that not the least critical genius that ever adorned the Oxford Chair
was possessed by John Keble. There is some faint excuse for Ignorance.
The actual _Prælections_[1119] of the author of _The Christian Year_,
being Latin, are not read: his chief English critical works,[1120]
though collected not so very long ago, were collected too late to catch
that flood-tide, in their own sense, which is unfortunately, as a rule,
needed to land critical works out of reach of the ordinary ebb.
Moreover, there is no question but Keble requires “allowance”; and the
allowance which he requires is too often of the kind least freely
granted in the present day. If we have anywhere (I hope we have) a man
as holy as Keble, and as learned, and as acute, he will hardly express
the horror at Scott’s occasional use of strong language which Keble
expresses.[1121] Our historic sense, and our illegitimate advantage of
perspective, have at least taught us that to quarrel with Scott again,
for not being “Catholic” enough, is almost to quarrel with Moses for not
having actually led the children of Israel into Palestine. And no man,
as honest as Keble was, would now echo that other accusation against the
great magician (whom, remember, Keble almost adored, and of whom he
thought far more highly as a poet than many good men do now) of
tolerating intemperance; though some might feign it to suit a popular
cant.
But in all these respects it is perfectly easy for those who have once
schooled themselves to this apparently but not really difficult matter,
to make the necessary allowance.[1122] And then, even in the English
critical Essays—the “Scott,” the “Sacred Poetry,” the “Unpublished
Letters of Warburton,” and the “Copleston”—_verus incessu patet
criticus_.
[Sidenote: _The_ Occasional [_English_] Papers.]
His general attitude to poetic criticism (he meddled little with any
other) is extremely interesting. His classical training impelled him
towards the “subject” theory, and the fact that his two great idols in
modern English poetry were Scott and Wordsworth was not likely to hold
him back. He has even drifted towards a weir, pretty clearly, one would
think, marked “Danger!” by asking whether readers do not feel the
attraction of Scott’s novels to be as great as, and practically
identical with, that of his poems. But no “classic” could possibly have
framed the definition of poetry which he puts at the outset[1123] of the
Scott Essay as “The indirect expression in words, most appropriately in
metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or
feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed.” Everybody
will see what this owes to Wordsworth; everybody should see how it is
glossed and amplified—in a non-Wordsworthian or an extra-Wordsworthian
sense. We meet the pure critical Keble again, in his enthusiastic
adoption of Copleston’s preference for “Delight” (putting Instruction
politely in the pocket) as the poetic criterion.[1124] And his defence
of Sacred Poetry, however interested it may seem to be, coming from him,
is one of the capital essays of English criticism. He makes mince-meat
of Johnson, and he takes by anticipation a good deal of the brilliancy
out of his brilliant successor, Mr Arnold, on this subject. The passage,
short but substantial,[1125] on Spenser in this is one of the very best
to be found on that critic of critics (as by an easily intelligible play
he might be said to be) as well as poet of poets. Spenser always finds
out a bad critic—he tries good ones at their highest.
[Sidenote: _The_ Prælections.]
Still the _Prælections_ themselves must, of course, always be Keble’s
own touchstone, or rather his ground and matter of assay. And he comes
out well. The dedication (a model of stately enthusiasm) to Wordsworth
as _non solum dulcissimæ poeseos verum etiam divinæ veritatis antistes_,
strikes the keynote of the whole. But it may be surprising to some to
find how “broad” Keble is, in spite of his inflexible morality and his
uncompromising churchmanship. He was kept right partly, no doubt, by
holding fast as a matter of theory to the “Delight” test—pure and
virtuous delight, of course, but still delight, first of all and most of
all. But mere theory would have availed him little without the poetic
spirit, which everywhere in him translates itself into the critical, and
almost as little without the wide and (whether deliberately so or not)
comparative reading of ancient and modern verse which he displays. His
general definition of Poetry here is slightly different from that given
above, as was indeed required by his subject and object. He presents it—
at once refining and enlarging upon part of the Aristotelian one of
Tragedy, and neutralising the _vinum dæmonum_ notion at once,—as
_subsidium benigni numinis_, the medicinal aid given by God to subdue,
soften, and sanctify Passion. But his working out—necessarily, in its
main lines, obvious but interesting to contrast with his successor Mr
Arnold’s undogmatised and secularised application of the same
idea[1126]—is less interesting to us in itself than the _aperçus_ on
different poets, ancient and modern, to which it gives rise. Few pages
deserve to be skipped by the student: even technical discussion of the
_tenuis et arguta_ kind, as he modestly calls it, becomes alive under
his hand on such subjects as the connection of Poetry and Irony (_Præl._
v.) But there is a still higher interest in such things as the contrast,
in the same Prælection, of the undeviating self-consistency of Spenser
in all his work, the bewildering apparent lack of central unity in
Shakespeare with its resolution, and the actual inconsistency of Dryden.
