But we must examine the results which he gives a little more closely

before concluding, and, according to the good old plan, take the

deficiencies, or the want of supremacies, first. As has been put, with

examples, above, Sainte-Beuve is not entirely to be trusted with the

out-of-the-way, the eccentric, even the abnormally great. The very

_ethos_ of the critic exposes him to this, and the opposite fault—the

_engouement_ for everything that _is_ out of the way, that _is_

eccentric, that _is_ abnormal, whether great or not—is not merely an

excess of a critical virtue, but a serious, an almost disqualifying

critical defect. Still, to be able to admire and recognise the

“earth-born and absolute fire”[608] is, if not a critical _sine qua

non_—for without it the critic may do good work—yet his rarest and

noblest gift. Sainte-Beuve had it not quite.

There is room for more difference of competent opinion as to his

abstinence from the most definite posing and placing—from the final

arrangement of his portraits exactly as he wished to have them seen by

his readers, and to stand in relation to each other. There is, of

course, its own merit in that abstinence, which is (as it was in the

earlier case of Villemain) something of a reaction from the fondness of

his “Empire” predecessors for the trenchant, the peremptory, the

official distinction and ticket. There had been very much too much of

this during the Neo-classic period; and there has been, to put it

mildly, quite enough and to spare of it since. Nevertheless, one may

think that Sainte-Beuve, though he never, as his countrymen too often

do, leaves you uninformed, does too often leave you floating—undecided

even as to what his own definite view of the man’s or work’s value,

relation, position, may be. Now this surely is a slight defect. When one

wants a picture, one does not want merely a sheet of drawing-paper, with

the most accurate and “genial” studies of eye, nose, chin, mouth, hair,

scattered anyhow about it, but the complete, or at any rate the

outlined, face made up from these studies.

I can think of no general fault save these two, and we are not now to

hark back to particulars. The tale of general and particular excellences

is more agreeable to construct, but more difficult to put in little. The

head and front of Sainte-Beuve’s critical welldoing he has himself put

excellently and more than once. To read; to understand; to love:—and

then to facilitate reading, understanding, and loving on the part of

others—these are the first and second great commandments of the critic.

And few, surely, have obeyed them better. He may be a little cumbered

about much serving—we do not (that is those of us who want criticism)

always want such Persic apparatus of biography and history and gossip.

But the Persic apparatus is very agreeable in itself, and sometimes even

not useless. And there is plenty of the plain leg of critical mutton—

well fed, well killed, well kept, and well dressed. Only perhaps a

certain degree of expertness can fully appreciate, but ordinary sense

and taste must surely not fail to perceive, the range of reading which

is—be it again and again repeated—in all but the most extraordinary

cases the _necessarium_, if not the _unum necessarium_, of the critic.

Common-sense and taste are perhaps at least equally well prepared with

the expertest _expertise_ to recognise, if they are given their way, the

sanity and the equity, the patience and the thoroughness, the freedom

from crotchet and caprice, from the merely parochial and the merely

particularist, which distinguish Sainte-Beuve from almost all other

critics. He was, as we have seen, very lucky; few have had at once his

gifts, and his opportunities of exercising them, and that rarest and

happiest gift of “the Hour,” without which Gift, and even in some sense

Opportunity, will fail to estate a man in his proper place. But the Hour

has seldom found the Man so ready: and the Man has in no single instance

in our department, and in few throughout all, requited the Hour by

leaving such fruits of it for all time to come.

The general discussion of the Classic-Romantic quarrel—so far as we can

deal with it—will be for the Interchapters; and it is not even very easy

here to make a methodic distinction between the names who will best

appear in this chronicle side by side with Sainte-Beuve, and those who

should figure in the corresponding chapter of the next Book as his

successors. But applying something of the same method which has helped

us before, we may perhaps most conveniently group beside him Victor Hugo

as a matter of course, with, of the rest, five representative figures—

Gautier for the Romantic farthest, the out-and-out partisans of

“art-for-art”; Nisard for the Classical reaction; Saint-Marc Girardin as

an example of that Academic criticism which has always been so important

in France, and which with and after Villemain took a new colour;

Planche, as the most noteworthy champion of the other school (yet not so

“other” but that the two interpenetrate and overlap) of the critics who

are purely men of letters, and almost purely journalists; and Magnin for

the pure scholars. The rest, with one or two exceptions, but not

excepting so famous a man as Janin, will bear postponement, can even be

postponed with advantage. The chief exception is Mérimée; here, as

always, by the joint efforts of Fate and himself, alone. But the great

twin names of Michelet and Quinet may require a little mention here, and

before proceeding even to Hugo.

[Sidenote: _Michelet and Quinet._]

These two inseparables—more inseparable even than the other pair, Cousin

and Villemain—must, I fear, be also among those whom I shall seem to

some readers to slight. Both, but especially Quinet,[609] were of course

saturated with literature. From his first translation of Herder to his

posthumous work on the Greek genius, Quinet was always dealing with the

subject, often _nominatim_, seldom in very remote fashion. Michelet no

doubt directed himself more to the purely historical side of that

historical study of humanity which he learnt from Vico, and Quinet

probably from Herder himself. Literary citations, literary parallels,

literary suggestions swarm in Michelet; even the ’45 seems to him (the

origin of the notion is obvious enough, but thinking it out will be

found uncommonly difficult) “a Canto of _Ossian_.” But for our purposes

the pair are almost disqualified—Michelet more than Quinet, but Quinet

very mainly—by two things. The first is that confusion—whither derived

from Vico or from the Germans does not matter—of literature with

history, sociology, politics, psychology, and the like, which has seemed

orthodox to the two last generations, but which to me appears a

dangerous delusion and confusion. The other is the peculiar _voyant_

thought and style of both, which precludes them from taking anything

like a clear and achromatic view of any literary matter, even if they

had endeavoured to do so. Not that the prophet cannot be a critic, for

we have been able to disentangle some extremely clear, trenchant, and

(however disputable) orderly and logical dicta of criticism from Blake:

and Carlyle’s deficiencies, where he is deficient as a critic, do not at

all come from this cause. But maresnesting, and night-maresnesting in

special, is the very worst possible—perhaps one might say the very most

impossible—occupation for a critic; and while Quinet was often, Michelet

was almost always, in quest of the variety and the sub-variety of nest.

[Sidenote: _Hugo._]

The temperament of Victor Hugo[610] was perhaps as uncritical a one as

any man ever possessed, or as ever possessed any man: but the strength

of his genius was such that it could hardly fail to confer mastery, at

any rate for a time, on its various literary applications. When the sins

of temperament had become besetting and habitual, and the genius was—in

this respect, not others—a little failed, his criticism became scarcely

more than a curiosity; when the genius was still in its prime, and the

temperament had not broken through all control, it is sometimes of a

very notable character. _William Shakespeare_[611] is the best text-book

of the later and worse state; the _Prefaces_ to the _Cromwell_,[612] to

the _Orientales_,[613] and the _Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées_[614]

of the earlier and better. To take the worst first, though there are

fine things in the _Shakespeare_ book,—there could not fail to be,

seeing that it was written, _en regardant l’océan_, by Victor Hugo,—and

though a sort of _aura_ of the right Romantic fury still breathes

through it, it has nothing of criticism except a splendid concionatory

harangue to admiration of the best things, and a great deal of Hugonism

nearly at its worst. The colossal confidence in ignorance, which made

the poet a laughing-stock to his enemies, permits him to observe (in

arguing that England never knew her Shakespeare till Voltaire taught her

better) that Dryden _parla de S. une fois pour le déclarer hors

d’usage_. [Sidenote: William Shakespeare.] It would be a good

examination question, “Translate into the French of Hugo ‘the largest

and most universal soul,’ &c.,” and the dictionary resulting would be

quite a useful cipher-code. Elsewhere you have the usual page-long

strings of names, the usual staccato sentences, punctuated with _nons_

and _ouis_, and stripped of articles and particles, the usual abuse of

England (whose life for one thing that she did, in giving Victor Hugo

refuge, he will yet not wholly take), and also the usual bursts of

verbal and imaginative inspiration which give us the _petite fièvre

cérébrale_, and make us excuse, forget, welcome any nonsense, any bad

taste, even any bad blood.

[Sidenote: Littérature et Philosophie.]

Nothing that I have said, or shall say, is to be construed as implying

contempt of the remaining critical works of Hugo. On the contrary, “Read

all the Prefaces of _Dryden_,” which Swift said in scorn, may be adapted

here in utter seriousness. And the student who wishes to know must read

the whole of _Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées_—that curious collection

of the poet’s critical and other work from the age of seventeen to the

age of thirty-two. The gods do not grant to any man to be a good critic

at seventeen; but they do grant to a Victor Hugo not to be a negligible

writer at any time. In the “Journal of a Young Jacobite” of 1819; in the

“Opinions of a Revolutionary” of 1830; in the _Idées au Hasard_; above

all, when the poet-critic was a little over age, in the articles on

Scott and Voltaire, on Lamennais and Byron, on Mirabeau and Dovalle,

there is matter which might have made twenty critics; though it did not

please the Fates that it should actually make one. These things are a

very open allegory; there should not be any need, and there is certainly

here no space, to interpret them.[615]

[Sidenote: _The_ Cromwell _Preface,_]

If Victor Hugo had written no criticism but _William Shakespeare_, I

think I should have put him, as I have put Balzac, in a note, and left

him otherwise alone, out of respect, not of persons, but of the divinity

of poetry. The two Prefaces that I have selected—there are others, but

these will suffice us—would have given him a substantive place here, if

he had written no poetry at all. That to _Cromwell_ is the longer, the

more elaborate, and much the more famous: but I do not think that it is

really quite so important as the later and shorter to the _Orientales_.

In the first, with a proud humility which retains a little more of the

noun, if it has not much less of the adjective, than the undisguised

arrogance of the later work, Hugo, while professing not to defend

himself at all, and to regard the Classic _v._ Romantic debate as

practically fought out and over, as a fact fights the whole battle once

more. It is observable that the word “art,” without being made exactly

the battle-cry, recurs again and again throughout the piece, and is, in

fact, its dominant. But he has a theory of poetry, not so very different

in outline from that of the “Goliaths classiques,” of whom he affects

not so much as to take notice. Man and poetry woke in primitive times;

when man is singing he is close to God; and the rest of it. The voice is

unmistakably Hugo’s, but the forms of thought which it chooses might

almost be eighteenth, or even seventeenth, century. They work out the

conclusion that Epic + Lyric = Drama—the latter being largely dealt with

to show the rise of Comedy and the dignity of the Grotesque. Already we

get Hugo’s name-triads flung at us (to use one of his beloved Spanish

comparisons) like _bolas_. There is a great deal about Shakespeare. The

“Two” Unities—Hugo has extended his grace to the original one—of Time

and Place are too absurd to be spoken of: but they _are_ spoken of and

shown to be absurd. A passage on rules, models, and imitations is

perhaps the most effective of the whole, though it comes the best part

of a century after Lessing. There is an excommunication of Delille (very

interesting to compare with the glorification by Joubert, whose own

theory of poetry fits Hugo as well, as it fits Delille, _to us_,

strangely), leading to some remarks on _Cromwell_ itself, which have but

minor interest, and a notable conclusion on Criticism. There is here

more dignity than in those remarks in which he was wont to indulge

later, when he drew upon himself the dignified reproof of M. Nisard: and

they contain some really good observation on False Taste, old and new, a

well-founded denunciation of critique by rule and kind, by faults and

beauties, and a final protest against mere Authority.

The piece is of great interest even now: and one can readily understand

the immense influence it must have had as a manifesto. But it is injured

by its length, by its want of method, and by the constant presence of

the two dissonances above indicated. That the poet should fight _pro

domo sua_ is natural, desirable, laudable: but why are we to be

disturbed by the constant assertion of a lofty indifference? It is again

natural, desirable, laudable, that he should fight the general Romantic

prize—there was every possible justification for it. But why, again, the

pretence of not troubling himself about any such business, and of the

business being really over?

[Sidenote: _and that to the_ Orientales.]

The Preface to the _Orientales_ escapes all these objections and, short

as it is, is undoubtedly the most remarkable piece of criticism that

Hugo has left, while it is also the boldest, the clearest, the least

hampered with tricks and mannerisms, the most serious, the most really

dignified. In it he “goes straight for the jugular.”[616] He questions,

and denies point-blank, the right of the critic to interrogate the poet

on his choice of subject or of treatment _at all_. “L’ouvrage est-il bon

ou est-il mauvais: voilà tout le domaine de la critique.” Here we come

again to one of the epoch-making sentences, one of the great _jalons_ of

critical history. No ancient had ever dared to say it. Patrizzi had said

it, hardly knowing what he had said. The German and English Romantics

had cast about it, implied it, made themselves responsible for it, or

something like it; but never posed it plumply as the Charter of

Literature. And Hugo does not leave it as if he were afraid of it, or

half-ignorant what it means. He turns it over and over, so as at each

turn to give a fresh blow to the Neo-classics. Never mind the means

employed: ask _how_ they are employed. There are no good or bad subjects

in poetry: there are only good or bad poets. Everything is a subject.

Poetry is a country of universal suffrage: examine _how_ the artist has

worked, not _why_. Art has nothing to do with gags, leading-strings,

handcuffs: he may go where he list, believe as he list, do what he

lists. Kind, story, space, time, fashion, all are at his choice.

And then, amplifying more particularly the phrase about the _limits_ of

art, Hugo has one of his most characteristic and finest passages of

exuberant prose, expressing the wish to make his poetry like a Spanish

city—half oriental, half mediæval—and finishes very briefly with some

words on his actual book.

[Sidenote: _Capital position of this latter._]

This is the real _clou_, the central decisive point of Hugonic, and

indeed of all Romantic, criticism. “Never mind the subject, the kind,

anything of that sort: is the treatment good?” is practically the gospel

of modern as opposed to ancient, of Romantic as opposed to Classical,

criticism. Of course, like all hard-and-fast propositions and

prescriptions as to things that are not hard-and-fast, and especially

like all controversial propositions and aggressive prescriptions of all

kinds, it does not contain the whole truth, and it does not even contain

nothing but the truth. If it be construed in the sense that one subject

is as good as another, it may, and probably will, lead wrong. If it be

taken to mean that even the experience of our two thousand five hundred

years (or whatever it is) of literature does not show that some subjects

are so much more difficult and thankless than others that they are

_practically_ impossible, it will entice the poet to useless and

probably dangerous experiment. But then, with reasonable people, it does

not mean either of these things. It is in reality a defensive much more

than an offensive proposition,—a protest which must be allowed in any

Court of Historical Criticism against the Classic and especially the

Neo-classic notion of _a priori_ classification of Subject and Kind, and

of referring to this instead of considering _the work_ first. [Sidenote:

_The_ “work”.]I have known objection taken to the use—at least the

frequent use—of this word “work” in literature, and as to literature. It

is, in fact, something of a shibboleth: but, I think, a valuable one. No

one who uses it intelligently is likely to forget that it is the _work_,

the work_ing_, the art, not the material, that he is to look to first.

