the case of M. Egger’s _History of

Greek Criticism_, which he had intended to take. He neither specially

chose nor specially rejected themes that he had already treated: and

sometimes, though not often, he reproduced parts of his old work. As to

the treatment, enough has been said of that above, or will be said

below. It was almost unique: it is still almost unmatched. As far as any

general scheme is extricable, it is the obvious one of a few general

remarks—not very seldom expanding into precious tractatules—of more or

less abstract criticism; a biographical sketch, anecdoted with special

view to literary influences; remarks, with more or less quotation, on

books and passages; and sometimes a sketch, usually rather shy and

suggestive than peremptory, of comparative “placing”—the comparison,

however, having been subtly presented throughout. But the method is

never stereotyped: and the variations are of the essence.

[Sidenote: _Bricks of the house._]

The hundreds of articles and the thousands of passages which these

eight-and-twenty volumes present are naturally difficult to deal with

after the method which has been here adopted; but a few pages may be

fairly devoted to a selection from the _notabilia_ with which “the sweet

compulsion” of reading them through again for the purpose has provided

me freshly. At the very beginning, and in the first volume, though it is

one of the most brilliant of all, Sainte-Beuve is rather militant: he

never became quite Olympian. The opening article on Saint-Marc

Girardin[599] (between whom and our critic there was always a little

friction) has a good deal of “malice” in the French, if not exactly in

the English, sense: and that which follows on Lamartine’s _Confidences_,

with a later one on _Raphael_, though just enough, is distinctly cruel,

and savours of political vengeance on the fallen dictator. But these

ticklish and disgustful contemporaneities give way to those perfect

studies of the Sévignés (if it be not profane to speak of that person in

the plural), the Hamiltons, the Jouberts, the Comines, the Firdousis,

which we associate most happily and most characteristically with

Sainte-Beuve. There is less, though there is some, of the wholly welcome

dealing with technically “ancient” literature: but there are two

consummate articles of “criticism in the second intention”—the papers on

“Villemain and Cousin as Men of Letters,” and on “Feletz, and Empire

Criticism.”

The second volume or semester of this Annus Mirabilis—for the two cover

the whole twelvemonth from October 1 to September 30, 1849-1850, with

exactly fifty-two articles told down for the fifty-two weeks[600]—

contains the famous and generous “Mlle. de Lespinasse”; the “Huet,”

which is perhaps as good an example as one can find of the whole in some

ways; the admirable “Chesterfield”; a wonderfully just “Mazarin”; the

“Gil Blas,” which will be reprinted with _Gil Blas_ for centuries; and

that magnanimous and yet not uncritical adjustment of coals of fire

which Sainte-Beuve set alight in honour of the death of Balzac,—all of

them varied, picked out, and set off by a profusion of studies of the

eighteenth century, less literary in substance but literary enough in

connection, and prefaced in one case, that of the “Madame du Châtelet,”

with a most ingenious link, conduit, or what shall we call it? of

explanatory connection between the purely literary and the merely

gossiping. If there is to be found, also, an extremely bitter-sweet

appendix on M. de Pontmartin, and an article on Chateaubriand, which is

a superfluity and a blunder after the great book, we can pardon them. No

other man has ever done such another year’s _darg_ in criticism.

We must not follow the rest of the twenty years or thereabouts with

equal precision, though few of them were less substantially filled. An

indication to those who do not know, a reminder to those who do, of

certain _sommités_ among the articles; and a small sheaf of specially

important passages, may lead us to the final summary of Sainte-Beuve’s

critical position and achievement.

A whole cluster of remarkable things opens the Third volume. The

“Rabelais” is practically the first piece of absolutely sane and

appreciative criticism on the subject, the starting-point and foundation

of what is now the accepted opinion of the competent. The “_Qu’est ce

qu’un classique?_” is one of those more general pieces of criticism in

which Sainte-Beuve does not go out of his way to indulge, but which he

does, when he does them, in a manner showing the superiority which

practice in actual “judging of authors” confers on its practitioners

when they “go up higher.” The “Rousseau” is almost equal to the

“Rabelais,” and it is not the first comer in criticism who can be just

to both. His social-historic studies of the seventeenth and the

eighteenth century serve as foils, and as intrinsically delightful

reading, though they are often on the fringes of literature itself. The

article on Latouche is a little ungenerous, and that on Fontenelle more

than a little inadequate; while I wish that Sainte-Beuve had not

indulged in a singularly vain and violent contrast between Camille

Desmoulins and Vauvenargues. But the “Pasquier,” the “Saint-Simon,” the

new “Diderot,” make amends.