All the Homeric studies deserve reading, the discussion of the _Odyssey_
in _Præl._ xi. being especially noteworthy, with its culmination in that
delightful phrase about Nausicaa which we quoted in the last
volume.[1127] Particularly wise and particularly interesting is the
treatment of “Imitation” (the lower imitation) in _Præl._ xvi., where
those who are of our mystery will not fail to compare the passage with
Vida. How comfortable is it to find a poet-critic, so uncompromising on
dignity of subject, who can yet admit, and that with not the faintest
grudging, that it “is incredible how mightily the hidden fire is roused
by single words or clauses—nay, by the sound of mere syllables, that
strike the ear at a happy nick of time.”[1128] This is almost “the
doctrine of the Poetic Moment” itself, though we must not urge it too
far, and though it is brought in apropos of the suggestiveness _to
poets_ of antecedent poetic work. It is still sovereign against a still
prevailing heresy. The abundant treatment of Æschylus[1129] is also to
be carefully noted; for, as we have observed, that mighty poet had been
almost neglected during the Neo-classic period.
The second score of Lectures is still technically devoted to the
ancients, especially Pindar, the second and third Tragedians,
Theocritus, Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace; but references to the
moderns, not very rare in the first volume, become still more frequent
here, and are sometimes, as those to Spenser and Bunyan in the matter of
allegory,[1130] and the contrast of Jason and Macduff as bewailing their
children,[1131] very notable. On his narrower subject, the judgment of
Sophocles in _Præl._ xxviii. is singularly weighty; and I should like to
have heard Mr Matthew Arnold answer on behalf of his favourite. The
comparative tameness, and the want of variety and range, which some (not
all, of course) feel in the “singer and child of sweet Colonos” are here
put with authority by one whom no one could accuse of _Sturm und Drang_
preferences, or of an undisciplined thirst for novelty. Only on
Theocritus, perhaps, does Morality sit _in banco_ with Taste to a rather
disastrous effect, and the fact is curiously explicable. His disapproval
of Scott’s strong language, and his want of ecclesiastical-mindedness,
and his lenity to liquor, had not blinded Keble in the least to Scott’s
poetry; he had admitted the charitable and comfortable old plea of
“time, not man,” in favour of certain peccadilloes of Shakespeare; he
is, in fact, nowhere squeamish to silliness. But he cannot pardon
Theocritus for the _Oaristys_ and such things, simply because the new
Wordsworthian nature-worship in him is wounded and shocked
_insanabiliter_. “Like Aristophanes,” he says, “like Catullus, like
Horace, Theocritus betakes himself to the streams and the woods, not to
seek rest for a weary mind, but as provocatives for a lustful
one.”[1132] This new “sin against the Spirit” is most interesting.
On the other hand, this very nature-worship keeps his balance, where we
might have thought he would lose it, on the subject of Lucretius. He
contrasts the comparative triviality and childishness of Virgil,
agreeable enough as it is, in regard to nature, with the mystic majesty
of his great predecessor. The charges of atheism and indecency trouble
him very little:[1133] the intense earnestness, the lofty delight in
clouds and forests and the vague, the likeness to Æschylus and Dante—all
these things he fixes on, and delights in. I wish he had written more on
Dante himself; what he has[1134] is admirable.
As to Virgil in person, though sensible enough of his merits, he says
things which would have elicited the choicest combinations of
Scaligerian Billingsgate; and brings out, in a way striking and I think
rather novel, the _permolestum_, the “serious irritation” caused by the
fact that Virgil either could not or would not give Æneas any character
at all, and that you feel sometimes inclined to think that he never
himself had any clear idea what sort of a real man his hero was. This
exaltation of the Character above the Action is very noteworthy.
But, in fact, Keble always is noteworthy, and more. Mere moderns may
dismiss him, with or without a reading, as a mill-horse treader of
academic rounds. He is nothing so little. He is, in fact, almost the
first representative of the Romantic movement who has applied its spirit
to the consecrated subjects of study; and he has shown, unfortunately to
too limited a circle, how fresh, how interesting, how inspiring the
results of this and of the true comparison of ancient and modern may
be.[1135] Literary criticism—indeed literature itself as such—was with
him, it is true, only a by-work, hardly more than a pastime. But had it
been otherwise, he would, I think, twenty years before Arnold, have
given us the results of a more thorough scholarship, a reading certainly
not less wide, a taste nearly as delicate and catholic, a broader
theory, and a much greater freedom from mere crotchet and caprice.
