His services, therefore, to English Criticism, whether as a “preceptist”

or as an actual craftsman, cannot possibly be overestimated. In the

first respect he was, if not the absolute reformer,—these things, and

all things, reform themselves under the guidance of the Gods and the

Destinies, not of men,—the leader in reform, of the slovenly and

disorganised condition into which Romantic criticism had fallen. In the

second, the things which he had not, as well as those which he had,

combined to give him a place among the very first. He had not the

sublime and ever new-inspired inconsistency of Dryden. Dryden, in Mr

Arnold’s place, might have begun by cursing Shelley a little, but would

have ended by blessing him all but wholly. He had not the robustness of

Johnson; the supreme critical “reason” (as against understanding) of

Coleridge; scarcely the exquisite, if fitful, appreciation of Lamb, or

the full-blooded and passionate appreciation of Hazlitt. But he had an

exacter knowledge than Dryden’s; the fineness of his judgment shows

finer beside Johnson’s bluntness; he could not wool-gather like

Coleridge; his range was far wider than Lamb’s; his scholarship and his

delicacy alike give him an advantage over Hazlitt. Systematic without

being hidebound; well-read (if not exactly learned) without pedantry;

delicate and subtle, without weakness or dilettanteism; catholic without

eclecticism; enthusiastic without indiscriminateness,—Mr Arnold is one

of the best and most precious of teachers on his own side. And when, at

those moments which are, but should not be, rare, the Goddess of

Criticism descends, like Cambina and her lion-team, into the lists, and

with her Nepenthe makes men forget sides and sects in a common love of

literature, then he is one of the best and most precious of critics.

Mr Arnold’s criticism continued to be fresh and lively, without a touch

of senility, or of failure to adapt itself to new conditions, till the

day of his death: and when that evil day came, the nineteenth century

had little more than a decade to run. On the other hand, though almost

all his juniors were more or less affected by him, it cannot be exactly

said that he founded any definite school, or started any by reaction

from himself. The most remarkable approach to such a school that has

been made since was made by Mr Pater, quite fifteen years before Mr

Arnold died. No very special necessities of method, therefore, impose

themselves upon us in regard to the classification of our remaining

subjects in the English division: and we shall be safe in adopting a

rough chronological order, taking first three very remarkable persons

who—though contemporaries of Arnold—show in criticism as in other

literature the influence of Carlyle.

[Sidenote: _The Carlylians._]

The increasing disinclination to take the standpoint of pure literary

criticism which we noticed in the master, and which characterised the

second quarter of the century, naturally and inevitably reproduced

itself in the three most brilliant of his disciples—Ruskin, Froude, and

Kingsley—with interesting variants and developments according to the

idiosyncrasy of the individual. There was, indeed, in them something

which can hardly be said to have been in Carlyle at all—a weakness which

his internal fire burnt out of him. This weakness, formulated most

happily by an erratic person of genius whom I have alternately resolved

to admit and decided to exclude here—Thomas Love Peacock,—is the

principle that you “must take pleasure in the thing represented, before

you can derive any from the representation.”[970] Incidentally and

indirectly, no doubt, _omnes eodem cogimur_; or at least there are very

few who escape the suck of the whirlpool. But the declaration and formal

acceptance of the principle is comparatively modern: and it is one of

the worst inheritances of that Patristic attitude which we dwelt upon

long ago.[971] It is indeed closely connected with the doctrine that

“all depends upon the subject”: but the Greeks were too deeply

penetrated with æsthetic feeling to admit it openly, and, from the

earliest times, philosophised on the attraction of _repulsive_ subjects.

It is indirectly excluded, likewise, by the stricter kinds of

Neo-classic rule-criticism, which saw nothing to disapprove in such

poems as the _Syphilis_. But it has, like other dubious spirits, been

let loose by “the Anarchy.” That you may and should “like what you like”

is open to the twist of its correlative—that you may _dis_like what _you

choose to_ dislike.

[Sidenote: _Kingsley._]

At any rate, all these three distinguished persons showed the

Carlylian-Peacockian will-worship in their different ways, to an extent

which makes them, as critics, little more than extremely interesting

curiosities. Kingsley, the least strong, intellectually speaking, of the

three, shows it strongly enough. His saying (reported, I think, by the

late Mr Kegan Paul), when one of his children asked who and what was

Heine, “A bad man, my dear, a bad man,” is a specially interesting blend

of the doctrine formulated by Peacock with the old Platonic-Patristic

“the poet-is-a-_good man_” theory. Heine was not quite “a proper moral

man” in his early years, certainly: though one might have thought that

those later ones in the _Matraszen-Gruft_ would have atoned in the eyes

of the sternest inquisitor. But “bad” would have been a harsh term for

him at any time. Still, it emphasises the speaker’s inability to

distinguish between morality and genius, between the man and the work.

This inability was pretty universal with him, and it makes Kingsley’s

own work as criticism almost wholly untrustworthy, though often very

interesting and stimulating to readers who have the proper correctives

and antidotes ready: it even (which is not so very common a thing)

affects his praise nearly as much as his blame. You must be on your

guard against it, when he extols _Euphues_ and the _Fool of

Quality_[972] as much as when he depreciates Shelley.

[Sidenote: _Froude._]

There was less sentimental and ethical prejudice in Mr Froude than in

his brother-in-law, but his political and, in a wide, not to say loose,

sense philosophical, prejudices were even stronger, and he drew nearer

to Carlyle than did either Kingsley or Ruskin in a certain want of

_interest_ in literature as literature.[973]

[Sidenote: _Mr Ruskin._]

We reach, however, as every one will have anticipated, the furthest

point of our “eccentric” in Mr Ruskin. His waywardness is indeed a point

which needs no labouring, but it is never displayed more incalculably to

the unwary, more calculably to those who have the clue in their hands,

than in reference to his literary judgments. Injustice would be done to

Rapin and Rymer if we did not give some of the enormous paradoxes and

paralogisms to which he has committed himself in this way: but the very

abundance of them is daunting, and fortunately his work is not so far

from the hands of probable readers as the dustbin-catacombs where those

poor old dead lie. “Indignation is a poetical feeling if excited by

serious injury, but not if entertained on being cheated out of a small

sum of money.” You may admire the budding of a flower, but not a display

of fireworks. Contrast the famous exposure of the “pathetic fallacy”

with Scott’s supposed freedom from it, and you will find some of the

most exquisite _un_reasons in literature. The foam in Kingsley’s song

must not be “cruel,” but the Greta may be “happy,” simply because Ruskin

does not mind finding fault with Kingsley, but has sworn to find no

fault with Scott—perhaps also because he, very justly, likes sea-foam.

Squire Western is not “a character,” because Ruskin had determined that

only persons “without a _fimetic_ taint” can create character, and

Fielding had a fimetic taint. And dramatic poetry “despises external

circumstance” because Scott did _not_ despise external circumstance, and

explanation is wanted why he could not write a play. Whether, with the

most delicious absurdity, he works out a parallel between a “fictile”

Greek vase (which is also, one hears, “of the Madonna”) and “fiction,”

or is very nearly going to worship a locomotive when it makes a nasty

noise and convinces him of its diabolism, this same exquisite unreason

is always at the helm. It very often, generally indeed, is committed in

admiration of the right things; it is always delightful literature

itself. But it never has the judicial quality, and therefore it is never

Criticism.[974]

[Sidenote: _G. H. Lewes._]

That George Henry Lewes had many of the qualities of the critic it would

be mere foolish paradox to deny. His _Goethe_ and his _History_ (if not)

_of Philosophy_ yet “of Philosophers” are sufficient proofs for any one

to put in: and of his mastery of that element of criticism which goes to

the making of an _impresario_ the wonderful success with which he formed

and trained his companion, George Eliot, is a still more convincing

demonstration. [Sidenote: _His_ Principles of Success in Literature.] I

understand, also, that he had real merits as a dramatic critic. But his

chief critical work, _The Principles of Success in Literature_,[975]

betrays by its very title the presence of an element of _vulgarity_ in

him, which can indeed scarcely escape notice in other parts of his work,

and which is by no means removed or neutralised by the quasi-philosophic

tone of the work itself. Much may be forgiven to a man, born in the

first quarter of the nineteenth century, when he uses the words

“progress,” “success,” and the like: but not everything. Fame may be the

last infirmity of noble minds; Success is but the first and last morbid

appetite of the vulgar. And, as has been said, Lewes does not fully

redeem his title by his text. There is plenty of common-sense and

shrewdness. There is plenty of apparent and some real philosophy. Some,

no doubt, will delight to be told that there are three Laws of

Literature, that “the intellectual form is the Principle of Vision; the

moral form the Principle of Sincerity; and the æsthetic form the

Principle of Beauty,” and then to have these various eggs tossed and

caught, in deft arrangements, for some chapters.

Indeed, there be many truths in the book, and I would most carefully

guard against the idea that Lewes knowingly and deliberately recommends

a mere tradesman-like view of literature. On the contrary, he strongly

protests against it: and writes about Sincerity with every appearance of

being sincere.[976] But his view of Imagination is confessedly low, and

almost returns to the Addisonian standpoint of “ideas furnished by

sight.” And when, with a rather rash hiatus, he promises[977] “_for the

first time_ to expound scientifically the Laws that constitute the

Philosophy of Criticism,” we listen even less hopefully and even more

doubtfully than somebody did when he understood somebody else to say

that he had killed the Devil. Lewes is not unsound on the subject of

imitation of the classics. He has learnt from Coleridge, or from

Wordsworth, or from De Quincey, that style is the _body_ not the _dress_

of thought: and much that he says about it is extremely shrewd and true.

But when he comes to its actual Laws and gives them as Economy,

Simplicity, Sequence, Climax, and Variety, the old not at all divine

despair comes upon us. All these are well, but they are not Style’s

crown; they are only and hardly some of the balls and strawberry leaves

of that crown. A sentence, or a paragraph, or a page may be economic,

simple, sequacious, climacteric, and various, and not be good style. I

am not sure that a great piece of style might not be produced to which,

except by violence, no one of these epithets—I am sure that many such

pieces could be produced to which not all—will apply. Once more the

light and holy soul of literature has wings to fly at suspicion of these

bonds—and uses them.

[Sidenote: _His_ Inner Life of Art.]

Lewes’s best critical work by far[978] is to be found in the Essay on

_The Inner Life of Art_, where he handles, without ceremony and with

crushing force, the strange old and new prudery about the connection of

verse and poetry, declaring plumply that the one is the form of the

other. But it is noticeable that this Essay is in the main merely a

catena or chrestomathy of critical extracts, united by some useful

review-work. On the whole, even after dismissing or allowing for any

undue “nervous impression” created by the unlucky word “Success,” it is

not very possible to give him, as a critic, a position much higher than

one corresponding to the position of Helps. Lewes is a Helps much

unconventionalised and cosmopolitanised, not merely in externals. He is

not only much more skilled in philosophical terminology, but he really

knows more of what philosophy means. He has more, much more, care for

literature. But the stamp of the Exhibition of 1851 is upon him also:

and it is not for nothing that his favourite and most unreservedly

praised models of style are drawn from Macaulay. I have no contempt for

Macaulay’s style myself: I have ventured in more places than one or two

to stigmatise such contempt as entirely uncritical. But the _preference_

of this style tells us much in this context, as the _preference_ of

champagne in another.

[Sidenote: _Bagehot._]

The evils of dissipation of energy have been lamented by the grave and

precise in all ages: and some have held that they are specially

discoverable in the most modern times. It is very probable that

Criticism may charge to this account the comparatively faint and scanty

service done her by one who displayed so much faculty for that service

as Walter Bagehot. A man whose vocations and avocations extend (as he

himself says in a letter quoted by Mr Hutton) from hunting to banking,

and from arranging Christmas festivities to editing the _Economist_, can

have but odd moments for literature. Yet this man’s odd moments were far

from unprofitable. His essay on _Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in

Poetry_ would deserve a place even in a not voluminous collection of the

best and most notable of its kind. The title, of course, indicates

Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning: and the paper itself may be said to

have been one of the earliest frankly to estate and recognise Tennyson—

the earliest of importance perhaps to estate and recognise Browning—

among the leaders of mid-nineteenth century poetry. As such titles are

wont to do, it somewhat overreaches itself, and certainly implies or

suggests a confusion as to the meaning of “pure.” If pure is to mean

“unadorned,” Wordsworth is most certainly not at his poetical best when

he has most of the quality, but generally at his worst; if it means

“sheer,” “intense,” “quintessential,” his best of poetry has certainly

no more of it than the best of either of the other two. The

classification suggests, and the text confirms, a certain “popularity”

in Bagehot’s criticism. But it is popular criticism of the very best

kind, and certainly not to be despised because it has something of

mid-nineteenth century, and Macaulayan, materialism and lack of

subtlety. This _derbheit_ sometimes led him wrong, as in that very

estimate of Gibbon which the same Mr Hutton praises, but oftener it

contributed sense and sanity to his criticism. And there are not many

better things in criticism than sanity and sense, especially when, as in

Bagehot’s case, they are combined with humour and with good-humour.[979]

[Sidenote: _R. H. Hutton._]

The criticism of a critic just cited, the late Mr R. H. Hutton, affords

opportunity for at least a glance at one of the most important general

points connected with our subject—the general distaste for pure

criticism, and the sort of relief which _l’homme sensuel moyen_ seems to

feel when the bitter cup is allayed and sweetened by sentimental, or

political, or religious, or philosophical, or anthropological, or

pantopragmatic adulteration. Mr Hutton’s criticism was, it is believed,

by far the most popular of his day; the very respectable newspaper which

he directed was once eulogised as “telling you what you _ought to_ read,

you know ”—a phrase which might have awakened in a new Wordsworth

thoughts too deep for tears or even for laughter.

[Sidenote: _His evasions of literary criticism._]

The commentary on it is supplied by the two volumes of Mr Hutton’s

selected and collected _Essays_.[980] These constantly deal with things

and persons of the highest importance in literature; but they abstain

with a sort of Pythagorean asceticism from the literary side of them. In

his repeated dealings with Carlyle, it is always as a man, as a teacher,

as a philosopher, as a politician, as a moralist, that he handles that

sage—never directly, or at most rapidly and incidentally, as a writer.

On Emerson he is a little more literary, but not much: and on him also

he slips away as usual. Even with Poe, whom one might have thought

literary or nothing, he contrives to elude us, till his judgment on the

Poems suggests that _inability_ to judge literature caused his refusal.

Dickens, Amiel, Mr Arnold himself—the most widely differing persons and

subjects—fail to tempt him into the literary open; and it is a curious

text for the sermon for which we have here no room that he most nearly

approaches the actual literary criticism of verse, not on Tennyson, not

on “Poetry and Pessimism,” not on Mr Shairp’s _Aspects of Poetry_, but

on Lord Houghton. He goes to the ant and is happy: with deans, and

bishops, and archbishops, and cardinals he is ready to play their own

game. But if Literature, as literature, makes any advances to him, he

leaves his garment in her hands and flees for his life.