And Victor Hugo, in the document before us, was practically the first to

enjoin this duty with authority and conviction.

We may pass appropriately to his most distinguished opponent and his

most enthusiastic disciple in regard to this gospel.

[Sidenote: _Nisard: his_ Ægri Somnia.]

The memories of a reviewer, however hard he may have tried to do his

duty, are apt to lodge in a tomb from which there grow more briers than

roses. It is not the most unpleasant of the thoughts of the present

writer on his own reviewing period that the _Ægri Somnia_[617] of M.

Désiré Nisard enabled him, not quite too late, to revise, in the right

direction, his opinion of their author. There needed, and there needs,

no grovelling palinode—Nisard still seemed, and still seems to me, to

have taken on the whole the wrong side in criticism. And I am not quite

certain that the reproach (which was brought against him and which he

endeavoured to refute, almost as late as the publication of _Ægri

Somnia_ itself, by boldly and wisely reprinting his early articles) of

having “burnt what he had adored” was quite unjust. But in these last

utterances there was a singular dignity, justice, and good taste,

contrasting rather fortunately or unfortunately, according to the side

on which one looked, with the insolences which Hugo had permitted

himself during the senile apotheosis of his fifteen years’ restoration

after the Année Terrible. And one saw—as indeed one always had seen more

or less—that whatever had been faulty in M. Nisard’s earlier, but not

earliest judgments, had been the result of an undue, an exclusive, a not

quite intelligently catholic devotion to justice, dignity, good taste.

There have been greater men who had worse gods.

[Sidenote: _His_ Essais sur le Romantisme.]

If one did not know how very differently personal matters strike the

person and the not-person, it might be surprising to a reader of the

reprinted _Essais sur le Romantisme_[618] that M. Nisard should have in

any way complained of the charge of burning what he had adored. The

first half of the book is occupied with articles dating from 1829 to

1831—on Hugo, Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, and even Musset. They are

very good articles; they are, I think, better criticism than

Sainte-Beuve’s own was at this time: but, though they are not wildly

ultra-Romantic, they in each and every case—even in that of Musset

himself—take the side and the defence of the innovators. It is true that

there is, towards the last, a momentous and germinal doubt whether there

is not something _excessive_ in Hugo—whether there is not _de trop_.

And in the Preface to the second part, written in 1838, the critic

announces his conversion in terms which admit of no dispute. He speaks

of his _retour aux doctrines classiques_, he says that he has “ranged

himself,” that he “climbs back, with discouraged and dragging step, the

road that he had run down in his intoxication.” Metaphor for metaphor,

has this much change to give or to receive from that of “burning the

adored”? And the substance of the remainder bears this out. Much in the

manifesto _Contre la Littérature Facile_ is quite true—not merely of

1830: and the subsequent controversy with Jules Janin is not idle or

one-sided. But as for the articles on Hugo himself which follow, an

innocent person might suppose them to have been written by quite another

M. Nisard than the author of those above referred to. The _Chants du

Crépuscule_, we are told, “ont achevé de désespérer les amis de M. V.

H.” (They contain, let it be remembered, _Napoleon II_.) There is a

_caractère de décadence_ in them. His prose has a better chance than his

verse. His _mort littéraire_ is _prochaine_ (so near, in fact, that he

wrote the _Légende des Siècles_ twenty, and published the _Quatre Vents

de l’Esprit_ more than forty years later).

Yes! M. Nisard was burning what he had adored; but it is fair to admit

that for the rest of his long life he adored what he had certainly never

burned. His most famous work, the _Histoire de la Littérature

Française_,[619] is written in rigid confinement to the Classical house,

with fresh windows opened, indeed, so that the critic could see the

glory of Shakespeare and others outside, but with a strict regulation

that nothing shall be changed in the furniture and regulations within.

The capital studies of Latin Poets, the miscellaneous literary work—

professorial and other—are all the consistent utterances of a man who

has pulled himself up on the edge (or a little over the edge) of a

precipice, and has resolved, for the rest of his life, to walk steadily

in the other direction. No article of Sainte-Beuve’s is at once juster

and more acute than that on M. Nisard’s _History_, with its exposition

of the way in which the critic-historian has constructed an _a priori_

theory of the French literary genius, and has written his history

accordingly—accepting and eulogising those writers who illustrate his

conception, neglecting or denouncing those who run counter to it. And

the conception itself is formed altogether according to the second

manner of viewing—the view according to which _Les Chants du Crépuscule_

is, in another sense, a song of approaching night. M. Nisard tells us

that his conversion was effected during a visit to England, and under

the influence of Homer and La Fontaine. Surely never was there such a

singular instance of _similia similibus_ in literature; nor has the

country of Shakespeare—where, by the way, Tennyson and Browning had just

brought out their first books—ever exercised a more remarkable influence

upon a studious visitor.

By whatever process, M. Nisard had become a confirmed anti-Romantic, and

such he remained to the end. He is one of the best of the breed:

learned, consistent, courageous, courteous withal, as the critic who is

or wishes to be considered “scholarly” too seldom is. But he has given

himself up to an idol: he will not take the Work as the Work presents

itself, and judge whether it is good or bad. And the result is

inevitable.

[Sidenote: _Their_ culpa maxima.]

The conclusion of the reprinted _Essais_, with great temper and in

excellent taste, practically confesses M. Nisard’s weakness as a critic.

It is the weakness of the old “faults-and-beauties” method, joined to

the moral heresy. Victor Hugo, he says, was a man with very grave moral

faults. He was: and what is more, these moral faults were of a

singularly disenchanting kind. Further, Victor Hugo’s works are full of

faults not merely moral. They are: and sometimes these faults are almost

inconceivable. But what M. Nisard forgot is that the critic, like the

miner, is finally concerned with the quantity and quality of poetic gold

which a poet—or, for the matter of that, with the quantity and quality

of literary gold which any man of letters—will yield. No matter that it

lies in a pestilential neighbourhood; no matter that you have to smelt

out quartz, and far worse and uglier things than quartz, to get it. Is

the gold there? That, and nothing else, is the question. Now, in Hugo

the gold is there; it is there not by pennyweights, not by ounces, not

by pounds, but by hundredweights to the ton. And the critical process,

if only it be perfected, is after all not so laborious as the process of

stamps and cyanide; the critic himself is not susceptible to wild beasts

and malaria. Gold or no gold? much gold or little? these are his true

questions. M. Nisard could not see them. The gold must be ready smelted

to a certain orthodox French standard; it must be even brought in

ingots, or ready worked into jewellery, according to pattern. Otherwise

he would not have it. And of the many critics that have been, are, will

be, like unto him, he was after all one of the best.

[Sidenote: _Gautier._]

France—I have been told frequently of late, and even not so very late,

years—has forgotten her Théophile Gautier. And some of the voices have

generally said that she has been quite right in doing so, whether urged

to the forgetfulness by serious arguments such as those of M. Émile

Faguet (whom, though I differ with him not seldom, I desire to take the

opportunity here of saluting with all possible respect as an admirable

critic, and to whom I could almost pay the doubtful compliment of

wishing that he were dead in order that I might discuss him fully), or

by the mere impertinences of quite trivial folk. I have never seen the

least reason to change my own opinion to the contrary, that “Théo” was

not only one of the most amiable and (with some peccadillos) estimable

men of letters of the whole French century, but one of the greatest of

its men of letters in verse and in prose, in romance and in

travel-writing, in miscellanies and in criticism. He was not greatest in

the function which here concerns us, but he was great. The common

complaint that he was too good-natured, though it may have some faint

colour, is mainly a blunder and the son of a blunder—that is to say, of

the notion, far too often encouraged by critics themselves, that the

critic is a schoolmaster, whose business is to say nothing but

“Blockhead!” and “Sit down!” and “Come to me after school!” But the

comparative ill-luck which pursued him, and forced him always to write

for bread, partly turned him away from pure literary criticism,[620] and

sometimes made him write smooth but not very significant things to

please, though never at the cost of friendship and principle. Much that

he wrote is not reprinted; he could not afford, like M. de Pontmartin,

for instance, to “embook” all his _feuilletons_. Yet certain volumes of

his printed works, the _Grotesques_, the _Histoire du Romantisme_, and

its companion the _Portraits Contemporains_, with some separate

articles, prefaces, &c., will give us good matter to indite of.[621]

[Sidenote: _His theory: “Art for Art’s sake,” &c._]

“Théo” has not been a favourite with the grave and precise sort among

our fellowship as a rule: yet, if they could be consistent, they should

at least admire him for his own consistency, and for the fact that, from

the very first to the very last, his criticism, apparently so

impressionist and occasional, was conducted on an almost rigid—on a

quite logical and well co-ordinated—theory. This theory was the famous

one of “L’Art pour l’Art,” with, for inseparable companion, the doctrine

that _the_ instrument, _the_ medium, _the_ vehicle, almost _the_

constituent of literary art, is the Word, the beautiful word, furnished

with its beauty by light and colour, by sound and form, and developing

it by skilful and laborious arrangement, selection, and rejection. As

for the major theory (the formulation of which is sometimes attributed

to Hugo himself, and was admitted by him as late as _William

Shakespeare_, but with an important qualification, and even, to a

certain extent, disclaimer, as to its range and meaning) I have already

said,[622] though I see that some critics have not observed the

observation, that, especially with the addition “Art for Art’s sake

_only_,” it is at best but a half truth, and may be a full half “error

and curse.” And we all know to what sort of whole a half truth

constantly turns. Art, after all, is a _means_: and “means for means’

sake only,” if not nonsense, is at any rate sense very incomplete. But

it was necessary, and it was almost desirable, that the exaggeration

should be formulated, because of the incessant intrusion of the opposite

theories, which are scarcely even _quarter_-truths, that all depends on

the subject, that art must serve morality, and the like. As for the

second doctrine above formulated, I need not say that, with Longinus and

with Dante, I accept it absolutely and _sans phrase_. To both doctrines,

however, to the more disputable as to the less, Gautier flew at first,

and clung at last, not more in the provocative youthfulness of the

Preface to _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ than in the famous and exquisite

“Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle”

of _Émaux et Camées_, many years afterwards, or in conversation and

writing, more than as many years later still. The first is an eager and

passionate sermon on the doctrine by a fervent neophyte; the second, its

mature embodiment in imperishable verse by a master. Both together leave

very little to be said on the matter save the single word “Read!”

[Sidenote: _His practice_: Les Grotesques.]

At any rate, what has to be said on them by way of comment belongs

rather to Interchapter and Conclusion than to this place, where we are

busy with Gautier’s application of his doctrines. The next considerable

document to the Preface just noticed is the _Grotesques_ of 1844, a

delightful book. After all that has been written since on Villon, one

comes back to it about him. Scalion de Virbluneau and some others are

mere _hors-d'œuvre_, agreeable enough, but no more. The _pièce de

résistance_ of the book is the long, ardent, but at the same time

humorous (Théo was one of the few indubitable humourists that France can

boast) vindication of the critic’s namesake, Théophile de Viaud, one of

the most luckless of the many luckless poets of genius. But Saint-Amant,

Chapelain, Scudéry, Scarron, supply him with occasions for work scarcely

inferior to the “Théophile.” The criticism is of course, on the whole,

avowedly criticism of the lighter kind, gossip-criticism, criticism

intended not to disgust those who do not take literature very seriously.

But it is also intended to please those who do: and it does.

[Sidenote: Histoire du Romantisme, _&c._]

The various documents included under the general head of _Histoire du

Romantisme_ and _Portraits Contemporains_ are of very different dates,

covering nearly the whole of Gautier’s forty years of literary life.

Being ranged rather by subject than by date,[623] they enable us to

judge the singular evenness and continuity of his critical spirit, which

(as Maxime Du Camp, I think, has urged, and as I myself have always

held) was systematic by tendency and nature, though haphazard on the

surface. The _Histoire_ itself was actually interrupted by the

critic-poet’s death: and the masterly Essay on the French Poetry of the

middle of the Century (which should be compared with Sainte-Beuve’s) is

only five years before it: but some of its companions go back twenty

years, and many of the _Portraits Contemporains_ recede to the legendary

decade of the ’Thirties themselves.

[Sidenote: _Ubiquity of felicity in his criticism._]

In all, the same critical qualities are apparent—a central motive and

directing power of belief in the two doctrines stated above, but at the

same time a system of gearing, flexible enough to accommodate itself to

the most widely different subjects, an unwearied and rejoicing faculty

of appreciation proper, an unrivalled science of verse and of

descriptive and decorative prose, an ever-present charm, and, over all

and through all, the atmosphere of the sweet and sunny temper which it

is so specially delightful and so rare to find in a competent critic.

But for those who want sufficient yet not too copious examples, three

long pieces—the article on French Poetry above mentioned, the “Balzac”

of 1858 (which M. Montégut, I think, has justly called _magnifique_),

and the Introduction to the posthumous edition of Baudelaire in 1867—

will do excellently. Between them they would fill a not so very small

volume, and there would be hardly a page in that volume destitute of the

merits just enumerated, and others to boot. The first is perhaps the

greatest example extant of reviewing, brought _sub specie æternitatis_,

and made really higher criticism. From the _Légende des Siècles_ (and

remember what Gautier writing on Hugo meant under the Second Empire!) to

the _Odes Funambulesques_, from _Poèmes Evangéliques_ to _Fleurs du

Mal_, on scores of poets and books of poetry besides, he finds always

the suitable, and, at the same time, always the admirable word to say.

On Balzac and Baudelaire alike—great as is the alteration of palette,

and viewing-glass, and style of handling that the two require—he shows

alike that “impeccability,” that “perfect magic in letters,” which the

younger of his subjects had ascribed to him. I do not know any critic

who deserves the older and now strangely altered epithet of “candid”

(_i.e._, “_amiably_ just”) better than Gautier: but his amiability is

never indulged at the expense of his justice. And perhaps it needs

nothing more than the statement of this fact to express, συνετοῖσι, the

infinite resources of his skill in thought and phrase.

[Sidenote: _Saint-Marc Giradin._]

Saint-Marc Girardin[624] (who was three or four years older than

Sainte-Beuve, and outlived him by four or five) has, in a reference

above, been coupled with Villemain, and the resemblance both of career

and of critical quality is rather strong. Both were politicians, both

professors, and both played their double part after a fashion to which

there are few parallels in English history, and those few not very

encouraging. But Saint-Marc Girardin was a really considerable person in

politics—not least in the very last days of his life, when, in the

National Assembly, charged with the reconstitution of France after the

Prussian War, he was a strong monarchical and Orleanist partisan. Of his

numerous works, our chief texts are his _Cours de Littérature

Dramatique_ and his _Essais de Littérature et de Morale_ which appeared

in succession[625] about the middle of the fifth decade of the

nineteenth century. It may be well to say frankly and plumply that he is

one of our (or perhaps it were better not to avoid the _moi haïssable_,

and say “my”) disappointments. I did not read him very early, and had a

very fair conceit of him when I began: but I find little to recommend in

him.[626] He is emphatically “clever”; must have been a stimulating and

effectual professor; writes very well; has a real (and not, as is rather

common, a painfully simulated) combination of the man of letters and the

man of the world. But he does not give me the idea of having had any

spontaneous, individual, love for literature, or any original personal

views about it. He has everywhere the _juste milieu_, the opportunism of

his time, and his party, and his profession. He is neither a _perruque_

nor an _échevelé_: he is, in fact, an accomplished Angel of the Church

of the Laodiceans. And Time is terribly of the Divine mind as to

Laodicea and its angels.