[Sidenote: _Garbett._]
I am not quite so well acquainted with the whole work of Keble’s
successor Garbett.[1136] Elected as he was, by the anti-Tractarian
reaction, against the apparently far superior claims of Isaac Williams,
his appointment has generally been regarded as a job; and I had to
divest myself of prejudice in reading him. He has indeed nothing of his
predecessor’s serene scholarship, and little of his clear and clean
taste. His form puts him at a special disadvantage. Instead of Keble’s
pure and flowing Latinity, you find an awkward dialect, peppered after
the fashion of Cicero’s letters with Greek words, peppered still more
highly with notes of exclamation, and, worst of all, full of words, and
clauses, and even whole sentences, in capitals, to the destruction of
all repose and dignity. He seems to have simply printed each Prælection
as he gave it (the pagings are independent), and then to have batched
them together without revision in volume form.[1137] But one cannot read
far or fairly without perceiving that, either before his election or
after it, Garbett had taken the pains to qualify by a serious study of
antecedent criticism—a study, it may be added, of which there is hardly
any trace in Keble. Garbett devotes especial attention to Longinus and
Dryden; and though I do not (as I have formerly hinted)[1138] agree with
him in regard to either,[1139] it is beyond all doubt that he had made a
distinct and original attempt to grasp both as critics. He deals with
Horace, of course; but it is noteworthy that he has again aimed at a
systematic and fresh view, taking Horace as the master of “Art Poetic,”
and comparing Boileau, &c. He has an abundant discussion of Scaliger,
whom he takes as third type and (rightly) as the father of classical
French criticism, while Dryden gives him his fourth. He knows the
Germans—not merely Lessing and Goethe, but Kant; and whatever the
failures in his execution, he can “satisfy the examiners” not merely
from the point of view of those who demand acquaintance with the history
and literature of the subject, but from that of those who postpone
everything to what they think philosophy. He refers to the climatic view
of literature,[1140] constantly combines historical and literary
considerations, and is altogether a “modern.” As has been said, I
disagree with him more often than I agree; but I do not think there can
be any serious denial of the fact that he was worthy of the Chair and of
a place here.
[Sidenote: _Claughton._]
The tenure of his successor Claughton, afterwards Bishop, was but for a
single term; and he seems to have left little memorial of it except a
singularly elegant Latin address on the appointment of Lord Derby as
Chancellor. Elegance, indeed, was Claughton’s characteristic as an
orator,[1141] but I should not imagine that he had much strength or very
wide or keen literary knowledge and enthusiasm. Of Mr. Arnold we have
spoken.
[Sidenote: _Doyle._]
There were foolish folk, not without some excuse of ignorance (if that
ever _be_ an excuse) for their foolishness, who grumbled or scoffed when
he was followed by Sir Francis Doyle. There had been some hopes of
Browning, which had been foiled—if by nothing else—by the discovery that
an Honorary M.A. degree was not a qualification; and it must be owned
that curiosity to see what Browning would do _in_ prose _on_ poetry was
highly legitimate. Moreover, the younger generation was busy with Mr.
Swinburne and Mr. Morris, who had not turned Tennyson and Browning
himself out, and they knew little of Sir Francis. Better informed
persons, however, reported of him as of an Oxford man of the best old
type of “scholar and gentleman,” a person of very shrewd wits, of
probably greater practical experience than any Professor of Poetry had
ever had, and the author of certain things like _The Red Thread of
Honour_ and _The Private of the Buffs_, which, in their own peculiar
style and division, were poetry _sans phrase_. The report was justified
by the new Professor’s Lectures.[1142] They are frankly exoteric; but
they are saved by scholarship from the charge of ever being popular in
the bad sense. They adopt as frankly, and carry a little farther, that
plan of making the lectures, if not exactly reviews of particular books
new and old, at any rate _causeries_ hung on particular texts and pegs,
which the vernacularisation of the Chair had made inevitable, and to
which Matthew Arnold himself had inclined gladly enough. They are,
though not in the least degree slipshod or slovenly, quite
conversational in style. But they deserve, I think, no mean place among
the documents of the Chair. Their easy, well-bred common-sense, kept
from being really Philistine (which epithet Sir Francis good-humouredly
accepted), not merely by their good breeding, but by the aforesaid
scholarship, by natural acuteness, and by an intense unaffected love for
poetry, might not be a good staple. But if the electors could manage to
let it come round again, as an exception, once in a generation or so, it
would be well, and better than well.
