tomahawk-and-black-flag critic to read the affectionate and admirably
executed eulogy of Edouard Ourliac, at iv. 580 of the second series;
until Sainte-Beuve went out of his way to offend the Clericals, Veuillot
appreciated him; and even in regard to Hugo, his handling (at ii. 542 of
the second series) is astonishingly clever. Further, Veuillot is very
seldom silly: one of the few instances I can think of, is his attack on
Sainte-Beuve and Rabelais. It is never quite easy to understand what
there is in Master Francis which upsets and disorganises even the most
intelligent Roman Catholic critics, and the fact is one of the heaviest
charges against the Roman form of Catholicism, from the literary point
of view. Of poetry, Veuillot had not much sense; one would hardly expect
it in him, and it is certain that his doctrine, that a great poet must
sing _ni sa dame, ni la dame d’autrui, ni les dames de tout le monde_,
would, if it were carried out universally, make poetry extremely
uninteresting. He could be vulgar, as in his attack on Edmond About (at
v. 372 of the second series), but then it has to be remembered that
About could be and was extremely vulgar himself, and that the greatest
danger of this sort of rough-and-tumble journalism is that you are too
apt to accept the weapons and the methods of the adversary.
[Sidenote: _Not so black as, &c._]
We have little space for “Mr Bludyer” in this book, and therefore it is
that I have given some to his greatest and most gifted representative in
the flesh during our time. One may think indeed—I do—that Mr Bludyer is
a very unnecessary evil,—that it is perfectly possible to fight as
keenly and as stanchly as you like with the pen, and yet never write
otherwise than fairly, honestly, and like a gentleman. But whether Mr
Bludyer must come or not, he generally does; and when he does, it would
be well if he always had the wits, and the raciness, and, on the whole,
the freedom from mere dirty selfish vanities and jealousies and greeds,
which characterised the redoubtable and notorious author of the _Odeurs
de Paris_.
[Sidenote: _The present._]
It is half pleasant and half unpleasant to conclude this notice of
French criticism with only a reference to those distinguished living
representatives of it who hold up its banner and spread its sails to all
the winds of the spirit. To name no juniors, I have already had more
than one occasion to refer to the great erudition, the remarkable
acuteness, and the practised critical method of M. Ferdinand Brunetière.
These qualities, with an agreeable and sufficient difference, appear
also in M. Émile Faguet: while M. Anatole France illustrates a more
strictly impressionist, and a lighter kind of our office with one of the
most charming styles that any living European writer uses for the
pleasure of the human race; and there are many who greatly admire the
wit, the alertness, and the truly Gallic nonchalance of M. Jules
Lemaître. They have all written for some considerable time: may they put
on none but Academic immortality for at least as much longer!
CHAPTER II.
BETWEEN COLERIDGE AND ARNOLD.
THE ENGLISH CRITICS OF 1830-60—WILSON—STRANGE MEDLEY OF HIS CRITICISM—
THE ‘HOMER’ AND THE OTHER LARGER CRITICAL COLLECTIONS—THE ‘SPENSER’—
THE ‘SPECIMENS OF BRITISH CRITICS’—‘DIES BOREALES’—FAULTS IN ALL,
AND IN THE REPUBLISHED WORK—DE QUINCEY: HIS ANOMALIES AND
PERVERSITIES AS A CRITIC, IN REGARD TO ALL LITERATURES—THEIR CAUSES—
THE ‘RHETORIC’ AND THE ‘STYLE’—HIS COMPENSATIONS—LOCKHART—DIFFICULTY
OF APPRAISING HIS CRITICISM—THE ‘TENNYSON’ REVIEW—ON COLERIDGE,
BURNS, SCOTT, AND HOOK—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL CHARACTER—HARTLEY
COLERIDGE—FORLORN CONDITION OF HIS CRITICISM—ITS QUALITY—DEFECTS AND
EXAMPLES—MAGINN—HIS PARODY-CRITICISMS AND MORE SERIOUS EFFORTS—
MACAULAY—HIS EXCEPTIONAL COMPETENCE IN SOME WAYS—THE EARLY ARTICLES—
HIS DRAWBACKS—THE PRACTICAL CHOKING OF THE GOOD SEED—HIS LITERARY
SURVEYS IN THE ‘LETTERS’—HIS CONFESSION—THE ‘ESSAYS’—SIMILAR
DWINDLING IN CARLYLE—THE EARLIER ‘ESSAYS’—THE LATER—THE ATTITUDE OF
THE ‘LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS’—THE CONCLUSION OF THIS MATTER—THACKERAY—
HIS ONE CRITICAL WEAKNESS AND EXCELLENCE—‘BLACKWOOD,’ IN 1849, ON
TENNYSON—GEORGE BRIMLEY—HIS ESSAY ON TENNYSON—HIS OTHER WORK—HIS
INTRINSIC AND CHRONOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE—“GYAS AND CLOANTHUS”—MILMAN,
CROKER, HAYWARD—SYDNEY SMITH, SENIOR, HELPS—ELWIN, LANCASTER,
HANNAY—DALLAS—THE ‘POETICS‘—‘THE GAY SCIENCE’—OTHERS: J. S. MILL.
There are few things more difficult to the conscientious writer, and few
which he knows will receive so little consideration from the
irresponsible reader, as those overlappings on the one hand, and
throwings-back on the other, which are incumbent on all literary
historians save those who are content to abjure form and method
altogether. The constituents of the present chapter give a case in
point. Some of them may seem unreasonably torn away from their natural
companions in our last chapter dealing with English criticism; some
unreasonably kept back from the society of the next. But, once more,
things have not been done entirely at the hazard of the orange-peel or
the die.
[Sidenote: _The English Critics of 1830-60._]
There is, to the present writer at any rate, a distinct colour, or set
of colours, appertaining to most of the English criticism of 1830-1860,
and it seems worth while to bring this out by isolating its
practitioners to a certain extent. We shall find these falling under
three main divisions—the first containing the latest-writing, and in
some cases hardly the least, of the great band of periodical critics,
mostly Romantic in tendency, of whom Coleridge is the Generalissimo and
Hazlitt the rather mutinous Chief of the Staff. Then come the mighty
pair of Carlyle and Macaulay; and then a rear-guard of more or less
interesting minors and transition persons. So, first of the first, let
us deal with one who, not only to his special partisans and friends,
seemed a very prince of critics in his day.
[Sidenote: _Wilson._]
The difficulties of appraising “Christopher North” as a critic are, or
should be, well known in general; but it is doubtful whether many
persons have recently cared to put themselves in a position to
appreciate them directly. No such revival has come to him as that which
has come to Hazlitt: and I have elsewhere given at some length[896] the
reasons which make me inclined to fear that no such revival is very
likely to come soon. For Wilson accumulated, with a defiance valorous
enough but certainly not discreet, provocation after provocation to
Nemesis and Oblivion. He is immensely diffuse; he is not more diffuse
than he is desultory; and in the greater part of his work he sets his
criticism with a habitual strain of extravagant and ephemeral _bravura_
which even the most tolerant and catholic may not seldom find
uncongenial. [Sidenote: _Strange medley of his criticism._] But all
this, though bad, is followed by things worse—critical incivility of the
worst kind, violent political and other partisanship, a prevailing
capriciousness which makes his critical utterances almost valueless,
except as words to the wise; and occasional accesses of detraction and
vituperation which suggest either the exasperation or some physical
ailment, or a slight touch of mental aberration. And yet, side by side
with all this, there is an enthusiastic love of literature; a very wide
knowledge of it; a real capacity for judging, wherever this capacity is
allowed to exercise itself; a generosity (as in the famous palinodes to
Leigh Hunt and to Macaulay) which only makes one regret the more keenly
that this generosity is so Epimethean; and, lastly, a faculty of phrase
which, irregular and uncertain as it is, apt as it is to fall on one
side into bombast and on the other into bathos, is almost always
extraordinary. An anthology of critical passages might be extracted from
Wilson which few critics could hope to surpass; but the first and
probably the last exclamation of any one who was driven by this to the
contexts would be, “How on earth could such good taste live in company
with a Siamese brother so hopelessly bad!”[897]
[Sidenote: _The_ Homer _and the other larger critical collections_.]
Wilson’s admirers, from his daughter downwards, have lamented that the
_Homer_—a good thing but not his best—was the only one of his longer and
more connected critical exercitations that was included[898] in his
collected works, while three others—the _Spenser_, the _Specimens of
British Critics_, and the dialogue _Dies Boreales_—were excluded. The
reasons of the exclusion seem obvious enough. At a rough and
unprofessional “cast-off,” I should guess each of the two earlier series
at about 300 of these present pages, and the _Dies_ at nearer 400. This
would have meant at least another three volumes added to a collection
already consisting of twelve. The Devil’s Advocate, moreover, would have
had other things to urge. Whatever Wilson had gained by age and sobering
(and he had gained much), he had lost nothing of his tendency to
exuberance and expatiation. After the first paper or two, the whole of
the _Spenser_ criticism is occupied with an examination of the First
Book of the _Faerie Queene_ only—the best known part of the poem. The
_Specimens of British Critics_—an admirable title which might have
served for a most novel, useful, and interesting work—means in fact a
very copious examination of Dryden’s critical utterances and a rather
copious one of those of Pope—so that this _professor_ at any rate has
not filled this _hiatus_. And the _Dies_, though they have got rid of
some of the superabundant animal spirits of the _Noctes_, are (it is
necessary to say it) very much duller.
[Sidenote: _The_ Spenser.]
Yet the regretters had some reason. I myself could relinquish without
much sorrow, from the matter actually republished, more than as much as
would accommodate the _Spenser_, nearly as much as would make room for
the _Specimens_ also. As for the former, the famous compliment of
Hallam[899] (not a person likely, either on his good or his bad side, to
be too lenient to Wilson’s faults) is at least a strong prerogative
vote. Nor does it[900] stand in need of this backing. Wilson spends far
too much time in slaying forgotten Satans that never were very Satanic—
the silliness of the excellent Hughes, the pedantry of the no less
excellent Spence, the half-heartedness, even, of Tom Warton. He does not
entirely discard his old horse-play and his old grudges, though we can
well pardon him for the fling that “the late Mr Hazlitt” did not think
Sidney and Raleigh gentlemen. But he discards them to a very great
extent; as well as the old namby-pambiness which sometimes mars his
earlier work, when he is sentimental, and which, with him as with
Landor, was a real danger. And the thing is full of admirable things,—
the generous admission that “Campbell’s criticism is as fine and true as
his poetry”; the victorious defence of the Spenserian stanza against
those who think it a mere following of the Italians: a hundred pieces of
good exposition and appreciation. While as for mere writing, we have
“written fine” after De Quincey and Wilson himself for some eighty
years. But have we often beaten this: “Thus here are many elegies in
one; but that one [_Daphnaida_] is as much a whole as the _sad_ sky with
all its _misty_ stars”?[901]
[Sidenote: _The_ Specimens of British Critics.]
The _Specimens of British Critics_,[902] ten years later, maintains, and
even with rare exceptions improves, the standard of taste in the
_Spenser_, but its faults of disproportion, irrelevance, and divagation
are much greater. The author himself once insinuates that his work may
be taken for “an irregular history of British Criticism,” and it
certainly might have been made such—“nor so very irregular neither,” as
they would have said in the days when Englishmen were allowed to write
English, and grammarians to prate about grammar. But Wilson cannot
resist his propensity to course any hare that starts. As has been said
above, he has the compass of a by no means meagre volume for dealing
ostensibly with no British critics but Dryden and Pope. If he dealt with
them only, and only as critics, there would not be much fault to find,
though we might wish for a better and fuller planned work. But not a
quarter—not, we might almost venture to say, a tenth—of his space is
occupied with them or with criticism. A very large part is given to
discussion, not merely of Dryden and Pope but of Churchill as
_satirists_; Dryden’s plays, rhymed and other, receive large
consideration, his theory of translation almost a larger, with
independent digressions on every poet whom he translates. Two or three
whole papers are devoted to Chaucer, not merely as Dryden translated him
but in all his works, in his versification, and so forth. I do not
wonder that, seeing a farrago so utterly non-correspondent to its title,
any one should have hesitated to reprint it. But I do know that there is
admirable criticism scattered all over it, that if it appeared as
_Miscellanies in English Criticism_, or _Critical Quodlibeta_, or
something of that sort, it would be worth the while of every one who
takes an interest in the subject to read it: and I do think it a pity
that it should be practically as if it were not.
[Sidenote: Dies Boreales.]
Perhaps hardly as much can be said of _Dies Boreales_,[903] which was
written when the author’s bodily strength was breaking, and which
betrays a relapse on senescent methods, with, naturally, no relief of
juvenile treatment. The dialogue form is resumed, but “Seward,”
“Buller,” and “Tallboys” are, as Dryden might have said, “the coolest
and most insignificant” fellows, the worst possible substitutes for
“Tickler,” and the Shepherd, and the wonderful _eidolon_ of De Quincey
in the _Noctes_. There is no gusto in the descriptions, even of Loch
Awe: and among the rare and melancholy flashes of the old genial
tomfoolery, the representation of a banquet at which these thin things,
these walking gentlemen, sit down with the ghost of Christopher to a
banquet of _twenty-five_ weighed pounds of food per man, is but ghastly
and resurrectionist Rabelaisianism. But if there is not the old
exuberance, there is the old pleonasm. Wilson seems unable to settle
down to what is his real subject—critical discussion of certain plays of
Shakespeare and of _Paradise Lost_. Nor, when the discussions come, are
they quite of the first class, though there are good things in them. The
theory of a “double time” in Shakespeare—one literal and chronological,
which is often very short, and another extended by poetical licence—is
ingenious, if somewhat fantastic, and, critically, quite unnecessary.
But the main faults of the writer, uncompensated for the most part by
his merits, are eminently here.
[Sidenote: _Faults in all,_]
These faults, to be particularised immediately, result in a lack of
directness, method, clean and clear critical grip, which is continuous
and pervading. Forty pages could generally be squeezed into fourteen,
and not seldom into four, with great gain of critical, no loss of
literary, merit. Now diffuseness, a bad fault everywhere, is an
absolutely fatal one in critical literature that wishes to live. It is
hard enough for it to gain the ear of posterity anyhow; it is simply
impossible when the real gist of the matter is whelmed in oceans of
divagation, of skirmishes, courteous or rough-and-tumble, with other
critics, of fantastic flourish and fooling. It is no blasphemy to the
_Poetics_ and the Περὶ Ὕψους themselves to say that to their terseness
they owe at least half their immortality.