[Sidenote: _His occasional polemic._]

And it is always so. There were squalls occasionally, as there were

especially certain to be, at the ticklish time, when the Second

Consulate or Presidency was passing, not quite ideally, into the Second

Empire. He need not have poured broadsides into popgunners like the

Staël-Hetzels and the Laurent-Pichats.[601] The first was a very useful

publisher and a respectable author of children’s books; I think I

remember some tolerable critical work of the second, apart from his

politics. But what is either to-day? what, much more, will either be a

hundred years hence, beside Sainte-Beuve? He knew Wordsworth: surely he

might have remembered that “our noisy _curs_ are” not even “moments in

the being of the Eternal Silence.” “They yap; what yap they? let them

yap.” For in some cases they can do nothing else: and in all the Silence

itself catches them very soon, if we do not lend them an echo.

In the Fourth volume, though the “Mirabeau” articles and the “Chamfort,”

the “Saint-Evremond et Ninon” and the “Marmontel” are charming in the

mixed kind, I think, for literature, the palm is due to that sentence—so

autobiographical and so much more than merely autobiographical—which

opens the “Moreau and Dupont” piece, “Je cause rarement ici de poésie,

precisément parceque je l’ai beaucoup aimée et que je l’aime encore plus

que toute chose.” _Quia multum amavi!_ And he does not derogate from

this attitude in the Fifth, where he welcomes Victor de Laprade and

Leconte de Lisle, while this also contains delightful things on

Raynouard, Rivarol, Retz, Patru, Gourville, and even the remarkable

person once called Le-Brun-_Pindare_. In the Sixth we go from Rollin to

La Reine Margot, from Bernardin and Courier to Saint Anselm backwards

and the Abbé Gerbet forwards, with, at the close, one article of special

interest here, Sainte-Beuve’s revised and in some ways _palinodic_

opinions on Boileau. The Seventh is mainly eighteenth century—

Montesquieu and the Président de Brosses, Franklin and Barthélemy, Grimm

(for whom, here as elsewhere, Sainte-Beuve makes strong fight against

the general, and, I am bound to say, in my judgment, the well-grounded,

distrust of him), Necker and Volney, with, to give us change from a

better time, Regnard and La Fontaine at front and close, Richelieu and

Saint François de Sales, Mérimée and Arnault, and the elder Marguerite.

On the last he is a little disappointing: and perhaps we might have

expected that he would be.

The Eighth, with many excellent examples of the usual

seventeenth-eighteenth century _causeries_, and with a most welcome

batch of mediæval studies on Joinville, on the _Roman de Renart_, on the

_Histoire Littéraire_—good to read even now, and priceless then—contains

an article, written with great care, to which an Englishman naturally

turns, and with which most Englishmen will be disappointed, that on

Gibbon. None of the usual causes could have blunted Sainte-Beuve’s

judgment here: yet it is blunted. Missing, in the one sense, what he

calls the _javelot_, the _coup de foudre_, the _cri haletant_—in other

words, the somewhat theatrical and rhetorical[602] touch of French, he

misses also, in the other, Gibbon’s _magnificence_, that sense of the

vast procession of events and that power of reproducing it, which gives

an almost poetic self-transcendence to an otherwise prosaic and

_philosophe_ nature. We all miss things, of course: but such a man as

Sainte-Beuve should not have missed such a thing as this. The

“Joinville,” however, which immediately follows, makes once more those

familiar amends; and the next volume (the Ninth) contains admirable

companions to it in the “Froissart” and the “Villehardouin,” this last

one of the author’s best. He had now started (to some though not to all

extents with advantage) dealing with one subject in several essays: and

most of this volume is so occupied. “Stendhal,” “Marivaux,” “Madame

Dacier,” with others, show his admirable flexibility. The Tenth is

perhaps less attractive, for except Agrippa d’Aubigné and one or two

others, its subjects are not as a rule of the first interest, and in one

Sainte-Beuve returns to Chateaubriand—not happily. But the Eleventh,

with a certain amount of “filling,”—the first collection stopped here,

and Sainte-Beuve had to plug the gap made by the removal of the index

when it was extended,—has at least two articles, or batches of articles,

of the first interest—those on Montluc and Cowper. _Ne fait pas ce tour

qui veut_—to appreciate equally, and almost at the same moment, the

greater d’Artagnan of Sienna and the patron of Puss.

As a matter of fact, the original enterprise of the weekly _Causerie_

did in a manner finish with this first issue. For five years

Sainte-Beuve had kept neck and neck with the enemy. His work afterwards

was more intermittent, and even underwent a cessation of some years when

he was lecturer at the École Normale, between 1857 and 1861. The last

four volumes of the actual _Causeries_ are made up from different

sources: though the bulk of the constituents are of the true breed.