[Sidenote: _Shairp._]
Of Principal Shairp so many good men have said so many good things that
it is almost unnecessary to add, in this special place and context, the
praise (which can be given ungrudgingly) that he has always, in his
critical work, had before him good intentions and high ideals. Much
further addition, I fear, cannot be made. When I read his question, “Did
not Shakespeare hate and despise Iago and Edmund?”[1143] when I remember
how Shakespeare himself put in the mouth of the one—
“I bleed, sir, but not killed”;
in the mouth of the other—
“The wheel is come full circle; I am here”;
and—
“Yet Edmund was beloved,”
I own I sympathise with an unconventional and unsophisticated soul who,
once reading this same utterance of Mr. Shairp’s, rose, strode about the
room, and sitting down, ejaculated, “What are you to do? What are you to
say? Where are you to go? when a Professor of Poetry, uttering such
things in Oxford, is not taken out, and stoned or burnt forthwith,
between Balliol and the _Randolph_?” And there is an only less dreadful
passage[1144] of miscomprehension on the magnificent close of Tennyson’s
“Love and Duty”—one of the greatest examples of the difficult
“_Versöhnung_ close,” the reconciliation of art, the relapse into peace.
But the lesson of criticism is a lesson of tolerance. A complete and
careful perusal of Mr Shairp’s _Aspects of Poetry_, and of his other
books, will indeed show that the _apices_ of criticism, whether
historical, or appreciative, or even philosophical, were beyond his
climb. He shows that constant necessity or temptation of engaging in
comment—eulogistic or controversial—upon the _ephemera critica_ of the
time, which has been one of the worst results of the change of the
lectures from Latin to English. You could not, in the stately old
vehicle, do more than occasionally decline upon such a lower level as
this. Mr Shairp is always citing and fencing with (or extolling
reviewer-fashion) Arnold or Bagehot, Hutton or Myers. _Quotidiana
quotidie moriuntur_; and, though no doubt it saves much trouble to
Professors if they can take out of a newspaper or a review, or even a
recent book, on their way to Oxford, a text for an hour’s sermon, their
state _sub specie æternitatis_ is far from the more gracious. Oxford is
constantly making new statutes now; I think one forbidding any citation
from this Chair of critical or creative literature less than thirty
years old would not be bad.
More happy, if not always more critical, were his dealings with things
Scottish, where sympathy lifted him out of the peddling, and transformed
the parochial. On Burns (even though there must have been searchings of
heart there) he could sometimes, though by no means always, speak
excellently; on Scott superexcellently; on Wordsworth almost as well; on
the Highland poets (if we do not forget our salt-cellar) best of all,
because he spoke with knowledge and not as Mr Arnold. His work is always
amiable, often admirable: I wish I could say that it is always or often
critical.[1145]
[Sidenote: _Palgrave._]
The great achievement of Mr Shairp’s successor, Francis Turner Palgrave,
in regard to literary criticism, is an indirect one, and had been mostly
done years and decades before he was elected to the Chair. Indeed, I
think little if anything was given to the world as the direct result of
his professorial work. As an actual critic or reviewer, Palgrave was no
doubt distinguished not over-favourably by that tendency to “splash” and
_tapage_ of manner which he shared with Kinglake and some other writers
of the mid-nineteenth century, and which has been recently revived. But
his real taste was in a manner warranted by his friendships; and his
friendships must almost have kept him right if he had had less taste. He
may have profited largely by these friendships in the composition of the
two parts of that really _Golden Treasury_, which, if it does not
achieve the impossible in giving everybody what he wants, all that he
wants, and nothing that he does not want, is by general confession the
most successful attempt in a quite appallingly difficult kind. The
second part, which has of course been the most criticised, seems to me
even more remarkable than the first, as showing an almost complete
freedom from one easily besetting sin, the tendency not to relish styles
that have come in since the critic “commenced” in criticism.
[Sidenote: Salutantur vivi.]
Of the late and the present holders of the Chair we are happily
precluded from speaking critically. May the bar not soon be lifted!