[Sidenote: _Pater._]

To assert too positively that Mr Walter Pater was the most important

English critic of the last generation of the nineteenth century—that he

stands to that generation in a relation resembling those of Coleridge to

the first, and Arnold to the latter part of the second—would no doubt

cause grumbles. The Kingdom of Criticism has been of old compared to

that of Poland, and perhaps there is no closer point of resemblance than

the way in which critics, like Polacks, cling to the _Nie pozwalam_, to

the _liberum veto_. So, respecting this _jus Poloniæ_ let us say that

those are fair reasons for advancing Mr Pater to such a position, while

admitting that he is somewhat less than either of his forerunners.

[Sidenote: _His frank Hedonism._]

His minority consists certainly not in faculty of expression, wherein he

is the superior of both, nor in fineness of appreciation, in which he is

at least the equal of either: but rather in a certain eclectic and

composite character, a want of definite four-square originality, which

has been remarkably and increasingly characteristic of the century

itself. In one point, indeed, he is almost entitled to the highest

place, but his claim here rests rather on a frank avowal and formulation

of what everybody had always more or less admitted, or by denying had

admitted the acceptance of it by mankind at large—to wit, the

_pleasure_-giving quality of literature. Even he, however, resolute

Hedonist as he was, falters sometimes in this respect—is afraid of the

plain doctrine that the test of goodness in literature is simply and

solely the spurt of the match when soul of writer touches reader’s soul,

the light and the warmth that follow.

[Sidenote: _His_ polytechny _and his style_.]

In two other main peculiarities or properties of his—the, we will not

say confusion but deliberate blending of different arts in method and

process, and the adoption (modifying it, of course, by his own genius)

of the doctrine of the “single word,”—he is again more of a transmitter

than of a kindler of the torch. The first proceeding had been set on

foot by Lessing in the very act of deprecating and exposing clumsy and

blind anticipations of it; the second was probably taken pretty straight

from Flaubert. But in the combination of all three, in the supplements

of mother-wit, and, above all, in the clothing of the whole with an

extraordinarily sympathetic and powerful atmosphere of thought and

style—in these things he stands quite alone, and nearly as much so in

his formulation of that new critical attitude which we have seen in

process of development throughout the present volume.

[Sidenote: _His formulation of the new critical attitude._]

The documents of his criticism are to be chiefly sought in the _Studies

in the History of the Renaissance_,[981] in parts of _Marius the

Epicurean_, and, of course, in the volume of _Appreciations_, and the

little collection of Essays reprinted from _The Guardian_.[982] The

posthumous books are less to he depended on, in consequence of Mr

Pater’s very strong tendency to _cuver son vin_—to alter and digest and

retouch. I do not know any place setting forth that view of criticism

which I have myself always held more clearly than the Preface of the

_Studies_. “To feel the virtue of the poet, or the painter, to disengage

it, to set it forth,—these are the three stages of the critic’s duty.”

The first (Mr Pater does not say this but we may) is a passion of

pleasure, passing into an action of inquiry; the second is that action

consummated; the third is the interpretation of the result to the world.

[Sidenote: The Renaissance.]

He never, I think, carried out his principles better than in his first

book, in regard to _Aucassin et Nicolette_, to Michelangelo, to Du

Bellay, as well as in parts of the “Pico” and “Winckelmann” papers. But

the method is almost equally apparent and equally helpful in the more

purely “fine art” pieces—the “Lionardo,” the “Botticelli,” the “Luca

della Robbia.” In that passage on the three Madonnas and the Saint Anne

of Da Vinci, which I have always regarded as the triumph both of his

style and of his method, the new doctrine (_not_ the old) of _ut pictura

poesis_ comes out ten thousand strong for all its voluptuous softness.

This is the way to judge Keats and Tennyson as well as Lionardo: nay, to

judge poets of almost entirely different kinds, from Æschylus through

Dante to Shakespeare. Expose mind and sense to them, like the plate of a

camera: assist the reception of the impression by cunning lenses of

comparison, and history, and hypothesis; shelter it with a cabinet of

remembered reading and corroborative imagination; develop it by

meditation, and print it off with the light of style:—there you have, in

but a coarse and half-mechanical analogy, the process itself.

[Sidenote: _Objections to its process._]

I fancy that objections to this proceeding take something like the

following form: “In the first place, the thing is too effeminate, too

patient, too submissive,—it substitutes a mere voluptuous enjoyment, and

a dilettante examination into the causes thereof, for a virile summoning

of the artist-culprit before the bar of Reason to give account of his

deeds. In the second, it is too facile, too _fainéant_. In the third, it

does not give sufficient advantage to the things which we like to call

‘great.’ The moments of pleasure are too much _atomised_: and though it

may be admitted that some yield larger, intenser, more continuous

supplies of moment than others, yet this is not sufficient.” Lastly

[this is probably always _subaud._, but seldom uttered except by the

hotter gospellers], “_We_ don’t believe in these ecstatic moments,

analysed and interpreted in tranquillity; we don’t feel them, and we

don’t want to feel them; and you are a nasty hedonist if you do feel

them.”

Which protest could, no doubt, be amplified, could, with no doubt also,

be supported to a certain extent. Nor is it (though he should placard

frankly the fact that he agrees in the main with Mr Pater) exactly the

business of the present historian to defend it at any length here,

inasmuch as he is writing a history, not a “suasory.” Let it only be

hinted in passing that the exceptions just stated seem inconclusive—that

the wanters of a sense cannot plead their want as an argument that no

others have it; that the process has certainly given no despicable

results; that it has seldom demonstrably failed as disastrously as the

antecedent rule-system; and, most of all, that nothing can be falser

than the charge of _fainéantise_ and dilettanteism. Only as “the last

corollary of many of an effort” can this critical skill also be attained

and maintained.

[Sidenote: _Importance of_ Marius the Epicurean.]

At any rate, though, as often happens to a man, he became rather more of

a preceptist and less of an impressionist afterwards, Mr Pater certainly

exemplified this general theory and practice in a very notable manner.

_Marius_ is full of both: it is much more than the _Wilhelm Meister_ of

the New Criticism. It is this which gives the critical attitude of

Flavian, the hero’s friend and inspirer, the supposed author of the

_Pervigilium_; this, which is the literary function of “Neo-Cyrenaicism”

itself—the μονόχρονος ἡδονή, the integral atom, or moment of pleasure,

being taken as the unit and reference-integer of literary value; this,

which gives the adjustment _ad hoc_ of the _Hermotimus_. The theory and

the practice take their most solid, permanent, and important form in

this most remarkable book, of which I find it hard to believe that the

copy, “From the Author,” which lies before me, reached me nearly twenty

years ago. The _Renaissance_ holds the first blooms and promises of

them; _Appreciations_ and the _Guardian Essays_ the later applications

and developments; but the central gospel is here.

[Sidenote: Appreciations _and the_ “Guardian” _Essays_.]

That the opening essays of these two latter books happen to contain

references to myself is a fact. But I fancy that this will not be the

main interest of them to posterity, nor, strange as it may seem, is it

their main interest to me.[983] The Essay on _Style_ which opens the

larger and more important book, is, I think, on the whole, the most

valuable thing yet written on that much-written-about subject. It

presents, indeed, as I have hinted, a certain appearance of “hedging,”

especially in the return to matter as the distinction between “good art”

and “great art,” which return, as easily rememberable and with a

virtuous high sound in it, appears to have greatly comforted some good

if not great souls. Certainly a pitcher of gold is in some senses

greater than a pitcher of pewter of the same design, especially if you

wish to dispose of it to Mr Polonius. A pewter amphora is again in some

senses greater than a pewter cyathus. But it does not seem to me that

this helps us much. How good, on the other hand, and how complete, is

that improvement upon Coleridge’s dictum, which makes Style consist in

the adequate presentation of the writer’s “sense of fact,” and the

criticism of the documents adduced! How valuable the whole, though we

may notice as to the writer’s selection of _prose_ literature as the

representative art of the nineteenth century, that this was _his_ art,

his in consummate measure, and that verse was not. Altogether, in short,

a great paper,—a “furthest” in certain directions.

There is an interesting tender, or rather pilot-boat, to this Essay in

the first of the _Guardian_ Reviews on “English Literature,” where the

texts are the present writer’s _Specimens_, Professor’s Minto’s _English

Poets_, Mr Dobson’s _Selections from Steele_, and one of Canon Ainger’s

many bits of yeoman’s service to Lamb. The relation is repeated between

the Wordsworth Essay in _Appreciations_ and a Wordsworth review among

the _Guardian_ sheaf: while something not dissimilar, but even more

intimate, exists between the “Coleridge” Essay and the introduction to

that poet in Mr Ward’s well-known book, which Introduction actually

forms part of the Essay itself. In the two former cases, actual passages

and phrases from the smaller, earlier, and less important work also

appear in the larger and later. For Mr Pater—as was very well known,

when more than thirty years ago it was debated in Oxford whether he

would ever publish anything at all, and as indeed might have been seen

from his very first work, by any one with an eye, but with no personal

knowledge—was in no sense a ready writer, and, least of all, anxious to

write as he ran, that those who run might read. There have been critics

who, without repeating themselves, and even, perhaps, with some useful

additions and variations, could write half a dozen times on the same

subject; and indeed most literary subjects admit of such writing. But

such (we need not say frivolity but) flexibility was not in accordance

with Mr Pater’s temperament.

There is hardly one of the papers in either book (though some of the

_Guardian_ pieces are simple, yet quite honest and adequate reviews)

that does not display that critical attitude which we have defined

above, both directly and in relation to the subjects. The most

interesting and important passages are those which reveal in the critic,

or recognise in his authors, this attitude itself—as when we read of

Amiel: “In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the

record of such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with

A., we feel that there has been and, with success, an intellectual

effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of this pleasure—to

define feeling.” Indeed, I really do not know that “to define feeling”

is not as good—it is certainly as short—a definition of at least a great

part of the business of the critic as you can get. And so again of Lamb:

“To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist,... and then to

interpret that charm, to convey it to others,... this is the way of his

criticism.”

It is certainly the way of Mr Pater’s, and it is always good to walk

with him in it—better, I venture to think, than to endeavour to follow

him in his rarer and never quite successful attempts to lift himself off

it, and flutter in the vague. Good, for instance, as is the Essay on

“Æsthetic Poetry,” it would have been far better if it had contented

itself with being, in fact and in name, what it is in its best parts—a

review of Mr William Morris.[984] This, however, was written very early,

and before he had sent out his spies to the Promised Land in _The

Renaissance_ (and they had brought back mighty bunches of grapes!),

still more before he had reached the Pisgah of _Marius_. Even here

though, and naturally still more in the much later paper on Rossetti, he

presents us, as he does almost everywhere, with admirable, sometimes

with consummate, examples of “defined feeling” about Wordsworth and

Coleridge, about Browning and Lamb, about Sir Thomas Browne (one of his

most memorable things), about more modern persons—Mr Gosse, M. Fabre, M.

Filon. Particularly precious are the three papers on Shakespeare. I have

always wished that Mr Pater had given us more of them, as well as others

on authors possessing more of what we may call the _positive_ quality,

than those whom he actually selected. It would, I think, speaking

without impertinence, have done him some good: and it would, speaking

with certainty, have done us a great deal. One may sometimes think that

it was in his case (as in some others, though so few!) almost a pity

that he was in a position to write mainly for amusement. But it is not

likely that his sequestered and sensitive genius could ever have done

its best—if it could have done anything at all—at forced draught. So, as

usual, things are probably better as they are.

[Sidenote: _Universality of his method._]

What, however, is not probable but certain, and what is here of most

importance, is that the Paterian method is co-extensive in possibility

of application with the entire range of criticism—from the long and slow

degustation and appreciation of a Dante or a Shakespeare to the rapidest

adequate review of the most trivial and ephemeral of books. Feel;

discover the source of feeling (or no feeling, or disgust, as it will

often be in the trivial cases); express the discovery so as to

communicate the feeling: this can be done in every case. And if it

cannot be done by every person, why, that is only equivalent to saying

that it is not precisely possible for everybody to be a critic, which,

again, is a particular case of a general proposition announced in choice

Latin a long time ago, practically anticipated in choicer Greek long

before, and no doubt perfectly well understood by wise persons of all

nations and languages at any time back to the Twenty-third of October

B.C. 4004, or any other date which may be preferred thereto. Besides the

objections before referred to, there may be others—such as that the

critic’s powers, even if he possesses them, will become callous by too

much exercise,—an objection refuted by the fact, so often noticed, that

there is hardly an instance of a man with real critical powers becoming

a worse critic as he grew older, and many a one of his becoming a

better. But, at any rate, this was Mr Pater’s way of criticism: this had

already been the way pursued, more or less darkling or in clear vision,

by all modern critics—the way first definitely formulated, and, perhaps,

allowing for bulk of work, most consistently pursued, by himself. And I

have said—perhaps often enough—that I do not know a better.

[Sidenote: _Mr J. A. Symonds._]

Although the relation of “moon” to “sun,” so often used as an image in

literary history, will not work with pedantic exactness in relation to

Mr J. A. Symonds and the critic just mentioned,—for the moon is not many

times more voluminous than the sun, and there are other difficulties,—it

applies to a certain extent. Both were literary Hedonists; both were

strongly influenced by Greek and Italian. But Mr Symonds’s mind, like

his style, was very much more irregular and undisciplined than Mr

Pater’s (which had almost something of Neo-classic precision adjusting

its Romantic luxuriance), and this want of discipline let him loose[985]

into a loquacity which certainly deserved the Petronian epithet of

_enormis_, and could sometimes hardly escape the companion one of

_ventosa_. His treatise on _Blank Verse_,[986] interesting as it is,

would give the enemy of the extremer “modern” criticism far too many

occasions to blaspheme by its sheer critical anti-nomianism: and over

all his extensive work, faults of excess of various kinds swarm. But

beauties and merits are there in ample measure as well as faults: and in

the literary parts of _The Renaissance in Italy_ the author has

endeavoured to put some restraint on himself, and has been rewarded for

the sacrifice. From some little acquaintance with literary history, I

think I may say that there is no better historical treatment of a

foreign literature in English. One can never help wishing that the

author had left half his actual subject untouched, and had completed the

study of Italian literature.[987]

[Sidenote: _Thomson (“B. V.”)_]

Not much need be said of the critical production—arrested, like the

poetical, by causes unhappy but well known—of James Thomson “the

Second,” hardly “the Less,” but most emphatically “the Other.” It ought

to have been good: and sometimes (especially under the unexpected and

soothing shadow of _Cope’s Tobacco Plant_) was so.[988] Thomson had much

of the love, and some of the knowledge, required; his intellect (when

allowed to be so) was clear and strong; he was, in more ways than one,

of the type of those poets who have made some of the best critics,

despite the alleged prodigiousness of the metamorphosis. But the good

seed was choked by many tares of monstrous and fatal growth. The least

of these should have been (but perhaps was not) the necessity of working

for a living, and not the necessity, but the provoked and accepted doom,

of working for it mostly in obscure and unprofitable, not to say

disreputable, places, imposed upon a temperament radically nervous,

“impotent,” in the Latin sense, and unresigned to facts. That

temperament itself was a more dangerous obstacle: and the recalcitrance

to religion which it was allowed to induce was one more dangerous still.