Moreover, his method of dealing with Literature, and especially with

that dramatic literature which chiefly interested him, is of the kind

from which, as it seems to me, there come few good things—“De l’Amour

Conjugal chez Shakespeare,” “Le Mariage au Théâtre dans Molière,” “La

Jalousie” in this, that, and the other. It may be because of that

“barrenness in the philosophic” with which I have been charged; but

these things seem to me to be learning’s labour lost. Study Othello,

study Leontes, study Posthumus as much as you like; but to see the life,

the poetry, the passion in these live, poetic, passionate men and plays,

not to extract a dead essence in a bottle and label it “Jealousy in

Shakespeare”—or rather _in vacuo_. Still, there are others who have

other tastes, and Saint-Marc Girardin’s half score of editions prove it,

and perhaps justify them.

[Sidenote: _Planche._]

Gustave Planche, on the other hand—a critic probably much less known

now, except vaguely and anecdotically, than Girardin—appears to me to

have been a real critic, and to have missed, so narrowly that I do not

quite know _how_ he missed it, being a very great critic. Probably it

was _quia non multum amabat_: because he succumbed to that fatalest

temptation of our kind to scratch and scoff and snarl instead of

embracing. Anecdotically, as I have said, he is probably well enough

known—his passion for George Sand, and his odd ways, and especially that

most unlucky indifference to clean linen, and cleanliness generally,

which he shared with the authors of the _Song to David_ and the

_Rambler_, turn up in all the books. He appears in the _Comédie

Humaine_,[627] and the more extreme Hugolaters shudder or storm at him

as a blasphemer of Hugo. But I rather doubt whether many people read his

criticism now.[628]

[Sidenote: _Weight of his criticism._]

Yet it deserves reading thoroughly: and it is only a pity that there is

not more of it easily accessible. That Planche entirely avoids the quest

of the mare’s-nest cannot be said; but some varieties of that curious

structure are very tempting even to good critics. He may be thought to

have found or built a famous one in the discovery that the three

egregious books of the excellent Henry Mackenzie, instead of being

Sterne _plus_ Rousseau, watered down with _quant. suff._ of artificial

tears, are “a sorrowful and unique hymn on the insufficiency and

obscurity of actual life,” the “confession of an immaculate soul.” One

thinks of the entire pressgang lifting up its voice and weeping at the

noble conduct of old Edwards, and the like, and one marvels—but not, in

my case at least, contemptuously. It is perhaps not wonderful, after

this, that Planche, though he admires Fielding, cannot tolerate

_Jonathan Wild_. Yet in close context he gives us taste of his quality

by a really admirable inquiry—one of the best I know—into the difference

of Drama and Novel, and the light which is thrown by and on this

difference, in regard to the inferiority of Fielding as a dramatist, and

his greatness in prose fiction. No one who has been so kind as to

interest himself in my views will think that I agree with Planche when

he holds that “literary quality does not matter,” when he bids us seek

“the will before the inspiration, the fatal irresistible _idea_.” He

would certainly have anathematised, and does, I think, somewhere very

nearly anathematise in terms, my favourite doctrine of the Poetic

Moment. But what do such differences of opinion matter? You blaze away

at the enemy, but, if he and you be of the right stamp, you salute the

soldier.

And Planche (for all his most unfortunate objection to soap and water)

is, I think, a “gentleman of the French Guard,” a _Black Mousquetaire_

of the doughtiest. His objection to Hugo[629] is not in the least fossil

or stupid. He has a right to it: it is a legitimate and inevitable

deduction from his general poetic creed and likings. No poet gives more

“poetic moments” than Hugo: and Planche, as we have seen, does not hold

with them. No poet has more of _poésie visible_ than Hugo: and Planche

objects to this poetry _nominatim_, directly, again and again, and wants

to go back to that _poésie intelligible_, in which, it must be admitted,

Victor would not be quite so victorious. He argues—and I do not know

that one can so easily deny it off-hand as point out that it is a

dangerous suggestion of false issues—that beauty of form does sometimes

“appeal to the very lowest passions”: while, on the other hand, a poet

_doit toujours avoir une idée philosophique_, which (again we must

confess) Hugo very seldom, if ever, had. Yet for all this he can say

plumply, _pour le maniement de la langue, M. Hugo n’a pas de rival_, and

he admires, little as he can have agreed with much of it, that

remarkable Preface to _Littérature et Philosophie Mélées_ on which we

have commented above.

He is nothing if not a daring critic. Some of us, who have studied

French Literature very long, would hesitate to tell a Frenchman, as

Planche unhesitatingly tells Bulwer,[630] not merely that he ought to be

_plus serré, plus précis, et moins vague_, which is true and within any

one’s competence, but _moins incorrect_, which from a foreigner seems

going far. This _verbality_ of Planche’s is in fact one of his main

notes. Lamartine,[631] one might think, was made for him as a poet: and

he does indeed think that Lamartine’s position is _magnifique et

incontesté_. But he does not scruple to say that _la grammaire est

souvent offensée_ by the poet of the _Méditations_; that _l’indicatif se

croise avec l’imparfait_ (think of the horror of this crime!) _à trois

lignes de distance_; that the ambitious _Jocelyn_ is _un beau poème sans

composition et sans style_. It may be more surprising that he is not

cordial to Alfred de Vigny, and cannot in the least grasp _Dolorida_:

but it must be remembered that Vigny’s earlier work (the posthumous

Poems might have pleased Planche better, had he lived to see them) is

distinctly inclined to that _poésie visible_, which the critic did not

like because, I think, he could not himself “see” it. It must be

admitted that he “gets home” on Leconte de Lisle’s Wardour Street Greek—

though I do not know that his sharp correction is more fatal than

“Théo’s” mild one.[632]

Lastly, we may mention the extremely remarkable paper[633] on _Les

Royautés Littéraires_, with its notable classification of critics into

those who gauge works of literature (1) by comparing them with the past,

(2) as present things merely, (3) by looking to the future and the end

that the author proposes to himself. Here it is enough to point out to

the intelligent the curious difference between this classification and

some others. For Planche, near as his terms may seem to come to it, does

_not_ mean, by the criticism of his first class, what we mean by the

Historic-Comparative method.

These specimens will, I hope, for all their scrappiness and want of

context, give some idea of the force, weight, acuteness, and

intellectual moment of Planche’s criticism. It is not in merely

accidental and catalogue fashion that I have put him next to Saint-Marc

Girardin. There is a real and a vital contrast. Planche may be right or

he may be wrong, but what he says is coherent; it comes from a direct

and real examination, intensely interested, of the subject under

discussion; it is guided by and supplemented from a body of definite

and, to some extent at any rate, reasoned literary preferences and

principles. In short, once more, the live contact, the true, fruitful,

critical embrace. It is a pity he did not wash!

[Sidenote: _Magnin._]

Of Magnin we need not say so much, but all that is said must be good. A

librarian for many, and a professor for a few, years, he was, as we have

called him, a pure scholar, but with his erudition mellowed and

sweetened by literature. His _Origines du Théâtre en Europe_,[634]

written in the early days of historical comparative study of mediæval

literature, is a classic still: and his _Causeries et Méditations_[635]

contain many things worth reading. He was much interested, as were so

many Frenchmen, by the visit of the English company of actors, in which

Miss Smithson was leading lady, to Paris: and he was led to study the

older English theatre, though he misjudges _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_,

and rather staggers one’s notion of the necessary acquaintance with the

language of the literature you are criticising, by talking about an

English poem entitled “_The_ Greece” (not “_La Grèce_,” understand). But

probably we all do things as bad or worse. And at any rate, Magnin, with

this work, his _Origines_, the re-introduction of modern readers to

Hroswitha,[636] and other things, is a protagonist of the historical and

the comparative in the study of literature.

[Sidenote: _Mérimée._]

As we separated Beyle in a former chapter, so we may separate Beyle’s

“most remarkable production,” Mérimée,[637] in this. His temperament,

the very opposite in all ways to Hugo’s, was as critical as Hugo’s was

uncritical, and his exquisite style—in some respects the most exquisite

of the French nineteenth century—should have lent itself to criticism

with a sort of pre-established harmony that could never have belonged to

the merely plain, or to the mainly “fulgurous.” But, as in other ways,

there was something suicidal, or at least self-silencing, in this same

temperament, and Mérimée has not left us very much to deal with here.

There are numerous strokes of it in the _Letters_ to Panizzi and the

_Inconnues_, some of them not unprecious. We knew that Mérimée (ii. 205,

to _the_ Inconnue) would think Hugo “words without ideas,” and recommend

a dose of Madame de Sévigné as a remedy (why not enjoy both and turn

them to profit?). But it is really interesting to find that he cannot

like Baudelaire, and most of all to find his first (though even then

rather lukewarm) approval of Renan as a brother in freethought

lessening, till we have the famous description—worthy of a Veuillot who

should cease to be a swashbuckler and become a gentleman of the sword—of

the style of the _Vie de Jésus_ as “the delight of all the servant-girls

of France.” But Mérimée, like some others whom we have noticed, was

drawn away by his studies, no less than by those contradictions of

cynical-sentimental temperament of which we have spoken, from pure

literary criticism to things like History and Antiquities, where he had

not to “distrust himself.” There may even have been some of the

Congrevian affectation, which Voltaire not unjustly rebuked, in the

caprice which made him, as M. Blaze de Bury[638] says, “causeur, érudit,

archéologue, académicien, sénateur, tout ce qu’on voulait, mais homme de

lettres! jamais!” which brought it about that “avec lui la littérature

ne venait que par surcroît.” In his published things of the kind,

_Mélanges Historiques et Littéraires_,[639] _Portraits Historiques et

Littéraires_,[640] and the like, the literary side is studiously kept

down and away from, though, as we see from the _Letters_, it was always

really present. He imputes to Beyle[641] his own assumed detachment from

it; the review[642] of Ticknor’s _Spanish Literature_, which he was so

admirably qualified to write, is full of traits going in the same

direction. One is rather sorry to find Mérimée siding with those who

would have mediocre authors kept out of literary histories, pretending

that a man may read too much (he was himself almost omnilegent), that

you can understand French seventeenth-century theatre (you cannot)

“without having read Campistron.” But this is the fanfaronade of a

modern Signor Pococurante, with a difference; and in the piece Mérimée

cannot help showing his own critical sense (whether consistently or not)

in his demand for more on the early literature, in his contempt of

symbolic and Germanising explanations of _Don Quixote_. Of the two

papers[643] which, with the “Beyle,” are the longest of his literary

essays, the “Cervantes” and the “Brantôme,” the latter has a mere

_coda_, the briefest possible, of true literary criticism, and the

former not very much of it. Even on his beloved Russians, Gogol,[644]

Pouchkine, Tourguénieff—though there was bound to be more here in the

case of an actual Introduction, so to say, at last by a Grand Master of

the Ceremonies of a new language and literature—there is hardly so much,

except perhaps on Pouchkine, as we should expect. Like Lockhart, to whom

he had a great resemblance, Mérimée hated “your d—d literary man” so

much, and feared so much to be mistaken for such a person, that he would

not, perhaps at last could not, be what he might have been as a critic.

But we could not do without the stories from _Charles IX._ to _Lokis_,

and we can very well do without criticism from him. So all, once more,

is for the best—a reflection which, when made in connection with

Mérimée, has unwonted piquancy.

CHAPTER III.

GOETHE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

HAMANN—LICHTENBERG—HERDER—HIS DRAWBACKS OF TEDIOUSNESS, PEDAGOGY, AND

“METEOROSOPHIA,” BUT GREAT MERITS—THE ‘FRAGMENTE’—THE ‘KRITISCHE

WALDER’—THE ‘URSACHEN DES GESUNKNEN GESCHMACK,’ THE ‘IDEEN,’ ETC.—

‘AGE-, COUNTRY-, AND RACE-, CRITICISM’—SPECIMENS AND REMARKS—

WIELAND—GOETHE—THE ‘HAMLET’ CRITICISM, ETC.—THE ‘SPRÜCHE IN PROSA’—

THE STERNE PASSAGES—REVIEWS AND NOTICES—THE CONVERSATIONS—SOME MORE

GENERAL THINGS: GOETHE ON SCOTT AND BYRON—ON THE HISTORIC AND

COMPARATIVE ESTIMATE OF LITERATURE—SUMMING UP: THE MERITS OF

GOETHE’S CRITICISM—ITS DRAWBACKS: TOO MUCH OF HIS AGE—TOO MUCH A

UTILITARIAN OF CULTURE—UNDULY NEGLECTFUL OF LITERATURE AS

LITERATURE—SCHILLER—HIS ÆSTHETIC DISCOURSES—THE BÜRGER REVIEW—THE

‘XENIEN’—THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH GOETHE—THE ‘NAÏVE AND SENTIMENTAL

POETRY’—OTHERS: BÜRGER—RICHTER—THE ‘VORSCHULE DER ÆSTHETIK’—THE

SO-CALLED “ROMANTIC SCHOOL”—NOVALIS—THE ‘HEINRICH’—THE EARLIER

‘FRAGMENTS’—THE LATER—HIS CRITICAL MAGNIFICENCE—TIECK—THE SCHLEGELS—

THEIR GENERAL POSITION AND DRIFT—THE ‘CHARACTERISTIKEN’—A. W.: THE

‘KRITISCHE SCHRIFTEN’ OF 1828—ON VOSS—ON BÜRGER—THE ‘URTHEILE,’

ETC.—THE ‘VORLESUNGEN ÜBER DRAMATISCHE KUNST UND LITERATUR’—THEIR

INITIAL AND OTHER MERIT—THE SCHLEGELIAN POSITION—THE ‘VORLESUNGEN

ÜBER SCHÖNE LITERATUR UND KUNST’—ILLUSTRATED STILL MORE BY

FRIEDRICH—UHLAND—SCHUBARTH—SOLGER—PERIODICALS, HISTORIES, ETC.

There is a difficulty in writing about German criticism, especially in

the great period of Goethe’s productiveness, which hardly occurs in any

other department of our subject. Not only is there much positive

critical writing from all the writers, great and small, of the time, but

almost all the writings of the great ones are criticism of an indirect

and applied kind. The whole of German Literature from 1750 to 1830 is a

sort of _Seminar_—a kind of enormous and multifarious Higher Education

movement, pursued, with much more than half consciousness, by persons

often of great talent and sometimes of great genius. To give an account

of all this is impossible: if it were possible it would be really

improper, because much of what the Germans found out with infinite

labour was only what nations more fortunately situated in regard to

literary position had inherited, if they sometimes neglected their

inheritance. But they also found out certain things which other nations

had not: nor is it easy to combine an indication of these with an

account, full, but not too full, of the entire movement; and hardly any

two persons are likely to agree on the point where fulness is reached

but running over has not begun.