[Sidenote: _and in the republished work._]
In the earlier, better known, and more easily accessible work the same
merits and defects appear in brighter or darker colours, as the case may
be. In once more going through the ten volumes of the _Noctes_,[904] and
the _Recreations_, and the _Essays_, I can find nothing more
representative than the Wordsworth Essay,[905] the famous onslaught on
Tennyson’s early Poems,[906] and the eulogy of Macaulay’s _Lays_,[907]
though I should now add _An Hour’s Talk about Poetry_ from the
_Recreations_.[908] In the first the author tries to be systematic, and
fails; in the second he is jovially scornful, not without some acute and
generous appreciation; in the third he is enthusiastically appreciative,
but not, on the whole, critically satisfactory; in the fourth he
compasses English sea and land to find one Great Poem, and finds it only
in _Paradise Lost_. Everywhere he is alive and full of life; in most
places he is suggestive and stimulating at intervals; nowhere is he
critically to be depended upon. Praise and blame; mud and incense;
vision and blindness alike lack that interconnection, that “central
tiebeam,” which Carlyle, in one of the least unsympathetic and most
clear-sighted of his criticisms of his contemporaries, denied him. The
leaves are not merely—are not indeed at all—Sibylline; for it is
impossible to work them into, or to believe that they were ever inspired
by, a continuous and integral thought or judgment. There is enjoyment on
the reader’s part, as on the writer’s, but it is “casual fruition”:
there is even reasoning, but it is mostly on detached and literally
eccentric issues. A genial chaos: but first of all, and, I fear, last of
all, chaotic.
[Sidenote: _De Quincey: his anomalies_]
Wilson’s neighbour, friend, contributor, and, in a kindly fashion,
half-butt, De Quincey[909] is, like Southey, though in different
measure, condition, and degree, rather puzzling as a critic. He, too,
had enormous reading, a keen interest in literature, and a distinctly
critical temperament. Moreover, during great part of his long life, he
never had any motive for writing on subjects that did not please him:
and, even when such a motive existed, he seems to have paid sublimely
little attention to it. The critical “places” in his works are in fact
very numerous; they meet the reader almost _passim_, and often seem to
promise substantive and important contributions to criticism. Nor, as a
matter of fact, are they ever quite negligible or often unimportant.
They constantly have that stimulating and attractive property which is
so valuable, and which seems so often to have been acquired by “the
Companions” from contact with the loadstone-rock of Coleridge. Every now
and then, as in the well-known “Note on the Knocking at the Gate in
_Macbeth_,” De Quincey will display evidence (whether original or
suggested) of almost dæmonic subtlety. Very often, indeed, he will
display evidence, if not of dæmonic yet of impish and almost fiendish
acuteness, as in his grim and (for a fellow artificial-Paradise seeker)
rather callous suggestion[910] that Coleridge and Lamb should have put
down their loss of cheerfulness in later years not to opium or to gin
but to the later years themselves. “Ah, dear Lamb,” says the little
monster,[911] “but note that the drunkard was fifty-six years old and
the songster twenty-three!”
[Sidenote: _and perversities as a critic,_]
Yet De Quincey is scarcely—on the whole, and as a whole—to be ranked
among the greatest critics. To begin with, his unconquerable habit of
“rigmarole” is constantly leading him astray: and the taste for jaunty
personality which he had most unluckily imbibed from Wilson leads him
astray still further, and still more gravely and damagingly. In the
volume on _The Lake Poets_ I do not suppose that there are twenty pages
of pure criticism, putting all orts and scraps together. The main really
critical part of the essay on Lamb—then a fresh and most tempting
subject—is a criticism of—--Hazlitt! The extremely interesting subject
of “Milton _v._ Southey and Landor” (though the paper does contain good
things, and, in particular, some excellent remarks on Metre) is all
frittered and whittled off into shavings of quip, and crank, and gibe,
and personality. The same is the case with what should have been, and in
part is, one of his best critical things, the article on Schlosser’s
_Literary History of the Eighteenth Century_. The present writer will
not be suspected, by friend or foe, of insisting ruthlessly on a too
grave and chaste critical manner: but De Quincey here is too much for
anything and anybody. “For Heaven’s sake, my good man,” one may say
almost in his own words, “do leave off fooling and come to business.” In
the very long essay on Bentley he has little or no criticism at all; and
here, as well as in the “Cicero,” he is too much stung and tormented by
his hatred of the drab style of Conyers Middleton to see anything else
when he gets near to that curious person, as he must in both. On Keats,
without any reason for hostility, he has almost the full inadequacy of
his generation, with not much less on Shelley; and when he comes to talk
even of Wordsworth’s _poetry_, though there was no one living whom he
honoured more, he is not very much less unsatisfactory.
[Sidenote: _in regard to all literatures._]
Nor are these inadequacies and perversities limited to English. There
was a good excuse (more than at one time people used to think under the
influence of the fervent Goethe-worship of the mid-nineteenth century)
for his famous and furious attack on _Wilhelm Meister_; but what are we
to think of a man (admitting that much has been said and thought of it)
coolly “dismisses,”[912] without so much as an unfavourable opinion, the
lyric and miscellaneous poetry of one of the greatest lyric poets of
Europe, or the world? He persistently belittles French literature: and
he had, of course, a right to give his judgment. But, unfortunately, he
not only does not give evidence of knowledge to support his
condemnation, but does give negative evidence of ignorance. That
ignorance, as far as contemporary literature went, seems to have been
almost absolute. Even Chateaubriand (a rhetorician after his own heart)
he never names in his dealing with French rhetoric, and never at all, so
far as I remember, except as a praiser of Milton; while the subject
before the seventeenth century seems to have been equally a blank to
him. But he is most wayward and most uncritical about the classics. He
gives himself all the airs of a profound scholar, and seems really to
have been a very fair one. Yet that “Appraisal of Greek Literature”
which Professor Masson has ruthlessly resuscitated[913] might almost
have been written by the most ignorant of the “Moderns,” two hundred
years ago, for its omissions and commissions. He seems to have been in
his most Puckish frame of mind if he was not serious; if he was, _actum
est_ (or almost so) with him as a critic.
[Sidenote: _Their causes._]
The truth seems to be that he had no very deep, wide, or fervent love of
poetry as such. He could appreciate single lines and phrases,—Milton’s
“Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,”
Landor’s
“Beyond the arrows, views, and shouts of men”;
but on the whole his curious, and of course strictly “interested,”
heresy about prose-poetry made him as lukewarm towards poetry pure and
simple as it made him unjust to the plainer prose, such as that of
Middleton, that of Swift, and even (incomprehensible as this particular
injustice may seem) that of Plato. Yet we should not be sorry for this
heresy, because it gave us, independently of the great creative passages
of the _Confessions_, the _Suspiria_, and the rest, the critical pieces
of the _Rhetoric_ and the _Style_. It is somewhat curious that in the
midst of an appreciative period we should have to fall back upon
“preceptist” work. But it is certainly here that De Quincey, though not
without his insuperable faults, becomes of most consequence in the
History of Criticism. In fact, he may be said to have been almost the
“instaurator”[914] of this preceptist criticism which, since its older
arguments had become nearly useless from the disuse of the Neo-classic
appreciation upon which they were based, or which was based upon them,
very urgently and particularly required such instauration.
[Sidenote: _The_ Rhetoric _and the_ Style.]
The _Rhetoric_ in particular, with all its defects, has not been
superseded as a preceptist canvas, which the capable teacher can broider
and patch into a competent treatise of the ornater English style. Its
author’s unconquerable waywardness appears in his attempt—based in the
most rickety fashion and constantly self-contradictory—to combine the
traditional and the popular senses of the word in a definition of
Rhetoric as _unconvinced_ fine writing,—the deliberate elaboration of
mere _tours de force_ in contradistinction to genuine and heartfelt
Eloquence. But its view is admirably wide—the widest up to its time that
can be found anywhere, I think; it is instinct with a crotchety but
individual life; and if the defects of the new method appear when we
compare it with Rapin or Batteux, the merits thereof appear likewise,
and in ample measure. Nor, despite some digression, is there much of the
author’s too frequent tomfoolery. His erudition, his interest in the
subject, and (towards the end) his genuine and alarmed eagerness to
contradict Whately’s damaging pronouncements as to poetry and prose,
keep him out of this. The _Style_ is much more questionable, and has
much more ephemeral matter in it—the author rides out all his favourite
cock-horses by turns, and will often not bate us a single furlong of the
journey to Banbury Cross on them. Moreover, much of it is occupied with
often just condemnation of the special vices of ordinary English
newspaper-and-book style in the earlier middle nineteenth century—Satans
which, though not quite extinct, have given main place to other
inhabitants of Pandemonium. But the paper, with the subsidiary pieces on
_Language_ and _Conversation_, will never lose interest and importance.
[Sidenote: _His compensations._]
No incident in the ruthless duty of the critical historian has given me
more trouble, or been carried through with more reluctance, than this
handling of De Quincey. I have to acknowledge a great, a very early, and
a constantly continued indebtedness to him. I could, as was hinted at
the beginning of this notice, compile a long and brilliant list of
separate instances in which his old-man-of-the-sea caprices have left
him free to give admirable critical pronouncements. His suggestive and
_protreptic_[915] quality cannot be overrated. On a philosophical point
of criticism he is very rarely wrong, though even here he is too apt to
labour the point, as in his deductions in the _Appraisal_ from the true
and important caution that “sublime” is a defective and delusive word
for the subject of Longinus. But he is of those critics, too commonly to
be found in the present stage of our inquiry, who are eminently
_unsafe_—who require to be constantly surrounded with keepers and
guards. I do not remember that Mr Matthew Arnold often, or ever, refers
to De Quincey. But I cannot help thinking that, in his strictures on the
English critics of his earlier time, he must often have had him in mind.
He could not have charged him with narrow reading. He could not have
charged him with mere insularity, or with flattery of his co-insulars.
But he might easily have produced him,—and it would have been very
difficult to get him out of the Arnoldian clutches, as a victim of that
“eternal enemy of Art, Caprice.”
[Sidenote: _Lockhart._]
There are few critics of whom we have been less allowed to form a
definite and well-grounded opinion, than of one of the most famous of
the practitioners of the art in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Some, I should hope, of the very unjust obloquy which used to
rest on Lockhart for his “scorpion” quality has been removed by Mr
Lang’s _Life_: but of his more than thirty years of criticism not much
more is accessible than what was public the day after his death. It is
true that this—the main articles of it being the _Scott_, the _Burns_,
the _Theodore Hook_, and the earlier _Peter’s Letters_[916]—is a very
goodly literary baggage indeed, and one which any man of letters might
consent to have produced, at the cost of a large curtailment of his
_peau de chagrin_. [Sidenote: _Difficulty of appraising his criticism._]
It is true, further, that great part of it puts Lockhart in the
forefront of the critical army. But its criticism, like the
mousquetaireship of Aramis, is but of an interim order; and of the
necessarily great body of anonymous reviewing, wherein at once the sting
and the strength of his critical powers must have been revealed, we have
but a very few instances even indirectly authenticated, the chief being
the famous _Quarterly_ review of Tennyson’s early work. Eking this
further with indications from letters and the like, we shall find in
Lockhart a notable though a more accomplished instance of the class of
critic to which, on the other side, Jeffrey also belonged. He is
differentiated from Jeffrey by a harder, if clearer and stronger,
intellect, by more critical system, and, no doubt, by less amiability of
temper. He had formed his taste by a deeper and wider education, he
possessed a better style, and he had, as his non-critical work shows,
far more imagination.
[Sidenote: _The_ Tennyson _review_.]
In the “Tennyson” paper, the authorship of which appears to be certain,
we have an example of Lockhart himself and of the school of criticism
which he represents, very far from at the best, but far also from at the
worst. This worst would have been nearly reached by him, if we could
believe the earlier “Keats” article in _Blackwood_ to be his—a charge
which, fortunately, is as yet Not Proven to any competent court, though
there may be searchings of heart about it. Undoubtedly Lockhart was
capable of indulging in that style of sneering insolence which, though
it is intellectually at a higher level by far than the other style of
hectoring abuse, is nearly as offensive, and less excusable because it
requires and denotes this very intellectual superiority. But the author
of the Tennyson article displays neither. He is merely polite and even
good-tempered for the most part; and it is constantly necessary to
remember, that if there were beauties which ought to have drawn his eyes
away from the faults, there were, in the earlier versions of these early
poems, faults enough to draw the eyes of any critic of his stamp away
from the beauties. There were trivial and mawkish things which have
disappeared entirely; flawed things which have been reforged into
perfect ring and temper; things, in the main precious, which were marred
by easily removable disfigurements. From unwillingness to accept the
later stages of a movement of which he had joyfully shared the earlier,
Lockhart cannot be cleared; but his guilt extends little further.
[Sidenote: _On Coleridge, Burns, Scott, and Hook._]
And he has excellent compurgation to bring forward against it. Quite
early, in _Peter’s Letters_, he had defended the genius of Coleridge
against his detractors with admirable vigour and taste. He is
extraordinarily good on Burns. The abundant critical remarks which he
has interspersed in the _Life of Scott_ itself, afford a wonderful
exhibition of sensitiveness and fineness of taste, with nothing to be
set on the other side except the very pardonable tendency to undervalue
and grudge a little in the case of the non-Scottish novels. But an
almost better instance of Lockhart’s critical power, on the biographical
as well as the literary side, is to be found in his article on Theodore
Hook, with its remarkable welcome of the new school of Victorian
novelists, which shows that his want of receptivity, as regards new
poetry, did not extend to prose fiction.
[Sidenote: _His general critical character._]
On the whole, we have few better examples than Lockhart, if we have any,
of the severer type of critic—of the newer school, but with a certain
tendency towards the older—a little too prone, when his sympathies were
not specially enlisted, to think that his subjects would be “nane the
waur of a hanging”—a little too quick to ban, and too slow to bless—but
acute, scholarly, logical, wide enough in range, when his special
prejudices did not interfere, and entitled to some extent to throw the
responsibility of those prejudices on the political and literary
circumstances of his time.
[Sidenote: _Hartley Coleridge._]
If the pixies had not doomed Hartley Coleridge[917] to a career (or an
absence of one) so strange and in a manner so sad, there would pretty
certainly have been a case, not merely of poetic son succeeding poetic
father, against the alleged impossibility or at least non-occurrence of
which succession he himself mildly protested, but of critical faculty
likewise descending in almost the highest intensity from father to son.
And the not ungracious creatures might plead that, after all,
opportunity was not lacking. During that strange latter half of his
lifetime when he fulfilled, more literally than happily, the poetic
prophecy of Wordsworth in his childhood, he seems to have had very
little other occupation—indoors at least—besides criticism actual and
practical. But, with the inveterate Coleridgean habit of “marginalling,”
and the equally inveterate one of never turning the Marginalia to any
solid account, the results of this practice, save in the case of the
famous copy of Anderson’s _Poets_ (shabbiest and slovenliest
treasure-house of treasures immortal and priceless!) which bears his
father’s and uncle’s notes as well as his own, are mostly Sibylline
Leaves _after_ the passage of the blast. [Sidenote: _Forlorn condition
of his criticism._] When a man commits his critical thoughts to the
narrow margins of weekly newspapers _unbound_—indeed, if he had them
bound, the binder would no doubt have exterminated them after the
fashion of his ruthless race—he might just as well write on water, and
better on sand. Still, the _disjecta membra_ do exist—in the _Biographia
Borealis_, or _Northern Worthies_, to some extent; in the Essays,
collected by the pious, if sometimes a little patronising, care of his
brother Derwent, to a much greater; and perhaps in one instance only,
the “Massinger and Ford” Introduction, after a fashion in a manner
finished. Yet even here the intended critical _coda_ is wanting, and the
inevitable critical divagation too much present.