There are no doubt many instances where rigid orthodoxy has proved

baneful, even destructive, to a man’s critical powers, or at any rate to

his catholic exertion of them: but there are also many in which it has

interfered little, if at all. On the other hand, I can hardly think of a

case in which religious, and of very few in which political, heterodoxy

has not made its partisans more or less hopelessly uncritical on those

with whom they disagree. Nor could the peculiar character of Thomson’s

education and profession fail to react unfavourably on his criticism. It

is hard to get rid of some ill effects of schoolmastering in any case;

it must be nearly impossible, in the case of a proud and rather

“ill-conditioned” man, who has not enjoyed either full liberal education

or gentle breeding, and who is between the upper and nether millstone,

as Thomson seems to have been, or at least felt himself, while he was a

military schoolmaster. All these irons entered into a critical soul

which might have been a fair one and brave: and we see the scars of

them, and the cramp of them, too often.[989]

[Sidenote: _William Minto._]

A journalist for one-half of his working life, and a professor—partly—of

literature for the other, William Minto executed in both capacities a

good deal of literary work: but his most noteworthy contribution[990] to

our subject consisted in the two remarkable manuals of English literary

history which, as quite a young man, he drew up.[991] To say that these

manuals were at the time of their publication by far the best on the

subject would be to say little: for there were hardly any good ones.

Their praise can be more of a cheerfully positive, and less of a

“rascally, comparative” character. They were both, but especially the

_Poets from Chaucer to Shirley_, full of study, insight, originality,

and grasp—where the author chose to indulge his genius. [Sidenote: _His

books on English Prose and Poetry._] Their defects were defects which it

requires genius indeed, or at least a very considerable share of

audacity, to keep out of manuals of the kind. There is, perhaps, too

much biography and too much mere abstract of contents—a thing which will

never serve the student in lieu of reading, which will sometimes

disastrously suggest to him that he need not read, and which must always

curtail the space available for really useful guidance and critical

illumination to him when he does. In the _Prose_ there is something

else. The book is constructed as a sort of enlarged _praxis_ on a

special pedagogic theory of style-teaching, that of the late Professor

Bain: and is elaborately scheduled for the illustration of Qualities and

Elements of Style, of Kinds of Composition. There is no need to discuss

how far the schedule itself is faulty or free from fault; it is

unavoidable that rigid adjustment to it—or to any such—shall bring back

those faults of the old Rhetoric on which we commented in vol. i., with

others more faulty than themselves. For classical literature was very

largely, if not wholly, constructed according to such schemes, and might

be analysed with an eye on them: English literature had other inceptions

and other issues. That Minto’s excellent critical qualities do not

disappear altogether behind the lattice-work of schedule-reference

speaks not a little for them.

[Sidenote: _H. D. Traill._]

Few writers have lost more by the practice of anonymous journalism than

the late Mr Traill. He engaged in it, and in periodical writing

generally, from a period dating back almost to the time of his leaving

Oxford,[992] and he had to do with it, I believe, till his death, the

extraordinary quality of his work recommending him to any and every

editor who knew his business. It was impossible, in reading any proof of

his, be it on matters political, literary, or miscellaneous, not to

think of Thackeray’s phrase about George Warrington’s articles, as to

“the sense, the satire, and the scholarship” which characterised them.

In the rather wide knowledge, which circumstances happened to give me,

of writers for the press during the last quarter of the nineteenth

century, I never knew his equal for combination of the three. [Sidenote:

_His critical strength._] For a great many years, however, chance, or

choice, or demand, directed him chiefly to the most important, as it is

thought, and the most paying, but the most exhausting and, as far as

permanent results go, the most utterly thankless and evanescent division

of journalism—political leader-writing, with actual attendance at “the

House” during the Session. And this curtailed both his literary

press-work and his opportunities of literary book-work. He did, however,

a great deal of the former: and the labours of the much-abused but

sometimes useful literary resurrection-men, who dig contributions out of

their newspaper graves, could hardly be better bestowed than upon him.

Fortunately, however, the literary side of his criticism—he was a critic

of letters and life alike, born and bred, in prose and in verse, by

temper and training, in heart and brain—remains in part of _The New

Lucian_, in the admirable monographs on Sterne and Coleridge,[993] and

in the collection of Essays[994] issued but a year or two before his

death.

[Sidenote: _On Sterne and Coleridge._]

In the three last-named volumes especially, his qualities as a critic

are patent to any one with eyes. The two monographs are models of

competence and grasp, but they are almost greater models of the

combination of vigour and sanity. Both subjects are of the kind which

used to tempt to cant, and which now tempts to paradox. To the first sin

Mr Traill had no temptation—whatever fault might have been found with

him, neither Pecksniffery nor Podsnappery was in the faintest degree his

failing. But he might have been thought likely to be tempted, as some

very clever men in our day have been, by the desire to fly in the face

of the Philistine, and to flout the Family Man. There is no trace of any

such beguilement—the moral currency is as little tampered with as it

could have been by Johnson or by Southey, while there is no trace of the

limitations of the one or of the slight Pharisaism of the other. And yet

the literary judgment is entirely unaffected by this moral rectitude:

the two do not trespass on each other’s provinces by so much as a

hair’s-breadth.

[Sidenote: _Essays on Fiction._]

The title-paper of the collected _Essays_, “The New Fiction,” connects

itself with several other pieces in the volume, “The Political Novel,”

“Samuel Richardson,” “The Novel of Manners,” and, to some extent, “The

Future of Humour.” Mr Traill was a particularly good critic of the most

characteristic product of the nineteenth century: I doubt whether we

have had a better. In poetry he seemed to me to sin a little, in one

direction (just as, I know, I seemed to him to sin in the other), by

insisting, too much in the antique fashion, on a general unity and

purpose. He shows this, I think, here in the paper on “Matthew Arnold,”

who, indeed, himself could hardly have objected, for they were

theoretically much at one on the point. But as to prose fiction he had

no illusions, and his criticism of it is consummate. We have not a few

instances of onslaughts upon corrupt developments of the art by critics

great and small; but I do not think I know one to equal Mr Traill’s

demolition of the “_grime_-novel” of to-day or yesterday. [Sidenote:

“_The Future of Humour._”] His highest achievement, however, in a single

piece, is undoubtedly “The Future of Humour,” which transcends mere

reviewing, transcends the mere _causerie_, and unites the merits of both

with those of the best kind of abstract critical discussion. One may say

of it, without hesitation, _Ça restera_; it may be lost in the mass, now

and then, but whenever a good critic comes across it he will restore it

to its place. It is _about_ a day, but not _of_ or _for_ it: it moves,

and has its being, as do all masterpieces of art, small and great, _sub

specie æternitatis_. If it were not so idle, one could only sigh at

thinking how many a leading article, how much journey-work in biography,

one would give for Traill to be alive again, and to write such criticism

as this.

[Sidenote: _Others: Mansel, Venables, Stephen, Lord Houghton, Pattison,

Church, &c._]

Others, great and small, we must once more sweep into the _numerus_

named, or unnamed. Mr Traill himself—for they were both of St John’s—may

be said to have directly inherited the mantle of Dean Mansel in respect

of critical wit and sense, though the Dean had only occasionally devoted

these qualities, together with his great philosophical powers, and his

admirable style, to pure literary criticism.[995] Of the immense

critical exercise of Mr George Venables, a little lacking in

flexibility, sympathy, and unction, but excellently sound and strong, no

salvage, I think, has ever been published: and though a good deal is

available from his yoke-fellow, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen,[996] this

latter’s tastes—as his father’s had done before, though in a different

direction—led him away from the purer literary criticism. Of three other

persons, eminent in their several ways, more substantive notice may

perhaps have been expected by many, and will certainly be demanded by

some. But Lord Houghton’s _Monographs_,[997] admirably written and

extremely interesting to read, hardly present a sufficiently individual

kind, or a sufficiently considerable bulk of matter, for a separate

paragraph. Mr Mark Pattison’s dealings with Milton and with Pope, as

well as with the great seventeenth-century scholars, may seem more, and

more imperatively, to knock for admission. As far as scholarship, in

almost every sense of the word, is concerned, no critic can surpass him;

but scholarship, though all but indispensable as the critic’s _canvass_,

needs much working upon, and over, to give the finished result. And

Pattison’s incurable reticence and recalcitrance—the temperament which

requires the French words _rêche_ and _revêche_, if not even _rogue_, to

label it—were rebel to the suppleness and _morigeration_ which are

required from all but mere scholastic critics. The happier stars or

complexion of his near contemporary, Dean Church, enabled him to do some

admirable critical work on Dante, on Spenser, and on not a few others,

which will be found in the _English Men of Letters_, in Mr Ward’s

_Poets_, in his own Collected _Essays_, and in separate books. Dr Church

combined, with an excellent style, much scholarship and a judgment as

sane as it was mild, nor did he allow the natural drift of his mind

towards ethical and religious, rather than purely literary,

considerations to draw him too much away from the latter.

[Sidenote: _Patmore._]

Mr Coventry Patmore has been extolled to the skies by a coterie. But to

the cool outsider his criticism, like his poetry, has somewhat too much

the character of “diamondiferous rubbish,”—a phrase which, when applied

to the poetry itself, did not, I am told, displease him. For though, in

_Principle in Art_[998] and _Religio Poetæ_[999] there may be a few

things rich and rare, there is a very large surplusage of the _other_

constituents of the mixture. The short articles of the first volume

consist almost wholly of it, and might have been left in the columns of

the Daily Paper in which they appeared with a great deal of

advantage.[1000] Indeed those on Keats, Shelley, Blake, and Rossetti,

which unfortunately follow each other, make a four-in-hand good only for

the knacker. Mr Patmore, when he wrote them, was too old to take the

benefit of _no_-clergy, to be allowed the use of undergraduate paradox.

And as, unfortunately, he was a craftsfellow, and a craftsfellow not

very popular or highly valued with most people, his denigration is all

the more awkward. A man who says that _The Burden of Nineveh_ “might

have been written by Southey” (and I do not undervalue Southey), must

have an insensible spot somewhere in his critical body. A man who says

that Blake’s poetry, “with the exception of four or five pieces and a

gleam here and there,” is mere drivel, must be suffering from critical

hemiplegia. There are better things in the other volume, and its worst

faults are excesses of praise, always less disgusting, though not always

less uncritical, than those of blame. But I am not here giving a full

examination to Mr Patmore’s criticism, I am only indicating why I do not

here examine it, as I am perfectly ready to do at any moment in a proper

place.

[Sidenote: _Mr Edmund Gurney._]

There were, I think, few English writers of the last quarter of the

nineteenth century who showed more of the true critical _ethos_ than the

late Mr Edmund Gurney. I did not know Mr Gurney myself, but most of my

friends did; a situation in which there is special danger (when the

friends are complimentary) of the fate of Aristides for the other

person. But the good things which were told me of Mr Gurney I find to be

very much more than confirmed by his books, though, of course, I also

find plenty to disagree with. The earlier of them, _The Power of

Sound_,[1001] is in the main musical; and I have generally found (though

there are some capital exceptions) that critics of poetry, or of

literature generally, who start from much musical knowledge, are

profoundly unsatisfactory, inasmuch as they rarely appreciate the

radical difference between musical music and poetical music. Even

Mitford fails here. But Mr Gurney does not. He was the first, or one of

the first, I think, in English to enunciate formally the great truth

that “the setting includes a new substance”—meaning not merely the

technical music-setting of the composer, but that “sound accompaniment”

which, in all poetry more or less, and in English poetry of the

nineteenth century especially, gives a bonus, adds a _panache_, to the

meaning.

[Sidenote: The Power of Sound.]

He was right too, I have not the slightest doubt, in laying it down that

“metrical rhythm is imposed upon, not latent in, speech”; and he went

right, where too many scholars of high repute have gone wrong, in seeing

that the much-decried English scansion-pronunciation of Latin almost

certainly brings out _to an English ear_ the effect on a Latin one,

better than any conjectured attempt to mimic what might have been the

Latin pronunciation itself. I was delighted to find that he, too, had

fixed upon Tennyson’s “Fair is her cottage” (his is not quite my view,

and perhaps we were both guided by a reported speech of Mr Spedding’s)

as almost the _ne plus ultra_ of “superadded” audible and visual effect

combined. And he is well worth reading on certain “illusions” of

Lessing’s.

[Sidenote: Tertium Quid.]

The literary part of _The Power of Sound_ is, however, if not

accidental, incidental mainly: not a few of the papers in the second

volume of _Tertium Quid_[1002] deal with literature pure and simple.

They are to some extent injured by the fact that many, if not most of

them, are merely strokes, or parries, or _ripostes_, in particular duels

or _mêlées_ on dependences of the moment. And, as I have pointed out in

reference to certain famous altercations of the past, these critical

squabbles seem to me almost invariably to darken counsel—first, by

leading the disputants away from the true points, and secondly, by

inducing them to mix in their pleadings all sorts of flimsy, ephemeral,

and worthless matter. Not the point, but what Jones or Brown has said

about the point, becomes the object of the writer’s attention; he wants

to score off Brown or Jones, not to score for the truth. So when Mr

Gurney contended with the late Mr Hueffer—another literary-musical

critic, who did _not_, as Mr Gurney did, escape the dangers of the

double employ—when he contributed not so much a _tertium_ as a _quartum

quid_ to the triangular duel of Mr Arnold, Mr Austin, Mr Swinburne about

Byron—he did not always say what is still worth reading. And he makes

one or two odd blunders, such as that the French are blind to

Wordsworth, whereas Wordsworth’s influence on Sainte-Beuve, to name

nobody else,[1003] was very great. But he is always sensible,[1004] and

he always has that double soundness on the passionate side of poetry and

on the peculiar appeal of its form, which is so rare and so distinctive

of the good critic.

These qualities should, of course, appear in his essay on the

“Appreciation of Poetry”;[1005] and they do. It is, however, perhaps

well to note that, while quite sound on the point that there is a right

as well as a wrong comparison, he, like others, hardly escapes the

further danger of “confusing the confusion”—of taking what is really the

right comparison for what is really the wrong. The comparison which

disapproves one thing because it is unlike another is wrong, not the

comparison which is used to bring out a fault, though the unlikeness is

not assigned as the reason of the fault at all. But I am here slipping

from history to doctrine on this particular point. I think Mr Gurney,

right in the main, might have been still _righter_: but in general I am

sure that he had admirable critical qualities, and I only wish he had

chosen, or had been forced, to use them more fully and frequently.[1006]

CHAPTER IV.