[Sidenote: _Hamann._]

An early and remarkable instance of this critical permeation is

Hamann,[645] the “Magus of the North.” If Hamann had been anything but a

German, superficial readers might take him for a quack; indeed, as it

is, they have done so, and possibly may still do so. After an early

visit to England—which was anything but fortunate, save that it imbued

him with English literature—and after trying various occupations, he

passed the greater part of his life in a very poor public employment. He

wrote large numbers of letters to Lindner, Herder, Moses Mendelssohn,

and other persons, and published many short treatises, of the most

miscellaneous in kind, and the most eccentric and occasionally

apocalyptic in style and title. But he was in reality as deadly a foe of

affectation and sham as Carlyle himself, who, no doubt, took not a

little from him. His polemic with his friend, and townsman, and

“high-honoured Herr-magister” Kant (whom, however, one shudders to find

elsewhere described as “ein guter _homunculus_”) does not concern us.

But it is almost impossible to read a few pages in his works without

coming across some literary reference, more or less remarkable when its

date is considered. As early as 1759 he writes[646] to Kant himself,

“Wir schreiben für ein Volk das Maler und Dichter fordert”; three years

later[647] he entitles two of his quaint little pieces “Author and

Critic,” “Reader and Critic,” and fills them with ironic wisdom. Earlier

than these last, in May 1761,[648] he has read Diderot, and, like

Lessing,[649] has discovered in and with him that rules are all very

well, but that there is something “more immediate, more intimate,

obscurer, but more certain” than the Rule.

He is harsh, but by no means wholly unjust (as indeed we have seen),

when he finds, in _The Elements of Criticism_, “Mehr Worte und Wendungen

als Sachen”; he knows Burke; and he leaves his “Magus”-tower to discuss

Baretti and Goldoni. Mystic as he is, he detects the emptiness of the

new Æsthetic:[650] and consistently champions direct perception of

literary and other beauty in individual cases. It is admitted that his

Shakespeare study[651] transmitted itself to Herder, upon whom he had

great influence: and, generally speaking, he may be said to have

exercised at least as much power in the germinal and stimulating way

upon the younger writers, who were to form the great generation, as

Lessing did in the way of dogma and method. Against the mere

_Aufklärung_ and against _Sturm und Drang_, Hamann was alike a

conservative and preservative agency: and he is one of the authors, now

getting terribly numerous, on whom I should like to spend much more time

and space than can be afforded here.

[Sidenote: _Lichtenberg._]

There are rather strong points of resemblance between Hamann and the

somewhat younger Lichtenberg. Both were very much influenced by visits

to England, and both show the inspiration or English humourists—

especially Swift—in their not exactly forced, but very decidedly

_purposed_, eccentricity. Lichtenberg, however, was more a man of this

world than the “Magus”: and he shows very much more of the passion of

the time for physics. Never did any one’s writings better deserve the

title of _Vermischte Schriften_[652] than his, consisting as they do,

for the most part, of a bewildering assemblage of mote-articles, ranging

from the question “Why Germany has no seaside watering-place,”[653] and

from an account of a “Sausage-Procession”[654] (which gives a foretaste

not merely of Jean Paul but of _Sartor Resartus_ itself) to serious

mathematical and physical discussions. Lichtenberg is perhaps best known

to English readers by his dealings with Garrick and other English

theatrical persons: but there is not a little pure literature in him,

outside as well as inside his two sets of titularly literary

_Bemerkungen_.[655] He has actual animadversions on Pope, on Swift, on

the early German drama even: but his most noteworthy critical

achievements are to be found in more general maxims and judgments, many

of them showing that creditable anxiety for the literary improvement of

his country which the best men of his generation all felt, and which was

rewarded in and by the next. He stigmatises that excessive _imitation_

which even here we have had to notice: he says plumply,[656] _Die

Deutschen lesen zu viel_; he is prophetically, as well as actually,

notable on the process of commenting and translating Shakespeare.[657]

But perhaps his best judgment-epigram is on that critical vice which is

the other extreme from general denigration. “Men call,” says he, “others

by the name of genius, as wood-lice [_Kelleresel_] are called

Millepedes. Not that they _have_ a thousand legs, but that people won’t

take the trouble to count!”

[Sidenote: _Herder._]

With Herder himself a different form of difficulty besets the historian.

Here there is no question of scattered literary _obiter dicta_ occurring

in a range of obstinately miscellaneous thinking. Twenty volumes[658] of

ostensibly and really literary work, of which something like a full half

is actual criticism, present themselves to the inquirer; he knows, and

everybody knows, that his author counts, as hardly anybody else, save

Lessing and Goethe, has counted, in the literary development of one of

the great “completely equipped”[659] literary nations of Europe; he can

see, if he has any eyes at all, that Herder is, with Lessing, Diderot,

and the shy and mainly apocryphal Gray, one of the very few leaders in

the conversion of Europe at large to a catholic study of literature. And

yet the arguments against any very full treatment of him in such a book

as this are twenty-legion strong.[Sidenote: _His drawbacks of

tediousness,_] In the first place, there is what I can only call a

certain fearful _woolliness_ about Herder’s literary work. It scarcely

ever compresses and crystallises itself into a solid and fiery

thunderbolt of literary expression. He himself, in the very forefront of

it,[660] speaks of “Die liebe Göttin Langeweile,” “the dear Goddess

Ennui,” as having “hunted many, if not most people, into the arms of the

Muses.” I am afraid it must be said that in his own case the dear

Goddess did not understand where her mission as matchmaker ended, and is

too frequently present at the interviews of man and Muse.

[Sidenote: _pedagogy,_]

In the second place, that pedagogic instinct which has been noted, which

is so excusable and so praiseworthy in him and in his contemporaries,

when we consider their circumstances and _milieu_, interferes somewhat

disastrously with the freedom and the lasting interest of his writing.

The Latin nations, by their inheritance of real or supposed prerogative

from Latin itself, we English by our alleged national self-sufficiency,

escape this in greater or less degree. All the four, Italians, French,

Spaniards, English, take themselves in their different degrees and

manners for granted; they are “men,” if only in the University sense.

The Germans of the mid-eighteenth century are, and take themselves for,

schoolboys: it is greatly to their credit, but it does not precisely

make them good reading without a great deal of good will. [Sidenote:

_and_ meteorosophia,] Lastly Herder, as it seems to me (though, no

doubt, not to others), in consequence of this sense of dissatisfaction

with his own literature, climbs too rapidly to generalisations about the

relation of literature itself to national character, and to the

connection of literature generally with the whole idea of humanity. All

this is noble; but we are in a bad position for doing it. It will be a

capital occupation for persons of a critical temperament when humanity

has come to an end—which it has not even yet, and which it certainly had

still less in Herder’s time.[661]

[Sidenote: _but great merits._]

These general disadvantages are indeed compensated by general merits of

a very eminent kind. Stimulated by Hamann, by Lessing, and by his own

soul, Herder betook himself, as nobody had done before him, to the

comparative study of literature, to the appreciation of folksong

(perhaps his best desert), to the examination of Ancient, Eastern,

Foreign literature in comparison with German. This is his great claim to

consideration in the history of literature and of criticism: and it is

so great a one that in general one is loath to cavil even at the most

extravagant expressions of admiration that have been lavished upon him.

[Sidenote: _The_ Fragmente.]

But individual examination of his works revives the objections taken

above. For instance, the early _Fragmente zur Deutschen Litteratur_[662]

has an almost unique _relative_ interest. I do not know where to look

for anything like it as a survey (or rather a collection of studies) of

a literature at a given period of its development. On the language; on

the prosody;[663] on the “rhetoric” in the narrow-wide sense, of German

after the close of the Seven Years’ War; on the chief authors and kinds

of its literature; on a vast number of minor points, positive and

comparative, in relation to it, Herder lavishes an amount of filial

devotion, of learning, of ability, which is quite admirable. Taken

_absolutely_, the value and the interest, and therefore the admiration,

shrink a little.

[Sidenote: _The_ Kritische Walder.]

The _Kritische Wälder_, which followed the _Fragmente_ in a couple of

years,[664] are occupied, first, with a sort of continuation of the work

of Winckelmann and of Lessing in the _Laocoön_ (a continuation which,

like its forerunners, busied itself chiefly with the arts other than

literature), and then with some work of Lessing’s enemy, Klotz,[665]

somewhat more directly literary in kind. Klotz, however, had busied

himself, and Herder necessarily busies himself in turn, with general

questions of the moral-literary type, especially in reference to Homer

and Virgil. The book is full of those curious _Rettungen_ or

“white-washings,” of which we have previously referred to an example in

speaking of Lessing on Horace. But it has not very much for us.

[Sidenote: _The_ Ursachen des Gesunknen Geschmack,]

There is some more, though the quality may be differently appreciated by

different persons, in the Prize Essay of 1773 on the _Causes of the

Decline of Taste in different Nations_:[666] and a great deal more in

the twenty years later _Ideen zur Geschichte und Kritik der Poesie und

bildenden Künste_.[667] In the first, Herder develops (not of course for

the first time, for Montesquieu had given the line long before, if he

had not applied it much to literature, and Du Bos had started it before

_him_, and Vico had in a manner anticipated both; but for the first time

in a wide, and at the same time not loose, application to literature

itself) the idea of Age- and Race-criticism—the close conjunction of a

general conception of the characteristics of a time and a country with

the phenomena observed or supposed to be observed in groups of literary

production. In theg second, at once generalising further, and descending

to further particulars, we have an attempt to connect literature with

general characteristics of humanity, and almost innumerable critical

experiments of this process, on different authors and schools and kinds.

[Sidenote: _the_ Ideen, _&c._]

Anything that has to be said in general on these processes is for the

Interchapters; but we may here repeat that no one can well exaggerate

their historical importance or the influence that they have exercised

since. Further, the merit of their combined precept and example, in

directing study at once to those features which are common in all

literature, and to the individual bodies by comparison of which the

general features are discernible, is quite beyond question. The Prize

Essay has perhaps the main defects of its kind, that of “figuring away”

in plausible gyration, without bringing home any very solid sheaves, or

even leaving any definite path. But the immense Miscellany of the

_Ideen_ more than makes up for this. Herder’s general scheme, here, in

the _Adrastea_,[668] in that _Aurora_ (suggested by the dawn of the

nineteenth century) which he only planned, and which was but a small

part of the huge adventures for which he died lamenting his lack of

time, may be described as that of a mediæval collection of _Quæstiones

Quodlibetales_, methodised by the presence throughout of his leading

practical and theoretic ideas. [Sidenote: Age-, Country-, and Race-,

Criticism] These were, as has been said, the necessity of enriching

German literature with material, and furnishing it with patterns,

“plant,” and processes, by the study of _all_ literature, ancient and

modern, as a practical and immediate aim; and the working out of the

notions of literature, as connected with the country, and literature, as

connected with the general race, for ultimate goal.

[Sidenote: _Specimens and Remarks._]

But, owing to the enormous _dissipation_,—the constant flitting from

flower to flower which his task imposed on him,—Herder was not and could

not be a very important critic on particular points. He was bound to

share the over-valuation of _Ossian_[669]—for was not _Ossian_ exactly

what was wanted to dissolve and lubricate the _sècheresse_ of

French-German enlightenment, and did it not appear to give a brilliant

new example of “national” literature? So we must not overblame him for

this, any more than we must overpraise him—while praising him heartily—

for having been undoubtedly the main agent in inoculating the Germans

with Shakespeare.[670] Elias Schlegel had begun the process, and Hamann

had continued it; but the first was cut off too early for him to do more

than make a beginning, and Hamann’s mission was rather to send others,

including Herder himself, than to work directly upon the general. It is

also fair to say that, with all his soaring ideals and world-wide

aspirations of mental travel, there was little _Schwärmerei_ about

Herder, except in a few semi-poetical passages, which can easily be

skipped. His judgment is a pretty sound and sensible one, if his taste

is not infallible—see for instance his remarks on political poetry (xvi.

169, _op. cit._), and the equally modest and intelligent observations

which follow on the impossibility of emulating or surpassing the special

qualities of foreign literatures, however useful these literatures may

be for study.[671] To any nation Herder must have been a useful and

stimulating teacher; to the Germans at this time he was simply

invaluable. But the definition of his general scope, and these few

particulars of his procedure, must suffice us here.[672]

[Sidenote: _Wieland._]

Wieland, the other chief of German _belles lettres_ between Lessing and

Goethe, is also one of those writers—necessarily thickening upon us as

we proceed—who were very important to their own times and countries, but

whose importance historically is here less a matter for detailed

investigation than for general summary. His extensive work[673] is full

of criticism; indeed his position as editor of the _Teutsche Merkur_ was

one of the most responsible and not of the least influential in the

great German period. The curious modernised-classical or

classicalised-modern novels and miscellanies of which he was so fond—

especially the _Abderiten_—abound in it, in a more or less dissolved and

diffused state; the seven or eight volumes of his miscellaneous

works[674] contain more in a precipitated and concentrated condition.

Now he will ask—but perhaps not answer—the question, “Was ist eine

schöne Seele?”[675] then discourse (after the fashion of Burke and

Barnwell and Bulwer) on “the Relation of the Agreeable and Beautiful to

the Useful”;[676] then come closer still to real practical criticism in

the interesting “Sendschriften an einen Jungen Dichter” of 1784.[677]

The alphabetically arranged reviews and notices which fill, or help to

fill, the three last volumes deal with all manner of authors and books,

from Aristophanes to the _Amadis_, and from Louise Labé to Luis Vivès.

In all, modified to some extent by the influence which his greater

juniors exercised latterly on him, there appears that somewhat rococo,

but interesting, attractive, and very largely beneficent blend or

coupling of wit and imagination (or at least fancy) which is Wieland’s

characteristic, and which undoubtedly did much—very much—to raise the

Germans out of another and much less attractive mixture of pedantry and

horse-play and bombast. But his individual critical utterances are of

less importance to us. And so to Goethe himself.

[Sidenote: _Goethe._]

In a certain sense the whole six-and-thirty volumes[678] of Goethe’s

work, with all the _Letters_ and _Conversations_ added, may be said to

be a record of his criticism: in this sense he certainly deserved the

hackneyed “nothing if not—--” But for our purposes, though we may step

beyond them now and then, the famous passages in _Wilhelm Meister_ and

elsewhere (especially “Shakespeare und Keine Ende”) on Shakespeare, the

_Sprüche in Prosa_, the collected papers on German and other literature,

and the _Conversations_ with Eckermann, will give a sufficient

collection of texts. The _Xenien_ will be more conveniently postponed

till we deal with their other author.

[Sidenote: _The_ Hamlet _criticism, &c._]

One thing must or should have struck every reader (at all accustomed to

draw conclusions from what he reads) about the _Hamlet_ passages in

_Meister_.[679] _These passages might have been written by a man who was

only acquainted with a prose translation of the piece into a language

other than its own._ This may seem a little staggering: but it is true.