[Sidenote: _Its quality._]
But in all this there is also present, after a fashion of which I can
remember no other instance, the evidences of a critical genius which not
only did not give itself, but which absolutely refused itself, a chance.
Hartley Coleridge has never, I think, been the subject of much study:
but a more tempting matter for “problem” lovers can hardly exist.
Nothing in his _known_ history accounts for the refusal. He was
admittedly not temperate: but no one has ever pretended that he was the
slave of drink to the extent to which his father was the slave of opium;
his interest in literature was intense and undying—that every page that
he ever wrote shows beyond possibility of doubt; and the fineness of his
critical perceptions is equally indubitable. [Sidenote: _Defects_] But
the extraordinary and, I think, unparalleled intellectual indolence—or
rather intellectual paralysis—which beset him, seems to have prevented
him not merely from writing, but from that mere reading in which men,
too indolent to make any great use of it, constantly indulge as a mere
pleasure and pastime. He confesses frankly that he had read very little
indeed: and this, though he had been almost all his life within reach
of, and for great part of it actually under the same roof with,
Southey’s hardly equalled library. This ignorance leads him wrong not
only on matters of fact, but also on matters of opinion: indeed, he
seldom goes wrong, except when he does not know enough about the matter.
It is unfortunate that we have hardly anything finished from him in the
critical way, except the “Massinger and Ford” and the Essays he wrote
for _Blackwood_, while these last bear such a strong impress of Wilson’s
own manner[918] that it is impossible not to think them
Christopherically sophisticated. In the _Northern Worthies_ he professes
not to meddle with Criticism at all, or to touch it very little. In the
“Marvell,” however, the “Bentley,” the “Ascham,” the “Mason,” the
“Roscoe,” and the “Congreve,” he is better than his word, and gives some
excellent criticism as a seasoning to the biography. [Sidenote: _and
examples._] One cannot, indeed, but grudge the time that he spends on
such worthless stuff as _Elfrida_ and _Caractacus_, but we must remember
that in that generation of transition, the generation of Milman and
Talfourd earlier, of Henry Taylor and others later, the possibility of
reviving the serious drama was a very important subject indeed. Hartley,
whose reverence for his father is as pleasant as his affection for his
mother, evidently thought much of _Remorse_ and _Zapolya_, and might
probably, if he ever could have got his will to face any hedge, have
tried such things himself. On Congreve he is nearly at his best: and his
essay certainly ought to be included in that unique volume of _variorum_
critical documents on the Restoration Drama, which somebody some day may
have the sense to edit.
But he would be neither Hartley nor Coleridge if he were not best in the
_Marginalia_, good as the “Massinger and Ford” introduction is in parts.
The “Anderson” notes, and those on Shakespeare, deserve the most careful
reading: and I shall be much surprised if any competent reader fails to
see that the man who wrote them at least had it in him to have made no
inadequate thirdsman to his father[919] and Hazlitt.
[Sidenote: _Maginn._]
Very few people nowadays, in all probability, think much of “bright,
broken Maginn”[920] as a critic; and of those few some perhaps
associate his criticism chiefly with such examples of it as the
article on Grantley Berkeley, which almost excused the retaliation on
its unfortunate publisher, or the vain attempt to “bluff” out the
Keats matter by ridiculing _Adonais_. Even as to most of his
exercitations in this most unlovely department, or rather corruption,
of our art, there is perhaps something to be said for him. He fights,
as a rule, not with Lockhart’s dagger of ice-brook temper, nor with
Wilson’s smashing bludgeon, but with a kind of horse-whip, stinging
indeed enough, but letting out no life and breaking no bones at worst
and heaviest, at lightest not much more than switching playfully. Had
there, however, been nothing to plead for him but this, there would
have been no room for him here. [Sidenote: _His parody-criticisms_]
But his favourite way of proceeding in his lighter critical articles,
though not invented by himself (as it was not of course invented even
by Canning and his merry men, from whom Maginn took it), the method of
parody-criticism, is, if not a very high variety, and especially not
in the least a convincing one, still one which perhaps deserves a few
lines of reference, and of which he was himself decidedly the chief
master. These parody-criticisms[921] are often quite good-natured, and
they exhibit the seamy sides of the various styles in a manner which
is critical “after a sort.”
[Sidenote: _and more serious efforts._]
Still, a mere allusion would suffice for them if they stood alone, and
Maginn’s paragraph might be completed by observing that he has repaired
the absolutely false statement, that “Michael Angelo was a very
indifferent poet,” by the far too true one, that “Any modern sermon,
after the Litany of the Church of England, is an extreme example of the
bathos.”[922] But his _Essay on Dr Farmer’s Learning of
Shakespeare_,[923] and the much shorter but still substantial _Lady
Macbeth_,[924] are by no means to be omitted or merely catalogued. These
two pieces show that Maginn, if
only he could have kept his hand from the glass, and his pen from mere
gambols or worse, not only might but would have been one of the most
considerable of English critics. The goodness, and the various
goodness, of both is all the more remarkable because Maginn seems to
have owed little or nothing to the influence of Coleridge. Almost the
only fault in the first is the hectoring incivility with which Farmer
himself is spoken of, and this, as we have seen, is but too old a
fault with critics, while it was specially prevalent at this period,
and our own is far from guiltless of it. But the sense and learning of
the paper are simply admirable: and Maginn’s possession of the last
critical secret is almost shown by his wise restraint in arguing that
Farmer’s argument for Shakespeare’s ignorance is invalid, without
going on, as some would do, and have done, to argue the poet
omniscient by learning as well as by genius. As for the _Lady
Macbeth_, the sense is reinforced, and the learning (here not
necessary) replaced, by taste and subtlety of the most uncommon kind.
I do not know a piece of dramatic character-criticism (no, not the
thousand-times-praised thing in _Wilhelm Meister_) more unerringly
delicate and right. And this man, not, as the cackle goes, by “neglect
of genius,” by the wicked refusal of patrons to patronise, not by
anything of the kind, but by sheer lack of self-command, wasted his
time in vulgar journalism at the worst, and with rare exceptions[925]
in mere sport-making at the best!
We have been occupied since the beginning of this chapter by men who,
save in the case of Hartley Coleridge, were closely connected with the
periodical press, and owed almost all their communication with the
public to it. We now come to a pair, greater than any of them, who were
indeed “contributors,” but not contributors mainly.
[Sidenote: _Macaulay._]
Another great name is added, by Macaulay, to the long and pleasant list
of our examples how “Phibbus car” has, in unexpected and puzzling but
always interesting ways, “made or marred the” not always “foolish Fates”
of critics and criticism. When we first meet him as a critic of scarcely
four-and-twenty, in the articles contributed to _Knight’s Quarterly_, we
may feel inclined to say that nobody whom we have yet met (except
perhaps Southey) can have had at that age a wider range of reading, and
nobody at all an apparently keener relish for it. [Sidenote: _His
exceptional competence in some ways._] He is, what Southey was not, a
competent scholar in the classics; he knows later (if unfortunately not
quite earlier) English literature extraordinarily well; he has, what was
once common with us, but was in his days getting rare, and has since
grown rarer, a pretty thorough knowledge of Italian, and he is certainly
not ignorant of French (though perhaps at no time did he thoroughly
relish its literature), while he is later to add Spanish and German. But
he does not only know, he loves. There is already much personal rhetoric
and mannerism especially in the peroration of his review of Mitford’s
_Greece_, where he reproaches that Tory historian with his neglect of
Greek literature. But it is quite evidently sincere. He has shown
similar enthusiasm, combined in a manner not banal, in his earlier
article on Dante, and he shows wonderful and prophetic knowledge of at
least parts of literature in his paper on the Athenian Orators, as well
as in the later article on History belonging to his more recognised
literary period. [Sidenote: _The early articles._] From a candidate of
this kind, but just qualified to be a deacon of the Church in years, we
may surely expect a deacon in the craft of criticism before very long,
particularly when he happens to possess a ready-made style of
extraordinarily, and not merely, popular qualities. There are some who
would say that this expectation was fully realised: I am afraid I cannot
quite agree with them, and it is my business here to show why.
[Sidenote: _His drawbacks._]
We have said that, even in these early exercitations, Macaulay’s
characteristics appear strongly: and among not the least strongly
appearing are some from which, unless a man disengages himself, he shall
very hardly become a really great literary critic. The first of these is
the well-known and not seriously to be denied tendency, not merely to
“cocksureness,” but to a sweeping indulgence in superlatives, a
“knock-me-down-these-knaves” gesticulation, which is the very negation
of the critical attitude. Even the sound, the genuine, the well-deserved
literary preferences above referred to lose not a little by this tone of
swaggering sententiousness in their expression; and they lose a great
deal more by the simultaneous appearance of the hopelessly uncritical
habit of making the whites more dazzling by splashing the deepest black
alongside of them. The very eulogy of Dante as a whole seems to Macaulay
incomplete without an elaborate pendant of depreciation of Petrarch,
while “Tasso, Marino, Guarini, and Metastasio” are swept into a dust-bin
of common disdain, and we are told that the _Secchia Rapita_, “the best
poem of its kind in some respects,” is “painfully diffuse and languid,”
qualities which one might have thought destructive of any “bestness.”
[Sidenote: _The practical choking of the good seed._]
It is of less importance—because the fault is so common as to be almost
universal—that the “Mitford” displays very strong political prejudice,
which certainly affects, as it should not do, the literary judgment.
Mitford may have been an irregular and capricious writer, but the worst
vices of the worst Rymer-and-Dennis criticism appear in the description
of him as “bad.” His style could not possibly be so described by a fair
critic who did not set out with the major premiss that whatever is
unusual is bad. And not only here, but even in the purely literary
essays, even at their most enthusiastically literary pitch, we may, I
think, without any unfairness, perceive an undertone, an undercurrent,
of preference for the not purely literary sides of the matter—for
literature as it bears on history, politics, manners, man, instead of
for literature in itself and for itself.
With the transference from _Knight’s_ to the _Edinburgh_, which was
political and partisan-political, or nothing, these seeds of evil grew
and nourished, and to some extent choked the others. The “Milton,” the
“Machiavelli,” the early and, for a long time, uncollected “Dryden,”
serve as very hot-beds for them. All three are, as the French would say,
_jonchés_ with superlatives, arranged side by side in contrast like that
of a zebra. The “Dryden”—a very tempting subject for this kind of work—
is not the worst critically; indeed it is perhaps the best. It is, at
any rate, far the most really literary, and it may not be unfair to
think that this had something to do with the fact that Macaulay did not
include it in the collected _Essays_.
[Sidenote: _His literary surveys in the_ Letters.]
The real _locus classicus_, however, for Macaulay’s criticism is perhaps
to be found, not in his published works at all, but in the letters which
he wrote to Flower Ellis from Calcutta,[926] taken in connection with
their context in Sir George Trevelyan’s book, and especially with the
remarkable avowal which occurs in a letter, a very little later, to
Macvey Napier. Macaulay, as is well known, availed himself of his Indian
sojourn to indulge in almost a debauch of reading, especially in pure
literature, and especially (again) in the classics. And his reflections
to Ellis, a kindred spirit, are of the most interesting kind. He tells
his correspondent that he has gone back to Greek literature with a
passion quite astonishing to himself. He had been enraptured with
Italian, little less pleased with Spanish, but when he went back to
Greek he felt as if he had never known before what intellectual
enjoyment was. It is impossible to imagine a happier critical
_diathesis_: and the individual symptoms confirm it. Admiration of
Æschylus is practically a passport for a man claiming poetical taste:
admiration of Thucydides holds the same place in prose. And Macaulay
puts them both _super æthera_. But it is a tell-tale that his admiration
for Thucydides (of whom he says he had formerly not thought much) seems
to have been determined by his own recent attention to “historical
researches and political affairs.” He does full justice to Lucian. He is
capital on Niebuhr: a good deal less capital on the Greek Romances; for
though Achilles Tatius is not impeccable in taste and exceeding peccable
in morality, it is absurd to call his book “detestable trash.” Perhaps
he is hard on Statius as compared with Lucan: but here taste is free. It
is more difficult to excuse him for the remark that St Augustine in his
_Confessions_ (a book not without interest) “expresses himself in the
style of a field-preacher.” The present writer is not fond of
conventicles, either house or hedge. But if he knew of a field-preacher
who preached as St Augustine writes, he fears he might be tempted
astray.
[Sidenote: _His confession._]
And then, after the six months’ voyage home in the slow _Lord
Hungerford_ (which must have been six months' hard reading, though not
penal), comes the great avowal to Macvey Napier, now editor of the
_Edinburgh_:—
You cannot suspect me of any affectation of modesty: and you will
therefore believe me that I tell you what I sincerely think, when I
say that I am not successful in analysing the effect of works of
genius. I have written several things on historical, political, and
moral questions of which, on the fullest reconsideration, I am not
ashamed, and by which I should be willing to be estimated; but _I have
never written a page of criticism on poetry or the fine arts which I
would not burn if I had the power_. Hazlitt used to say of himself, “I
am nothing if not critical.” The case with me is exactly the reverse;
I have a strong and acute enjoyment of works of the imagination, but I
have never habituated myself to dissect them.... Trust to my knowledge
of myself; I never in my life was more certain of anything than of
what I tell you, and I am sure that Lord Jeffrey will tell you exactly
the same.[927]
Such a deliberate judgment on himself by such a man, close on the “age
of wisdom,”[928] after fifteen years’ constant literary practice, is
practically final; but probably not a few readers of Sir George’s book
felt, as the present writer did, that it merely confirms an opinion
formed by themselves long before they ever read it.
[Sidenote: _The_ Essays.]
At any rate, in nearly all the best known _Essays_ the literary interest
dwindles and the social-historic grows. I do not object, as some do, to
the famous “Robert Montgomery.” This sort of criticism ought not to be
done too often: and no one but a Dennis of the other kind enjoys doing
it, except when the criminal’s desert is of peculiar richness. But it
has to be done sometimes, and it is here done scientifically, without
rudeness I think, with as much justice[929] as need be “for the good of
the people,” and well. Still, it is not in the hangman’s drudgery, it is
in the herald’s good office, that Macaulay’s critical weakness shows.
There are some who, in all good faith and honest indignation, will
doubtless cry “What! is there no literary interest in the “Milton”
itself or in the “Bunyan”? Certainly there is. But, in the first case,
let the Devil’s Advocate’s devil (it is too easy for his chief) remind
us that there is very strong party feeling in both—that no less a person
than Mr Matthew Arnold denied criticism to the “Milton”—that the author
of the “Bunyan” himself puts in the forefront of his praise of _The
Pilgrim’s Progress_ its “strong _human_ interest,” and that he goes on
to make one of his too frequent uncritical contrasts, and one of his
very rare gross blunders of fact, as to the _Faerie Queene_. And,
besides, he was still in the green tree, as he was also when he gave
the, in part, excellent criticism of the “Byron,” where the sweeping
general lines of the sketch of the poetry of “correctness” follow those
of some inferior but more original surveys of Macaulay’s editor Jeffrey.