LATER GERMAN CRITICISM.

HEINE: DECEPTIVENESS OF HIS CRITICISM—IN THE ‘ROMANTISCHE SCHULE,’ AND

ELSEWHERE—THE QUALITIES AND DELIGHTS OF IT—SCHOPENHAUER—VIVIDNESS

AND ORIGINALITY OF HIS CRITICAL OBSERVATION—‘DIE WELT ALS WILLE,’

ETC.—GRILLPARZER—HIS MOTTO IN CRITICISM—HIS RESULTS IN APHORISM, AND

IN INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT—A CRITIC OF LIMITATIONS: BUT A CRITIC—

CARRIÈRE: HIS ‘ÆSTHETIK’—LATER GERMAN SHAKESPEARE-CRITICS—GERVINUS:

HIS “GERMAN POETRY”—ON BÜRGER—THE SHAKESPEARE-HERETICS: RÜMELIN—

FREYTAG—HILLEBRAND AND COSMOPOLITAN CRITICISM—NIETZSCHE—

‘ZARATHUSTRA,’ THE ‘BIRTH OF TRAGEDY,’ AND ‘DER FALL WAGNER’—

‘UNZEITGEMÄSSE BETRACHTUNGEN’—‘LA GAYA SCIENZA’—‘JENSEITS VON GUT

UND BÖSE,’ ETC.—‘GÖTZEN-DÄMMERUNG’—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL POSITION.

The volume of critical writing in Germany since Goethe’s death, and the

deaths of those younger contemporaries of his, like Tieck and A. W.

Schlegel, who were mentioned in our last chapter on the subject,[1007]

has been, of course, very great. The unceasing literary and scientific

industry of the nation (with, in particular, the habit of the doctoral

thesis forming almost an obligatory part of the regular education of any

man pretending to culture) has made books of more or less critical

intent and content as the sands of the sea. Yet the determination of the

national critical temperament towards abstract æsthetic, or towards the

most rudimentary and literal duties of _Quellenforschung_, of tabulation

of rhyme and word-form, and the like, together with the custom (most

fatal of all those encouraged by the thesis habit) of constantly

“shoddying-up” former inquiries into fresher form, has prevented much of

the very best kind of work from being done. If it were not for Heine,

Schopenhauer, and one other who may come more as a surprise, in the

earlier part, and the singular, erratic, and mainly wasted genius of

Nietzsche in the later, this chapter would cut a very rueful figure

beside most others in the book. Nor was any one of these primarily a

literary critic.[1008]

[Sidenote: _Heine: deceptiveness of his criticism._]

Heinrich Heine[1009] did many wonderful and many delightful things; but

though he certainly did many things more delightful, I do not know that

he ever did anything more wonderful than in making _Die Romantische

Schule_ persuade divers folk that he, the author of the _Nord-See_ in

his morning, the author of Bimini when the night had almost fallen, was

anything but a Romantic himself. This curious achievement shows the

dangers that wait upon those who peruse his criticism. If they cannot

remember that a man very frequently blasphemes, in jest or temper, what

he loves and adores, if they have not graven on their souls Lamb’s lines

which culminate in

“Not that she is truly so”—

they had much better not read Heine at all. For he will lead them into

many foolish and hurtful errors, and direct them, as by his own account

he actually did certain poor people in his impish days, to the sign of

the Stone Jug as the most comfortable and respectable hotel in

Göttingen.[1010]

[Sidenote: _In the_ Romantische Schule, _and elsewhere_.]

To put at once out of controversy what ought never to have been in it,

let any one compare the famous passage or passages in _The Romantic

School_[1011] about the Schlegels, with all their fantastic and

contemptuous satire, and the serious passage about them in the much less

well-known article on Menzel.[1012] Nay, let any man accustomed to sift

evidence compare the more serious part of the “Romantic School” passages

themselves with the less serious ones, and he will not have much doubt

left on the manner. Heine was not only one of those persons who “cannot

get enough fighting,” but one of those who always prefer the most

fantastic, the most unconventional, I fear one must in some cases say

the most unsportsmanlike, tactics and methods. He would have liked the

_savate_ better than the formal rules of the English ring, with their

pruderies about hitting below the belt and using your feet: and I think

his favourite weapon would have been that ingenious Irish implement the

Gae-Bulg, with which the great Cuchullain slew somebody else nearly as

great whose name abides not with me—a short, many-barbed harpoon which

you kicked from between your toes upwards, into the under and

unprotected part of the opponent’s stomach. The Middle Ages were

actually the most representative times of Christian literature: and had

been made even too much of as such by the school he was attacking. This

offended his Judaism, that equally passionate and unpractical form of

religion. He knew—it is one of his great critical deliverances—that if

the Romantic is not always the mediæval, the mediæval is almost always

the Romantic. And so at times there was no mercy for mediævalism and

Romanticism. At other times he went and wrote, or had already written,

_Don Ramiro_ and _Das Liedchen von der Reue_, and _Mein süsses Lieb,

wenn du im Grab_, and _Die alten bösen Lieder_, and _Ich bin die

Prinzessin Ilse_, and the best things in the _Nord-See_ itself, and the

nineteenth chapter of _Atta Troll_, and nearly the whole of the

_Romancero_, and _Bimini_!

[Sidenote: _The qualities and delights of it._]

With such a man the critical letter killeth, unless you crush the snake

on the wound, and, as the scientific people say now (justifying, like

all real new wisdom, the wisdom of old), set free the antidote which the

snake’s own blood contains for its own safety against its venom. Never

was any so liberal of this antidote, without even the trouble of

crushing, so easy to charm, so _self-charming_, as Heine. As he says

himself,[1013] “the laughter sticks in his throat,” too often and too

evidently: and all but the dullest ears should hear the sob that chokes

it. But, unfortunately, there are ears in this world that _are_ dull of

hearing; there are even several of them. And for these, as a critic,

Heine is not.[1014]

For others he is perhaps the chief, and certainly one of the earliest,

of those who have discovered that the Goddess of Criticism is really

all the different Muses in turn, and that she can be Thalia as well as

Clio. There is still an idea that the critic ought to be very serious:

and this Heine certainly was not—at least consecutively—while he was

not even quite master of his own seriousness when he had it. There is,

for an Englishman, no more agreeable spectacle of the kind than the

delightful struggle of Shakespeareolatry and Anglophobia in

_Shakespeare’s Mädchen und Frauen_.[1015] All the Victor Hugo

passages[1016] should be carefully compared, remembering of course

that the half of Hugo had not been told to Heine. So should all the

Goethe pieces,[1017] remembering, again, the interview, when the

younger poet could find nothing to say to the elder but that the

wayside plums between Jena and Weimar were good. Read him on Hoffmann

and Novalis,[1018] and remember that it is not exactly everybody—not

even every Heine (if indeed there could be more Heines than one)—that

can appreciate Novalis _and_ Hoffmann together. In fact read him

everywhere: but whenever you begin to read him, remember two little

sentences of his, and if you cannot understand and enjoy them, shut

the book. The one is that[1019] about the orange-trees at Sans-Souci

whereof “every one has its number, like a contributor to Brockhaus’s

_Konversationsblatte_.” The other is the pronouncement that “without

the Will of the Lord no sparrow falls from the housetop, and

Government-Councillor Karl Streckfuss makes no verse.” These will

serve as useful tuning-forks, and they are not difficult to carry

about and use.

In fine, Heine is a dangerous model, no doubt; yet even as a model he

gave something to Criticism which it had not possessed before, which

even Voltaire was unable to give it, because _his_ laughter was too far

removed from tears. Heine’s humour too often turned to the humoursome:

but it was always present. And Humour is to the critic very nearly what

Unction is to the preacher, in its virtue as well as in its danger.

Moreover if he could certainly hate he could as certainly love—could not

help loving. And when you find Love and Humour together, they and you

are not far from the critical Kingdom of Heaven.[1020]

[Sidenote: _Schopenhauer._]

The critical work of Schopenhauer[1021] is partly to be found in his

great book, but it there assumes forms which are not of those with which

we chiefly busy ourselves, while the critical sections of the _Parerga

und Paralipomena_[1022] are ours—“stock, lock, and barrel”—a familiar

metaphor which ceases to be hackneyed in face of the peculiar

combativeness of Schopenhauer’s thought and style. They have all the

refreshing quality of audacious originality and crisp phrase,[1023] and

they have perhaps less than is the case elsewhere the perverseness—in

fact, the mere ill-temper—which was the result, partly of his dreary

creed, partly of the injustice with which he considered himself to be

treated by the _Verdammte Race_.

[Sidenote: _Vividness and originality of his critical observation._]

In these latter moods he is sometimes very amusing, as where he speaks

of “a disgusting jargon like the French,”[1024] or whenever he mentions

Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel; but in them few men are critical, and

Schopenhauer is certainly not one of the few. One might make a not

uninteresting critical postil or _annotatiuncula_ on the enthusiasm of

this pessimist for Scott: but it would be a slight divagation. Read all

that he has to say on Style;[1025] it is the best thing, I think, that

has ever been written on that subject in German, and one of the best

things ever written in any language. It is conspicuously free from the

old jest (repeated after Diderot on Beccaria so often) that there is

nothing of his subject in his treatment; and we may forgive him for

denouncing Parenthesis, when we remember the misconduct of the Germans

towards that delightfullest of Figures. Among his numerous judgments, of

more wisdom than mercy, none is better suited for these times (in which

the evil, bad in his own, has grown worse) than his condemnation of the

idea that “the last work is always the best,” that “what is written

later is always an improvement on what was written before.”[1026] Nor is

Schopenhauer’s anathema on reading pure and simple too strong, if it be

taken with the grain of salt always necessary as seasoning to his strong

meat—which grain is in this place the addition, “what is not worth

reading, and what is merely _new_.”[1027]

Nor (as though he could leave no literary fault of his and our time

untransfixed) does he spare the labour lost on biography and inquiry

into originals and the like—“the analysing,” as he calls it, “of clay

and paint instead of admiring the shape and colour of the vase.”[1028]

No critic, who is not very uncertain of himself, need be annoyed by the

characteristic observation on the critical faculty, “there is _for the

most part_ no such thing.”[1029] For each of us may flatter himself that

he is the exception, and need have no doubt about the rule. And, as a

matter of fact, Schopenhauer proceeds to show that there _is_ a critical

faculty, and that he knows very well what it is, and that he has it. If

he condemns comparison, it is only what we have so often called the

wrong comparison; he lays the very strongest emphasis on the Golden Rule

of Criticism—that a poet, or any writer, is to be judged by his best

things. On the old subject of the value of immediate and popular

recognition, he is perhaps too interested a judge: and there is also

evident temper in his exhortation to critics to “scourge mercilessly,”

his doctrine that “Politeness in criticism is injurious.” As the world

goes, the critic who accepts it as his first duty to scourge

mercilessly, to neglect politeness, is quite as likely to scourge the

few good books as the many bad, and will certainly do _himself_

irreparable harm. So, also, while recognising the nobility of much that

Schopenhauer has written on genius,[1030] we shall perhaps think that

his encomia on arrogance and his disapproval of modesty are slightly

unnecessary. Let us, at any rate, first light our largest lantern, and

go out in the brightest day our climate allows, to find these modest

men.

[Sidenote: Die Welt als Wille, &c.]

In the æsthetic section,[1031] main and appended, of his great book

itself, Schopenhauer concerns us less. It may be quite true[1032] that

the subjective part of æsthetic pleasure is delight in perceptive

knowledge, independent of Will; and the bass may be “the lowest grade of

the objectification” of the said Will. But according to the views,

perhaps wrongly but constantly maintained in this book, positions of

this kind have nothing to do with the discovery or the defence of any

concrete critical judgment whatsoever. We find of course—as we must find

in any man of Schopenhauer’s powerful intellect and wide knowledge—

divers interesting _aperçus_, not always or often conditioned by a tame

consistency. Thus[1033] he dislikes rhyme altogether, but sees, as not

everybody since has seen, and as comparatively few had seen before him,

the beauty of rhymed Mediæval Latin. The passage on the sublimity of

silence and solitude is an extremely fine one: and if his general

quarrel with the world puts him in an unnecessary temper with minor

poets,[1034] it is interesting to compare his attack on them with

Castelvetro’s.[1035] It would be very interesting, too, to compare and

connect his views on Poetry with his very celebrated opinions on Love:

but _non nostrum est_.[1036] And it is only when Schopenhauer touches

ethics that he is disputable; on æsthetic questions in the applied sense

he seldom goes wrong, and is always stimulating and original to the

highest degree.

[Sidenote: _Grillparzer._]

Our “surprise” is the Austrian poet, Grillparzer.[1037] I am told by

persons who know more about that matter than I do, that Grillparzer was

a remarkable playwright; I am sure that he is a remarkable critic. Four

volumes of his Works are devoted to this subject, and nearly the whole

of one of them[1038] is occupied by critical _pensées_ and aphorisms of

the kind in which Joubert is the great master. Grillparzer is not the

equal of the Frenchman, nor has he the depth of his countryman Novalis:

but his critical matter is more abundant than the latter’s, and it is of

a rather more practical kind. He seems, at all times of his long life,

to have practised, and he has explicitly, preached, what I myself

believe to be certainly the most excellent if not the only excellent way

of criticism. [Sidenote: _His motto in criticism._] The delivery unto

Satan of all theory, which I have put in the forefront of this Book, is

of course intentionally hyperbolical: yet what he puts in the forefront

of his own is quite sober. “My plan in these annotations is, without any

regard to system, to write down on each subject what seems to me to flow

out of its own nature. The resultant contradictions will either finally

clear themselves away, or, being irremovable, will show me that no

system is possible.” I am by no means sure that this was not the

practice of Aristotle; it pretty certainly was that of Longinus; I have

endeavoured to show that, pursued as it was by Dryden all through his

literary life, it made him a very great critic; and it was to no very

small extent (though in his case it was hampered and broken into by his

fatal inconsecutiveness) the method also of Coleridge. Grillparzer had

not the genius of these men: but he seems to have pursued his own method

faithfully for some fifty or sixty years, and the result is some mediate

axioms of very considerable weight, and a large body of individual

judgments which are at least of interest.