Goethe handles—with extraordinary and for the most part unerring

insight—the characters, the situations, the conduct of the play. But

there he stops dead. Of its magnificent and ineffable poetical

_expression_—of those phrases and passages which, read hundreds of times

through scores of years, produce as much effect on the fit reader as at

first, and more—he says nothing. “Shakespeare und Keine Ende” tells the

same story: nearly all, if not all, the scattered references from the

Frankfort speech of 1771, when he was just of age, to the last remark to

Eckermann sixty years later, tell the same. It is at least a curious

one. One begins to wonder whether the person who wrote Shakespeare was,

not Bacon, but, say, Wieland.

[Sidenote: _The_ Sprüche in Prosa.]

Many things, however, might, and some perhaps shall, be said about this.

Let us turn to the more miscellaneous and general utterances of the

_Sprüche in Prosa_, which, with the parallel verse jottings, especially

some of the _Zahme Xenien_, are recognised as supplying a sort of

running accompaniment of Goethe’s thought, for all periods of his life.

No one (again with the same slight goodwill to think) can read far in

either of these divisions, much less in both of them, without perceiving

the very strong, we might almost call it the overbearing, practical and

ethical tendency, even of those passages which apparently bear most

closely on literature. All the best things are _generalised_ as much as

possible, with perhaps some forgetfulness of the writer’s own caution

about _Allgemeine Begriffe_.[680] In these generalities there is much

that is admirable, such as the famous “Superstition is the poetry of

life,”[681] and the much less known but very striking “Rhythmical

movement has something magical about it: it makes us believe that the

Sublime is our own property.”[682] The danger appears in his

often-quoted comparison of Classicism to Health and Romanticism to

disease[683]—if he had said “Classicism is precaution against disease:

Romanticism is making the best of that which must come,” there would

have been something to say for him. But it is far off in the admirable,

“There are pedants who are also scoundrels; and they are the worst of

all.”[684]

But when we pass from these generalities—disputable sometimes,

indisputable not seldom, almost always stimulating—to individual

judgments, the case is a little altered. If he had oftener written such

notes as “_Vis superba formæ_. _Ein schönes Wort von Johannes

Secundus_,”[685] it had been better. What is the good of saying of

_Henry IV._[686] that “If everything else extant of the kind were lost,

we could restore poetry and rhetoric completely out of this alone”?

Nobody shall outgo me in rational admiration of _Henry IV._ I will not

give up a hair of Doll Tearsheet’s head, nor a blush of the page’s

cheek. Everything in it is good: but to say that everything that is good

is in it would deepen the inscrutable smile on Shakespeare’s face a

little less inscrutably. The saying, however, may perhaps be allowed the

credit, as well as the discredit, due to enthusiastic exaggerations.

This is not the case with the passages on Sterne,[687] which are

numerous, which form a tolerably complete context, and which are yet

separated from each other, and returned upon, in a fashion which shows

what a strong impression the subject had made on the writer’s mind.

[Sidenote: _The Sterne passages._]

We begin with the sufficiently round statement, “Yorick Sterne was the

finest[688] spirit that ever worked. Whosoever reads him has at once the

feeling of freedom and beauty; his humour is inimitable, and not every

kind of Humour frees the soul.” Now, as a thing said once, this would be

surprising enough, however well we may think of Sterne: but Goethe does

not leave it alone. After the widest casts round to the general aspects

of Poetry and Science, Art and Humour, he circles back to “Tristram.”

“Even at this moment” (the context shows that this must have been pretty

late in his life), “every man of culture should take his works once more

in hand, that the nineteenth century may learn what we owe him already,

and look out for what we may still owe him.” Another page and more of

generalities, and he harks back again. “Sterne was born in 1713 and died

in 1768. To comprehend him one must not leave out of consideration the

moral and ecclesiastical state of his time: we should remember that he

was Warburton’s contemporary.” And then a context of notes remarks on

his “free spirit,” “his power of developing things from within,” of

“distinguishing truth from falsehood,” his “hatred for the

didactic-dogmatic, the pedantic tendencies of the serious”; his wide

reading and discoveries of “the inadequate and the ridiculous”; his

“boundless sagacity and penetration,” and a great many other things.

Admitting that Sterne is “never a model,” he thinks him “always

suggestive and stimulating,” and makes the charitable remark that “the

element of coarseness in him, _in which he moves so carefully and

elegantly_, might have spoilt many others.”

Now this is at first odder than the hyperbole about _Henry IV._, and

takes one’s breath away more completely for the moment. One may have a

very strong liking for “Atalanta’s better part,” for the lightness,

grace, good sense, refreshing qualities of Shandyism, and a very great

admiration for Sterne’s genius, especially for the uniqueness, if not

exactly the impeccability, of its literary expression. But to make of

him, even to the extent to which it is possible to make of his master

Rabelais, an author to be turned over by day and night, a _vade mecum_,

a great teacher, a literary discoverer and deliverer, the “finest spirit

that ever worked”—this is really going rather too far. Yet the point of

view is perfectly obvious, and it is equally obvious that it is not a

literary point of view at all. Goethe felt severely the Philistinism of

his own country, and he had—as most Continentals always have had, and as

some dear good Englishmen think it proper still to have—the idea that

England was specially dominated by the weaver’s beam. Sterne to him is a

David: his jests and pranks are the small stones of the brook, and he

thinks of nothing more than of the discomfiture of Goliath.

Yet he could be Philistine enough himself, as where, in _Shakespeare und

Keine Ende_, having talked of the universality of Shakespeare[689] more

mysteriously and pretentiously, but far less intelligently and forcibly,

than Dryden a century and more earlier, he tells us that “Coriolanus is

_pervaded throughout_ by the chagrin experienced at the refusal of the

mob to recognise the choice of its betters.” In _Julius Cæsar_

“_everything rests on_ the idea that the leaders are averse to seeing

the highest place filled, because they wrongly imagine that they can

work successfully in co-operation.” _Antony and Cleopatra_ “declares

with a thousand tongues [_plus_ a thousand copybook headings?] that idle

enjoyment is incompatible with a life of activity.” We have all heard of

Goethe as a great and true Apollo, a Philistine-slayer from youth to

age. Was there ever more platitudinous and trivial chatter of Ashdod

than in these three sentences? And how, again, when we find him, like a

seventeenth-century Preceptist, dividing literary motives into

Progressive, Retrogressive, Retardative, Retrospective, and

Anticipatory, a list which yet once again sets one thinking, with a

shameful joy, on possible Rabelaisian developments and parodies of it?

Is our own poor Alison, with his Bandit unequally yoked to a Grecian

nose[690]—are the poor Le Bossus and Rapins themselves—to be scoffed at,

when we find this Jove of Weimar and Germany laying it down that

“Christians contending with Christians will not, especially in later

times, form a good picture,” but that “Christians conquering Turks” are

admissible?

[Sidenote: _Reviews and Notices._]

The very numerous literary reviews and notices which fill nearly two

volumes[691] of the Works in the edition we are using must, of course,

be read by every one who desires to acquaint himself thoroughly with

Goethe’s criticism: but they have not quite the importance which they

might be expected to have, and very often, when they are at their best,

that best comes to little or nothing more than we find condensed and

quintessenced in a maxim of the _Sprüche_ or a sentence of the

_Conversations_. This indeed could not be otherwise: for the most

“panoramic intellect” (a phrase which Goethe acknowledged with rather

sardonic politeness when it was applied to him by some English

critic[692]) cannot see, and the most facund tongue cannot say, the same

thing differently every time. Even in the earliest there are very neat

things, as where[693] poor Sulzer’s _Die Schönen Künste_ is described in

the opening sentence of the review as “Very suitable for translation

into French: indeed it might very well have been translated _from_

French.” The very latest, such as that on Mérimée’s _La Guzla_,[694]

display that combination of fresh interest, impartial judgment, and

experienced knowledge which ought to be the reviewer’s equipment, but

which unluckily few attain.

[Sidenote: _The_ Conversations.]

On the whole, however, the _Conversations with Eckermann_ are the

richest _placer_ of Goethe’s criticism, and the most convenient for the

general reader. There appears to be no reason for any exaggerated

scruples about admitting them as genuine and trustworthy. Eckermann, no

doubt, has some of the irritating qualities which are almost inseparable

from the Boswellian temperament: one need not be ashamed of enjoying

that characteristic Heinesquery, the regret

“Dass Goethe sei todt,

Und Eckermann sei zu Leben.”

But this need not prevent our being thankful that Eckermann remained _zu

Leben_ long enough to put these things on record. There is nothing in

the least disloyal or disgusting about them: the sternest hater of

eavesdropping need not be afraid or ashamed to take up the book. And

Eckermann seems to have been very fairly in possession of the two

positive and the one negative qualities required by his difficult and

rather thankless art—exactness, intelligence up to a certain point, and

the absence of the superfluous cleverness which might have tempted him

to refine, and touch up, and overlay. Therefore some analysis of the

chief critical utterances of the book should find a place here. It must,

moreover, always be remembered that Goethe was a man soaked in

literature, and that those who read him without having at least dipped

in it are apt to make mistakes.[695] Pretty early we have one of those

striking generalities which catch mankind, and which—in a sense not

unjustly—have earned their author his immense reputation. “Fact must

give the motive, the points that require expression the particular

kernel; but to make a beautiful enlivened whole, _that_ is the business

of the poet.”[696] The practical advice about a certain job of

verse[697] is as good as it can be, and as we should expect it to be; to

find a better and more _conscious_ craftsman of letters than Goethe, you

may take the wings of the morning and put a girdle round the earth in

vain. Nor perhaps is much more needed than mere quotation for the three

words on the opposite page, _Ach, das Publikum!_ There is a very

noteworthy passage[698] on Schiller and his philosophy, and a still more

noteworthy one,[699] indeed one of the cardinal places of the whole, on

the character of writers, with a context—accidental as far as dates go

(for there is a full fortnight between them), but real in thought—on

Style.

The classification of his enemies[700] is very interesting and curious,

as are, both from the critical and the personal standpoint, the

observations[701] on Klopstock and Herder. But what follows[702]

immediately, on the contemporarily intimate relations between France and

Germany in literature, is more noteworthy still, and so is, especially

when we take account of the dates and of other places, Goethe’s

dissuasion[703] of Eckermann from undertaking a _compte-rendu_ of German

Literature for an English Review. At this very time[704] the _Globe_ was

being founded in Paris: and Goethe’s admiration for the _Globe_ was

unbounded. J. J. Ampère he knew personally: but the praise which so

constantly recurs applies to Sainte-Beuve, Rémusat, and others almost

more than to Ampère. In one place later, he expresses his surprise that

these young French reviewers did not think it necessary, as the Germans

did, to “hate one another” if they differed in opinion.[705] Alas! the

disease was not, and is not, confined to Germany: and it certainly did

not spare these same contributors to the _Globe_. But their width of

range, their comparative spirit, their judicial and yet not pedagogic

manner, justly enchanted Goethe. And it was doubtless because he did

not, in 1824, think it possible for a reviewer to show them, that he

bade Eckermann not “eat the beans” of reviewing.

The passage[706] which naturally and immediately follows on the

connection of German and English literature, and the frank avowal of the

enormous indebtedness of the former to the latter, is deservedly famous,

and certainly shows Goethe most favourably in the light of that combined

lamp of intelligence, learning, and character which he himself always

liked to turn on his subject. But one does not read with so much

satisfaction what follows at a little distance on the sufficiency of

translation,[707] a passage at which, I feel sure, all the Muses wept.

Scientifically, morally, practically, translation can do much: from the

point of view of pure literature, all it can do is to supply something

different from the original—good perhaps, bad perhaps, between the two

most probably, but never _the_ original. Once more he refers

valuably[708] to the great older contemporaries of his youth—Lessing,

Herder, Wieland, as well as to Schiller. Always we may apply to Goethe

when he speaks of Schiller what Thackeray says so well of Pope[709] when

he speaks of Swift. His remarks on Menander in more places than one

supply a very curious document, or item of a document, as to his

criticism generally, when we reflect in what a fragmentary state the

great New Comic has come down to us. Many notable passages on

Shakespeare and Molière follow: indeed, the various contexts on Molière

should be as carefully looked at and compared as those on Shakespeare,

Byron, and Scott. They will form, with these, the chief bases of our

general estimate of Goethe’s criticism.

The judgment[710] of January 1827 on Hugo is famous and interesting.

More favourable than later ones, it shows the critic’s eclecticism, if

not quite his catholicity. He saw, and saw rightly, the connection with

Chateaubriand: and we must not _now_ be too severe on him for thinking

_then_ that Hugo “may be as important as Lamartine and Delavigne.” A

less agreeable side of his criticism—one to which we have had, and shall

have, to turn and return—is the remark on Flemming,[711] _er kann jetz

nicht mehr helfen_. Now Flemming certainly was not a very great poet; he

_has_ only “a very pretty talent, rather prosaic and _bourgeois_.” But

the “er kann jetz nicht mehr _helfen_” is hard to forgive. It is a point

of view which has done harm to many, notably to Mr. Arnold: but that is

between the Muses and themselves. What concerns us, is that it is bad in

itself. The idea that such and such a writer “won’t _pay_,” that you

can’t “get culture” out of him, is the pure Philistinism of culture

itself. It is the exact analogue to the theory and practice of “saving

your own dirty soul” in religion. What does it matter whether he “helps”

or not, if he is good and, in his own little or large measure, delights?

This calculus of profit is mighty disgusting and, we may add, mighty

dangerous: for it is at the root of much of the bad criticism in the

world.

He is in his better mind, and in his own sphere, with the remark[712]

that now, fifty years ago, and fifty years hence, it is, was, will be so

that what men wrote when they were young will be best enjoyed by young

men. And we may note in passing wise and witty things on destructive

criticism,[713] on Smollett,[714] on _Lazaret-poesie_,[715] before

leaving with a good taste in our mouth, the first and, for literary

utterances I think the weightiest, volume of the _Conversations_.

A good example of that common-sense judgment which is perhaps Goethe’s

chief claim as a critic is to be found early in vol. ii.,[716] where he

speaks of Aristotle as “rash in his opinions.” At first sight this may

seem not merely impertinent, but contradictory of the facts: and yet

there is much in it. Undoubtedly Aristotle, great as he is, _was_ rash,

with the peculiar Greek rashness of imagining that Greek facts were all

facts: and this was nowhere more the case than in his literary

criticism. We may be less happy—on the same page and the next—with a

repetition of Philistinisms against Fouqué and the Middle Ages, about

there being “nothing worth our fetching from these dim old German

times,” or with an additional mistake (which again has done much harm)

about the “miseries” of these said times and the uselessness of adding

them to our own. How much better is a fresh application of “the apples

of gold and pictures [frames] of silver,” a metaphor of which he was

fond, a little later! “Die Frauen,” says he,[717] “sind silberne Schalen

in die _wir_ goldene Aepfel legen.” In other words, their worth and

their fairness are their fairness and their worth to _our_ imagination,

which indeed is the conclusion of the whole matter, not merely in

gynæcology. His statement as to Voltaire[718] that “everything which so

great a talent writes is good,” is interesting to compare with the

direct negative of Joubert. And it may repay anybody if he thinks a

little about its connection with a more general and very important

statement of Goethe’s, that “in Art and Poetry Personality is

everything,”[719] wherewith also it were well to combine his frequent

references[720] to his favourite idea of the “dæmonic.” His extreme and

repeated[721] admiration of _Daphnis and Chloe_ (undoubtedly a charming

thing) is to be noted.