And though there is interesting criticism in the “Boswell,” it is pushed
to the wall by the (I fear it must be said) ignoble desire to “dust the
varlet’s jacket,” and pay Croker off in the _Edinburgh_ for blows
received at St Stephen’s.[930]
Indeed it would be quite idle to stipulate that anything here said to
the detriment of Macaulay’s criticism is said relatively, if there were
not a sort of doubtless honest folk who seem to think that denying a man
the riches of Crœsus means that he is penniless and in debt. Macaulay
_was_ a critic on his day—a good one for a long time, and perhaps always
a great one _in potentia_. But his criticism was slowly edged out by its
rivals or choked by its own parasitic plants. It occupies about a
twentieth part (to adopt his own favourite arithmetical method) of the
Essay on Bacon, about one-tenth of that on Temple. In the famous piece
on “Restoration Drama” it is the moral and social, not the literary or
even the dramatic, side of the matter that interests Macaulay: and in
dealing with Addison himself, a man who, though not quite literary or
nothing, was certainly literary first of all, the purely literary
handling is entirely subordinated to other parts of the treatment. This
may be a good thing or it may be a bad thing: the _tendenz_-critics, and
the criticism-of-life critics, and the others, are quite welcome to take
the first view if they please. But that it is a _thing_; that Macaulay
himself acknowledged it, and that—despite his unsurpassed devotion to
literature and his great performance therein—it must affect our estimate
of him, according to the schedules and specifications of this book, is
not, I think, deniable by any honest inquirer.
[Sidenote: _Similar dwindling in Carlyle._]
A phenomenon by no means wholly dissimilar in kind, but conditioned as
to extent and degree by the differing temperaments and circumstances of
the two men, may be seen in the criticism of Macaulay’s great
contemporary, opposite, and corrective, Carlyle;[931] and those who care
for such investigations might find it interesting to compare both with
the admitted instances of dwindling literary interest—not critical but
simply enjoying—in cases like that of Darwin. But leaving this extension
as out of our province, and returning to our two great men of letters
themselves, we shall find differences enough between them, here as
elsewhere, but a remarkable agreement in the gradual ascendancy obtained
by anthropology over (in the old and good sense, not the modern
perversion) philology. Carlyle had always the more catholic, as Macaulay
had the exacter, sense of literary form; but it may be suspected that at
no time was the form chiefly eloquent to either: and in Carlyle’s
attitude for many years after the somewhat tardy commencement of his
actual critical career, something ominous may be observed. It may seem
strange and impious to some of those who acknowledge no greater debt for
mental stimulation to any one than to Carlyle, and who rank him among
the greatest in all literature, to find one who joins them in this
homage, and perhaps outgoes most of them therein, questioning his
position as a critic. Let us therefore examine the matter somewhat
carefully.
Carlyle’s criticism, like his other qualities, interpenetrates nearly
all his work, from _Sartor_ to the “Kings of Norway”: it appears in the
_Life of Schiller_,[932] in _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, in _Past and
Present_, in the _Life of Sterling_, while it _fuliginates_ itself to
share in the general fuliginousness of the _Latter-day Pamphlets_, and
is strewn even over the greater biographies and histories of the
_Cromwell_ and the _Frederick_. We shall, however, lose nothing, and
gain much, by confining ourselves mainly to the literary constituents of
the great collection of _Essays_ in this place. The discussion can be
warranted to be well leavened with remembrance of the other work.
Who indeed is more rememberable than Carlyle? Of late years, partly from
having read them so much, partly from having so much else to read, I
have left parts of these Essays unopened for a long time. Yet, in
looking them through for the purpose of this present writing, I have
found myself constantly, even in the least familiar and famous parts,
able to shut the book and complete clause, sentence, or even to some
extent paragraph, like a text, or a collect, or a tag of Horace or
Virgil. But in this re-reading it has struck me, even more forcibly than
of old, how much Carlyle’s strictly critical inclinations, if not his
strictly critical faculties, waned as he grew older. In the earlier
Essays—those written before and during the momentous period of the
Craigenputtock sojourn—there is a great deal of purely or almost purely
literary criticism of an excellent kind—sober and vigorous, fresh and
well disciplined. There may be, especially in regard to Richter and
Goethe, a slightly exaggerated backing of the German side. But it is
hardly more than slightly exaggerated, and the treatment generally is of
the most thorough kind compatible with an avowed tendency towards
“philosophical” rather than “formal” criticism. Professor Vaughan was
certainly justified in including part of the _Goethe_ in his selected
specimens of English criticism[933] for its general principles and
examples of method. Nor is Carlyle less to be praised for his discharge
of the more definitely practical part of the critic’s business. He is
thought of generally as “splenetic and rash”: but it would be impossible
to find anywhere a more good-humoured, and (in parts at least) a more
judicial censure than that of William Taylor’s preposterous _German
Poetry_,[934] or a firmer, completer, and at the same time less
excessive condemnation than that of the equally preposterous method of
Croker’s original _Boswell_. We may see already that the critic
evidently prefers matter to form, and that he is by no means quite
catholic even in his fancy for matter. [Sidenote: _The earlier_ Essays.]
But he has a right to be this; and altogether there are few things in
English criticism better worth reading, marking, and learning, by the
novice, than the literary parts of these earlier volumes of
_Essays_.[935] It may be that the channels in which his ink first flowed
(especially that rather carefully, not to say primly, banked and paved
one of the _Edinburgh_) imposed some restriction on him; it may be that
he found the yet unpublished, or just published, _Sartor_ a sufficient
“lasher” to draw off the superfluous flood and foam of his fancy. But
the facts are the facts.
[Sidenote: _The later._]
And so, too, it is the fact that, later, he draws away from the attitude
of purely literary consideration, if he does not, as he sometimes still
later does, take up one actually hostile to this. The interesting
“Characteristics” (as early as 1831) is one of the places most to be
recommended to people who want to know what Carlyle really was, and not
what divers more or less wise or unwise commentators have said of him.
The writer has flings at literary art—especially conscious literary art—
towards the beginning: afterwards (which is still more significant) he
hardly takes any notice of it at all. In the much better known
“Boswell,” “Burns,” and “Scott”[936] Essays, his neglect of the purely
literary side is again the more remarkable, because it is not
ostentatious. In the “Diderot,” dealing with a subject who was as much a
man of letters first of all (though of very various and _applied_
letters) as perhaps any man in history, he cannot and does not neglect
that subject’s literary performance; but the paper is evidence of the
very strongest how little of his real interest is bestowed upon it. It
is of the man Diderot—and of the man Diderot’s relation to, and
illumination of, that condition of the French mind and state of which
some good folk have thought that Carlyle knew nothing—that he is
thinking, for this that he is caring. Later still, he will select for
his favourite subjects people like Mirabeau, who had much better have
written no books at all, or Dr Francia, whose connection with literature
is chiefly limited to the fact of his having written one immortal
sentence. And this sentence, not having myself seen or wished to see the
works of Rengger, I have always suspected that Carlyle or “Sauerteig”
edited for him.[937]
[Sidenote: _The attitude of the_ Latter-day Pamphlets.]
And then things get worse. That invocation of the Devil in the
_Latter-day Pamphlets_,[938] “to fly away with the poor Fine Arts,” is
indeed put off on “one of our most distinguished public men.” But
Carlyle avows sympathy with it. He even progresses from it to the
Platonic view that “Fiction” at all “is not quite a permissible thing”—
is “sparingly permissible” at any rate. “Homer” was meant for
“history”:[939] the arts were not “sent into the world to fib and
dance.” As for Literature more particularly, “if it continue to be the
haven of expatriated spiritualisms,” well: but “if it dwindle, as _is
probable_, into mere merry-andrewism, windy twaddle, and feats of
spiritual legerdemain,” there “will be no hope for it.” Its “regiment”
is “extremely miscellaneous,” “more a _canaille_ than a regiment,” and
so forth. The “brave young British man” is adjured to be “rather shy of
Literature than otherwise, for the present,”—a counsel which, it is well
known, Mr Carlyle repeated in his Edinburgh Rectorial address sixteen
years later. Nor did he ever alter the point of view which he had now
taken up, either in book, or minor published work, or Letters, or
autobiographic jottings, or those _Ana_ which still flit on the mouths
of men concerning his later years.
[Sidenote: _The conclusion of this matter._]
A man who speaks thus, and thinks thus, has perforce renounced the
development of any skill that he may once have had in the analysis of
the strands of the tight-rope, or the component drugs of the Cup of
Abominations. Still less can he be expected to expatiate, with the true
critic’s delight, on the elegance with which the dancer pirouettes over
vacancy, or on the iridescent richness of the wine of Circe, as it
moveth itself in the chalice. I do not know that—great critic, really,
as he had been earlier and always might have been—the loss of his
services in this function is much to be regretted. For he did other
things which assuredly most merely literary critics could not have done:
and not a few good workmen stepped forward, in the last thirty years of
his life, to do the work which he thus left undone, not without some
flouting and scorning of it. But, once more, the fact is the fact: and
his estrangement from the task, like that of Macaulay, undoubtedly had
something to do with the general critical poverty of the period of
English literature, which was the most fertile and vigorous in the
literary life of both.
[Sidenote: _Thackeray._]
Another of the very greatest gods of mid-nineteenth century literature
in England displays the slightly anti-critical turn of his time still
more curiously. It is one of the oddest and most interesting of the many
differences between the two great masters of English prose fiction in
the mid-nineteenth century that, while there is hardly any critical view
of literature in Dickens, Thackeray is full of such views.[940] He
himself practised criticism early and late; and despite the
characteristic and perhaps very slightly affected depreciation of the
business of “reading books and giving judgment on them,” which appears
in _Pendennis_ and other places, it is quite clear that he pursued that
business for love as well as for money. Moreover, from first to last,—
from his early and long uncollected “High-Jinkish” exploits in _Fraser_
to the _Roundabout Papers_,—he produced critical work from which an
anthology of the very finest critical quality, and by no means small in
bulk, might be extracted with little pains and no little pleasure.
[Sidenote: _His one critical weakness_] If he “attains not unto the
first three,” it is I think only from the effect of the reaction or ebb
that we note in this chapter, and from a certain deficiency in that
catholic sureness which a critic of the highest kind can hardly lack.
Nobody is obliged to like everything good; probably no one _can_ like
everything good. But, in case of disliking, the critic must be able
either to give reasons (like those of Longinus in regard to the
_Odyssey_) relatively, if not positively, satisfactory: or he must
frankly admit that his objections are based upon something
extra-literary, and that therefore, in strictness, he has no literary
judgment to give.
Now Thackeray does not do this. He was not, perhaps, very good at giving
reasons at all: and he was specially affected by that confusion of
literary and extra-literary considerations from which all times suffer,
but from which his own time and party—the moderate Liberals of the
mid-nineteenth century in England—suffered more than any time or party
known to us. Practically we have his confession, in the famous and
dramatically paradoxical sentence on Swift, that, though he is the
greatest of the Humourist company, “I say we should hoot him.” The
literary critic who has “got salvation” knows that he must never do
this—that whatever his dislike for the man—Milton, Racine, Swift, Pope,
Rousseau, Byron, Wordsworth (I purposely mix up dislikes which are with
those which are not mine)—he must not allow them to colour his judgment
of the writer. _Gulliver_ may be a terrible, humiliating, heart-crushing
indictment, but nothing can prevent it from being a glorious _book_: and
so on. Now Thackeray, by virtue of that quality of his, different sides
of which have been—with equal lack of wisdom perhaps—labelled “cynicism”
and “sentimentality,” was wont to be very “peccant in this kind,” and
it, with some, though less, purely political or religious prejudice, and
a little caprice, undoubtedly flawed his criticism.
[Sidenote: _and excellence._]
When, however, these outside disturbers kept quiet, as they very often
did, Thackeray’s criticism is astonishingly catholic and sound, and
sometimes he was able to turn the disturbers themselves out. He had a
most unhappy and Philistine dislike of the High Church movement: yet the
passage in _Pendennis_ on _The Christian Year_ is one of the sacred
places of sympathetic notice. The well-known _locus_ in _The Newcomes_,
as to the Colonel’s horror at the new literary gods, shows how sound
Thackeray’s own faith in them was: yet he, least of all men, could be
accused of forsaking the old. He had that generous appreciation of his
own fellow-craftsmen by which novelists have been honourably
distinguished from poets: though not all poets have been jealous, and
though, from Richardson downwards, there have been very jealous
novelists. If there were more criticism like the famous passage on Dumas
in the _Roundabouts_, like great part of the solid _English Humourists_,
like much elsewhere, our poor Goddess would not be liable to have her
comeliness confounded with the ugliness of her personators, as is so
often the case. And his is no promiscuous and undiscriminating
generosity. He can “like nicely,” and does.
Still, though he has sometimes escaped the disadvantages of his
temperament, he has often succumbed to those of his time; and what those
disadvantages were cannot be better shown than by an instance to which
we may now turn.
[Sidenote: Blackwood, _in 1849, on Tennyson_.]
When, in writing a little book upon Mr Matthew Arnold,[941] the present
writer spoke severely of the state of English criticism between 1830 and
1860, some protests were made, as though the stricture were an instance
of that “unfairness to the last generation” which has been frequently
noticed, and invariably deprecated and condemned here. I gave, on that
occasion, some illustrative instances;[942] I may here add another and
very remarkable one, which I had not at that time studied. In April 1849
there appeared in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ an article of some length on
Tennyson’s work, which at the time consisted of the revised and
consolidated _Poems_ of 1842 (still further castigated in the one-volume
form, so familiar to the youth of my generation), and of _The Princess_.
This article[943] is not in the least uncivil—“Maga” had now outgrown
her hoydenish ways: but we do not find the maturer, yet hardly less
attractive, graces of the _trentaine_. The writer proclaims himself
blind and deaf at every moment. He misses—he positively blasphemes—the
beauty of many things that Wilson had frankly welcomed. He selects for
praise such second—or third-rate matter as _The Talking Oak_.