[Sidenote: _His results in aphorism,_]

The former are perhaps the better. He has even attempts at the

definition of Beauty, which are as good as another’s, holding that the

Beautiful not merely gives satisfaction and appeasement to the sensual

part in us, but also lifts up the soul.[1039] This, at least, escapes

the witty judgment of Burke quoted above, after Schlegel. He has the

combined boldness and good sense[1040] to see and say that “Sense _is_

prose”—to cry woe on the poetry that can be fully explained by the

understanding. He has dealt a swashing blow[1041] at a terribly large

part of ancient and modern criticism in the words, “Pottering,

[“Schlendrian,”] and Pedantry in Art always delight in judging by Kinds—

approving this and denouncing that. But an open Art—sense knows no

Kinds: only individuals.” He is interesting and distinctly original on

Dilettanteism:[1042] stigmatises in women (I fear he might have added

not a few men) the “inability to admire what you do not wholly

approve,”[1043] and says plumply,[1044] _Klassisch ist fehlerfrei_, a

proposition which begs the question as little as any on a question that

is always begged.

Nearly all his aphorisms on poetry and prose blend neatness and adequacy

well, as this:[1045] “Prose and Poetry are like a journey and a walk.

The object of the journey lies at its end: of the walk, in the walking.”

Nay, he is blunter still, and to some people perhaps quite shocking, in

comparing the two to eating and drinking.[1046] A text for a weighty

critical sermon might, I think, be found in an aphorism of his,[1047]

which is not easy to translate into English without periphrasis: and

though he does not often venture upon the complicatedly figurative,

there is another[1048] about Islands which I wish Mr Arnold had known,

that he might have given us a pendant to _Isolation_. In fact, in these

meditations of his, Grillparzer, though never pretentiously Delphic, is

always for thoughts.

[Sidenote: _and in individual judgment._]

The very large body[1049] of individual judgments on literature, ancient

and modern, with which he supports these, and from which, in part no

doubt, he drew them, is, on the whole though not wholly, a little

inferior. But we can see the reason for this inferiority where it

exists, and even then it does not make him worthless. He has somewhat

imperfect sympathies. On Shakespeare’s Sonnets[1050] he is not much

better than Hallam; his single judgment on Heine,[1051] though

studiously moderate, might almost be called studiously inadequate: and

in talking of Friedrich Schlegel he cannot forget the author of

_Lucinde_, or that when they once met at Naples, the future mystic and

Neo-Catholic ate too much, drank too much, and talked too greasily.

This, considering that he himself can admire _The Custom of the

Country_, seems a little hard.

[Sidenote: _A critic of limitations: but a critic._]

Grillparzer is, in fact, one of those critics in exploring whose region

one gets to be familiar with certain danger-signals which are not always

signals of danger only. As a practised playwright he speaks with special

interest on Shakespeare, and he has given us judgments on other

dramatists, which have not less. His appreciation, by no means

indiscriminate, of Beaumont and Fletcher[1052] is specially noteworthy,

and he has a whole volume on the Spanish Drama. I do not know whether

any of our modern Byron-worshippers are acquainted with his

estimate[1053] of their idol, whom he fully accepts as “the second

greatest English poet,” but of whom he gives an idea quite different

from the average Continental one. As a dramatist once more, and a man

with dramatic ideas, he is extremely hard on Lessing;[1054] but I do not

know an admiring critic of Goethe who is much better[1055] on that

difficult person. We know that he will not appreciate Walther von der

Vogelweide, though he has no strong anti-mediæval prejudice as such; and

he does not.[1056] Finally, let me give, as remarkable, his coupling of

Adam Smith’s _Wealth of Nations_ and A. W. Schlegel’s _Lectures on

Drama_ as “two of the most mischievous books of modern times for an

inexperienced understanding.” I am not satisfied with his calling Tieck

a “chattering noodle” (“Fasler”), but at any rate he calls Gervinus

“absurd.” He returns again and again to the charge against this latter

egregious person, who is still quoted by the compilers of Shakespeare

Hand-books and the writers of examination papers. If I had any need of

pardoning (which I have not, since I understand them) his remarks on

Walther, on the Sonnets, and on Heine, I would do it at once for the

exclamation, “Du lieber Himmel!” which he, a German, makes on Gervinus’s

most famous boast that “the English have left it to us Germans to do

full justice to their Shakespeare,” and for his explosion at the methods

by which “_bis aufs Blut_ wird alles erklärt.”[1057]

In short, I strongly recommend Grillparzer, about whom I have seen very

little in English, to study at the hands of those Englishmen who take an

interest in criticism. A very considerable man of letters himself, he

seems to have never, in the course of his long life, lost interest in

the work of others. He had some natural limitations, and they appear to

have been further tightened by his playwrightship and by the influence

of Joseph Schreyvogel, a sort of Austrian Nisard, of whom I do not know

much.[1058] But the quotations and account which I have given will, I

think, show that he had no small root of the critical matter in him, and

that in more than one or two instances he enunciated _and observed_

critical truths which are not exactly the stereotyped headings of the

critical copybook.

It is not necessary here, after what has been said repeatedly before, to

enter into any apology for not discussing the abstract Æsthetic of the

German nineteenth century. Even Hegel, though he is tempting, must be

omitted; for, as an authority of unsuspected competence[1059] observes

with some naïveté on this very point, “it is undoubtedly difficult to

get a net result out of Hegel,” and it is with net results that we are

concerned. But a disciple of his may be usefully discussed with

reference to the more general sides of the matter.

[Sidenote: _Carrière: his_ Æsthetik.]

The _Æsthetik_[1060] of Moritz Carrière is a sort of object-lesson on

its subject. The praises which have been bestowed on its style are quite

justified: there is no German book of the kind known to me that is

pleasanter to read. Its learning and its arrangement are all that can be

desired. And yet, as one reads it, the old reflections on _The Elements

of Criticism_ arise (with a difference of course) once more. The

impressions produced are rather those of a long course of elegant

sermons, with æsthetic substituted for theology, than of anything else.

Here you may read that women are smaller than men; that “as the noses of

children are small and stumpy, a _retroussé_ nose in the adult indicates

want of development, though with elegant culture [of the feature or the

person?] it may be naïve and roguish”; that dilettanti are always

plagiarists. The conclusion of the second volume, to the extent of

nearly two hundred pages, is devoted to Poetry, and is very good

reading. Sometimes whole pages are neatly woven of agreeable poetical

citations, or of dicta from more or less important persons,—“Schiller

says,” “Goethe observes,” and so on. We learn further how Music

“presents the idea as the principle and measure of the movement of life,

and connects the beauty of that which is to come with that of what is”—

like, say, a dinner-bell when one is talking to an agreeable person in a

pretty drawing-room. Observe that Herr Carrière is neither quack nor

twaddler; he does really feel the beauties about which he is talking.

Such a passage as that at the foot of p. 457, vol. ii., and the top of

the next, on Homer’s method of bringing scenes and figures before us, is

real criticism of a valuable kind,—not more, it is true, than a

corollary of Lessing’s propositions, but worth adding to them, for all

that. I know hardly anything more shrewdly and amusingly adjusted, as a

sort of æstheticised “Rhetoric” of the Hermogenean type, than the

remarks and illustrations about Figures, from that of the orator who

said, “Let us burn our ships and launch out boldly into the open sea,”

onwards. The attempts to connect different metres with distinctive

mental effects, or with separate classes of subject, are again most

ingenious. His defence of the rhymes of the _Nibelungenlied_ against the

characteristic criticism of Gervinus is admirable. In fact, the book is

almost everywhere, as Mr Weller would say, “wery pretty.”

Only—as we have so often been constrained to add in dealing with

critics, from the Greek Rhetoricians downwards—how much better employed

would this erudition, this taste, this ingenious adjustment of

exposition to example, have been upon individual and complete poems,

books, writers! These pieces, these selected examples, are after all

only branches torn from the living trunk, mutilated things, wanting

their context almost always to give them full beauty and their own

beauty. But this is not the worst: for at least on the doctrine of the

Poetic Moment they will sometimes give that moment. But they are

produced, not to give it but to exemplify a presumed classification and

analysis of the manner of its giving. They have to yield a formula: and

insensibly, inevitably, the heresy will grow upon the reader, that the

formula will yield _them_. It is as if some diabolical physiologist took

Helen from the arms of Paris or of Faustus, extracted her eyes, or tore

off her hair, or drew ounces of the half-divine blood from her veins,

dissected and analysed them, and said, “Gentlemen, this dissection

reconstituted, this analysis ‘made up,’ will give you what is required

to make you immortal.” But, alas! it will not. And the fact is, that

_no_ explanation of the manner in which the literary delight is produced

is ever general or true of any but the individual instance. That delight

is never the same twice running: these stars always have some, it may be

infinitesimal, but discernible and individualising, glory. Yet Herr

Carrière is a craftsmanlike and entertaining demonstrator of the

Undemonstrable.

[Sidenote: _Later German Shakespeare-critics._]

The performances of the later German Shakespeare-critics are so much

better known in England than almost any other part of the literature of

the subject that it seems unnecessary to devote much of our rapidly

disappearing space to them. Gervinus, Delius, Ulrici, Elze, have all

been translated, quoted, and so forth, with the curious deference to

foreign opinion in matters of taste, which has so oddly accompanied

English stiff-neckedness in general. [Sidenote: _Gervinus: his_ German

Poetry.] I am bound to say that I think not much of any of these

pundits;[1061] and least of all of their great Panjandrum Gervinus. His

critical quality, however, may be for our purpose better gauged by

taking his large work on German Poetry.[1062] It is an estimable book

enough; the author often says what he ought to have said, and does not

very often or very outrageously say what he should not. But the faults

of his Shakespeare-criticism—platitude, verbiage, attention to the

unnecessary, and avoidance of the heart and root of the matter, the

quality of Shakespeare as an English poet, mark this also. Take persons

most diverse in character, time, what you will—take Walther von der

Vogelweide, Hans Sachs, Opitz, Novalis, for instance—and read his

verdicts on them. You will find that in the first place he hardly ever

quotes or appreciates a _phrase_—in itself a tell-tale, and damagingly

tell-tale, abstinence. But you will also find, in compensation for this

reticence, a flood of general remark, (false) comparison, see-saw

antithesis, and the like. By no means his worst judgment, but a most

characteristic one, is that on Bürger, which I may partly translate,

partly summarise, from the original:[1063]—

[Sidenote: _On Bürger._]

“Bürger then appears to us as at once a pathological and a critical

poet, a poet of Nature and of Art, a poet of the people and of Love. He

belongs at once to the school of the North and to that of the South,

relies at once on sensations and reflections. His nature-painting is

apparently dashed on with a big brush, but it is careful in detail.

There is in him a fight of the Universal and the Particular, of Art and

Nature, of Endowment and Facility, of Poetry and Platitude.”

I do not know how many readers will sympathise with, or even understand,

the kind of rage which, I confess it, such criticism as this excites in

my mind. It is not exactly false criticism; on the contrary, it is

rather true. But its truth has nothing vital, nothing germinal, nothing

specially appropriate to the subject in it: and if there can be said to

be anything specially appropriate to the writer, it is only matter for

an unfavourable judgment of him. Any man, with a good deal of reading

and a little practice, can string tic-tac antitheses of this kind, made

up of critical commonplaces and terminology, together for pages. No man,

from anything of the kind, could grasp the real _differentia_ of Bürger—

the fact that he was one of the first to make, in poetry, an almost

convulsive attempt to get out of the conventional by attempting the

supernatural.

In all these German Shakespeare-critics, moreover, the fault (which we

have noticed even in Goethe) reappears, that they are criticising, not

Shakespeare, but the translation of Shakespeare; that while they have

plenty to say about the plot, and the “points in Hamlet’s soul,” and

even sometimes the text in its lower aspects, the other and over-soul,

the essence, the poetry, of Shakespeare not merely escapes, but

apparently fails to interest or occupy them at all. On the accidents,

the unnecessary things, they are voluble. “The rest is silence”—to

expand which text in its present bearing were an insult.

[Sidenote: _The Shakespeare-heretics: Rümelin._]

A word or two, however, may be given to the arch-heretic in this

division—the interesting Herr Rümelin.[1064] I find, in relation to this

subject, a MS. note, of no matter what author, which may deserve

quotation, despite the impropriety of its phraseology: “_Asinus

Rumelinus_. Asinity much invited by precedent asinity on the other

side.” And really there is something in this. It is not merely that Herr

Rümelin’s essay sets forth his thoughts as those _eines Realisten_, and

thus declares its author a reactionary partisan against Idealism and

Romanticism. By a quaint, but not uncommon, “suck of the current” he has

adopted not a few of the fallacies of the school he combats. It is

_their_ Shakespeare, not the Shakespeare of Shakespeare and eternity,

that he is belittling. We have seen how a sensible German like

Grillparzer treated Gervinus’s boast about Germany as Shakespeare’s

prophet. Rümelin’s demonstration that Shakespeare was forgotten in

England for 150 years is only this same boast altered a little. It is,

as every child ought to know now, and as I shall not here waste time in

proving, an absolute falsehood: but it could be of no importance to the

true critic if it were true. Gold scarcely ceases to be gold during the

time that it is, or because it is, _irrepertum_: and perhaps the only

thing that retains the slightest interest in this part of Herr Rümelin’s

examination is his use of the argument that Bacon does not mention

Shakespeare—a fertile source since of the finest mare’s-nests. But the

Essay is a really interesting one, and might have done—though I do not

know that it has done—much good to the chatterers about Shakespeare. The

Southampton chatter, the chatter about the greatness of the Elizabethan

period in connection with politics, &c., the chatter of Gervinus, the

chatter of the Romantics—against all these Rümelin directs an

anti-criticism, easy enough and sometimes not ineffective. As a Realist

he does not (we can easily see why) like the character-play. As a

Preceptist, he holds that Tragedy must not individualise, and that

scarcely one of Shakespeare’s dramas contains a _wohlgefügte

pragmatische denkbare Handlung_. As a mid-nineteenth century Liberal he

is pained to find that Shakespeare was a Royalist and an aristocrat of

the purest water. Comparing Shakespeare and Goethe (for there is much

mere Chauvinism in Rümelin), he finds that the one “flashes on things

like a rocket or a blue light,” while the other “shows them in a clear

mirror.” But after all he admits “the joy in the poet.” So perhaps this

poor heretic was not quite so far from the Kingdom of Heaven as Gervinus

and Ulrici, for in reading them you are seldom invited to consider “the

joy in the poet”—the Poetic Moment—at all.

We may conclude this chapter with notices of three later German critics,

who are, in different ways, interesting and characteristic—the novelist

Freytag; the cosmopolitan polygrapher, Karl Hillebrand; and the

greatest, if the maddest, man of letters of modern Germany—Nietzsche.