The third volume, giving us[722] Eckermann’s second skimmings of his

notes and memories, is, perhaps naturally, less fruitful, but it is far

from barren. Another of the audacious and felicitous phrases which have

done so much to establish Goethe’s fame is that[723] about Shakespeare’s

“unflustered, innocent, _sleepwalkerish_ manner of production”: and the

passage on Schlegel[724] is a good combination of magnanimity and

veracity. One of the strangest blunders of interpretation ever made by

such a man is that by which he makes[725] Macduff’s “He has no children”

apply to Macbeth instead of to Malcolm, thereby not only making

necessary a clumsy explaining-away of Lady Macbeth’s own words, but

spoiling the poetry of the actual passage. In the same context comes the

contradiction of himself, that Shakespeare thought mainly of the stage

when he wrote.[726] On the other hand, the passage[727] on Burns,

Béranger, and the effect on literary talent of an exciting atmosphere of

various kinds, from the clash of sentiment and thought in a city like

Paris to the inspiration of traditional ballad-literature, is all but

consummate in a certain way.

Then read him on the _incommensurableness_ of poetry,[728] and (in a

happier vein about Classic and Romantic than that which has been

noticed) pronouncing[729] that, for all the fuss (_Lärme_) about the

two, “a work that is good all through will be a classic sure enough,”

and you may leave him in a state of reconciliation which, in wise

persons, will not be disturbed by later utterances on French authors,

Guizot, Villemain, Mérimée, Victor Hugo even, though on the latter you

may think that he has got at a wrong angle. After all, one may say that

Hugo and not Goethe was in that position: for few persons with a

critical head now think of the author of _Marion de l’Orme_ as they

think of the author of the _Contemplations_ and the _Légende_.

[Sidenote: _Some more general things: Goethe on Scott and Byron._]

To proceed from particulars to mediate generalities, a very instructive

light on Goethe’s general critical attitude may be obtained by comparing

his expressions in regard to Scott and to Byron.[730] He admires both.

But in regard to Scott he justifies his admiration. His analysis to

Eckermann[731] of _The Fair Maid of Perth_ is really critical: he points

out how good this passage is, how cunningly that episode is worked in,

how powerful is that other picture. He praises _Rob Roy_ in the same

manner,[732] “going at the jugular,” selecting the truth of detail, the

_unendliche Fleiss in den Vorstudien_ (the very thing which shallow

critics deny to Scott), and so forth. Now, his eulogies of Byron are

quite different. They are nearly all in generals; the most definite

passage that I remember, about the wigshops and lamplighters in _Don

Juan_, comes from Eckermann’s mouth, not Goethe’s. The great man himself

is struck by Byron’s social and political position; he is lost in wonder

at Byron’s real or supposed revolt against what he, like others,

supposes to have been English Philistinism (the Philistinism of

Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding!), and the like. It is never a phrase, a

passage, a situation, hardly ever a book[733] that he praises. And I do

not know a closer approach to the merely and purely _bête_ in a writer

of the greatest literary, and of great critical, genius than the

remark[734] that a few lines of _Don Juan_ “poison the whole

_Gerusalemme_.” It would be as sensible to say that one stanza of Tasso

is an antidote to the whole of _Don Juan_. The two things are

“incommensurable,” and severed by a gulf.

[Sidenote: _On the historic and comparative estimate of literature._]

Another remarkable thing about Goethe’s criticism, which might be

illustrated from the _Sprüche_, from Eckermann, and from other sources,

may again surprise those who have simply adopted the common opinion of

him as an apostle of universal culture. Curiously enough, he, the

“Doctor Universalis” of nineteenth-century literature, as some would

make him, distinctly discourages and disparages that historic study of

Comparative Letters which is the distinguishing nineteenth-century

principle. His warning to the Germans, that they have most to lose by

the introduction of a “world-literature,” is no doubt true enough _ad

hoc_ or _ad hos_: and when, close by, he emits the wish, “May the study

of Greek and Roman literature remain the basis of the higher Culture,”

we can only say “Amen, and Amen” ever-lastingly. But his stigmatisation

of Chinese, Indian, Egyptian literatures as _Curiositäten_—useless for

moral and æsthetic culture—is very tell-tale: and even the most

experienced person may be slightly shocked when he finds Goethe

extending this taboo to European-mediæval letters as well.[735]

[Sidenote: _Summing up: the merits of Goethe’s criticism._]

I hope that it is not extravagant to think that this selection of the

actual facts of the case, individual and grouped, may serve to base,

with some solidity, a judgment of Goethe’s actual position as a critic.

For a considerable time, let us say roundly the middle forty years of

the nineteenth century, from 1830 to 1870, this position, very mainly

owing to the efforts of a large number of great men from Carlyle

downwards, was exalted to the very skies: and even more recently it has

been rather left alone than seriously attacked. The causes of this—

causes which to some extent are true causes and must always operate—may

be put shortly as follows. Goethe possessed, to an extraordinary degree,

and later perhaps than any one else, that singular _wisdom_ which has

been more than once animadverted upon as the property, in the strict

sense, of the eighteenth century. He was, for half its length and for

nearly two-thirds of his own life, a man of its own: and he never

escaped, or wished to escape, entirely from its influence. He was always

“in touch” with life and fact: there was “no nonsense about him,” to use

an excellent vernacular phrase which, if somewhat double-edged, has a

keen and heavily backed edge on the favourable side. There are no

“Samothracian mysteries of bottled moonshine” in him; the most

apparently dreamy parts of his loftiest and greatest things, such as the

second part of _Faust_, are always, like natural and healthy dreams,

merely sublimations of actual facts—experienced or capable of being

experienced.

But further, and on the other hand, he had, from very early youth, and

by the favour of those of “the Mothers” who allow men of great genius to

anticipate and combine the gifts which most have only later and

separately, a very strong infusion indeed of Romance _and_ of Science—

the two apparently opposite characteristics of the century to which his

last thirty years belonged. He had hardly a touch of the special

stupidity which accompanied the special cleverness of his earlier

century—the degeneration of “common-sense.” In him the fashionable and

epidemic diseases of the Neo-classic period were neutralised by the

appropriate agencies, without any of these turning to the morbid. The

comparison of _Goetz_ with _The Robbers_ is an education in pathological

criticism. Nobody ever served under two flags with such honour and

credit as Goethe; he may even be said to have effected, if not alone,

yet mainly, a reconciliation and junction of arms between his two

masters. Yet again his almost unique mastery (just glanced at) of the

tendencies of the morrow; his sympathy, in his age, and when he was in a

way the greatest man of letters in Europe, with the ideas, tastes,

aspirations of quite young men—not merely secured, but to no very small

extent deserved, the enthusiastic adhesion of these latter. And when we

add to these powerful general things his extraordinary literary gifts,

the still more extraordinary range of his interests, the Olympian

good-nature of his character, and his singular, and almost supra- or

infra-human, avoidance of extremes, it ceases to be at all surprising

that the position above noted should have seemed to good wits to be his:

it may even seem ungracious, pedantic, absurd to take any exceptions to

it.

[Sidenote: _Its drawbacks: too much of his age._]

Yet the exceptions must be taken, and, if possible, made good. The

greatest of them—at least, according to those general lines which he

himself loved and followed—is connected with that peculiarity of his

which has been noticed a few lines previously. He is just a little too

much of the day and the morrow combined—not enough of yesterdays and

to-morrows far behind and far ahead. The least local and temporary of

those who are for an age—possessor of the widest “age” perhaps of them

all—he is still of that age, and, except in criticisms that are of life

rather than of literature, not sufficiently of all time. As we have seen

and shown, he cannot duly appreciate the Middle Ages; and the fact that

others were over-appreciating them does not excuse him a whit. In his

formative precepts he looks too much to what he thought the requirements

of actual nineteenth-century literature—a modified Romanticism, not

excluding Science. In other words, he keeps time without winding for a

longer period than any other clock on record, but he is perhaps rather

impossible to wind afresh. On that calculus of his own which we have

disallowed and protested against, which we shall shortly disallow and

protest against afresh, one might too often say that _he_ cannot “help

us any more.” He is not as “rash in his opinions” as he thought

Aristotle was, but he is more inadequate; we can nowadays allow for and

discard Aristotle’s rashness, and find abundance of the eternal left in

him, and we cannot quite do this with Goethe. We must sometimes, with

Aristotle, have, and mark, the side-note, “This was a man of the fourth

century B.C.”; we must always with Goethe have the other, “This was the

cleverest man of 1770-1830.” Take him again with Longinus, and we find

that Longinus needs hardly any side-note at all—only here and there in

utterances such as that about the _Odyssey_. And I at least think that

Coleridge, though he certainly needs it here and there, needs it

seldomer, far seldomer, than Goethe.

[Sidenote: _Too much a utilitarian of Culture._]

But there is another count. Goethe, as everybody knows, had a private

chapel (which has bred chantries and churches and cathedrals all over

the world), with an ephod and teraphim and everything complete,

dedicated to the great god, Cham-Chi-Thaungu, otherwise called Culture.

It is ill to be joined to any idols: and this was well seen of him.

“This cannot help us,” he says constantly; “we cannot fetch any good out

of this.” “Such times, such books, such men have nothing to say for us.”

Now, such sentences, from the point of view of the really higher

criticism, are anathema, because they are _negative_. The corresponding

positives are not condemnable at all. If a thing does help any one, if

any can fetch good, or delight, out of it, it passes at once—in a low

class perhaps, perhaps in a high—but it passes. That it does _not_ help

any particular person proves nothing at all. If the work is good, on its

own scale and specification, it can afford to wait for the persons whom

it will help, to whom it will “give culture.” Its beauty is its sole

duty. Indeed “What _is_ culture?” is a question to be asked not at all

jestingly, and it will be hard to find the answer.

[Sidenote: _Unduly neglectful of literature as literature._]

Yet once more the specimens given (I believe quite fairly) above entitle

us—and all but the most blindly fanatical _Goetheaner_ will find it hard

to _dis_entitle us from the observation—to observe in them a constant

deflection from strictly literary consideration of things. He likes to

consider “poetry” rather than “poesy,” poets rather than poetry; and in

poets he is always considering the not strictly poetical qualities. He

extols, for instance, in a well-known passage, Byron’s “Keckheit,

Kühnheit, Grandiosität.” Now the last, though a somewhat questionable,

may be a real, poetical quality: but what is there essentially poetical

in _Keckheit_ and _Kühnheit_? The occasion requiring them, it is good

that a poet—as that a fox-hunter, a sub-lieutenant left in command of

the regiment, a householder facing a fire or a burglar at two o’clock in

the morning—should have them: but what is there specially _poetical_

about them? On the contrary, may not a man have them and be, in virtue

of having them, a bad, and the worse, poet? Character, conduct,

personality (the second construed in a liberal way), these things are

what Goethe is always harping on. Now, ten generations of foes and

friends have (with the good leave of some friends as well as foes of

mine) been able to make out next to nothing at all about Shakespeare’s

character, conduct, and personality. Yet most people think that

Shakespeare was, let us say, one of the great poets of the world.

Shelley’s character was rather weak; his conduct was sometimes

disgusting; his personality, though generally amiable, is very vague;

and some of us think him the “next poet,” not merely the next English

poet, to Shakespeare. We may be wrong: but our case is a case.

Therefore, insolent absurdity as it may seem, I venture to doubt whether

Goethe’s criticism is of the absolutely greatest value. We have met with

many marks or notes of the true critic in our “journey across Chaos,”

and some of them Goethe has. But there are most important ones which he

lacks. That he is a great _dramatic_ critic I can very well admit: but

his very greatness here, on the principle more than once referred to,

makes him a dubious critic of literature. For the Goethe of _Faust_ (not

least of the Second Part of it), of the best lyrics, and of some other

things, I have, and for a great number of years have had, almost

unlimited admiration: for the critical Goethe I feel very much less.

That, assisted by natural xenomania, he was a great revelation to

Englishmen seventy, eighty, even a hundred years ago, I can very well

allow and believe: that he was a valuable populariser of a critical

attitude, useful as an alterative to that of Neo-classicism, I know. But

I am less sure that there is much in him, as he would himself say, for

us now. Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge, are _creeds_: though the first

and second are too succinct and the last too discursive and full of

_lacunæ_. I can admit even Scaliger, even Boileau, to be of the calibre

of a will-worship. But Goethe, the critical Goethe, has too much the

character of a superstition, now rather stale.

[Sidenote: _Schiller._]

Schiller’s critical position, which some have estimated very highly,

depends first upon the collection of small æsthetic treatises, and of a

few actual reviews, which is included in his prose works;[736] secondly,

in his share of the _Xenien_; and thirdly, in the critical utterances of

his _Letters_, especially those in the correspondence with Goethe,

though by no means neglecting those to others, especially Körner. With

regard to the first part of the first division, extraordinary importance

has been attached to it by some—importance which a wary person would be

slow to accept on trust, when he remembers, not merely the remarks of A.

W. Schlegel, a declared unfriend, but those of Goethe, Schiller’s

unflinching defender, and those of Novalis, a very competent and

apparently quite dispassionate observer.[737] Much, however, will of

course depend on the estimation in which “æsthetic salt for putting on

the tail of the Ideal”[738] is itself held.

[Sidenote: _His Æsthetic Discourses._]

The very strong inclination of the poet towards the abstract discussion

is shown in his “Dissertation on the Connection of the Animal Nature of

man with the Spiritual,” written and printed in his twenty-first year:

as well as in others nearly as early. And few things of the kind can be

more curious than the comparison of the “Briefe über _Don Carlos_” with

such other defences of a man’s own work as Dryden’s or Corneille’s.[739]

The Discourses on Tragedy,[740] which appeared in the _Thalia_ for 1792,

of course have their interest. But Schiller’s most noteworthy exercises

in this direction have, I believe, been generally thought to be the

æsthetic discourses of the Fourteenth volume[741] and those on “Naïve

and Sentimental Poetry,”[742] and on “The Sublime” in the Fifteenth.

[Sidenote: _The Bürger review._]

This also contains the few reviews preserved. Of these, the most

remarkable is the unlucky one on Bürger, as to which I can only say

that, having first read it when I had not read A. W. Schlegel’s

reply,[743] and did not know the tenor of this, I had anticipated

Schlegel’s verdict, that it is “an offence against literary morality.”

In one case, therefore, however humble, Schiller’s later plea,[744] that

posterity would do justice to the uprightness of his intentions, has not

itself been justified: and I cannot think that it can have been so in

many others. For, though the ill side of human nature will always

rejoice in its own likeness, and though, even putting this aside, there

is still a singular notion abroad that an abusive review must be an

honest and well-intentioned one, _this_ review is one of the worst ever

written, and in one of its own latter sentences it writes itself down

so. Bürger, we are told, has “wealth of poetical painting, the glowing

and energetic language of the heart, a streamer of poetry, now waving

gorgeously, now caressingly floating, and [finally] an honest heart that

speaks from every line.” If it were possible to imagine a reader who did

not know _Lenore_ or anything of the rest, and who had worked patiently

through the pages on pages of carping and sneering which lead up to this

astonishing confession, we can only suppose that he would gasp for

breath, and wonder whether he had turned over half a dozen sheets at

once and come upon the end of a quite different paper.