_Claribel_, not Tennyson’s greatest thing, but the very Tennyson in
germ, “leaves as little impression on the living ear as it would on the
sleeper beneath.” The exquisite _Ode to Memory_, with all its dreamy
loveliness, is “an utter failure throughout,” it is a “mist” “coloured
by no ray of beauty.” But the critic is made most unhappy by the song “A
spirit haunts the last year’s bowers.” It is “an odious piece of
pedantry.” Its admirable harmony, at once as delightful and as true to
true English prosody as verse can be, extracts from him the remark,
“What metre, Greek or Roman, Russian or Chinese, it was intended to
imitate, we have no care to inquire: the man was writing English, and
had no justifiable pretence for torturing our ears with verse like
this.” The _Lady of Shalott_ is “intolerable,” “odious,” “irritating,”
“an annoyance,” “a caprice”: anybody who likes it “must be far gone in
dilettanteism.” Refrains are “melancholy iterations.” With a rather
pleasing frankness the critic half confesses that he knows he ought to
like the _Marianas_, but wholly declares that he does not. He likes the
_Lotos-Eaters_, so that he cannot have been congenitally deprived of
_all_ the seven senses of Poetry; but he cannot even form an idea what
“the horse with wings kept down by its heavy rider” means in the _Vision
of Sin_, and he cannot away with the _Palace_ and the _Dream_, now
purged, let it be remembered, of their “balloons” and Groves-of-Blarney
stanzas, and in their perfect beauty. “Giving himself away,” in the
fatal fashion of such censors, he does not merely in effect pronounce
them both with rare exceptions “bad and unreadable,” but selects the
magnificent line—
“Throb through the ribbed stone”—
for special ridicule. “To hear one’s own voice throbbing through the
ribbed stone is a startling novelty in acoustics,” which simply shows,
not merely that he had never heard his own or any other voice singing
under a vaulted roof, but that he had not the mite of imagination
necessary for conceiving the effect. With _The Princess_, as less _pure_
poetry—good as it is—he is less unhappy; but he is not at all
comfortable there.
To do our critic justice, however, though it makes his case a still more
leading one, he is not one of the too common carpers who string a
reasonless “I don’t like this” to a tell-tale “I can’t understand that,”
until they can twist a ball (not of cowslips) to fling at a poet. He
has, or thinks he has, a theory: and in some respects his theory is not
a bad one. He admits that “the subtle play of imagination” may be “the
most poetical part of a poem,” that it may “constitute the difference
between poetry and prose,” which is good enough. But he thinks you may
have too much of this good thing, that it may be “too much divorced from
those sources of interest which affect all mankind”; and he thinks,
further, that this divorce has taken place, not merely in Tennyson, but
in Keats and in Shelley. Yet, again, as has been indeed already made
evident, he has not in the least learnt the secret of that prosodic
freedom, slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent of early
Middle English writers, and Chaucer, and the Balladists, and Spenser,
and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Coleridge, which it is the glory of the
nineteenth century to have perfected. And he detests the new poetic
diction, aiming at the utmost reach of visual as well as musical appeal,
which came with this freedom. His recoil from the “jingling rhythm”
throws him with a shudder against the “resplendent gibberish.” In other
words, he is not at focus: he is outside. He can neither see nor hear:
and therefore he cannot judge.
But others’ eyes and ears were opening, though slowly, and with
indistinct results, at first.
[Sidenote: _George Brimley._]
I hardly know a book more interesting to the real student of real
criticism than George Brimley’s _Essays_.[944] That it gives us, with
Matthew Arnold’s earliest work, the first courses of the new temple of
English Criticism is something, but its intrinsic attraction is its
chief. The writer was apparently able to devote his short but not
unhappy life, without let or hindrance other than that of feeble health,
to literature; he was unhampered by any distracting desire to create; he
could judge and enjoy with that almost uncanny calmness which often
results, in happy dispositions, from the beneficent effect of the _mal
physique_, freed from the aggravation of the _mal moral_.[945] He has
idols; but he breaks away from them, if he does not quite break them. He
puts no others in their places, as Arnold did too often: and, like
Dryden (though they had no other point of resemblance than in both being
admirable critics, and both members of Trinity College, Cambridge), he
never goes wrong without coming right, with a force and vehemence of
leap only intensified by his recoil. In his best work, what should be
the famous, and is, to those who know it, the delightful, Essay on
Tennyson, we have a thing profitable at once for example, for reproof,
and for instruction, as few critical things are.
[Sidenote: _His Essay on Tennyson._]
We find him at the opening a little joined to one idol, that apparently
respectable, but infinitely false, god, the belief that the poet must
somehow or other deal with modern life.[946] Even from this point of
view he will not give up Tennyson, but he apologises for him, and he
colours nearly all his remarks on at least the early _Poems_ by the
apologies. He cannot shake himself quite free. He sees the beauty of
_Claribel_: but he will not allow its beauty to be its sole duty. It “is
not quite certain what the precise feeling of it is,” and “no poem ought
to admit of such a doubt.” No music of verse, no pictorial power, “will
enable a reader to care for such ‘creatures of the fancy’” as Margaret
or Eleanore, as the Sea Fairies, and many others. “_If_ expression were
the highest aim of poetry,” _Mariana_ would be consummate: but—--! Mr
Tennyson “moved in the centre of the most distinguished young men of the
University,” “yet his poems present faint evidences of this,” strange to
say! _The Miller’s Daughter_, and _The Gardener’s Daughter_, and _The
May Queen_ are dwelt on at great length, and with an evident feeling
that here is something you can recommend to a practical friend who
cannot embrace day-dreams. _Mariana in the South_ should “connect itself
more clearly with a person brought before the mind”—with a certificate
of birth, let us say, and something about her parentage, and the bad man
who left her, and the price of beans and garlic in the next village.
_The Lady of Shalott_ “eliminates all human interest.” _Fatima_, justly
admired, “has neither beginning, middle, or end.” _The Palace of Art_
has “no adequate _dramatic_ presentation of the mode in which the great
law of humanity works out its processes in the soul.” [So lyric poets,
we understand, are _not_ entitled to speak lyrically: but must write
drama!] And, greatest shock of all, _The Dream of Fair Women_ is not so
much as mentioned. When Brimley wrote it had long shaken off its earlier
crudities,—had attained its final symmetry. It was there, entire and
perfect, from the exquisite opening, through the matchless blended
shiftings of life and literature, woven into one passionate whole, to
those last two stanzas which give the motto of Life itself from youth to
age, the _raison d'être_ of Heaven, the undying sting of Hell, the
secret of the peace that grows on the soul through Purgatory. And the
critic says nothing about it!
Yet he has justified his instinct—if not quite his cleared vision—from
the first. Of _Claribel_ itself, of the _Marianas_, of _The
Lotos-Eaters_, of the _Palace_, he has given analytic appreciations so
enthusiastic, and at the same time so just, so solidly thought, and so
delicately phrased, that there is nothing like them in Mr Arnold (who
was rather grudging of such things), and nothing superior to them
anywhere.
There is a priceless wavering, a soul-saving “suppose it were true?” in
that “If” (most virtuous of its kind!),—“_If_ expression were the
highest aim of poetry,” nor do I think it fanciful to see in the
blasphemy about music and painting _not_ saving “creatures of the
fancy,” a vain protest against the conviction that they _do_. Where he
can get his prejudice and his judgment to run in couples—as in regard to
_Locksley Hall_—the car sweeps triumphantly from start to finish, out of
all danger from the turning pillar. When he comes to _Maud_ (which the
folk who had the prejudice, but not the judgment, were blaspheming at
the very moment at which he wrote), he turns on them with a vehemence
almost inconsistent—but with the blessed inconsistency which is
permissible—and lays it down plump and plain, that “it is well not to be
frightened out of the enjoyment of fine poetry ... by such epithets as
morbid, hysterical, spasmodic.” Most true, and it would be still better
to add “beginning,” “middle,” “end,” “not human,” the neglect of
acquaintance with the most distinguished young men of the university,
the absence of dramatic presentation, and the rest of them, to the herd
of bogies that should first be left to animate swine, and then be driven
into the deep. Once, indeed, afterwards he half relapses, observing that
there is “incongruity” in _The Princess_. But his nerves have grown
firmer from his long bath of pure poetry, and he agrees to make the best
of it.
[Sidenote: _His other work._]
This “Tennyson” essay is one of a hundred pages, though not very large
ones: but the only other piece of length which has been preserved, a
paper on “Wordsworth” not much shorter than the “Tennyson,” is, as was
perhaps natural, seeing that it was published immediately after the
poet’s death, mainly biographical, and so uninteresting: while the
remaining contents of the volume are short reviews. The “Wordsworth”
starts, however, with reasoned estimates of Byron, Scott, and Shelley,
as foils to Wordsworth: and to these, remembering their time,[947] the
very middle of the century, we turn with interest. The “Byron” and the
“Scott” reward us but moderately: they are in the main “what he ought to
have said,”—competent, well-balanced, true enough as far as they go, but
showing no very individual grip. The Shelley, a better test, is far more
satisfactory in the result. It is quite clear that Brimley sympathised
neither with Shelley’s religious views, nor with his politics, nor with
his morals. He may be thought to be even positively unjust in saying
that Shelley’s “mind was ill-trained, and not well furnished with
facts,” for _intellectually_ few poets have been better off in this
respect. Yet, in spite of all this, he says, “with one exception a more
glorious poet has not been given to the English nation,” which once more
shows how very much sounder he was on the subject of poetry than Arnold,
and how little beginnings, and middles, and ends, with all their
trumpery, really mattered to him. Among the shorter pieces, the attempts
at abstract, or partly abstract, treatment in “Poetry and Criticism” and
“The Angel in the House” (only part of which latter is actually devoted
to its amiable but rather wool-gathering title-subject) are not
conspicuously successful; they are, in fact, trial-essays, by a
comparative novice, in an art the secrets of which had been almost lost
for nearly a generation. But the attempt in “Poetry and Criticism” to
gather up, squeeze out, and give form to the Coleridgean vaguenesses
(for that is very much what it comes to), has promise and germ. As for
the smaller reviews, Mr Brimley had the good fortune to deal as a
reviewer with Carlyle, Thackeray, and Dickens, as well as Bulwer and
Kingsley, not to mention such different subjects as the _Noctes
Ambrosianæ_ and the _Philosophie Positive_: and the merit of coming out,
with hardly a stain upon his character, from any one of these (in some
cases very high) trials. We may think that he does not always go fully
right; but he never goes utterly wrong. And when we think what sorrowful
chances have awaited the collision of great books at their first
appearance even with by no means little critics, the praise is not
small.
[Sidenote: _His intrinsic and chronological importance._]
Yet a sufficient study of the “Tennyson” essay should have quite
prepared the expert reader for these minor successes. Brimley, as we
have said, was only partially favoured by time, place, and circumstance,
even putting health out of the question. He was heavily handicapped in
that respect: and he had no time to work out his critical deliverance
fully, and to justify it by abundant critical performance. But he has
the root of the matter in him: and it throws out the flower of the
matter in that refusal to be “frightened out of the enjoyment of fine
poetry by epithets.” When a man has once shown himself _ausus contemnere
vana_ in this way, when he has the initial taste which Brimley
everywhere shows, and the institution of learning which he did not lack,
it will go hard but he is a good critic _in posse_ already, and harder
if he is not a good one in such actuality as is allowed him. And this
was well seen of George Brimley.
[Sidenote: “_Gyas and Cloanthus._”]
It is one of the penalties, late but heavy, of an attempt to take a
kingdom (even one not of Heaven) by storm for the first time, that you
have to “refuse” or “mask” not a few of its apparently strong places—and
if their strength be more than apparent, the adventurer will not be
conqueror. There are in English, as in other nineteenth-century
literatures, many persons who addressed themselves more or less
seriously to criticism, who obtained more or less name as critics, with
whose works every well-read person is more or less acquainted, yet who
must be so refused or masked at the writer’s peril of the reader’s
disappointment or disapproval. Many of them seemed to be pillars of the
early and middle nineteenth-century reviews; from some of them, no
doubt, some institution in criticism has been received by readers of all
the three generations which have passed since the appearance of the
earliest. [Sidenote: _Milman, Croker, Hayward._] It may seem intolerable
_outrecuidance_ to put Milman and Croker and Hayward, Sydney Smith and
Senior and Helps, with others not even named, as it were “in the
fourpenny box” of our stall. Yet it is unavoidable, and the stall-keeper
must dare it, not merely—not even mainly—because he has no room to give
them better display. Milman was at least thought by Byron a formidable
enough critic to have the apocryphal crime of “killing John Keats”
assigned to him by hypothesis: and his merits (not of the bravo kind)
are no doubt much greater than the bad critics who, after Macaulay,
depreciate his style, and the maladroit eulogists of his free thought,
who would make him a sort of nineteenth-century Conyers Middleton,
appear to think. But he has no critical credential, known to the present
writer, that would give him substantive place here.[948] Croker was
neither such a bad man nor such a bad writer as Macaulay would have had
him to be: but he was almost as much more of a bravo than Milman as he
was less of a scholar. Senior, before he became a glorified earwig, or,
if this seem disrespectful, the father of all such as interview, was a
sound, if not very gifted, reviewer, but little more: Hayward, a much
cleverer and, above all, much more worldly wise Isaac Disraeli, who made
the most of being “in society” (see Thackeray), talked better than he
wrote, but still wrote well, especially by the aid of _l’esprit des
autres_. [Sidenote: _Sydney Smith, Senior, Helps._] Of Sydney Smith
earlier, and Sir Arthur Helps later, the fairest thing to say in our
present context is, that neither held himself out as a literary critic
at all. Sydney could give admirable accounts of books: but he nowhere
shows, or pretends to, the slightest sense of literature. Helps,
starting[949] a discussion on Fiction,—the very most interesting and
most promising of all literary subjects for a man of his time—a subject
which was just equipped with material enough at hand, and not yet too
much, neither novel to the point of danger nor stale to the point of
desperation,—“keeps to the obvious,” as one of his own characters
acknowledges, in a fashion almost excusing the intrinsically silly
reaction from obviousness, which distinguished the last quarter of the
century, and is now getting obviously stale itself. The influence of
works of fiction is unbounded. The Duke of Marlborough took his history
from Shakespeare. Fiction is good as creating sympathy. It is bad as
leading us into dreamland. Real life is more real than fiction. Writers
of fiction have great responsibility. In shorter formula, “We love our
Novel with an N because it is Nice; we hate it because it is sometimes
Naughty; we take it to the Osteria[950] of the Obvious, and treat it
with an Olio of Obligingness and Objurgation.” But Helps, in this very
passage, tells us that he prefers life to literature, and no one can be
a good critic who, _when he criticises_, does that: though he may be a
very bad one, and yet make the other preference.
[Sidenote: _Elwin, Lancaster, Hannay._]
We must still extend this _numerus_ a little in order to do that
justice—unjust at the best—which is possible here, and which is yet not
quite so futile and inadequate as some still more unjust judgments would
have it. For the object of this History is to revive and keep before the
eye of the reader the names, the critical position, and, if only by
touches, the critical personality, of as many of those who have done
good service to criticism in the past as may be possible. A little less
wilfulness and exclusiveness of personal taste, or rather less
opportunity of indulging it, would probably have made of Whitwell Elwin—
who survived till the earlier portion of this book was published, but
did his critical work long ago—a really great critic. Even as it is, his
_Remains_[951] contain some of the best critical essays, not absolutely
supreme, to be found among the enormous stores of the nineteenth
century, especially on the most _English_ Englishmen of letters during
the eighteenth, such as Fielding and Johnson. A short life, avocations
of business, and perhaps the absence of the pressure of professional
literary occupation, prevented the work of Henry Lancaster[952] from
being much more than a specimen: but his famous essay on Thackeray
showed (and not alone) what he could do. On the other hand, the not
always mischievous, though too often galling, yoke of the profession was
not wanting to James Hannay. His literary work was directed into too
many paths, some of them too much strewn with the thorns and beset with
the briars of journalism. But there are very few books of the kind which
unite a certain “popularity” in no invidious sense, and an adaptation
for the general reader, with sound and keen criticism, as does his far
too little known _Course of English Literature_;[953] while many of his
scattered and all but lost essays show admirable insight.