-----
Footnote 1105:
Of Whitfield (or Whit_feld_, as some write) I have found nothing but
that he wrote some Latin verses on William the Third. The second
volume of William Hawkins’s _Tracts_ (1758) contains, besides a
ridiculous tragedy, _Henry and Rosamond_, an _Essay on Drama_,
principally occupied by carpings at Mason’s _Elfrida_, and some
Letters on Pope’s Commentary on Homer—very small critical beer. About
Wheeler I find less even than about Whitfield. The piety of his son
published—long after date and in our own times—1870—the _Prælections_
of John Randolph, a man who, besides holding several other
professorships at Oxford, attained to eminence in the Church, and died
Bishop of London in 1813. They are very sober and respectable. There
is in poetry a _non contemnenda proprietas quod imitando præcipiat_;
and the warning, _non aliunde artis suæ rudimenta desumet Criticus
nisi ex sanæ Logices præceptis_, might with advantage have been
observed oftener than it has been. But Randolph sticks in the bark and
the letter. Holmes, a poet after a fashion, a theologian, and what
not, seems to have written more freely on anything than on criticism.
Footnote 1106:
He complies with the requirements of method and fashion by dealing
_generally_ with the End and Usefulness of Poetry, its Kinds and so
forth. But all this we have had a thousand times. What we have here
specially is a comparison, and a new comparison.
Footnote 1107:
Vol. i. p. 57 _sq._
Footnote 1108:
Southey, himself a proper moral man in all conscience, but a sensible
one withal, somewhere remarks, “said well but not wisely” on Hurdis’s
“Give me the steed
Whose generous efforts bore the prize away,
I care not for his grandsire or his dam.”
A mild echo of the revolutionary period!
Footnote 1109:
In a review in the _British Critic_ (1814), reprinted in _Papers and
Reviews_, Oxford and London, 1877.
Footnote 1110:
See the _Remains_, edited by his son. London, 1871.
Footnote 1111:
First published at the end of his tenure in 1813. My copy is the 2nd
ed., Oxford, 1828.
Footnote 1112:
See remarks on Trapp, pp. 6 and 7 ed. cit.
Footnote 1113:
_V._ pp. 187, 197, 390, 229, 177.
Footnote 1114:
Keble, however, was right in specifying the chief exception—the
admirable prælection on _Epitaphs_ (No. 27, p. 340).
Footnote 1115:
This is all the more tantalising in that his definition of _Judicium_
in _Præl._ 2 seems to promise nothing less than an inquiry into the
critical and appreciative faculty as regards Poetry.
Footnote 1116:
_V._ vol. i.
Footnote 1117:
London, 1826.
Footnote 1118:
See Beddoes’ _Letters_ (ed. Gosse, London, 1894), p. 68: “Mr Milman
(our poetry professor) has made me quite unfashionable here by
denouncing me as one of a ‘villainous school.’” These Letters are
crammed with matter of literary and critical interest. I was much
tempted to give them a place in the text as illustrating the critical
opinions of a person in whom great wits and madness were rather
blended than allied; in the transition generation—the _mezzanine_
floor—of 1800-1830.
Footnote 1119:
_Prælectiones Academicæ Oxonii habitæ annis_ 1832-41. Oxford, 1844. 2
vols., but continuously paged.
Footnote 1120:
_Occasional Papers and Reviews_, by John Keble, M.A. Oxford and
London, 1877.
Footnote 1121:
_Occ. Pap._, p. 62.
Footnote 1122:
The place most perilously aleatory is the fling in _Occ. Pap._, p. 87,
at “Mr Leigh Hunt _and his miserable followers_.”
Footnote 1123:
_Occ. Pap._, p. 6.
Footnote 1124:
Ibid., p. 150.
Footnote 1125:
Ibid., pp. 98-102.
Footnote 1126:
Those who make the contrast will, however, I think, find out that
Arnold owes more to his forerunner than might be gathered from his
published lectures.
Footnote 1127:
P. 312.
Footnote 1128:
_Præl. Ac._, p. 281.
Footnote 1129:
It occupies seven Prælections (xvii.-xxiii.) and some 200 pages.
Footnote 1130:
ii. 415.
Footnote 1131:
ii. 586.
Footnote 1132:
ii. 641. He has a liking for Horace; but objects to him (not quite
unreasonably) as _sordidior quidem_ in his Epicureanism, when you
compare him with Lucretius.
Footnote 1133:
He allows him, as well as Byron and Shelley, the plea of _vix compos_
in certain respects.
Footnote 1134:
ii. 678 _sq._ and elsewhere.
Footnote 1135:
I pass, as needless to dwell on at length, the excellence of his
style and expression in these lectures. “So acute in remark, so
beautiful in language,” as Newman says in the letter printed in _Occ.
Pap._, p. xii. _sq._
Footnote 1136:
My only _possession_ is _De Re Critica Prælectiones_. Oxford, 1847.
Footnote 1137:
My copy, which is “from the author” to some one unknown, has not a few
pen-corrections, apparently in his own hand.
Footnote 1138:
Vol. ii. p. 372.