The truth appears to be that Schiller, with all his talent, all his

genius, was something of a prig: and a prig is capable of almost any

discreditable act. It has often been pointed out that for the author of

_Die Räuber_ to find fault with Bürger as not being strictly proper is

“rather too rich”: but it must be remembered that when Schiller wrote

_Die Räuber_ he was a prig too, though a prig in a fit of

unconventional, Bohemian, and _Sturm-und-Drang_ priggishness. _Here_ the

cold fit had followed the hot. The poet of the Moors is now busied with

“the man of culture,” with “Idealising art which collects and mirrors

all the morality, all the character, all the wisdom of the time,” and

which of course rejects equally raptures about “Molly,” and childish

things about the dead riding fast. He informs us, with the true superior

air, that Bürger “not seldom mingles with the People, to whom he should

only let himself condescend.” And he has succeeded, marvellous to say,

in reducing _ad absurdum_ the argument against popularity as a test of

poetry, in his very endeavour to reduce thereto the argument _for_ it.

“’Tis as much as to say,” cries he with lofty scorn, “‘What pleases

excellent judges is good: what pleases all without distinction is

better.’” “Why, so it is, oh well-born Court-Counsellor and Professor at

Jena,” one may reply.[745]

[Sidenote: _The_ Xenien.]

As for the _Xenien_, I am afraid I am still more out of accord with

Schiller’s admirers here. The ill-nature of them is very suspicious when

we find that, in this collaboration, it communicated itself to Goethe,

who was certainly not ill-natured as a rule, though he was rather

selfish. But the ill-nature is not the worst part. This kind of thing,

whether it is done by a Pope, or by a Firm of Goethe, Schiller, &

Company, has some of the disgustfulness of pigeon-shooting or even

rabbit-coursing. There is hardly any real sport in it; the victims are

nearly always rather defenceless, and generally quite harmless: their

destruction does little, if any, good to anybody; and the spectacle is

demoralising.[746]

These _Xenien_, I confess, appear to me to be one of those superstitions

of literature which it is certainly the business of the critic, and the

historian of Criticism, to protest against and demolish if he can. I

never thought very much of them: and I think still less of them after a

very careful study for the purposes of this book.[747] They

corresponded, of course, in a certain sense, to the nearly contemporary,

but much less famous and, as far as their authors are concerned, much

less remarkable _battues_ of Rivarol and Gifford in France and England.

Goethe and Schiller were not only much more formidable sportsmen, but

had much better game—or worse vermin if anybody likes—for quarry. The

imperfections of German literature were, as they always have been, much

greater than those of French, and much more easily got at than those of

English. It is rather ridiculous, and more than rather disgusting, to

find even such men treating such others as Wieland and Jean Paul (Herder

himself seems only to have escaped because of his personal connection

with Weimar) as if they were “Tom Sternhold or Tom Shadwell.” But this

is not the worst of it. The _Xenien_ are not, as a rule or in any large

proportion, particularly _good_: and if they did not appeal to the

ill-nature of mankind, and had not great names attached to them, few

people would think them so. Schiller’s are often very lumbering verse

and phrase, regarded merely as phrase and verse: Goethe’s are less often

so, but seldom very brilliant as either.[748] If more people would read

them in comparison with Martial himself, their lameness and awkwardness

could hardly fail to be made clear. It would need a rather wider reading

(though I at least have as little doubt of the result) to show not

merely their pervading ill-nature and arrogance but their frequent

miss-fires.

[Sidenote: _The Correspondence with Goethe._]

Most fortunately, however, we are not left either in the cold with the

Æsthetic treatises, or in hot water with the Bürger review and the

_Xenien_. The _Letters of Schiller and Goethe_[749] are a twice-blest

book. Nowhere does one _like_ Goethe so much as in them: nowhere is it

possible to understand, and therefore to like, Schiller better than in

parts of them. It is true that the sense of his being fundamentally a

prig of genius remains—that even the sense of his having something of

that “bad blood,” of which Milton, Racine, and perhaps Wordsworth, are

the chief other examples among persons of genius of the Upper House,

remains likewise. But Goethe meets him with such an amiable

_camaraderie_, he softens his asperities with such a never offensive but

always effective blend of cordiality and irony, that, after the first

few letters, Schiller begins to talk almost like a man of this world,

and yet neither loses his predominant interest in literature. It is true

that when we come to the _Xenien_ the offence returns. It is not

pleasant to find two men of genius calmly plotting how to put, into the

smallest space and the neatest form, most envy, hatred, malice, and all

uncharitableness towards the greatest number of persons obnoxious to

them. And Schiller’s remarks on the necessity of “giving it hot” to a

certain unlucky Reichardt, who had had the impudence not merely to

praise the _Horen_ lukewarmly, but to praise the wrong things in them,

can only be matched with Macaulay in reference to Croker, while there is

much more deliberate malice in them. It is no excuse to say that severe

criticisms are sometimes necessary. The reviewer is a policeman who may

sometimes have to use his staff: the _Xenien_-writer is a bravo who

chooses the stiletto. But enough of that matter.

And, as has been said, the book as a whole is very interesting to us.

Schiller’s criticisms on _Meister_ never reach the concentrated justice

of Novalis (_v. inf._) But they are by no means without _parrhesia_: and

the picture they give us of the successive results of the instalments,

on an eagerly receptive and extraordinarily sensitive literary

wit-gauge, is not readily to be paralleled, except by the companion

remarks of Goethe on _Wallenstein_ later. And Goethe’s practised

_Weltweisheit_ deprives his observations of the naïve character which

Schiller always, for good or for bad, retains. The latter, however,

always retains likewise his porcupine attitude towards contemporary men

of letters who are not quite of “ours.” From Richter to Bouterwek he

cannot away with them in one sense, and would like to away with them

very much in the other. Where this disturbing element does not come in,

he is better; but seldom quite satisfactory. He was right not to think

much of Darwin, and not wrong to think something of Restif’s _Monsieur

Nicolas_: but this last, at least, has little to do with literature. His

Shakespeare criticisms are always informing from the ethical-æsthetic

side; they hardly even attempt the literary. But the elaborate character

of the Index to these letters, which exhibits all the literary judgments

of both the poets under separate reasoned catalogues, makes it almost

unnecessary to pursue our usual process of sampling, the task being done

to hand.

[Sidenote: _The_ Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.]

Of the definite critical treatises, by far the most important for our

purpose (the “Æsthetic Education” being omitted, on the showing of its

chief admirers, as of a more general bearing) is the tract on “Naïve and

Sentimental Poetry.” It has even been claimed for this, that here, for

the first time, is a distinction made out between ancient and modern

poets, on the score of their objective and subjective character

respectively. The distinction is not quite real, and it is not

critically made out. In support of the first demurrer (which is

something too wide for us here), let me request anybody who really knows

the Greek choruses, and especially those of Æschylus, to say whether, on

his soul and conscience, he can deny them “sentimentality” in the good

sense, subjectivity in any. Goethe and Browning will be hard put to it

to fight this prize against the choruses of the _Agamemnon_ alone. The

other point is more relevant. At the time[750] when Schiller wrote this

essay we know, from a subsequent letter of his[751] to Goethe, that he

had not read the _Poetics_; this is dangerous, but it is not fatal. What

is, as it seems to me, fatal is that nearly all his literary citations

are of a general and second-hand character. I can see nowhere any direct

evidence of “contact” with the texts. He knows Kant at first hand

certainly; he probably knows Lessing and Herder; he of course knows

Kleist and Wieland. But did he know, at first hand and in the originals,

besides the ancients, Shakespeare and Milton, Dante and Ariosto,

Rabelais and Molière? I cannot see much evidence of it.

In fact, though I know well to what danger I am, once more, exposing

myself, I must once more say that Schiller does not seem to me a great

critic, or even a good one. He was a man of letters who, as such,

possessed genius, and a philosopher who at least had a very great talent

for philosophy; and so much of a critic as can be made by these two

qualifications he was. To put it in other ways, and perhaps to go even a

little further, he was, as a merely _a priori_ critic, or a critic

furnished with such _a posteriori_ knowledge as can be supplied at

second-hand, very clever indeed. He could spin out of his interior more

criticism, and of a better quality, than most men could. But he was

excessively deficient in Love—that first and greatest fulfilling of the

law of the true critic: and, partly without his own fault (for, as is

well known, his life was short and not altogether favoured by fortune),

partly by it, he did not give himself, or was not given, sufficient

opportunity to warm his hands before that immortal fire of literature

which each generation keeps burning, to soften what is harsh, feed what

is starved, anoint and cheer and clean what is stiffened and saddened

and soiled in the nature of man. The best of life might yet have been

for him in criticism, as in other things: the _Versöhnung_, the time of

the “calmed and calming _mens adepta_,” might have come. But it did not

so please the Gods; and the most illogical form of playing Providence

perhaps, though not the most mischievous and impertinent, is to refuse

to accept the fact of what the Gods did _not_ choose to do.

[Sidenote: _Others: Bürger._]

Others of the greatest men of this Augustan period of German literature

were more or less given to criticism, while not deriving their chief

titles from it. Bürger himself was not at all contemptible in this

respect. His answer to Schiller[752] is not undignified, and a little

more of that wisdom of the serpent, which Molly’s adorer never

possessed, would have made it very damaging. As we have said, it was

Schiller’s ridicule of his theory of popularity that was ridiculous, not

the theory in itself: and several things worth attention will be found

in the two _Prefaces_ to his _Poems_, in his “Thoughts on translating

Homer,” and in his Prose Fragments. In these last, indeed, there are

some critical utterances of real weight on the extreme sensuous and

individualist side of theoretical Poetic. Bürger says boldly that “among

people to whom asafœtida gives a more charming scent than roses the poet

ought to celebrate asafœtida”; and I am bound to say I think he is

right.[753]

[Sidenote: _Richter._]

There is a note to the Preface of the second edition of Jean Paul’s[754]

_Vorschule der Æsthetik_ which expresses my own opinions on its subject

so completely that I must give it in full. “A collection of Wieland’s

reviews in the _Teutsche Merkur_, or, in short, any honest selection of

the best æsthetic reviews from newspapers and periodicals, would be a

better bargain for the artist than any newest _Æsthetic_. In every good

review there is, hidden or revealed, a good 'Æsthetic,' and, more than

that, an applied one, and a free, and the shortest of all, and (by dint

of the examples) the best.”

No one, of course, who has the slightest knowledge of Richter will

suppose that the whole book is written in such a straight-forward and

common-sense style as this. But it is very far indeed from being one of

his thorniest or most acrobatical: and Carlyle[755] need scarcely have

feared that it might “astonish many an honest brother of our craft were

he to read it, and altogether perplex and dash his maturest counsels if

he chanced to understand it.” Nobody who can understand the _Biographia

Litteraria_ could have the faintest difficulty with the _Vorschule_.

[Sidenote: _The_ Vorschule der Æsthetik.]

Such Richterisms as do appear are chiefly in the appendix lectures, the

“_Miserikordia_-Lecture for Stylists,” the “_Jubilate_-Lecture for

Poetical Persons,” and the “_Kantate_-Lecture on Poetical Poetry,”

which, nevertheless, do contain excellent things. In the main body of

the book there are only occasional flings (such as, “according to Kant,

the formation of the heavenly bodies is easier to deduce than the

formation of a caterpillar”), while the famous and very just description

of a certain thing as “like a lighthouse, high, shining, empty,” is mere

justice lighted up itself by wit. The fact is, that the book is one of

the best of its kind, and deserves to be reserved from that exclusion of

titular Æsthetics which prevails in this part of our History, not more

by the large intermixture of actual criticism in it than by the sanity,

combined with inspiration, of the rest. From its separation at the

beginning of the “Nihilists” of Poetry (those who generalise everything)

and the Materialists (who abide wholly in the sensuous) to the fragments

on Style and Language at the end, it is a really excellent book, and if

it has not been translated into English it ought to have been, and to

be.

[Sidenote: _The so-called “Romantic School.”_]

The German “Romantic School”[756] has been the occasion of divers solid

books[757] (and famous booklets) all to itself, and I do not consider it

necessary to say much about it generally here. In a certain justifiable

sense it may be said to have begun with Klopstock and only died, if it

died even then, with Heine, who, on a calculus to me, I own,

incomprehensible in any other sense than this, is thought by some to

have killed it. But its usual connotation in literary histories, a

connotation responsible, I think, for this and other errors, is that of

a period extending from the latest years of the eighteenth century over

about the first quarter (or the first thirty or forty years) of the

nineteenth, and dominated by a remarkable quartette of friends—the two

younger Schlegels, “Novalis,” and Tieck. The work of all the four is

saturated with literary criticism of the polemic and propagandist kind,

but it is rendered more troublesome to handle than it need be by the

pestilent habit (which the Germans took from Rousseau, and from Goethe

downwards indulged after the most intemperate fashion) of throwing

polemic and propagandist thought into the forms of prose romance.

[Sidenote: _Novalis._]

Of these four the _greatest_ critic is, in my humble judgment, Novalis—

though he wrote the least criticism. Indeed, there is a sense in which

one might, without absurdity, call Novalis the greatest critic of

Germany. He is, in fact, the Shelley of criticism; and it may be left to

the Devil’s Advocates to suggest that, like Shelley, he had time to

indicate, at least, all that was of truth in him, and had no time to

turn it into, or muddle it with, error. He, very much more than Jean

Paul, is _der Einzige_: though his uniqueness is such that, while it

does not adjust itself to all times or temperaments, it will, when once

apprehended, always re-present itself at some time or other with some

slight assistance of fortune.

It would hardly have assisted his critical position if he had carried

out the intention, which we are told[758] he entertained (under the

influence of the above-noted delusion, as to the suitableness of the

Romance for such purposes), of writing seven documents of the kind, on

Poetry, Physics, the Civic Life, Commerce, History, Politics, and Love!

_Wilhelm Meister_, which (see below) he judged so well, would have had

much to answer for if this had been done. As it is, the existing but

unfinished _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_ represents the first of these, and

the not much more than begun _Lehrlinge zu Sais_ is believed to

represent the second: but the rest remained bodiless and in the gloom.

It was much better so: for neither the partly completed nor the hardly

begun book approaches in value the _Fragmente_ which follow. In fact,

even if the scheme were really practicable (which, despite certain

imposing instances, may be very much doubted), it is pretty clear that

Friedrich von Hardenberg was not the man for it.

[Sidenote: _The_ Heinrich.]