[Sidenote: _Dallas._]
To one remarkable critic, however, who, though a younger man than Mr
Arnold, is on the whole of a Præ-Arnoldian type, and to whom justice, I
think, has not usually been done, a little larger space must be given. I
must admit that, having been disgusted at the time of the appearance of
_The Gay Science_[954] by what I then thought its extremely silly, and
now think its by no means judicious, title, I never read it until quite
recently, and then found (of course) that Mr Dallas had said several of
my things before me, though usually with a difference.[955] But I have
not the least inclination to say _Pereat_: on the contrary, I should
like to revive him. [Sidenote: _The_ Poetics.] Fourteen years earlier
than the date of his principal book, as a young man fresh from the
influence of the Hamiltonian philosophy, and also, I think, imbued with
not a little of Ruskinism, he had written a volume of _Poetics_,[956]
which, though it does not come to very much, is a remarkable book, and a
very remarkable one, it we consider its date—a year before Mr Arnold’s
_Preface_, and when Brimley and others were only waking up by fits, and
starts, and relapses, to the necessity of a new criticism. Not that
Dallas is on the right track: but he is on a track very different from
that of most English critics since Coleridge. He revives, in an odd
way,—odd, at least, till we remember the Philistinism of the First
Exhibition period,—the Apologetic for Poetry; he establishes, rather in
the old scholastic manner, the distinction between Poetry the principle
and Poesy the embodiment: he talks about the “Law of Activity,” the “Law
of Harmony,” and the like.
[Sidenote: The Gay Science.]
There is, for the time, not a little promise in this: and there is much
more, as well as some, if not quite enough, performance, in the later
book. _The Gay Science_ (an adaptation, of course, of the Provençal name
for Poetry itself) was originally intended to be in four volumes: but
the reception of the two first was not such as to encourage the author—
who had by this time engaged in journalism, and become a regular writer
for _The Times_—to finish it. I cannot agree with the author of the
article in the _D. N. B._, that the cause of its ill-success was its
“abstruseness”: for really there is nothing difficult about it. On the
contrary, it is, I should say, rather too much in the style of the
leading article—facile, but a little “woolly.” Its faults seem to lie
partly in this, but more in the two facts that, in the first place, the
author “embraces more than he can grasp”; and that, in the second, he
has not kept pace with the revival of criticism, though he had in a
manner anticipated it. He knows a good deal; and he not only sees the
necessity of comparative criticism, but has a very shrewd notion of the
difference between the true and the false Comparisons. Acuteness in
perception and neatness in phrase appear pretty constantly: and he
certainly makes good preparation for steering himself right, by deciding
that Renaissance criticism is too verbal (he evidently did not know the
whole of it, but is right so far); German too idealist; Modern generally
too much lacking in system. Yet, when he comes to make his own start, he
“but yaws neither.” He is uncomfortable with Mr Arnold (who, by this
time, had published not merely the _Preface_ but the _Essays in
Criticism_), and finds fault with him, more often wrongly than rightly.
Especially he shows himself quite at a loss to comprehend Sainte-Beuve,
whom he, like some later persons, hardly thinks a critic at all.[957] He
gets boldly into the “_psycho_logical coach,” and books himself, as
resolutely as any German, for the City of Abstraction. “The theory of
imitation,” we are told, “is now utterly exploded”—a remarkable instance
of saying nearly the right thing in quite the wrong way. We travel
arm-in-arm with “Imagination” and “The Hidden Soul” (which seems to be
something like Unconscious Cerebration); we hear even more than from Mr
Arnold about the “Play of Thought”; we have chapters on chapters about
Pleasure—not the specially poetic pleasure, but pleasure in general. In
short, we are here in the presence, not so much of what we have called
“metacritic” as of something that might almost better be called
“_pro_critic”—altogether in the vestibule of critical inquiries proper.
Of course it is fair to remember the two unwritten or unpublished
volumes. But I venture very much to doubt, from a perusal of both his
published works, whether Dallas would have ever thoroughly “collected”
his method, or have directed it to that actual criticism of actual
literature, of which, however (as of most things), there are fragments
and essays in his work. The disturbing influences which, as we have
seen, acted on so many of his contemporaries or immediate seniors acted
differently on him, but they acted: and his literary “ideation” was, I
think, too diffuse to make head completely against them. Yet he had real
critical talent: and it is a pity that it has not had more adequate
recognition.
[Sidenote: _Others: J. S. Mill._]
But it is time to leave this part of the subject, only casting back
among the elders, because each of these has “become a name,”—to John
Foster,[958] and W.J. Fox,[959] Henry Rogers,[960] and the first Sir
James Stephen, not even naming others of perhaps hardly less fame. And
let us salute the man among these elders who, at first sight and
frankly, could pronounce _The Lady of Shalott_, “except that the
versification is less exquisite [it was much improved later], entitled
to a place by the side of _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Christabel_,” who
doubted whether “poetic imagery ever conveyed a more intense conception
of a place and its inmate than in _Mariana_,” and who justified his
right to pronounce on individual poems by the two very remarkable
articles on “What is Poetry?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry.” One
remembers, with amused ruth, Charles Lamb’s friend and his “What a pity
that these fine ingenuous youths should grow up to be mere members of
Parliament?” as one thinks of the Juvenilia and the Senilia of John
Stuart Mill.[961]
CHAPTER III.
ENGLISH CRITICISM—1860-1900.
MATTHEW ARNOLD: ONE OF THE GREATER CRITICS—HIS POSITION DEFINED EARLY—
THE ‘PREFACE’ OF 1853—ANALYSIS OF IT, AND INTERIM SUMMARY OF ITS
GIST—CONTRAST WITH DRYDEN—CHAIR-WORK AT OXFORD, AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO
PERIODICALS—‘ON TRANSLATING HOMER’—“THE GRAND STYLE”—DISCUSSION OF
IT—THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE—ITS ASSUMPTIONS—THE ‘ESSAYS’:
THEIR CASE FOR CRITICISM—THEIR EXAMPLES THEREOF—THE LATEST WORK—THE
INTRODUCTION TO WARD’S ‘ENGLISH POETS’—“CRITICISM OF LIFE”—POETIC
SUBJECT OR POETIC MOMENT—ARNOLD’S ACCOMPLISHMENT AND POSITION AS A
CRITIC—THE CARLYLIANS—KINGSLEY—FROUDE—MR RUSKIN—G. H. LEWES—HIS
‘PRINCIPLES OF SUCCESS IN LITERATURE’—HIS ‘INNER LIFE OF ART’—
BAGEHOT—R. H. HUTTON—HIS EVASIONS OF LITERARY CRITICISM—PATER—HIS
FRANK HEDONISM—HIS “POLYTECHNY” AND HIS STYLE—HIS FORMULATION OF THE
NEW CRITICAL ATTITUDE—‘THE RENAISSANCE’—OBJECTIONS TO ITS PROCESS—
IMPORTANCE OF ‘MARIUS THE EPICUREAN’—‘APPRECIATIONS’ AND THE
“GUARDIAN” ESSAYS—UNIVERSALITY OF HIS METHOD—MR J. A. SYMONDS—
THOMSON (“B. V.”)—WILLIAM MINTO—HIS BOOKS ON ENGLISH PROSE AND
POETRY—H. D. TRAILL—HIS CRITICAL STRENGTH—ON STERNE AND COLERIDGE—
ESSAYS ON FICTION—“THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR”—OTHERS: MANSEL, VENABLES,
STEPHEN, LORD HOUGHTON, PATTISON, CHURCH, ETC.—PATMORE—MR EDMUND
GURNEY—‘THE POWER OF SOUND’—‘TERTIUM QUID.’
[Sidenote: _Matthew Arnold: one of the greater critics._]
In coming to Mr Matthew Arnold we come again, but for the last time, to
one of our chiefs of the greater clans of criticism. _Vixere fortes
post_ Mr Arnold; let us hope that _vivunt_. We have heard, more or less
vaguely, of new schools of criticism since, in more countries than one
or two, and an amiable enthusiasm has declared that the new gospels are
real gospels, far truer and better than any previously known. I am not
myself, by any means, in general agreement—I am often in very particular
disagreement—with Mr Arnold’s critical canons, and (less often) with his
individual judgments. But as I rest on my oars, and look back over
European criticism for the eighty years which have passed since his
birth, I cannot find one critic, born since that time, who can be ranked
above or even with him in general critical quality and accomplishment.
And, extending the view further over the vast expanse down which we have
already travelled, though I certainly find greater critics—critics very
much greater in originality, greater in catholicity, perhaps greater in
felicity of individual utterance—I yet find that he is of their race and
lineage, free of their company, one of them, not to be scanted of any
sizings that have been, by however unworthy a manciple, allotted to them
here.
[Sidenote: _His position defined early._]
We have seen that of these greater critics some have, at this or that
period of their career, launched a kind of manifesto or confession, of
which their other critical work is but, as it were, the application and
amplification: while others have never done this, but have built up
their critical temple, adding wing to wing and storey to storey, not
seldom even deserting or ruining the earlier constructions. Mr Arnold,
in practice as in principle, belonged to the first class, and he
launched his own manifesto about as early as any man can be capable of
forming a critical judgment which is not a mere adaptation of some one
else’s, or (a thing really quite as unoriginal) a flying-in-the-face of
some one else’s, or a mere spurt and splash of youthful
self-sufficiency. You can be a bishop and a critic at thirty—not before
(by wise external rule) in the former case; hardly before, according to
laws of nature which man has unwisely omitted to codify for himself, in
the latter. Mr Arnold was a little over thirty when, collecting such
things as he chose to collect out of his earlier volumes of Poetry, and
adding much to them, he published the collection with a Preface in
October 1853. I doubt whether he ever wrote better, either in sense or
in style; and I am quite sure that, while some of the defects of his
criticism, as it was to be, appear quite clearly in the paper, all the
pith and moment of that criticism appear in germ and principle likewise.
[Sidenote: _The_ Preface _of 1853_.]
In the interesting and important “Advertisement” which, eight months
later, he prefixed to the second edition of this book, Mr Arnold himself
summed up the lessons of the _Preface_, which followed it, under two
main heads,—the insistence on the importance of the subject—the “great
action”; and the further insistence on study of the ancients, with the
specified object of correcting the great vice of our modern, and
especially English, intellect—that it “is fantastic, and wants sanity.”
He thus, to some extent, justified the erection of these into his two
first and great commandments—the table-headings, if not the full
contents, of his creed and law. But, for our purpose, we must analyse
the Preface itself rather more closely.
It opens with an account of the reasons which led the author to exclude
_Empedocles_, not because the subject was “a Sicilian Greek,” but from a
consideration of the situation itself. This he condemns in a passage
which contains a very great amount of critical truth, which is quite
admirably expressed, and which really adds one to the not extensive list
of critical axioms of the first class. Even here one may venture to
doubt whether the supreme poet will not vindicate his omnipotence in
treating _poeticamente_. But if the sentence were so qualified as to
warn the poet that he will _hardly_ succeed, it would be absolutely
invulnerable or impregnable.
[Sidenote: _Analysis of it,_]
But why, he asks, does he dwell on this unimportant and private matter?
Because he wishes particularly to disclaim any deference to the
objection referred to above as to the choice of _ancient_ subjects: to
which he might have added (as the careful reader of the whole piece will
soon perceive), because insistence on the character of the Subject was
his critical being’s very end and aim. In effect, he uses both these
battle-horses in his assault upon the opposite doctrine that the poet
must “leave the exhausted past and fix his attention on the
present.”[962] It is needless to say that over his immediate antagonists
he is completely victorious. Whatever the origin of the ignoble and
inept fallacy concerned, this particular form of it was part of the
special mid-nineteenth century heresy of “progress.” But whether he
unhorses and “baffles” it in the right way may be another question.
_His_ way is to dwell once more, and with something already of the
famous Arnoldian iteration, on the paramount importance of the “action,”
on the vanity of the supposition that superior treatment will make up
for subjective inferiority. And he then exposes himself dangerously by
postulating the superior interest of “Achilles, Prometheus,
Clytemnestra, Dido,” to the personages of any modern poem, and, perhaps
still more dangerously, by selecting as his modern poems _Hermann and
Dorothea_, _Childe Harold_, _Jocelyn_ [!!!], and _The Excursion_. He may
be said here to lose a stirrup at least: but on the whole he certainly
establishes the point—too clear to need establishment—that the _date_ of
an action signifies nothing. While if the further statement that the
action itself is all-important is disputable, it is his doctrine and
hypothesis.
He is consistent with this doctrine when he goes on to argue that “the
Greeks understood it far more clearly than we do”—that “they regarded
the whole, we the parts”—that, while they kept the action uppermost, we
prefer the expression. Not that they neglected expression—“on the
contrary, they were ... the masters of the _grand style_.” Where they
did not indulge in this, where they were bald or trivial, it was merely
to let the majesty of the action stand forth without a veil. “Their
theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of Aristotle and the
unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a thousand tongues, ‘All
depends upon the subject. Choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself
with the feeling of its situations; this done, everything else will
follow.’”[963]
As a necessary consequence, they were “rigidly exacting” as to
construction: _we_ believe in “the brilliant things that arise under the
poet’s pen as he goes along.” We refuse to ask for a “total impression”:
instead of requiring that the poet shall as far as possible efface
himself, we even lay it down that “a true allegory of the state of one’s
own mind in a representative history is perhaps the highest thing one
can attempt in the way of poetry.” Against this Mr Arnold pronounces
_Faust_—though the work of “the greatest poet of modern times, the
greatest critic of all times”[964]—defective, because it is something
like this. Next he deplores the want of a guide for a young writer, “a
voice to prescribe to him the aim he should keep in view”—and, in
default of it, insists once more on models.
The foremost of these models for the English writer is, of course,
Shakespeare, of whom Mr Arnold speaks with becoming reverence, and of
whom he had earned the right to speak by his magnificent sonnet years
earlier. But his attitude towards Shakespeare, as a literary Bible, is
guarded. Shakespeare chose subjects “than which the world could afford
no better”; but his expression was _too_ good—too “eminent and
unrivalled,” too fixing and seductive to the attention, so to draw it
away from those other things which were “his excellences _as a
poet_.”[965] In leading writers to forget this, Shakespeare has done
positive harm, and Keats’s _Pot of Basil_ is taken as an instance,
whence the critic diverges to a long condemnation of this great but
erring bard’s “difficulty” of language, and returns to the doctrine that
he is _not_ safe as a model. The ancients are: though even in them there
is something narrow, something local and temporary. But there is so much
that is not, and that is an antidote to modern banes, that we cannot too
much cling to them as models. These, he adds at some length, the present
age needs morally as much as artistically. He has himself tried, in the
poems he is issuing, to obey his own doctrines: and he ends with the
famous peroration imploring respect for Art, and pleading for the
observance and preservation of “the wholesome regulative laws of
Poetry,” lest they be “condemned and cancelled by the influence of their
eternal enemy, Caprice.”