Among them are some of Sainte-Beuve’s most interesting studies of the

past—“Ronsard” (revisited), “Saint Amant,” “Voiture,” “Vauvenargues,”

“Villon”—and some of his most famous papers on contemporaries, such as

those on Musset and the Guérins. The last volume of all contains two of

the most valuable of those invaluable papers on criticism in general, to

which we have drawn attention already, that on Nisard’s _History_ and

that on _La Tradition en Littérature_. But perhaps the special appeal of

these appendix-volumes is the appearance of articles on books and

authors that are still in a manner modern—on _Madame Bovary_, on

_Fanny_,[603] on M. de Banville, on M. Scherer.

[Sidenote: _The_ Nouveaux Lundis.]

And when the series began again regularly, after this interruption, with

the _Nouveaux Lundis_ in 1861, he formally promised or threatened a

recrudescence into criticism “truer” and “franker” and more regardless

of contemporary protest.

One may be sorry for this, even though the particular ashes are long

cooled. Although Sainte-Beuve’s “malignity” was, as has been said,

absurdly, and is still sometimes inexcusably, exaggerated, he was far

from free from those _iræ_ from which the something less than celestial

spirit of the critic so seldom escapes.[604] There is a sort of

“rankle,” a kind of distant growl of “That’s _my_ thunder,” in his

review at the time of M. Rigault’s _Querelle_, in his later obituary of

the author, and even elsewhere: the first paper of the _Nouveaux Lundis_

on Laprade is openly and almost rudely hostile: while the critic

proceeds later to exchange fresh broadsides with M. de Pontmartin.

Still, where the element of hostility or personality does not put flies

in the ointment, it is of course of the first interest to have such a

paper as, say, the “_Madame Bovary_” article, or the later one on

“Salammbô,” introductions to such rising “imps of fame” as Taine, Renan,

the Goncourts, Saint-Victor, Fromentin, Feuillet,—even such fair and

well-weighed, though antagonistic, examinations as that of Veuillot. In

regard to Taine and others, especially, Sainte-Beuve is particularly

interesting, because they present a crop of his seed, a development of

his own method, with the substitution, for that rather _ondoyant et

divers_ conclusion or no-conclusion of his to which we shall return, of

hard-and-fast theories of ruling ideas, and _milieux_, and the rest. All

this, however, would not make up to those of us who love the modern

_quâ_ modern little and the contemporary _quâ_ contemporary not at all,

if it had induced Sainte-Beuve to give up those inestimable studies of

the past, or those well-reasoned considerations of criticism in general,

which are his main titles to fame. But it did not. One of the very best

of the latter kind is the famous review of M. Taine’s own _Histoire de

la Littérature Anglaise_. And in the former, the “La Bruyère,” the

“Sévigné,” the “Perrault” in the first volume, the “Bossuet” in the

second, the article (independent of his “Introduction,” which is itself

a masterpiece) to Crepet’s _Poètes Français_, and the batch on the

_Mystère d’Orleans_ (that is to say, the Early French Drama) in the

third are more than reassuring. Soon, moreover, _Daphnis and Chloe_

promises a renewal[605] of those articles on the classics which are

perhaps the only ones ever written, since our regrettable

specialisations in the nineteenth century, by a literary critic of the

very first order in the modern sphere.[606]

Towards the last he turned a little too much to the political, and

though at the very end the long batch on Talleyrand is succeeded by one

equally long on his old favourite, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, the amiable

Marceline is not quite a poetess of importance enough, nor is the part

actually devoted to her poetry large enough, to make the swan-song quite

literary. But there is plenty of genuine matter everywhere, and even the

contemporary articles afford room for justice at last to Gautier, and

for a long and attractive review of _La Poesie en 1865_, where M. Sully

Prudhomme, and others not even yet quite out of fashion, appear. It may

be that something of the irrational and superstitious _guignon_ of

continuations attaches to these _Nouveaux Lundis_: but surely very

little.[607]

[Sidenote: _The conclusion of this matter._]

Why more? Indeed, save to observe the proportion and method of the book

(which are of the first importance), and to pay proper respect to a

prince in the critical Israel (which is hardly of less), why so much?

Except for the vast bulk of his work, and for the fact that it is not

collected into definite “Works,” but exists under a large number of

separate headings, some of which may be overlooked, Sainte-Beuve’s

criticism offers itself with almost every advantage and facility to the

reader. It has to the full those superficial attractions of

“readableness” which have given to French criticism its popular

position; and it lacks those superficialities in the other sense, which

detract from the value of French criticism so often. The immense variety

not merely provides something specially interesting for almost everybody

who has any literary, historical, or, one might almost say, intellectual

interests at all, but prevents tedium or satiety in those whose

interests are wider. The style, though neither coruscating, nor treacly,

nor enigmatic, is—in its perfection and when it has outgrown some early

defects—“the model of the middle style” in criticism, suitable for the

purpose and the writer’s temperament. It can say anything that the

author wishes to say, and does not try to say what he cannot.