Footnote 1139:
It is particularly unfortunate that he has endeavoured to construct a
theory of Longinus as a statesman-critic, comparing him with Burke. I
have already said that I do not think the identification of the author
of the book with Zenobia’s prime minister in the least disproved or
(with the materials at present at disposal) disprovable: but it
certainly is not proved to the point of serving as basis to such a
theory.
Footnote 1140:
With reference to Schlegel and Madame de Staël.
Footnote 1141:
His sermons have been disrespectfully spoken of; but I think unjustly.
I heard them myself in pretty close juxtaposition with those of Pusey
and Wilberforce, and even with the, in both senses, rare discourses of
Mansel. In vigour and body they were nowhere beside any of these; but
they could fairly hold their own in the softer ways of style.
Footnote 1142:
First Series (comprising the “Inaugural,” with two others on
“Provincial Poetry” and _The Dream of Gerontius_), London, 1869. A
second appeared in 1877.
Footnote 1143:
_Aspects of Poetry_ (London, 1881), p. 30.
Footnote 1144:
Ibid., p. 157.
Footnote 1145:
How entirely _un_critical he was may be judged from the fact that he
brackets Voltaire and Diderot as apostles of the _Aufklärung_ in an
anti-Romantic sense.
APPENDIX II.
AMERICAN CRITICISM.
AN ATTEMPT IN OUTLINE ONLY—ITS DIFFICULTIES— THE EARLY STAGES—THE
ORIGINS AND PIONEERS— TICKNOR—LONGFELLOW—EMERSON—POE— LOWELL: HIS
GENERAL POSITION—‘AMONG MY BOOKS’— ‘MY STUDY WINDOWS‘—‘ESSAYS ON THE
ENGLISH POETS’— LAST ESSAYS—O. W. HOLMES—THE WHOLE DUTY OF CRITICS
STATED BY HIM _IN ALIA MATERIA_— WHITMAN AND THE “DEMOCRATIC” IDEAL—
MARGARET FULLER— RIPLEY—WHIPPLE—LANIER.
[Sidenote: _An attempt in outline only._]
I am very well aware of the arguments which may be advanced against
attempting to extend our survey of criticism across the Atlantic. I at
least do not undervalue the apparently formal, but in truth real,
objection that we have undertaken _European_ criticism only: while I
appreciate the opposite demur, that the space of an appendix is as
uncomplimentary and as uncomplementary as total exclusion would be. But
after having taken counsel of more than one American friend, by no means
specially Anglophile in temper, I found that, apparently, the inclusion
even in this form would be at least sometimes taken in the spirit in
which it is meant, while on the other hand I had myself felt very
strongly the disadvantage of excluding such a critic as Mr Lowell, who
has all the characteristics of the best of our own with an inviting
_differentia_. The bursting-point, however, of this volume is pretty
nearly reached; and I must again observe that there is no invidious
intention in the proportion of the notice. I have endeavoured to allot
to Mr Lowell himself a space (allowing for differences of scale and
type) not, I think, unfair in proportion to his English fellows; others
I have had to survey more in summary. But I hope that the whole may at
any rate provide a not inadequate outline-sketch of the subject; and in
this hope I submit it, not merely to English readers, but to those still
more nearly concerned, from some of whom this book has received
attention at once of the most candid (in the better pre-Sheridanian
sense of that word) and of the most searchingly competent.
[Sidenote: _Its difficulties._]
The difficulties of the task are complicated by the necessity, according
to our plan, of omitting living writers. The history of American
criticism appears, even more than that of other departments of
literature, to be very mainly a history of the present; and I could
write _ex abundanti_ on that. The “middle distance” is also well
provided. But the origins are singularly obscure, and appear to be
regarded with neither pride nor interest by Americans themselves. When I
thought of this excursus first, some years ago, I was referred by an
American friend to two articles[1146] which had appeared not long before
in _The International Monthly_ on “American Literary Criticism and the
Doctrine of Evolution.” The title gave me some forebodings in its
doubleness; yet this might be interpreted favourably, for how can you
treat the “evolution” of a subject without treating its history? I
found, however, that the author, though his papers lacked neither
thought nor style, was wholly occupied with the doctrine of evolutionary
criticism generally, as against judicial and appreciative; and that he
did not even propose to meddle with the history of his subject save by
occasional allusion. The histories of American literature have afforded
me something more, but not much.