[Sidenote: _and interim summary of its gist._]
Comment on this, beyond the remarks already made, had best be postponed
till we can consider Mr Arnold’s criticism as a whole. [Sidenote:
_Contrast with Dryden._]But to one thing we should draw attention, and
that is, that here is a critic who knows what he means, and who means
something not, directly, or as a whole, meant, or at least said, by any
earlier critic. That “all depends on the subject” had been said often
enough before: but it had not been said by any one who had the whole of
literature before him, and the tendency—for half a century distinctly,
for a full century more or less—had been to unsay or gainsay it.
Further, the critic has combined with the older Neo-classic adoration of
the “fable” something perhaps traceable, as hinted above, to the
Wordsworthian horror of poetic diction, a sort of cult of baldness
instead of beauty, and a distrust, if not horror, of “expression.” In
fact, though I do not believe that he in the least knew it, he is taking
up a position of direct and, as it were, designed antagonism to
Dryden’s, in that remarkable preface to _An Evening’s Love_, one of
those in which he comes closest to the Spaniards, where he says plumply
“the story is the least part,” and declares that the important part is
the workmanship—that _this_ is the _poiesis_. It is hardly possible to
state the “dependence”—in the old duelling sense—of the great quarrel of
Poetics, and almost of Criticism, more clearly than is done in these two
_Prefaces_ by these two great poet-critics of the seventeenth and the
nineteenth centuries in England.
I do not think that there is any published evidence of the time or of
the circumstances at and in which Mr Arnold began contributing critical
articles to periodicals. [Sidenote: _Chair-work at Oxford, and
contributions to periodicals._] But his appointment (which must have
been, at any rate to some extent, due to the _Preface_ as well as to the
_Poems_) to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in 1857 gave him a
strong stimulus towards the development of his critical powers in
reasoned form; while shortly afterwards, the remarkable developments of
the press towards the end of the ’Fifties, which began by the
institution of _Macmillan’s_ and the _Cornhill Magazine_, and continued
through the establishment of a strongly literary and critical daily
newspaper in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, to the multiplication of monthly
reviews proper in the _Fortnightly_, _Contemporary_, and _Nineteenth
Century_, supplied him with opportunities of communicating these studies
to a public larger than his Oxford audience, and with a profitable and
convenient intermediate stage between the lecture and the book. He was,
however, always rather scrupulous about permitting his utterances the
“third reading”: and some of them (notably his Inaugural Address at
Oxford) have still to be sought in the catacombs. But the matter of more
than a decade’s production, by which he chose to stand, is included in
the three well-known volumes, _On Translating Homer_ and _The Study of
Celtic Literature_ for the Oxford Lectures, and the famous _Essays in
Criticism_ for the more miscellaneous work, the last, however, being
rounded off and worked up into a whole by its Preface, and by its two
opening pieces, _The Function of Criticism in the Present Time_ and _The
Influence of Academies_.
In these three books the expression of critical attitude, displayed, as
we have said, unmistakably in the _Preface_ of 1853, is not only
developed and varied into something as nearly approaching to a _Summa
Criticismi_ as was in Mr Arnold’s not excessively systematic way, but
furnished and illustrated by an extraordinarily interesting and
sufficiently diversified body of critical applications in particular.
Yet there is no divergence from the lines marked out in the Preface, nor
is there to be found any such divergence—if divergence imply the least
contradiction or inconsistency—in the work of the last decade of his
life, when he had dropped his ill-omened guerilla against dogma and
miracles, and had returned to the Muses. He is as much a typical example
of a critic consistent in consistency as Dryden is of one consistent in
inconsistency: and it naturally requires less intelligence to comprehend
him than appears to be the case in the other instance. In fact, he could
never be misunderstood in general: though his extreme wilfulness, and
his contempt of history, sometimes made him a little bewildering to the
plain man in detail.
[Sidenote: On Translating Homer.]
In discussing the first, and indeed all, of these, it is, of course,
important to keep what is suitable for a History of Criticism apart from
what would be suitable only for a monograph on Mr Arnold. Yet the
idiosyncrasies of the greater critics are as much the subject of such a
general history as their more abstract doctrines. We see, then, here
something which was not difficult to discern, even in the more frugal
and guarded expression of the _Preface_, and which, no doubt, is to some
extent fostered and intensified by that freedom from the check of
immediate contradiction or criticism which some have unkindly called the
dangerous prerogative of preachers and professors. This something is the
Arnoldian confidence—that quality which Mr Hutton, perhaps rather
kindly, took for “sureness,” and which, though strangely different in
tone, is not so very different in actual nature from the other
“sureness” (with a prefix) of Lord Macaulay. We may think that this
confidence is certainly strengthened, and perhaps to some extent caused,
by a habit of turning the blind eye on subjects of which the critic does
not know very much, and inspecting very cursorily those which he does
not much like. But we shall see that, right or wrong, partial or
impartial, capricious or systematic as he may be, Mr Arnold applies
himself to the actual appreciation of actual literature, and to the
giving of reasons for his appreciation, in a way new, delightful,
invaluable.
[Sidenote: “_The grand style._”]
The really important part or feature of the tractate for us is its
famous handling of “the Grand Style.” He had used this phrase,
italicising it, in the _Preface_ itself, had declared that the ancients
were its “unapproached masters,” but he had not said much about it or
attempted to define it. Here he makes it almost his chief
battle-charger—presenting Homer, Dante, and Milton as the greatest
masters of it, if not the only sure ones, denying any _regular_
possession of it to Shakespeare, and going far to deny most other poets,
from Tennyson down to Young, the possession of it at all. It was
impossible that this enigmatic critical phrase, applied so
provocatively, should not itself draw the fire of critics. He could not
but reply to this in his “Last Words,” but he had to make something of a
confession and avoidance, with much sorrow, perhaps not without a very
little anger. For those who asked “What _is_ the Grand Style?”
mockingly, he had no answer: they were to “die in their sins.” To those
who asked with sincerity, he vouchsafed the answer that the grand style
“arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with
simplicity or severity a serious subject.” Let us, with as much
simplicity, severity, and seriousness as may be, treat both the
expression and the definition.
[Sidenote: _Discussion of it._]
The expression itself—the origin of which, like that of some others in
our special lexicon, is to be found in the criticism not of literature,
but of Art in the limited sense, and which was, I think, first made
current in English by Sir Joshua Reynolds—is of course a vague one, and
we must walk warily among its associations and suggestions. At one end
it suggests, with advantage to itself and to us honest inquirers, the
ὕψος of Longinus. At the other, it has perhaps a rather damaging
suggestion of the French _style noble_, and a still more dangerous
echo-hint of “grand_iose_.” And Mr Arnold himself once (_Preface_, ed.
1853, p. xix) uses “grandiose”, as we saw that the Latins and the French
have sometimes done, as equivalent to “grand”. Coming, then, unsatisfied
by these vaguenesses, to the definition, we shall perhaps think it
permissible to strike out the first two members, as in the former case
almost self-confessedly, in the second quite, superfluous. That the
Grand Style in poetry will only arise when the stylist is poetically
gifted scarcely requires even enunciation: that the nature which
produces the grand style must be _pro tanto_ and _pro hac vice_ “noble,”
is also sun-clear. Something of the Longinian circularity in one
point[966] seems to have infected Mr Arnold here. But with the rest of
the definition preliminary and _prima facie_ inquiry has no fault to
find. Let us take it that the Grand Style in poetry is the treatment of
a serious subject with simplicity or severity. Even to this a fresh
demurrer arises, which may be partly, but cannot be wholly, overruled.
Why this antithesis, this mutual exclusion, between “simplicity” and
“severity”? “Severe simplicity” is a common, and is generally thought a
just, phrase: at any rate, the two things are closely related. We may
note this only—adding in Mr Arnold’s favour that his special attribution
of simplicity to Homer and severity to Milton would seem to indicate
that by the latter word he means “gorgeousness _severely restrained_.”
This, with such additional and applied lights as are provided by Mr
Arnold’s denunciation of _affectation_ as fatal to the Grand Style, will
give us some idea of what he wished to mean by the phrase. It is, in
fact, a fresh formulation of the Classical restraint, definiteness,
proportion, form, against the Romantic vague, the Romantic fantasy. This
had been the lesson of the Preface, given after the preceptist manner.
It is now the applied, illustrated, appreciative lesson of the
_Lectures_. It is a doctrine like another: and, in its special form and
plan, an easily comprehensible reaction from a reaction—in fact, the
inevitable ebb after the equally inevitable flow. But when we begin to
examine it (especially in comparison with its Longinian original) as a
matter of theory, and with its own illustrations as a matter of
practice, doubts and difficulties come thick upon us, and we may even
feel under a sad necessity of “dying in our sins,” just as Mr Carlyle
thought that, at a certain period of his career, Ignatius Loyola “ought
to have made up his mind to be damned.”
To take the last first, it is difficult, on examining Mr Arnold’s
instances and his comments, in the most impartial and judicial manner
possible, to resist the conclusion that his definition only really fits
Dante, and that it was originally derived from the study of him. To that
fixed star of first magnitude in poetry it _does_ apply as true, as
nothing but true, and perhaps even as the whole truth. Nobility,
quintessential poetry, simplicity in at least some senses, severity and
seriousness in almost all,—who will deny these things to the _Commedia_?
But it is very difficult to think that it applies, in anything like the
same coequal and coextensive fashion, to either Homer or Milton. There
are points in which Homer touches Dante; there are points in which Dante
touches Milton; but they are not the same points. It may, further, be
very much doubted whether Mr Arnold has not greatly exaggerated both
Homer’s universal “simplicity” and his universal “seriousness.” The
ancients were certainly against him on the latter point. While one may
feel not so much doubt as certainty that the application of “severity”
to Milton—unless it means simply the absence of geniality and humour—is
still more rash.
But when we look back to Longinus we shall find at least a hint of a
much more serious defect than this. Why this unnecessary asceticism and
grudging in the connotation of grandeur? why this tell-tale and
self-accusing limitation further to a bare three poets, two of them,
indeed, of the very greatest? Mr Arnold himself feels the difficulty
presented by Shakespeare so strongly that he has to make, as it were,
uncovenanted grand-style mercies for him. But that is only because you
have simply to open almost any two pages out of three in Shakespeare,
and the grand style smites you in the face, as God’s glory smote St
Stephen. _We_ can afford, which shows our strength, to leave Shakespeare
alone. Longinus of old has no such damaging fencing of the table of
_his_ Grand Style. The Greeks, it is known, thought little of Love as a
subject: yet he admitted the sublimity of Sappho. And if he objected to
the πλεκτάνην χειμάρροον of Æschylus, it was only because he thought it
went too far. How much wiser is it, instead of fixing such arbitrary
limits, to recognise that the Grand Style has infinite manifestations;
that it may be found in poets who have it seldom as well as in those who
have it often; that Herrick has it with
“In this world—the Isle of Dreams”;
that Tennyson has it again and again; that Goethe has it in the final
octet of _Faust_; that Heine and Hugo, and hundreds of others, down to
quite minor poets in their one moment of rapturous union with the Muse,
have it. How much wiser to recognise further that it is not limited to
the simple or severe: whether it is to the serious is another question.
For my part, I will not loose the fragile boat or incur the danger of
the roof,—speaking in a Pickwickian-Horatian manner,—with any one who
denies the grand style to Donne or to Dryden, to Spenser or to Shelley.
The grand is the transcendent: and it is blasphemy against the Spirit of
Poetry to limit the fashions and the conditions of transcendence.
[Sidenote: _The Study of Celtic Literature._]
The other “chair”-book, _The Study of Celtic Literature_, is tempting in
promise, but disappointing in performance. This is due partly to the
fact that great—perhaps the greater—part of it is not occupied with
literary criticism at all, but with that curious blend of matter—
literary, political, theological, ethical, and social—to the manufacture
of which Mr Arnold was more and more turning his attention. And when it
becomes literary, we find other difficulties. In the _Preface_ itself,
and in the _Homer_, Mr Arnold had sometimes been unjust or
unsatisfactory on what he did not know or did not like—Mediæval
literature, the Ballad, &c.,—but his remarks and his theories had been,
in the main, solidly based upon what he did know thoroughly and did
appreciate—the Classics, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth. Here not Pallas, I
think, but some anti-Pallas, has “invented a new thing.” Whether Mr
Arnold knew directly, and at first-hand, _any_ Welsh, Breton, Cornish,
Irish, or Scotch Gaelic, I do not know.[967] He certainly disclaims
anything like extensive or accurate knowledge, and it is noticeable that
(I think invariably) he quotes from translations, and only a few
well-known translations. Moreover he, with his usual dislike and
distrust of the historic method, fences with, or puts off, the inquiry
what the dates of the _actual_ specimens which we possess of this
literature may be. Yet he proceeds to pick out (as if directly
acquainted with the literatures themselves, at dates which make the
matter certain) divers characteristics of “melancholy,” “natural magic,”
&c., in Celtic literature, and then, unhesitatingly and without proof of
any kind, to assign the presence of these qualities, in writers like
Shakespeare and Keats, where we have not the faintest evidence of Celtic
_blood_, to “Celtic” influence.
[Sidenote: _Its assumptions._]
Now, we may or may not deplore this proceeding; but we must disallow it.
It is both curious and instructive that the neglect of history which
accompanied the prevalence of Neo-classicism, and with which, when it
was dispelled, Neo-classicism itself faded, should reappear in company
with this _neotato_-classicism, this attempt to reconstruct the classic
faith, taking in something, but a carefully limited something, of
Romanticism. But the fact is certain: and, as has been said, we must
disallow the proceeding. Whether melancholy, and natural magic, and the
vague do strongly and especially, if not exclusively, appear in Celtic
poetry, I do not deny, because I do not know; that Mr Arnold’s evidence
is not sufficient to establish their special if not exclusive
prevalence, I deny, because I do know. That there is melancholy, natural
magic, the vague in Shakespeare and in Keats, I admit, because I know;
that Mr Arnold has any valid argument showing that their presence is due
to Celtic influence, I do not admit, because I know that he has produced
none. With bricks of ignorance and mortar of assumption you can build no
critical house.
[Sidenote: _The_ Essays: _their case for Criticism_.]