[Sidenote: _Freytag._]

For the first, Gustav Freytag’s _Technik des Dramas_[1065] could hardly

lack mention here as the principal contribution to criticism of the

chief novelist of Germany during the later nineteenth century, and as

itself one of the main contributions to a division of our subject which

comes direct from one of the main fountainheads, the _Poetics_ of

Aristotle. Freytag, however,—and the explicitness of his title bars any

complaint on the subject,—occupies himself almost wholly with the

_theatrical_ side of the matter—such questions as that of verse or prose

and the like being relegated to the close, and very briefly handled. Had

he written three hundred years earlier we should have had more room for

him. As it is, the chief thing noticeable, and that not favourably, is

his adoption of that Goethean utilitarianism which we have stigmatised

before. He says nothing, he tells us, about French classical drama or

the drama of Spain, because “we have nothing more to learn and nothing

to fear from them.” That, it need scarcely be said, is complete heresy

according to the view of criticism maintained in this book. What you

have to “fear” hardly in any case matters; and you have always something

to learn.

[Sidenote: _Hillebrand and cosmopolitan Criticism._]

Karl, or, as he sometimes called himself, Carl, Hillebrand is an

interesting figure, and withal a typical one. He invented, I think, a

useful word—“xenomania” or _Fremdensucht_—which was very proper for the

nineteenth century: he attracted the notice, in his own country, of such

a formidable and considerable person as the young Nietzsche; he wrote in

several languages and lived in more countries, especially England and

Italy. There was a time, which I can remember very well, when he “seemed

to be a pillar.” But I am not so sure that he was one. He prided himself

on his cosmopolitanism: and one of his best-known pieces, addressed to

the editor of _The Nineteenth Century_ and reprinted in the great

collection of his miscellaneous works, entitled _Zeiten Völker und

Menschen_,[1066] deals with the presence of _Fremdensucht_ and

insularity combined in Englishmen. We were, thought Herr Hillebrand some

twenty or five-and-twenty years since, interesting ourselves in

Continental matters at last, but we were not doing it in the right way.

Frenchmen thought we interested ourselves too promiscuously in their men

and matters; so did Germans. We put [_did_ we?] Mérimée and Octave

Feuillet on a level; Rachel and Madame Sarah Bernhardt. We distressed

Herr Hillebrand’s cosmopolitanism and his particularism equally.

This is a sufficiently interesting and distinct point of view to have a

few words here, especially as it has been often taken since. I venture

to disagree with it _in toto_. It is very well, if your sight is weak,

to have the best spectacles adjusted to it that art can adjust. But you

will very seldom better your sight by taking somebody else’s spectacles;

and if you borrow the spectacles of several other people and combine or

frequently substitute them, you will very soon see “men as trees

walking.” To the process of having spectacles made for yourself

corresponds that of studying foreign literatures as widely as possible

and as carefully as possible; the process of adopting French points of

view of Frenchmen, German of Germans, and the like, answers, I think, to

the other. There is a wrong interpretation of _Sportam nactus es_, but

also a right. And I think Herr Hillebrand’s own results bear out what I

have said. His critical work is very extensive; it had much, and still

has some, interest. It is the work of a man of certainly more than

average cleverness and of much more than average information; of a man

with a really fair knowledge of literature and more than a fair

knowledge of institutions, customs, national _mores_ generally. Herr

Hillebrand would never have made some, or many, of the little slips at

which we laugh so much in other people, and at which other people laugh

in us. But his cosmopolitanism, I think, eviscerated and emasculated his

genius. In re-reading essays of his which I have read before, I have

found them faded, tame, “fushionless”; in reading others for the first

time they produce the same effect without the contrast. The satirist was

justified in making fun of the “temptations To belong to other nations”;

but, in a sense of which Mr Gilbert was not thinking, and of which I

doubt his making fun, it _is_ to credit and to advantage that an

Englishman shall remain an Englishman, a German a German, and so forth.

There is a moral in the story of Antæus.

Not that there is not in Hillebrand work still interesting (though it is

usually rather too contemporary as well as too cosmopolitan) when he is

dealing with Fielding and Sterne and Milton, and Machiavelli and

Rabelais and Tasso, as well as when he is dealing with Doudan and Renan

and Taine. He was for an age: but for rather a short one. And one of his

papers is an awful example. It is entitled _Delirium Tremens_, and it

characterises the work with which it deals as a “distressing

aberration.” That work is analysed with considerable skill, and the

article contains some shrewd remarks, notably one on the invariable

tendency towards “charcoal-burner” faith of some kind even in the most

free-thinking Frenchman. Hillebrand’s strength lay in things of this

kind. But the instance shows where his strength did not lie, and that

this was in the direction of literary criticism. For this “distressing

aberration,” this effect of _delirium tremens_, is one of the capital

imaginative works of the later nineteenth century—the _Tentation de

Saint-Antoine_ of Gustave Flaubert.

[Sidenote: _Nietzsche._]

Nietzsche’s criticism[1067] is, on the one hand, very much what might be

expected by any one who might have managed (it would be difficult) to

read only that part of his work which does not contain it, and on the

other throws a very useful amount of additional light on his general

mental attitude. Himself a remarkable artist from the purely literary

side—the best modern German prose-writer by far, with Heine and

Schopenhauer—he cannot help paying literary art the same compliment

which he pays to some other things, that, not exactly of believing and

trembling, but of acknowledging as he blasphemes. He blasphemes, of

course, pretty freely: take away blasphemy, parody, and that particular

kind of borrowing which thinks to disguise itself by inserting or

extracting “nots,” and there is not much of Nietzsche left but form.

[Sidenote: Zarathustra, _the_ Birth of Tragedy, _and_ Der Fall Wagner.]

The mere headings of _Also Sprach Zarathustra_ will guide the laziest to

his ultimate opinions upon poetry and other things. At the beginning,

the _Birth of Tragedy_ (1871) is, despite its title, hardly literary at

all; its theory of an orgiastic hyperanthropic Dionysus-cult superseding

the calm “Apollonian” Epic, and itself superseded by the corrupting

philosophy of Socrates, being entirely philosophic (or philo_moric_).

Later, the onslaught on Wagner is very literary, and consists, in fact,

of a violent—of a frantic—protest against the tendencies of Romanticism,

of which he quite correctly sees that Wagner is, with whatever

differences, a musical exponent, and against “literary” music itself.

Perhaps there never was a hostile contention which the other side could

accept with such alacrity as Nietzsche’s approximation[1068]of Wagner

and Victor Hugo. They _are_ extremely alike in merits as in faults, and

the recognition of the twinship is a point in favour of Nietzsche’s

critical power, whatever his dislike of it may be.

[Sidenote: Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen.]

To attend more heedfully to chronological order—the four remarkable

essays of the _Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_, which, early as they are

(1873-76), are perhaps the last things in which Nietzsche displayed

himself as entirely _compos mentis_, are close to our subject

throughout,[1069] and not seldom openly deal with it. The tremendous

castigation administered to the “Culture-Philistinism” of Strauss—a

document very fit to be registered as an abiding corrective to the hymns

of our German-praisers, from Mr. Arnold to Mr. Haldane, and all who

shall follow—is sometimes directly, and always in spirit,

literary-critical. The unfriendly attitude of the next paper to the

Study of History may seem less so, for, as we have seen, literary

criticism without literary history is almost hopeless. But here

Nietzsche’s as yet unformulated, but certainly conceived, aspirations

towards a future that was to be quite different from the past, probably

come in, and he was entitled to regard with suspicion, and to meet with

protest, the “dry-as-dust” character of German history-study. The

enthusiastic encomia on Schopenhauer and Wagner are again as constantly

literary in character as the subsequent denials of both.

[Sidenote: La Gaya Scienza.]

If the similarity of title in Nietzsche’s _La Gaya Scienza_ (“Die

Fröhliche Wissenschaft”) and in Mr Dallas’s above-mentioned book should

awake expectations of criticism in anybody, he will be at first

grievously disappointed, for, except an anticipation of a later fling at

Seneca,[1070] he will, for a long time, find nothing at all of the kind.

But he will make a very great mistake if he throws the book aside. The

aphoristic manner, or rather the manner of detached notes, like Ben

Jonson’s in the _Discoveries_, which Nietzsche had now adopted, makes it

unsafe to conclude from any one page, or even from a considerable

sequence of pages, what will meet us when we turn the next. In the

middle, and again towards the end, we come upon “pockets” of our ore.

From § 82 onwards, on the opposition of _esprit_ to the Greek temper, on

translation, on the origin of Poetry, we find many noteworthy things,

leading up to a formal note on “Prose and Poetry,” wherein is the

selection of Leopardi, Mérimée, Emerson, and Landor as the prose masters

of the nineteenth century proper. Here Mérimée’s scorn and Landor’s

pride may have had something to do with Nietzsche’s admiration: but they

cannot be said to usurp their places. I am not Italian scholar enough to

give an opinion on Leopardi’s claim. Emerson, some may think, while not

denying his merits, “a little over-parted.” I should venture to

substitute Schopenhauer, if not Nietzsche himself.[1071] And after this

we at last come on the long missing passage on Shakespeare, only to

find, as perhaps some may have been very well prepared to find, that

Shakespeare is not treated as a poet at all, but as the author of

_Hamlet_ and the creator of—Brutus! Nietzsche, as most people should

know, had a great idea of the Romans, thought them _vornehm_, and the

nearest approaches in history to the _Uebermensch_; but his special

selection of Brutus is very curious, though fortunately out of our

range. The other pocket of the book comes long afterwards, and quite

toward the end, where we get interesting things on modern German

philosophers, “learned books and literature,” and the all-important

question, “Was ist Romantik?” Here, however, Nietzsche goes off on

Apollo and Dionysus as of old.

[Sidenote: Jenseits von Gut und Böse, _&c._]

The late and already somewhat half-sane _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_,

with its still later and still more fatally symptomatic continuation the

_Genealogie der Moral_ (1887), devotes itself mainly to non-literary

exercises of Nietzsche’s general topsyturvyfication.[1072] But there are

passages which at any rate come close to literature. Such are the

curious remarks on Galiani, Aristophanes, Petronius, together with some

on Plato and Lessing, in §§ 26-28 of _Jenseits_; those on certain

Germans of the great age, from Goethe himself downwards, in § 247; very

specially those on German style and speech, in § 250; and the quaint

attack on English philosophy in § 255. It may be not improperly observed

here, in connection with Nietzsche’s Anglophobia, that besides what was,

as in the case of “der Alte Zauberer” (Wagner), a sufficient cause of

hate, the fact that he had once been rather directed by and indebted to

English thinkers,[1073] there were others. He paid us the compliment of

believing England to be the European stronghold of Christianity and

Morality, and seems to have known very little directly about us.

[Sidenote: Götzen-Dämmerung.]

The great critical “place” in Nietzsche, however, as far as I have read

him (for I have not yet had time to explore the “rubbish-heaps raked

together by abject adorers,” as a very competent authority once

described them to me, of the _Nachgelassene Werke_) is the

_Götzen-Dämmerung_ (1889), his last publication before the prison-house

closed. Nowhere is the Ishmaelite character, which reveals itself

pathetically in the _Zarathustra_, so petulantly present. The very first

paragraph batches together as “Meine Unmöglichen,” with a scornful tag

to each tail, Seneca, Rousseau, Schiller, Dante, Kant, Hugo, Liszt,

George Sand, Michelet, Carlyle, Mill, the Goncourts, and Zola—a somewhat

heterogeneous company who receive some recruits in the amplifications of

their judgments that follow. A hasty judge, who could not apply the

system of ruthless toleration which has been applied in this book, might

of course disable Nietzsche altogether on some of them. To say that

Dante is “a hyena who makes poetry in graves” is, _mutatis mutandis_, no

more and no less critical than to say that Nietzsche is a Bedlamite who

sets his Bedlam on fire and sings and dances on the blazing walls. Here

the source of uncritical blindness is obvious: and the explanation is

renewed in the cases of Mill, George Sand, and one of the later

additions, Renan. But the objection to Mill’s “_offensive_

clearness,”[1074] to George Sand as “the milch-cow of beautiful style,”

to Renan’s “nerve-dissolvingness,”[1075] are really literary objections,

and, as some may think, not unjust ones.

Very interesting is his intense hatred of Sainte-Beuve for his

“femininity,” his Romanticism (which Nietzsche does not, like some

people, mistake), and (as he lets us see, with his usual naïveté) his

critical power. His wrath with George Eliot for trying to retain

Christian morality, after giving up Christian faith, is less literary.

But, on the whole, Nietzsche’s criticism, such as it is, hangs very well

together and is characteristic enough, even where it may seem,

inconsistent. It has the special bents of the lover of _Rausch_, of the

anti-crusader to whom, not as in the case of his much-admired

Beyle,[1076] the Christian Hell, but the Christian Heaven, is something

that leaves him no peace or patience, with the general drift which we

have seen in German criticism, to fix on extra-literary points. A whole

study might be made of his attitude to Goethe, whom he welcomes,

salutes, almost adores as a fellow anti-crusader, as an example of

_vornehm_ selfishness and unsentiment, while he is never tired of

bringing in some of Goethe’s greatest things, notably the ends of both

parts of _Faust_, for his favourite end-of-the-nineteenth-century trick

of parody-reversal.

[Sidenote: _His general critical position._]

On the whole, therefore, we may call Nietzsche a contributor of

extraordinarily interesting things to our history, and in some ways a

literary critic _in potentia_, such as Germany has hardly given us save

in the case of Novalis. But here, as elsewhere, his gifts of potency

were marred by the _impotency_, the reckless, uncontrolled,

uncontrollable flux and reflux of mood and temper, which distinguished

him ever more and more. We have not required—we have seen that it is

ridiculous to require—a rigid consistency, a development only in one

straight line, from the critic. He may, he must, learn, branch out, even

sometimes retrace his steps in a moderate degree. But when we find, with

but a few years between the judgments, of Schopenhauer, that he is “a

great educator,” a sort of intellectual Joshua to the German Israel, and

that he is a “common smasher or debaser of the currency”;[1077] of

Wagner that he is a hierophant, a master of masters, the “Alexander

Magnus” of music, and that he is an “old sorcerer,” a “modern

Cagliostro,” a “seducer and poisoner of Art,” we can but shake our

heads. No man can go through such revolutions as these and remain a

critic, if he ever was one. That in some ways Criticism has seen no

nobler mind, no stronger or keener faculty, overthrown and lost to her,

is, I think, true enough: but of the overthrow and the loss I can

entertain no doubt.

CHAPTER V.

REVIVALS AND COMMENCEMENTS.

LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER—SPAIN—ITALY—DE SANCTIS—CHARACTER OF HIS

WORK—SWITZERLAND—VINET—SAINTE-BEUVE ON HIM—HIS CRITICISM OF

CHATEAUBRIAND AND HUGO—HIS GENERAL QUALITY—AMIEL: GREAT INTEREST OF

HIS CRITICAL IMPRESSIONS—EXAMPLES THEREOF—THE PITY OF IT.