It can hardly, on the other hand, rejoice any reader of _Heinrich von

Ofterdingen_, whether he be philosopher, critic, or simple reader for

reading’s sake, when the Quest of the Blue Flower, and all the other

agreeable Fouqué-like “swarmeries,” are interrupted by a discourse of

three pages from the poet Klingsohr on the _Überschwenglichkeit_ of

certain subjects for poetry. Even if you are a poet, and a

Middle-High-German, and the father of Matilda, you must not talk like

that in a novel. And your poetry, and your Middle-High-Germanship, and

your fatherhood of Matilda are very distinctly _überschwenglich_ for you

in your character as a critic. From Heinrich, therefore, we shall

chiefly get (though there are tempting _aperçus_ in it here and there) a

somewhat vague notion of the _clair-de-lune_ Poetic of the central

Romantic school. [Sidenote: _The earlier_ Fragments.] The _Disciples at

Sais_ hardly concern us. But the _Fragments_ that remain give much less

unsubstantial food. Here is that witty and appallingly accurate judgment

of Klopstock, which applies to a whole class of poets as well, that “His

works appear to be, for the most part, free translations and workings up

of an unknown Poet by a very talented but unpoetical philologist.” Here,

too, is that remarkable judgment of Goethe’s work in general, and of

_Wilhelm Meister_ in particular, of which Carlyle bravely gave the

gist,[759] though it certainly did not coincide with his own opinion,

and which remains almost a pattern of independent and solid judgment,

unspoilt by any petulance or jealousy of youth, from a young man of

letters on the living leader of his country’s literature. Here also are

some almost equally remarkable things on Shakespeare, not quite showing

the _adequacy_[760] of those on Goethe, but very acute and especially

valuable because they enter a protest against the exaggeration—a

reaction, of course, from the opposite exaggeration of Voltaire & Co.—of

Shakespeare’s deliberate artistry. And these individual judgments occur

side by side, in the æsthetic and literary division of these

_Fragments_, with more general dicta of astonishing profundity and

beauty.

The most pregnant of all the sayings, as it seems to me, though the

æstheticians may not like it, is this,[761] “Æsthetic is absolutely

independent of Poetry”; and I should pair with it the other,[762] “May

not poetry be nothing but _inner_ painting and music, freely modified by

the nature of [the individual’s?] feeling (Gemüth)?” The further

Shakespearian remarks[763] on the blending of contradictories in our

poet, with the remarkable approximation of his style to Boccaccio’s and

Cervantes’ prose, as “gründlich, elegant, nett, _pedantisch_ und

vollständig,” may puzzle some people, but they do not puzzle me. What a

critical genius must a German have had who, about 1800 and before he

himself was thirty, combined[764] with the above-cited judgments of

Klopstock and Goethe, recognition of the facts that Wieland and Richter

sin from formlessness, and from having “not æsthetic or comic _spirit_,

but only æsthetic or comic _moods_,” _and_ that Schiller “starts from

too definite a point, and draws in too sharp and hard an outline.” “Man

ist allein mit allem was man liebt”[765] may be said, by any one who

likes, to be mere “dropping into poetry” in feeling as in form. Again:

it is not so to me. And the postil[766] on a highly aggressive text,

“Die Welt muss _romanticisirt_ werden,” is not so aggressive as it

looks.

[Sidenote: _The later._]

I am, however, inclined to think that there is still further improvement

in the fragments and thoughts of the _third_ volume. This was not

published till nearly twenty years after Carlyle wrote the Essay by

which, in all probability, most Englishmen know Novalis. But I should

venture to recommend, to any one who wishes to understand him, the

reading of it both first and last. The biographical article, written

many years before by his old friend and chief, Just, gives, I think, a

fuller and truer notion of the man than Tieck’s _Vorrede_ in the first

collection. The Diaries, Letters, and oddments of various kinds help to

fill out this portrait, and the _Fragmente_, themselves, from p. 160

onward, contain most admirable things. This third volume, in fact, forms

a much earlier pendant to Amiel’s _Journal_, with, as some people may be

excused for thinking, much less _Katzenjammer_, a much manlier tone, and

far more positive genius.

How much more critical and more informing is the confession[767] that

“Shakespeare is darker to him than Greece”—that he is more at home with

Aristophanes’ jokes than with Shakespeare’s—not merely than the old

abuse, but than certain kinds of laudation! What a combination (on a par

with the sentence on Klopstock, elsewhere cited) of _giustizia_,

_potestate_, _sapienzia_, _e amore_ (not a bad definition, by the way,

if I may dare to borrow it, of the qualifications of the critic) is

there in the saying[768] that Goethe is “der wahre _Statthalter_ des

Poetischen Geistes auf Erden”! The words—idle paradox as they may seem

to some—“Moments may occur when A B C books and Compendia seem to us

poetical,”[769] are a better text for a whole æsthetic—or, at least, for

a whole theory of real criticism—than _oratio sensitiva perfecta_ or any

of its clan. So is this:[770] “By industrious and intelligent study of

the classics of the Ancients, there arises for us a classical literature

which the Ancients themselves had not.” How just the observation[771]

that “Lessing saw too clearly: and so missed the feeling of the

_undefined_ Whole”!

[Sidenote: _His critical magic._]

These are but specimens. But I shall venture to say of them that for

awaking the critical power, and qualifying the critical taste where it

exists—as examples of that critical unity of subject and object which

has been so often spoken of—they are specimens of some significance.

There is only one other person who can, I think, be yoked with Friedrich

von Hardenberg. If you want critical system, range of actual critical

examination, and the like, you must go elsewhere. But for critical

_magic_—for the critical “Open sesame!”—go to the two contemporaries,

Novalis and Joubert.

[Sidenote: _Tieck._]

Tieck, at one time very famous as a critic, and not undeservedly so,

need occupy us less than his friends: for he has less intensity than

Novalis, and less extension than the Schlegels. Survey of his critical

work may, therefore, with advantage be confined to the actual collection

of his _Kritische Schriften_,[772] which he issued in his last years:

for the _Nachgelassene Schriften_,[773] the two thin volumes of which

appeared after his death, contain only an eristic or apologetic piece,

“Über Parteilichkeit, Dummheit, und Bosheit”—an “_un_hübsches Lied”

which we all feel inclined to sing now and then—and some fragments and

sketches for his great projected Shakespeare-book. It need hardly be

said that Tieck occupies a very important position in the succession of

German Shakespeare critics, or that some of the most interesting of his

criticisms belong to the subject. Three out of the four earliest

articles of the _Kritische Schriften_, all dated before 1800, concern

the Master—the first being a perhaps excusably ill-tempered one on the

engravings of the too famous Shakespeare Gallery; the second, the really

valuable discussion of his “Handling of the Marvellous”; and the third,

“Letters” on him. Tieck, as is again matter of common knowledge, was an

early student of the Pre-Shakespearian drama, dealing with it at

intervals in 1811, 1823, and 1828. His criticism is generally

appreciative: but his textual suggestions are not always fortunate.[774]

As an example of what may be called the Romantic _potpourri_, Tieck’s

work is very interesting and symptomatic. It ranges from Early German

drama through Kleist to Goethe at home, and from Espinel to the history

of the _Novella_ abroad. It is all sensitive, appreciative, catholic;

and there is a remarkably sound sense of Literary History (which it must

be remembered was still in its infancy) in an article on “Criticism and

German Bookishness” (_Buchwesen_). On the whole, however, that

subordinate position, from the historical point of view, which I have

assigned to him, in comparison with the other members of the quartette,

seems to me not unjustifiable.

[Sidenote: _The Schlegels._]

There are not many better known names in the History of Criticism than

those of the (younger) Schlegels. They may even be said to be, in a

vague and general manner, more associated with the idea of “Romantic”

criticism than any other persons: and the question of the exact

relationship of both to Coleridge, or of Coleridge to them, is one of

those which seem to have more power than anything else to conciliate the

attention to critical persons, though, as has been confessed repeatedly,

the attraction is rather repulsive to the present writer. Of their

influence on Madame de Staël—who at least served as a most influential

vulgariser of the new critical ideas in Europe—there is no question at

all: the later critical Corinne is mainly, if not merely, as much

Schlegel as could go clothed in French petticoats, and remember itself

there. Those who adopt the common, but to my thinking quite erroneous,

idea that Romanticism began to wane towards the middle of the nineteenth

century, or even earlier, probably mean Schlegelian Romanticism, and are

so, perhaps, not quite wrong. In any case, the name, if shadowy and in a

sense antiquated, is still imposing, if only as having once

imposed.[775]

[Sidenote: _Their general position and drift._]

The work of the Schlegels generally—for not a little of it was done in

common, and almost all expresses a common tendency—may be described as a

continuation of that of Herder, with a still more definitely literary

intent, and with what may be called a _complexion_ to that intent which

was most definite of all. Criticism in Germany had been a long time

focussing itself, and it may perhaps even be questioned whether the

period of actual focus which it had now reached lasted very long; but

for a time it did last. The somewhat wool-gathering and tentative

efforts of Bodmer and his school had started the movement: and those of

Gottsched, with, in a less utterly perverse direction, those of the

half-French school—of whom Wieland is the representative, “too good for

such a breed”—had wholly failed to divert it; the keen-edged strength of

Lessing had given it movement and penetration; the immense literary

excursions of Herder and others had opened up the widest fields to it.

Nay, the Æsthetics, from Baumgarten to Schiller, with the imminent or

accomplished transcendence of their transcendentalism in the minds, if

not yet on the pens, of such men as Fichte and Hegel, had in a dangerous

balloon-like fashion given new motive and vehicle; and the amiable if

excessive Chauvinism of those about Klopstock had its good side

likewise. If the extraordinary critical insight and sureness of hand

which we have seen in the fragments of Novalis could have been allowed

to preside over the concentration of all these, and had taken into

partnership the practical wisdom of Goethe, and the exact scholarship of

the great German school of philologists from Reiske downwards, there is

no knowing how great the things done in consequence might have been. As

it was, these two friends of Novalis were not quite equal to so mighty a

task: but they did what they could, and it was a good deal.

[Sidenote: _The_ Characteristiken.]

On the whole, Carlyle, I think, showed a right _flair_, due not merely

to the fact that he had probably made his own first acquaintance with

them in it, by selecting the _Characteristiken_[776] as more than

titularly characteristic. No matter what article we take, or which

brother, the eulogies of Lessing and of Meister, or the apology for

Bürger, the “Romeo and Juliet,” an admirable thing in all but its

title,[777] or the capital “Letters on Poetry” (in which A. W.,

unhampered by the connection with a heretic on the subject which

afterwards hampered Coleridge, puts the indissolubility of the marriage

between metre and poetry with the greatest force), the “Bluebeard and

Puss in Boots,” or the “Don Quixote,” there is noticeable, in all, the

peculiar modern blend of criticism—moral, æsthetic, verbal, and purely

literary—compounded and applied with the utmost freshness, vigour, and

skill. I do not know that they ever did better work, though, no doubt,

there is observable, here as elsewhere, the great fault of Romantic

criticism generally—that the critic is, so to say, too much at the mercy

of the last speaker. The actual goose, on pool or grass, is always not

only a swan, but _the_ swan. Shakespeare and Calderon, Indian Literature

and Chamfort, rule the roost so absolutely and exclusively for the time

that one has twinges and qualms of doubt as to the legitimacy of the

kinghood of any one of them.

[Sidenote: _A. W.: the_ Kritische Schriften _of_ 1828.]

But henceforward we may separate the brothers for a moment and take the

elder first. His _Kritische Schriften_, mentioned in the note above,

have the advantage, which it is nearly impossible to exaggerate, of

containing not merely reviews and critical writings of different

periods, but also later annotations on the earlier ones.[778] There can

be no better test of a man’s critical quality than this: and Schlegel

comes out of it very well, though the result no doubt does not place him

quite as high as his friend Corinne and some others would do. The two

best examples are the long and early review of Voss’s Homer,[779] and

that (later but still early) of Bürger’s _Poems_. There is perhaps a

slightly excessive patriotism in the author’s contention that German is

better suited than any other language for the purpose of translating

Homer; one is almost tempted to echo Garrick to Goldsmith: “Come, come!

you are perhaps the worst ... eh, eh?” in certain respects, though no

doubt not in all. Yet even here there is force as well as ingenuity in

the contention that the very fact of Germany possessing no large amount

of great literature at the time prevented German phrase from being

hackneyed in, and, as it were, _ascript_ to, certain contexts and

associations, as was the case with Italian, French, and even English,

while the enormous and unquestioned xenomania with which the Germans had

for generations been refreshing and stocking their speech and their

culture was another advantage.[Sidenote: _On Voss._] There is, moreover,

too much distinct animus against Pope as a coryphæus of the English

Neo-classics; but this itself marks Schlegel’s attitude, which, let it

be remembered, was fresh and novel. Nor is it surprising that, as the

author tells us with pride, both Goethe and Schiller, personages not

always well disposed to him, warmly approved the metrical part of the

essay. It is now pretty generally admitted, both that Schlegel was a

very sound critic on this all-important subject, and that the importance

of it was almost greater in Germany than elsewhere owing to the extreme

laxity and cacophony, descending at times nearly to the level of the

horse-fiddle, in which men not merely like Klopstock but like Bürger had

indulged. And the whole is one of the first examples I know of a full

modern review of the best kind, neither “puff” nor “slate” (though there

is a good deal of severe criticism in it), neither mere _compte-rendu_

nor mere divagation from the subject into some general discussion which

happens to interest the reviewer.

[Sidenote: _On Bürger._]

The Bürger article[780] has the additional interest of being an answer,

and a crushing one, to a precedent criticism. I have said[781] something

earlier of Schiller’s unlucky production, and need not return to it: but

it may fairly be observed that this is as good an instance of obedience

to literary morality as that was of offence against it. Bürger had been

a friend of Schlegel’s, and he was one of the poetical protagonists of

the cause for which Schlegel himself was fighting. Yet there is no

unfair praise here: and, what is more, there is no abstinence from just

censure. Indeed Schlegel may be thought to be even a little too hard on

the unlucky _Lenardo und Blandine_, though this piece has nearly all the

faults of “Monk” Lewis and other imitators.

If, however, these and other pieces of themselves place Schlegel in a

high position as a critic, the volumes do not fail to show his

shortcomings. The system of self-annotation, though possessing some

advantages, is dangerous, as giving opportunity for those egotistical

displays of which Schlegel has been commonly accused: but this does not

matter so very much. [Sidenote: _The_ Urtheile, _&c._] The batch of

_Urtheile_, _Gedanken_, &c., which closes the first volume, and which

originally appeared in the _Athenæum_ (the periodical which the two

brothers had founded in 1798, the very year of the _Lyrical

Ballads_[782]), do not raise our opinion of Schlegel’s talent, and they

certainly do not, as do the corresponding _Fragments_ of Novalis, give

us any idea of critical genius. The one exception[783] is not at all

like the others, and _is_ very like Novalis himself. But even this is

rather an amusing and well-aimed “fling” than a real critical plummet

suddenly let down to the bottom of the well of critical Truth. The rest

are quite ordinary and commonplace things, by no means unrespectable but

nothing more. Now, no one is bound to isolate his critical judgments and

set them up in specimen-cases for examination after this fashion. But if

he does so, they should be something more than commonplace, and

ordinary, and respectable.[784]

[Sidenote: _The_ Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und Literatur.]