[Sidenote: _The early stages._]
I do not mention this in any spirit of fault-finding, for few people are
less likely than myself to need reminding that in literary and critical
history, as elsewhere, you cannot make bricks without straw, and still
less without clay. There was, and there could be, little attempt at
important criticism in “colonial” times, and the immense material
expansion of the earlier Republican period was very little more
favourable to it than the quiescence and dependence of the
Monarchical.[1147]
The definite entrance of the United States into the society of nations,
after the second war with England and the settlement of Europe by the
final suppression of Napoleon, as necessarily brought with it the
organisation of critical as of other employment for the intellect.
[Sidenote: _The origins and pioneers._] There is something agreeably
Arcadian in the idea of Longfellow, a boy of nineteen, being sent to
Europe by the trustees of his college to qualify himself for a Chair of
Literature; but the fact is no more and no less creditable to these
functionaries than it is symbolic of the new tendencies of the time.
Still, Longfellow was not actually the apostle of comparative and
extensive criticism in America. Ticknor, his elder by eighteen years,
had, partly no doubt by this very fact of the admission of his country
to the full franchise of nations, been induced to give up the study and
practice of the law, and to devote himself to literature, in the very
year of Waterloo itself. And he too, after a sojourn in Europe, became,
some years before his fellow at Bowdoin, Professor of Modern Languages
and Belles Lettres at Harvard. Emerson, born between the two, was a
little later in treading the same road than either, but he trod it; and
his visit to Europe, in 1833, determined the critical writings and
lectures which followed.
These three I should take to be the founders of American criticism of
the adult and accomplished kind, and they represent it, interestingly
enough, in three different ways. It is true that no one of them is first
of all a critic, or even, as Mr. Lowell was afterwards, a critic in
power at least equal to that of any other of his qualities. But this was
only in the nature of things.
[Sidenote: _Ticknor._]
It is not merely because Ticknor’s lifework was a literary history that
one may call him first of all a literary historian. The fact that the
_History of Spanish Literature_, more than fifty years after its
publication, and nearly seventy after its inception, although the
interval has been one of the fiercest in pursuing, and one of the most
voluminous in recording, literary explorations, retains, and is likely
to retain, its position not merely as a classic, but as an authority,
shows some pre-established harmony between writer and task. Yet, though
the provinces of the literary historian and the critic overlap to a very
large extent,—though the historian who is not a critic must be a mere
reference-monger, and the critic who is not a historian a mere
bellettrist,—yet there are skirts and fringes of each province which are
not necessarily part of the other. Ticknor is rather less of a critic
than he is of a historian—his grouping of facts, his investigation and
statement of them, his perception of origins and connections, are all a
little superior to his appreciation pure and simple. Yet there are few
who can afford to look down on him in this latter respect; and as
historical critic and critical historian I do not know where to look for
his superior, while I should have very soon done looking for his equals.
[Sidenote: _Longfellow._]
Longfellow (for it will be convenient to take Emerson last) shows us, as
a matter of course, a different critical phase. He never, so far as I
know, wrote any connected study of literature, and I do not think that
it would have been very good if he had. His lectures, which were
necessarily numerous, and the articles which he wrote (I believe in no
small numbers) have never taken any important position, and again I
should doubt whether, if we had them or more of them, anything very
remarkable would be included.[1148] Yet he had, and displayed in the
intensest degree, that most agreeable and not least profitable function
of the critical faculty which attaches itself to literature, assimilates
it, transforms it into instruction and delight. This is noticeable in
almost every page of his poems: it is the very genesis of many of them,
and perhaps of the best of them: it is at once the explanation and the
refutation of the charge of want of originality brought against him. So
in his prose. _Hyperion_ and _Outre-Mer_ are permeated and saturated
with it. The literature of Germany, the literature of Spain, have done
more than colour the poet’s or prose-writer’s work; they have penetrated
to its substance, fed it, been digested and absorbed into its very life.
From _The Golden Legend_ and _The Spanish Student_ to the smallest
fragments this process is noteworthy. And while it shows, on the part of
the writer himself, processes necessary to the critic, in intenser and
more poetic form, it performs on the reader “the office of the critic”—
his hierophantic, initiating, inoculating office—in the most vivid and
forcible manner and degree. No one who, susceptible to literature, but
more or less ignorant of it, reads Longfellow but must, consciously or
unconsciously, imbibe something of literature itself—of a literature far
wider and deeper than that which the poet (though I speak as a lifelong
lover of Longfellow’s poetry) himself creates.