[Sidenote: _Limitations of this chapter._]

Something apologetic has to be said, also, in regard to this present

chapter. It is confessedly inadequate as a History, in each individual

case, of the critical performances of European countries, other than

England, France, and Germany; it is perhaps not so inadequate as a

constituent of the present work. That the writer does not pretend to any

such acquaintance with these performances as he may, he believes, claim

with the others, may seem a rather damning plea: yet perhaps it is not

so. For it is for the other side to show that such acquaintance was

necessarily incumbent on him, and that, not possessing it, he was bound

to postpone the setting forth of what he had to say until the

acquisition was accomplished. I acknowledge that I am not of this

opinion. In some cases, as we shall see, the critical achievements now

under consideration are almost demonstrably unimportant to the general

history of Criticism as yet: and in all it may, I think, be fairly

contended that they are for the present negligible. For the present, no

doubt, only. There probably will come a time when such a new-comer as

Russian will extend to European criticism the influence which it has

already begun to exercise on European literature, and when older

literatures, like Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and the Scandinavian

varieties, will reassert, or assert for the first time, their position.

But they have hardly done so yet, save in the case of those who, like Dr

Brandes, are not of our competence, as living.

[Sidenote: _Spain._]

The most remarkable of the confessions of this with which I am

acquainted is given by the part relating to our present subject, of that

work, so freely used, and so necessarily praised, in the last volume,

the _Historia de las ideas estéticas en España_ of Señor Menéndez y

Pelayo. This consists of three substantial volumes, or about a third of

the whole work. Yet it is hardly too much to say that it is solely

concerned with æsthetic ideas _out of_ Spain—that it is an account of

the general course of European, not of the particular course of Spanish,

criticism. The foreigner and the general historian can hardly be blamed

for not attempting what the native and the specialist declines. If,

indeed, we were concerned with living writers, Señor Menéndez himself

and others would give us most satisfactory occupation: but we are not.

[Sidenote: _Italy._]

The case of Italy is rather different. Here also there are notable

critical names with which our scheme precludes us from dealing, but here

native enterprise has not “confessed and avoided.” I do not know

anything, in any other language, like the very remarkable _Antologia

della Nostra Critica Moderna_ of Signor Luigi Morandi:[1078] and I

certainly do not know of any such testimony to the existing critical

interests of another country as the fact that sixteen editions of it

appear to have been sold in little more than as many years. Yet this

very book justifies our refusal. Signor Morandi has not hesitated to

“throw back,” not merely to Manzoni, who was born fifteen years within

the eighteenth century, but even to Baretti, whose whole life was

comprised therein, and who was born in the year in which Addison died.

Yet by far the larger number of his contributors are living. They have

already done much to make good the claim of their country, if not to

that pride of critical place which she held in the sixteenth century, at

any rate to a place far higher than she could claim in the seventeenth

and eighteenth: and they are likely to go farther yet. For Italy, never

quite neglectful of the glories of her older literature, has of late

turned to their study with a will; and in this turning, as we have seen,

lies the one and certain way to a critical Renaissance.[1079]

[Sidenote: _De Sanctis._]

We must, however, give some special mention to one writer who is very

remarkable in himself, and who is generally admitted to have been, as

far as in one man lay, the author, or at least encourager, and guide of

this renewed attention to criticism in Italy. Francesco de Sanctis is

undoubtedly a very interesting person. To us his interest does not lie—

to the same extent as it may to others—in the coincidence of his time

and his efforts with the new struggle for, and attainment of, political

unity: but we can cheerfully allow a place for this. Italy wanted to do

for and by herself, in criticism as elsewhere, and he came to show her

how so to do. But from our point of view his critical character is

interesting somewhat differently, and somewhat differently explicable.

He obviously, like Mr Arnold in England, like others elsewhere, was

determined towards criticism by the influence of the French Romantics,

especially Sainte-Beuve. But he blended with the general characteristics

of this criticism not so much Mr Arnold’s specially literary devotion to

the greater gods of ancient and modern times, not so much Sainte-Beuve’s

own irresistible attraction to the character, the manners, and so forth

of his subjects—as the old Italian addiction, already revived and

redirected by Vico, towards philosophising. [Sidenote: _Character of his

work._] In the first Essay of his most famous, influential, and

characteristic book[1080] he cannot write more than a few lines without

flinging his disciple neck and heels into the ocean with the question,

as a chief one of Literature, “What is the destiny of the human

generations?” A momentous question certainly: but one which concerns

literature only as it concerns everything else from theology to

therapeutics, and perhaps a little less than it concerns most of them.

But this opens the old truceless war, and we must turn away from it. Let

me only suggest that De Sanctis is a little unfair to the ancients when

he says in the same essay that “the sense of Life begins to reveal

itself in Shakespeare.” Many a dialogue and many a chorus, many an

oration and many a historic passage, will rise up in judgment against

him for this, at the great day of critical account.

We must not, however, be too severe on him; for a certain southern

tendency to hyperbole is not one of his least engaging characteristics.

He shows himself of the nineteenth-century in general, and of the tribe

of Sainte-Beuve in particular, by being almost nothing if not an

essayist. They complain of his _History of Italian Literature_ that,

good as it is, it is too much of a bundle of Essays; his two best-known

works, _Saggi Critici_[1081] and _Nuovi Saggi_,[1082] do not pretend to

be anything else. The latter is chiefly devoted to Italian subjects, for

De Sanctis was deeply imbued with a generous cult of his own noble

literature, which is one of the best features of the Italians. The

_Saggi Critici_ is more miscellaneous, and so more representative. I do

not know his work quite exhaustively enough to be certain how much he

knew of English; but it is rather noteworthy that in dealing with

Beatrice Cenci his reference to Shelley is exceedingly slight, and might

almost be called perfunctory. On the other hand, he has an interesting

(first hand?) comparison between “Machbet” and Wallenstein. But French

literature, and especially contemporary French literature, seems to have

interested him most. He has a very vigorous and successful defence of

Hugo’s Triboulet against Saint-Marc Girardin, and what seems to me the

best, and the most characteristic, of all his essays is one on the

_Contemplations_, where two distinct and rather opposite currents of

thought and sentiment clash and ripple in the most refreshing manner.

Nowhere is there a better example of that generous hyperbolical rhetoric

which has been glanced at: no one has given a more amiable exhibition of

that _petite fièvre cérébrale_ which has been noticed more than once,

and which the great Frenchman excites in all fit minds. But while the

critical De Sanctis applauds and revels, the philosophical De Sanctis

has qualms. Is not (here we have an echo of Planche) Hugo’s art more

musical than poetical? Poetry must have “a clear silver” sound. No sound

can give you any idea: where we have Mr John Morley’s sad heresy about

the “vernal wood” anticipated. So once more the _besoin de philosopher_

did a little spoil De Sanctis, and has continued, let us say, not quite

to improve his countrymen and disciples. But he did a great, an

effectual, and to this day an enduring and admirable work: and even

Italy, high as is the standard which she has set her children, is

justified also of this her child.

[Sidenote: _Switzerland._]

The accounts which I could give of nineteenth-century criticism in most

other nations would be second-hand, would have to be meagre, and, for

the reasons just given, as well as others to be added at the end of this

chapter, would be almost superfluous; but there is one—the smallest of

all—which cannot be quite passed by. Switzerland, from geographical

situation and linguistic and racial circumstance, has always been

exposed to whatever literary influences were felt in each and all of her

three great neighbours: and her contributions to the literature of

Europe, stimulated thereby, have always been more than respectable. We

have somewhat unceremoniously classed not a few of the authors of these

contributions according to language rather than to strict nationality.

But the literary activity of the Swiss—chiefly in French, but _as_

Swiss—has been particularly great and particularly critical during the

nineteenth century: and we may give some space to two[1083] famous

examples of it, one in the earlier, one in the later, division of the

period—to Vinet and to Amiel.

[Sidenote: _Vinet._]

Alexandra Vinet was not a long-lived man, scarcely completing his

half-century. But from a very early age he was a teacher of literature,

and though he devoted part of his energies to theology and other

subjects, he was always, in a manner, a critic in his heart. His

_Chrestomathie Française_,[1084] arranged when he was little past

thirty, was one of the earliest books of the kind, and is still one of

the best, as far as its time would let it be: and his _History of

Eighteenth Century French Literature_[1085] is, and will remain, a minor

Classic. But perhaps no book of his affords better occasion for

criticising his criticism than the posthumous collection of his _Études

sur la Littérature Française au Xix^{ème} Siècle_.[1086]

[Sidenote: _Sainte-Beuve on him._]

Vinet was (to give a choice of metaphors) dubbed Knight-Critic, or

admitted of the Academy of Universal Criticism, at the hands of

Sainte-Beuve himself—the Grandmaster of Order and Academy alike—in an

article written in 1837, and at present contained in the first thirty

pages or so of the _Portraits Contemporains_, vol. iii. It is written in

a more patronising tone, with more meticulousness of detail, and with

less easy mastery of method, than it would have been as a _Causerie_, a

dozen or two dozen years later; but it is very flattering on the whole,

and well enough deserved. The Master’s sword, however, as usual, in the

process of dubbing, finds out, lightly but unerringly, the joints of the

neophyte’s harness. “Les idées morales, religieuses, chrétiennes, eurent

toujours le pas dans son esprit sur les opinions purement littéraires.”

This is the same peculiarity which, with a difference, afterwards

distinguished Vinet’s compatriot, M. Scherer: and it is very noticeable

in the book which we have selected for comment. [Sidenote: _His

criticism of Chateaubriand and Hugo._] The gown and bands of the

Protestant pastor are perpetually hampering the critic’s step and

gesture, and flopping up into his eyes. He admires Chateaubriand,[1087]

but he is constantly stopping to tell him how sad it is that he should

confuse Popish superstition with Christian verity. He admires Victor

Hugo[1088]—he does him indeed much more justice than one might have

expected, and than remarks on Vinet himself would sometimes lead the

second-hand reader to think. But he is made unhappy as a man by Hugo’s

art-for-art’s-sake attitude, by his early royalism, by his later

anti-Christianity or non-Christianity: while as a professor he is

shocked by single-syllable lines, by audacious metaphors (yet he himself

finely says somewhere that “only one poet has a greater range of

metaphor than Hugo, and that is Humanity itself”), by some real

enormities and more escapades of bravado. One is sometimes tempted to

laugh at such things as his review of _Les Burgraves_,[1089] with its

tone of half-puzzled seriousness, till one comes again to such excellent

points as the remark that “Hugo is sometimes mistakable for a parody of

Hugo.”

[Sidenote: _His general quality._]

On the whole, however, I confess that I find Vinet rather estimable than

enjoyable. He is distinctly _lourd_: though it would be unjust and

inaccurate to call him by the dictionary equivalent of that term in

English. He carries his Chair too much with him,[1090] and seems to

think it necessary to set it down with an effort, and formally establish

himself in it, before he makes any deliverance. I do not—I think I may

at this eleventh hour ask my readers if I have not justified this claim

to impartiality—object to him because he is what he calls a spiritualist

in art, or because, against my own views, he pronounces[1091] that there

can be no such thing as “pure” literature. I could produce from him a

very large number of acute and true critical _aperçus_, like those above

cited. He is never merely trivial or negligible: I do not think that he

was in the least indifferent about literature. But he seems to me to

leave his reader indifferent. His critical method has none of that

_maestria_ which carries one away, and only sets one down again when it

chooses to relax its grip. There is no stimulus in Vinet, such as we

find after widely different fashions in Sainte-Beuve himself and in

Planche, in Saint-Victor and in Taine—nay, even in M. Scherer. There is

neither persuasion nor provocation in him: he disposes you neither to

follow nor to fight.

[Sidenote: _Amiel: great interest of his critical impressions._]

Of the famous and much-discussed work of Henri François Amiel,[1092] we

are fortunately concerned only with the literary criticism, the value of

which Mr Arnold duly saw, though, in deference to other persons,

perhaps, he did not pay so much attention thereto as to some other

matters. This literary criticism is of great interest, and I may as well

say at once that I think M. Scherer did not do it justice[1093] when he

said of his friend that “en littérature, il reculait devant une œuvre.”

He could not here mean, what is true, that Amiel’s timid and

half-despairing nature recoiled before the completion of a work, for he

makes it a parallel with his recoiling before avowal in love, and quotes

his own words about his difficulty in “enjoying naïvely and simply.”

Undoubtedly this “moral eunuchism” (for it is impossible not to think of

the famous passage in _Peter Bell the Third_) is to be laid to Amiel’s

charge too often; but I think conspicuously _not_ in his presentments

and judgments of literature. He is here far more healthy and far more

natural than anywhere else. Indeed, he is sometimes so very little

sicklied over with any pale cast that he frankly and naïvely records his

changes of impression about the same book as he reads. These changes

are, in tolerably active and sensitive natures, so rapid and curious

that some practised reviewers have made it a principle, whenever they

can, first to read the book they are reviewing through, with as little

interruption as possible, lest the “plate” shift or change; and,

secondly, never to review it on the same day on which they read it, that

the impressions may have time to blend and harmonise. The most

interesting, perhaps, of Amiel’s records of experience in this kind is

the group of impressions of Eugénie de Guérin, which occur together in

the _Journal_ at vol. i. p. 197. He reads and re-reads her on successive

September days in 1864, and reads her once more in the middle of

October. The first impression (which maintains itself for the two days)

is altogether one of enthusiasm, not merely in regard to the sentimental

side, the _impression nostalgique_, &c., but with a delighted

recognition of _verve_, _élan_, greatness of soul in this “Sévigné des

Champs” [Notre Dame des Rochers will forgive!]. After the month’s

interval he does not recant: but finds a rather less charming side as

well. Eugénie’s existence is at once “too empty and too confined”: he

wants “more air and space.” Now both these impressions are genuine and

vivid: and, what is more, they are both frankly taken and expressed,

without any gaucherie or “feeling faint,” any “touching the hem of the

shift,” and daring no more.