In that central citadel or canon of the subject, _Essays in Criticism_,
this contraband element, this theory divorced from history, makes its
appearance but too often: it can and need only be said, for instance,
that Mr Arnold’s estimate of the condition of French, and still more of
German, literature in his own day, as compared with English, will not
stand for five minutes the examination of any impartial judge, dates and
books in hand. But the divorce is by no means so prominent—indeed most
of the constituent essays were, if I mistake not, written before the
Celtic Lectures were delivered. The book is so much the best known of Mr
Arnold’s critical works—except perhaps the Preface to Mr Ward’s _Poets_—
that no elaborate analysis of it here can be necessary. Its own Preface
is defiantly vivacious—and Vivacity, as we are often reminded, is apt to
play her sober friend Criticism something like the tricks that Madge
Wildfire played to Jeanie Deans. But it contains, in the very last words
of its famous epiphonema to Oxford, an admission (in the phrase “this
Queen of Romance”) that Mr Arnold was anything but a classic _pur sang_.
The two first Essays, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
and the “Influence of Academies,” take up, both in the vivacious and in
the sober manner, the main line and strategy of the old _Preface_
itself. We may, not merely with generosity but with justice, “write off”
the, as has been said, historically false parallels with France and
Germany which the writer brings in to support his case. That case itself
is perfectly solid and admissible. Those who are qualified to judge—not
perhaps a large number—will admit, whether they are for it or against
it, that no nonsuit is possible, and perhaps that no final decision for
it or against is possible either, except to the satisfaction of mere
individual taste and opinion.
The case is, that the remedy for the supposed or supposable deficiencies
of English literature is Criticism—that the business of Criticism is to
discover the ideas upon which creative literature must rest—that there
is not enough “play of mind” in England—that Criticism again is the
attempt “to know the best that is known and thought in the world”—that
foreign literature is specially valuable, simply because it is likely to
give that in which native literature is lacking. These are the doctrines
of the First Essay, mingled with much political-social application and
not a little banter. The second takes them up and applies them afresh in
the direction of extolling the institution of Academies, and contrasting
the effects of that influence on French critics and the absence of it in
English, very much to the disadvantage of the latter, especially Mr
Palgrave. For Mr Arnold had adopted early in his professorial career,
and never gave up, the very dubious habit of enforcing his doctrine with
“uses” of formally polite but extremely personal application.[968]
Now, this case or bundle of cases is, I have said, quite fairly and
justly arguable. Even though I hope that great part of this volume and
of the last will have shown that Mr Arnold was quite wrong as to the
general inferiority of English criticism, he was (as I have, not far
back, taken the pains to show also) not quite wrong about the general
criticism of his own youth and early manhood—of the criticism which he
himself came to reform. Nor was he wrong in thinking that there is in
the uncultivated and unregenerate English mind a sort of rebelliousness
to sound critical principles. Very much of his main contention is
perfectly good and sound: nor could he have urged any two things more
universally and everlastingly profitable than the charge never to
neglect criticism, and the charge always to compare literatures of other
countries, literatures of other times, literatures free from the
political-religious-social _diathesis_ of the actual patient.
[Sidenote: _Their examples thereof._]
It is generally acknowledged that the influence of Sainte-Beuve was an
“infortune of Mart” or of Saturn, when it induced Mr Arnold to take his
two first examples of this comparative study from interesting but
unimportant people like the Guérins. But except persons determined to
cavil, and those of whom the Judicious Poet remarks—
“For what was there each cared no jot,
But all were wroth with what was not”—
every one will admit that the rest of the seven—the “Heine,” the “Pagan
and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” the “Joubert,” the “Spinoza,” and the
“M. Aurelius”—form a pentad of critical excellence, and brilliancy, and
instruction, which can nowhere be exceeded. I, at least, should find it
hard to match the group in any other single volume of criticism. Idle
that we may frequently smile or shake the head—that we must in some
cases politely but peremptorily deny individual propositions!
Unimportant that, perhaps even more by a certain natural perversity than
by the usual and most uncritical tendency to depress something in order
to exalt something else, English literature is, with special reference
to the great generation of 1798-1834, unduly depreciated! These things
every man can correct for himself. How many could make for themselves
instances of comparative, appreciative, loosely but subtly judicial
criticism as attractive, as stimulating, as graceful, as varied, and
critically as excellent, being at the same time real examples of
creative literature?
[Sidenote: _The latest work._]
We are fortunately dispensed here from inquiring into the causes, or
judging the results, of that avocation from literature, or at least
literary criticism, which held Mr Arnold for exactly ten years, from
1867 to 1877. Nor will it be necessary (though it would be pleasant) to
discuss in detail all the contributions of the slightly longer period
which was left him, from his return to his proper task in the spring of
1877 with the article on M. Scherer’s “Milton,” to his sudden and
lamented death in the spring of 1888. Just before that death he had
published an article on Shelley, which (for all the heresy glanced at
below) is one of the very best things he ever did; little less can be
said of the Milton-Scherer paper eleven years earlier, and whenever he
touched literature (which was fairly often) during the interval, he was
almost always at a very high level. A good deal, though not quite all,
of the ebullience of something not quite unlike flippancy, which had
characterised his middle period, had frothed and bubbled itself away;
his general critical views had matured without altering; and their
application to fresh subjects, if it sometimes (as very notably in the
case of Shelley) brought out their weakness, brought out much more fully
their value and charm. The article on Mr Stopford Brooke’s _Primer of
English Literature_, the prefaces to the selected Lives of Johnson, to
Wordsworth, to Byron, the papers in Mr Ward’s _Poets_ on Gray and Keats
(postponing for a moment the more important Introduction to that work as
a whole), the literary part of the _Discourses in America_, and (though
I should put this last quartette on a somewhat lower level) those on Mr
Scherer’s Goethe, George Sand, Tolstoi, and Amiel, form a critical
baggage, adding no doubt nothing (except in one case) to the critic’s
general Gospel or theory, but exemplifying with delightful variety and
charm his critical practice.
[Sidenote: _The Introduction to Ward’s_ English Poets.]
The possible or actual exception, however, and the piece which contains
it, require more individual notice. In the Introduction to Mr Ward’s
book, Mr Arnold devised no one really new thing, but he gathered up and
focussed his lights afresh, and endeavoured to provide his disciples
with an apparently new definition of poetry. He drove first at two wrong
estimates thereof, his dislike of the second of which—the “personal”
estimate—had been practically proclaimed from the very first, and may be
allowed to be to a great extent justified, while his dislike of the
first—the “historic” estimate—had always been clear to sharp-eyed
students, though it lacked an equal justification. In fact, it is little
more than a formulation of Mr Arnold’s own impatience with the task—
laborious enough, no doubt, and in parts ungrateful—of really mastering
poetic, that is to say literary, history. Of course, _mere_ age, _mere_
priority, confers no interest of itself on anything. But to say—if we
may avail ourselves of Gascoigne’s instance—that the first discoverable
person who compared a girl’s lip to a cherry does not acquire for that
now unpermissible comparison merit and interest, is not wise. To assume,
on the other hand, some abstract standard of “high” poetry, below which
time and relation will not give or enhance value, is still less wise.
Portia, in a context of which Mr Arnold was justly fond, might have
taught him that “nothing is good _without respect_,” and that _no_
“respect” is to be arbitrarily barred.
[Sidenote: “_Criticism of Life._”]
But even from the sweetest and wisest of doctors he would not, I fear,
have taken the lesson. He is set to prove that we must only pay
attention to “the best and principal things” as of old,—to class and
mark these jealously, and to endeavour to discover their qualification.
You must not praise the _Chanson de Roland_ or any early French poetry
very highly, but you may praise (as before) Homer, Milton, and Dante as
much as you like. Chaucer, like Burns, Dryden, and Pope, like Shelley,
has not “high seriousness.” And poetry is expressly defined as “a
criticism of life, under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by
the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”
It is important (though very difficult) to keep undue repetition out of
such a book as this, and we shall therefore, in regard to “high
seriousness,” merely refer the reader to what has been said above on the
“grand style.” And we shall cut down criticism of the definition as much
as possible, to return to it presently. The defence of it once made, as
“not a definition but an epigram,” certainly lacks seriousness, whether
high or low. The severest strictures made on Mr Arnold’s levity would
not have been misplaced had he offered an epigram here. Nor need we
dwell on the perhaps inevitable, but certainly undeniable, “circularity”
of the formula. The _jugulum_ at which to aim is the use of the word
“criticism” _at all_. Either the word is employed in some private
jargon, or it has no business here. Mr Arnold’s own gloss of the
“application of ideas to life,” gives it perhaps the doubtful benefit of
the first supposition: but, either in this way or in others, does it
very little good. _All_ literature is the application of ideas to life:
and to say that poetry is the application of ideas to life, under the
conditions fixed for poetry, is simply a vain repetition.
[Sidenote: _Poetic Subject or Poetic Moment._]
Yet insufficient, and to some moods almost _saugrenu_, as such a
definition may seem at first sight, it is, calmly and critically
considered, only a re-forming of the old line of battle. Once more, and
for the last time formally, Mr Arnold is taking the field in favour of
the doctrine of the Poetic _Subject_, as against what we may, perhaps,
make a shift to call the “Doctrine of the Poetic _Moment_.” It is
somewhat surprising that, although this antinomy has been visible
throughout the whole long chain of documents which I have been
endeavouring to exhibit in order, no one, so far as I know, has ever
fully brought it out, at least on the one side. Mr Arnold—like all who
agree with him, and all with whom he and they agree, or would have
agreed, from Aristotle downwards—demands a subject of distinct and
considerable magnitude, a disposition of no small elaborateness, a
maintained and intense attitude, which is variously adumbrated by a
large number of terms, down to “grand style” and “high seriousness.” The
others, who have fought (we must confess most irregularly and confusedly
as a rule) under the flag which Patrizzi, himself half or wholly
unknowing, was the first to fly, go back, or forward, or aside to the
_Poetic Moment_—to the sudden transcendence and transfiguration—by
“treating poetically,” that is to say, by passionate interpretation, in
articulate music—of _any_ idea or image, _any_ sensation or sentiment.
They are perfectly ready to admit that he who has these moments most
constantly and regularly under his command—he who can co-ordinate and
arrange them most skilfully and most pleasingly—is the greatest poet,
and that, on the other hand, one or two moments of poetry will hardly
make a poet of any but infinitesimal and atomic greatness. But this is
the difference of the poets, not of the poetry. Shakespeare is an
infinitely great poet, and Langhorne an infinitesimally small one. Yet
when Langhorne writes
“Where longs to fall that rifted spire
_As weary of the insulting air_,”[969]
he has in the italicised line a “poetic moment” which is, for its poetic
quality, as free of the poetic Jerusalem as “We are such stuff,” or the
dying words of Cleopatra. He has hit “what it was so easy to miss,” the
passionate expression, in articulate music, unhit before, never to be
poetically hit again save by accident, yet never to perish from the
world of poetry. It is only a grain of gold (“fish-scale” gold, even, as
the mining experts call their nearly impalpable specks), but it is gold:
something that you can never degrade to silver, or copper, or pinchbeck.
To Mr Arnold this doctrine of the Poetic Moment, though he never seems
to have quite realised it in its naked enormity (which, indeed, as I
have said, has seldom been frankly, as here, unveiled), was from the
first the Enemy. He attacked it, as we saw in his _Preface_, when he was
young, and he fashions this _Introduction_ so as to guard against it in
his age. Yet it is curious that in his practice he sometimes goes
perilously near to it. On his own showing, I cannot quite see, though I
can see it perfectly well on mine, why even such a magnificent line as
“In la sua volontade e nostra pace”
should not only prove Dante’s supremacy, but serve as an infallible
touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality
in other poetry. High poetic quality depends, we have been told, on the
selection and arrangement of the subject. Dante, we know accidentally
and from outside, _has_ that selection and arrangement. But suppose he
had not? The line itself can tell us nothing about them.
[Sidenote: _Arnold’s accomplishment and position as a critic._]
Nevertheless, as has been said so often, the side which a man may have
taken in the everlasting and irreconcilable critical battle of judges by
the arrangement, and judges by the result, hardly affects his place in
Criticism as it should be allotted by a final Court of Appeal. How does
he express for himself, and how does he promote in others, the
intelligent appreciation, the conscious enjoyment of literature? That is
the question: and few critics can meet this question more triumphantly
than Mr Arnold. Like others, he can but give what he has. If you ask him
for a clear, complete, resumed, and reasoned grasp of a man’s
accomplishment—for a definite placing of him in the literary atlas—he
will not have much answer to give you. He does not pretend, and has
never pretended, to give any. A certain want of logical and methodical
aptitude, which may be suspected, a dislike of reading matter that did
not interest him, which is pretty clear, and that dread and distrust of
the “historic estimate,” which he openly proclaimed, would have made
this impossible. But we were warned at the very outset not to go to him
for it. And for acute, sensitive, inspired, and inspiring _remarks_ on
the man, or the work, or this and that part of work and man—attractively
expressed, ingeniously co-ordinated, and redeemed from mere
desultoriness by the constant presence of the general critical creed—no
critic is his superior.
Nor are these his only “proofs”—his only “pieces in hand.” He may be
said—imperfectly Romantic, or even anti-Romantic, as he was—to have been
the very first critic to urge the importance, the necessity, of that
comparative criticism of different literatures, the half-blind working
of which had helped to create, if it had not actually created, the
Romantic movement. In England he was absolutely the first to do this
systematically, and with something like—though not with complete—
impartiality. The knowledge of Spanish and Italian poetry and romance,
long very common with us, had died down in the first half of the
nineteenth century, and had not been much used for critical purposes
while it lasted. The _engouement_ for French, of the late seventeenth
and eighteenth, had reacted itself—in men as different as Coleridge,
Landor, and De Quincey—into a depreciation which, if not “violently
absurd,” as Mr Arnold translates Rémusat’s term of _saugrenu_ applied to
it, was certainly either crassly ignorant or violently unjust. German
had, it is true, been exalted on the ruins of the popularity of the
three Romance literatures; but it had been worshipped scarcely according
to knowledge: and of the whole mediæval literature of Europe there was
hardly any general critical appreciation. Mr Arnold himself, in fact,
was still too much in the gall of bitterness here. It was imperative, if
the Romantic and “result-judging” criticism was not to become a mere
wilderness of ill-founded and partial individualisms, that this
comparison should be established. It was equally imperative that it
should be established, if Mr Arnold’s own “_neotato_-classicism,” as we
have called it, was not to wizen and ossify like Neo-classicism itself.
He was its first preacher with us: and there had not, to my knowledge,
been any such definite preacher of it abroad, though the practice of
Germany had implied and justified it from the first. And he was one of
its most accomplished practitioners,—Lessing not being equal to him in
charm, and Sainte-Beuve a little his inferior in passion for the best
things.
Yet another watch-word of his, sovereign for the time and new in most
countries, which he constantly repeated (if, being human, he did not
always fully observe it himself), was the caution against confounding
literary and non-literary judgment. No one rejected the exaggeration of
“Art for Art’s sake _only_” more unhesitatingly; but no one oftener
repeated the caution against letting the idols of the nation, the sect,
the party interfere with the free play of Art herself, and of critical
judgment on Art.