[Sidenote: _Examples thereof._]

And this character of at least relative vivacity—of ease and power in

enjoyment—generally distinguishes, as it seems to me, the literary

entries, which have far less of what some have called the _ton

amielleux_ about them than any others. The description of the style of

Montesquieu[1094] is quite admirably true and fresh: and if that of

Joubert[1095] is open to more exception, it is precisely because Amiel

is mixing up Joubert’s utterances as a literary critic and his

utterances as a philosopher, &c., too much; because he is not keeping

his own saner organ of judgment mainly at work. The fastidious and

morbid side does show itself in that on Rousseau, which follows

immediately: but this we should expect. On Vinet,[1096] though too

complimentary, as was for a dozen reasons almost inevitable, he shows

extraordinary acuteness and _finesse_, as also on Sismondi.[1097] If he

is less satisfactory on Chateaubriand, we can again explain it, and he

does justice to _René_. The apology for Quinet[1098] is as judicious as

it is sympathetic: and I know few more curious and interesting companion

passages in criticism than those on Hugo and Lamartine earlier, on

Corneille and Hugo later, which occur almost together in the book,

though there was some time between the composition of them.[1099]

In the first of these, the juxtaposition of the citations from _Les

Châtiments_ and _Jocelyn_ is a stroke of genius; in the latter batch,

though it is quite clear that the judge does not completely like either

the author of _Polyeucte_ or the author of _Les Misérables_, the

indication of characteristics is even greater in another way, because

more elaborated and responsible. On M. Cherbuliez[1100] Amiel is again

of the first interest, because the slight over-valuation of

compatriotism on the small scale is balanced by a distinct antagonism of

“nervous impression.” And we have even a more curious “place” in the

notice of _John Halifax_,[1101] which is the last of our passages in the

first volume. Here Amiel’s starting-point is a vain imagination—the

usual misjudgment of things English, by a man who does not know England—

but the use made of it is singularly good. The second volume gives us

another invaluable pair on the most antecedently _not_ to be paired of

writers, About and Lotze—who nevertheless bring out between them the

remarkable powers of Amiel’s mind-camera. The summer of 1869 supplies

more documents on Lamennais, Heine (inadequate this latter, but again

necessarily), and Renan, with admirable obituary remarks to follow on

Sainte-Beuve. One side of Taine—the side up to the date almost solely in

evidence—comes out two years afterwards,[1102] and the remaining

references that I have are so numerous that I fear they, or rather some

of them only, must be collected in a note.[1103]

[Sidenote: _The pity of it._]

We must, however, in order to take an accurate and complete view of

Amiel as a critic, and not merely of Amiel’s occasional criticisms,

remember that these _aperçus_, brilliant as they are, are scattered over

more than thirty years, and that they form, as it were, the lucid

intervals in a lifelong night of moping, the islets far scattered and

estranged from another, amid the _nigras undas lethargi_. That the man

who wrote them was, at the time of writing, almost invariably a sane,

mentally active, “moderately cheerful” being, is, I think, absolutely

beyond question; that he might, if he had chosen to write more and to

give himself more freely to that which comes before the writing, have

freed himself to a great extent from his Melancholia, I have no doubt.

Escape from that dread yet sweet enchantress—that serpent not of old

Nile but of the older Ocean that flows round the world—no man can wholly

who has been born of her servants; probably no such man would ever wish

to do so. But there are two gates of partial and temporary emancipation—

the Gate of Humour and the Gate of Study—which she usually permits to

stand open, and through which men may pass, lest her sway become

tyranny. That of Humour was apparently barred to Amiel: the other

evidently was not. But he would very rarely use it. We know that he had

many opportunities of contributing to critical journals, and that he

would not take them, but fled back to Maya and the Great Wheel. Here the

other, the more popular, the more irritating, side of him comes in.

But I can see no _pose_ whatever in the literary entries. On the

contrary, their freshness and spontaneity make a very remarkable

contrast to almost all the rest of the book, except perhaps a few of the

Nature-passages. Still, they _are_ “intervals and islets” only—there is

a singular want of connection between them. Amiel seems seldom or never

to have troubled himself in the least about taking any connected views

of literature: he seldom or never extends the remarkable comparative

power which he shows in his various companion sketches. And, further, I

am not certain that if he had attempted regular studies or _causeries_

they would have been good—that he would not have maundered off into the

vague instead of giving grasped views and judgments. This, however, no

one can decide. What remains positive and proved is, first, that his

intellect never shows to greater advantage than in his literary

passages.

_Sed hæc hactenus._ I believe honestly, and not as a subterfuge to cover

pusillanimity or laziness, that if I were to give here an examination of

notable critics during the nineteenth century from every nation and

country in Europe, I should not really advance the survey of criticism

which we now possess in the very least. Until a time so recent that it

falls out of our consideration, all these countries and nations have

most certainly been following—until, perhaps, one which is not recent

but still to come, they seem likely to follow, the same course which the

Three First have pursued before them, and in most, if not in all cases,

have followed their leaders in a more definite order of sequence still.

All, about the second or third decade of the century, devoured Scott and

Byron; all, a little (or more than a little) later, reinforced our

influence by that of the French Romantic movement; most, earlier or

later, devoted themselves to that German literature which had in a sense

preceded ours, as it certainly had the French. In all, the Romantic

leaven worked itself out, under the conditions of the literature and the

individual, to spirit, or wine, or vinegar, as the case might be. In

all, “Realism” and “Naturalism,” “Decadence” and “Preciousness,” showed

themselves, as similar things have shown themselves many a time before,

in the merry-go-round of history and of literature. Quite lately, in

some—Russian, Norwegian, Belgian, _que-sais-je?_—signs of secondary

fermentation have been shown, which have greatly impressed some

observers. But it is as yet much too early to take serious critical

account of them.

And so the long journey—the tale of length also, which recounts it—may,

if it actually must not, end with a few general observations of summary

and reflection, to correspond to those which we have interspersed

before.

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION.

§ I. THE PRESENT STATE OF CRITICISM.

§ II. THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.

I.

In a letter (written on what was to prove his deathbed) which I received

from my friend of nearly forty years, the late Bishop of London, in

reference to the first volume of this work, he said he had often wished

it possible to begin books of the kind at the end, and write backward,

so as at once to engage the interest of the reader on matter more or

less known to him, and to lead him on to the unknown by easy stages,

instead of plunging him into a bath of strange matter. I nearly always

found in Creighton’s utterances—from the time when we used to outwatch

the Bear in certain lofty rooms looking over Merton Meadow, and the

Broad Walk, and the river, towards the full of the moon—a _Hinterland_

as well as a foreground of meaning. And in this case, no doubt, the

advantage of such a topsyturvyfication, if it were practicable, would

not be confined to the reader. It is almost as important to the writer

that he should not lose himself too much in “origins”—that he should

keep fruit as well as root in view—nay, that, if possible, he should

have a sort of Alcinous' garden of the subject before him, with its

various developments simultaneously present. I hope, indeed, that I have

not quite failed, as it is, to accomplish something of this

tregetour-work for my own benefit and the reader’s. Yet even “beginning

at the end” would have had its dangers, for in no part of the book is

what we have sometimes called a “horizontal” view more necessary, or

more apparently hard to maintain, than in this present. The immense mass

of material which has to be selected or rejected is an obvious

difficulty: and the certainty that, as readers in the earlier part have

grumbled at too extensive treatment of matters of which they knew

nothing, so in this later they will grumble at too curt treatment of

what they do know and expect to be treated fully—is equally obvious. But

these are not really formidable dragons or lions. To grapple with the

first is the plain and _prima facie_ business of the adventure, and to

the second the adventurer must make up his mind.

But the knight’s worst foes now, as of old, are not lions or dragons,

but treacherous and deluding enchanters and enchantresses, taking

advantage of his own weakness. And the difficulty of keeping a steady,

achromatic, comparative estimate of the criticism of to-day and of

yesterday is in this instance Archimago and Duessa at once. We have

seen, again and again, during the progress of our history, how at one

time—a long time ago for the most part—Criticism has been entirely

bewitched by the idea of a Golden Age, when all poets were sacred and

all critics gave just judgment: how, at another, a confidence, bland or

pert as the case might be, has existed (and exists) that we are much

wiser than our fathers. Above all, we have seen repeatedly that constant

and most dangerous delusion that the fashion which has just ceased to be

fashionable is a specially bad and foolish one, with its concomitant and

equally unreasonable but rather less dangerous opposite, that the

fashion that _is_ in is the foolishest and feeblest of all fashions.

With these things we have hitherto had to cope only at long bowls, so

that it has been comparatively easy to keep a critical head. We are now

at closest grapple with them: and while it cannot but be difficult to

escape or to conquer, it will be wellnigh impossible not to seem

captured or vanquished to spectators who have themselves not fully

purged their eyes with the necessary euphrasy and rue.

From these same dangers, however, the very fact of having steadily

worked through the history from the beginning, yet with an abiding

memory of the end, should be something of a safeguard for writer and

reader alike. We have seen how justly Mr Rigmarole might pronounce all

times “pretty much like our own” in respect of the faults and dangers of

criticism, though this time might incline to that danger and that to

this. If one—even one—lesson has emerged, it must have been that to

select the favourite critical fancy of _any_ time as the _unum

necessarium_ is fatal—or redeemed only by the completeness with which

such a selection, when faithfully carried out, demonstrates its own

futility. Yet we have seen also that the criticism of no time is wholly

idle or wholly negligible—that the older periods and the older men are

no “shadows,” but almost more real, because more original, than the

newer—that each and all have lessons, from the times of prim and

strictly limited knowledge to the times of swaggering and nearly

unlimited ignorance. And we should not be quite unable to apply

these.[1104]

In the preceding Book we have surveyed, in most cases virtually and in

some actually, to the end of the Nineteenth century, the latest stage or

stages of that modified and modernised criticism, the rise of which was

traced in the first Book of the present volume, and its victorious

establishment in the second. We have seen how—owing partly, no doubt, to

the mere general law of flux and reflux, but partly, and perhaps mainly,

to the enlarged study of literature, and the breaking down, in

connection with this, of the Neo-classic standards and methods,—judging

_a posteriori_, or, as Johnson, prophesying and protesting, called it,

“by the event,” came to take the place of judging _a priori_, or by the

rule. That in many cases the new critics would not themselves have

admitted this description of their innovations we have not attempted to

deny or disguise: but we have not been able to agree with them. We have,

however, seen also that to satisfy the craving for generalities and for

“pushing ignorance further back,” new preceptist systems, in no small

number, and sometimes of great pretensions and no small complexity, have

been advanced, and that the new subject of “Æsthetics”—in itself little

more than a somewhat disorderly generic name for these systems—has

obtained considerable recognition. But no one of these has, nor have all

of them together, attained anything like that position of

acknowledgment, “establishment,” and authority which was enjoyed by the

Neo-classic faith: and we have seen that some of the straitest

doctrinaires have condescended, while the general herd of critics have

frankly preferred, to judge authors as they found them.

That the results have been in many ways satisfactory, it seems

impossible for any one but the extremest of partisans to deny. The last

and worst fault of any state, political or other, that of “decreeing

injustice by a law,” has been almost entirely removed (at least as a

general reproach) from the state of Criticism. That a work of art is

entitled to be judged on its own merits or demerits, and not according

as its specification does or does not happen to be previously entered

and approved in an official schedule—this surely cannot but seem a gain

to every one not absolutely blinded by prejudice. Nor is it the only

point which ought to unite all reasonable suffrages. By the almost

necessary working of the new system, the _personnel_ of Criticism has

been enlarged, improved, strengthened in a most remarkable degree. The

old opposition of the poet and the critic has ceased to exist. It is

true indeed that, as we have seen, it never existed as an absolute law;

but it was a prevailing one, and it deprived criticism of some of its

most qualified recruits, or made them, if they joined, inconsistent,

like Lope, and Dryden, and Johnson. Nay, Coleridge himself could hardly

have been the critic he was under the older dispensation, much less

those other poets, many and of many countries, who have enriched the

treasury of a Goddess once thought to be the poet’s deadliest foe.

Yet, again, putting the contributions of poets, as poets, on one side,

the general literary harvest of the kind has been undoubtedly more

abundant, and in its choicer growths more varied, more delightful, even

more instructive. A collection of the best critical results of the last

fifty years only would certainly yield in these points to no similar

book that could be compiled from the records of any other period, even

of much greater length. From the perfected craftsmanship of Saint-Beuve,

and the whole critical production of Matthew Arnold, through the work of

writers unnecessary to enumerate, because all possible enumeration would

almost necessarily be an injustice, you might collect—not a volume, not

half a dozen, but a small, and not so very small, library, of which you

could not merely say “Here be truths,” but “Here is reading which any

person of ordinary intelligence and education will find nearly, if not

quite, as delightful as he can find in any other department of _belles

lettres_, except the very highest triumphs of prose and poetic Fiction

itself.”

Now, the removal of the reproach of injustice, the removal of the

reproach of dulness, these are surely good and even great things: while

better, and greater still, is the at least possible institution of a new

Priesthood of Literature, disinterested, teaching the world really to

read, enabling it to understand and enjoy, justifying the God and the

Muse to Men.

This is a fair vision; so fair, perhaps, that it may seem to be, like

others, made of nothing more solid than “golden air.” That would be

perhaps excessive, for, as has been pointed out above, the positive

gains under this New Dispensation, both of good criticism produced and

of good literature freed from arbitrary persecution, have been very

great. But, as we foreshadowed in the Interchapter at the end of the

last volume, there is another side to the account, a side not to be

ignored. If Buddha and Mr Arnold be right, and if “Fixity” be “a sign of

the Law”—then most assuredly Modern Criticism is not merely lawless, but

frankly and wilfully antinomian. It is rare to find two critics of

competence liking just the same things; it is rarer still to find them

liking the same things for the same reason. And so it happens that the

catholic ideal which this New Criticism seemed likely to establish is

just as far off, and just as frequently neglected or even outraged, as

in the old days of strict sectarianism, and without the same excuse. The

eighteenth-century critic could render a reason, _pro tanto_ valid, for

patronising Chaucer, and taking exceptions even to Milton, because

neither was like Dryden. But the critic of to-day who belittles Dryden

because he is not like Chaucer or Milton is utterly without excuse:—and

yet he is to be found, and found in high places. If (as in another case)

critics were to be for a single day what they ought to be, the world

would no doubt be converted; but there certainly does not appear to be

much more chance of this in the one case than in the other.

And so the enemy—who is sometimes a friendly enemy enough—has not the

slightest difficulty in blaspheming,—in asking whether the criterion of

pleasure does not leave the fatal difficulty: “Yes: but pleasure _to

whom_?”; in demanding some test which the simple can apply; in

reproaching “Romantic” critics with faction and will-worship, with

inconsistency and anarchy. Nor perhaps is there any better shift than

the old Pantagruelian one—to _passer oultre_. There _are_ these

objections to the modern way of criticism: and probably they can never

be got rid of or validly gainsaid. But there is something beyond them,

which can be reached in spite of them, and which is worth the reaching.

This something is the comprehensive and catholic possession of

literature—all literature and all that is good in all—which has for the

first time become possible and legitimate. From Aristotle to La Harpe—

even to one of the two Matthew Arnolds—the covenant of criticism was

strictly similar to that of the Jewish Law,—it was a perpetual “Thou

shalt not do this,” or “Thou shalt do this only in such and such a

specified way.” There might be some reason for all the commandments, and

excellent reason for some; but these reasons were never in themselves

immortal, and they constantly tended to constitute a mortal and

mortifying Letter. The mischief of this has been shown in something not

far from two thousand pages, and there is no need to spend more time on

it. Nor is it necessary even to argue that in the region of Art such a

Law entirely lacks the justification which it may have in the region of

Morals.