[Sidenote: _Emerson._]
That Emerson also is not first of all a critic is not surprising,
because, as most people have seen, Emerson is not, first of all,
anything but Emerson. But he is in some ways more of a critic than
either of the others, and the reason why he is not more so still is
that, like his master or analogue Carlyle, he rather refuses to look on
literature as literature. His ethical preoccupations and his
transcendentalism alike prevent him from doing this—he is Carlyle _plus_
Vinet. In the second place, if I may say so without offence, he shows
us, as neither Ticknor nor Longfellow, both of whom were too
cosmopolitan, shows us, the American touch-me-not-ishness, the somewhat
unnecessary affectation of nationality. The literary chauvinism of the
famous lecture on “The American Scholar” is perhaps more apparent than
real; but his query, “Who is Southey?” in the record of his interview
with Landor, is awkward. “Southey is, say what you like about his poetry
or his politics, one of the greatest _men of letters_ of all time,” is
the answer which a critic should have given to himself. Yet there is
much good positive criticism in Emerson (if there can be said to be
anything positive in him), and there is still more of that vague
stimulative force which is so noticeable in these first great writers of
America, and which is so interesting when we consider their
circumstances, individual and national. In the _English Traits_ and the
_Representative Men_, in the lectures and elsewhere, there is always
ringing to the fit ear the “_Tolle, lege!_” of the greater critics, with
the comment which helps to make the book understood, when it is taken up
and read.
[Sidenote: _Poe._]
By the ’Thirties and ’Forties of the nineteenth century the European
pilgrimage was no longer necessary to fetch the critical spark home.
American criticism became abundant, and not merely abundant. In no case
do I so much regret the necessity of compression as in that of Poe. The
extreme and almost incomprehensible injustice with which the ill-fated
author of _Ligeia_ and _The Haunted Palace_ was so long treated by his
countrymen has, I believe, abated; and I have seen, in the article
referred to, a complimentary, though merely passing, reference to him as
a critic. But there is still room, I think, for some substantial
_Rettung_, as Lessing would have said. The substance would have to be
considerable, for the matter under consideration,[1149] which is not
small in bulk, is heterogeneous, and even to some extent chaotic. More
than any other part of Poe’s work it is the scapegoat of his
unfavourable circumstances, of his patchy education, of his weaknesses
in conduct, temper, and constitution. A great deal is mere hack-writing—
_chaînes de l’esclavage_—stuff never meant to abide the steady judgment
of posterity. You may, if you please, pick out of it the most amazing
things, such[1150] as that “for one Fouqué there are fifty Molières” (I
am no undervaluer of Fouqué, but I wish—I _do_ wish—that I knew where to
look for even one of the forty-nine additional Poquelins); and “for one
Dickens ... five million ... Fieldings,” where perhaps five million
marks of exclamation might not inadequately meet the case. Generous as
is the praise which he heaps upon Mrs Browning and Mr Horne; true as
much of what he says is; one feels that his observations want
_reducing_, adjusting, co-ordinating under the calmer influence of
comparative and universal criticism. There was not the slightest reason
why he should get into such a frantic rage with, the “devilled kidneys”
(a most pleasant and wholesome food) in that very pleasant and wholesome
book _Charles O’Malley_; or why he should have so furiously resented Mr
Lowell’s remarks on himself in the _Fable for Critics_, open as these
are to criticism; or why he should have said or done a hundred other
things of the kind. His “hungry heart and burning,” his ill-disciplined
intellect and temper, drove him in all sorts of directions, and not
unfrequently in the wrong ones.
Yet his critical instincts were almost always right; and not seldom they
were remarkably original. Considering what the ways of poets are, and
that Poe had his full share of the then prevailing American soreness
towards “British” writers, I know few things in literature more pleasant
and edifying at once than his enthusiastic and intelligent welcome of
Tennyson. “The Rationale of Verse,” though there are faults in it, due
to ignorance or carelessness in terminology, to haste, and to imperfect
reading, is one of the best things ever written on English prosody, and
quite astonishingly original. Although, when he takes a great deal of
pains it is apt to be rather lost labour, as, for instance, in the
comically laborious dissection of Longfellow’s _Spanish Student_ (a
delightful thing if taken in the proper way), the acuteness which he
often shows even in such pieces, and much more in his lighter _aperçus_,
is remarkable. The _Marginalia_ are full of good things—I find, after
reading them anew for this purpose, that my reference slips “stand like
the corn arow.” His dislike of German criticism[1151] may have been half
opposition to Carlyle, between whom and himself there was a gulf fixed;
and he should not have said that Macaulay had more true critical spirit
than both the Schlegels put together. But this very passage is worth
pondering, and it was very bold at the time. I do not think he borrowed
the true observation of the resemblance between _Hudibras_ and the
_Satyre Menippée_.[1152] His defence of the “rhetorician’s rules”[1153]
is just and lively: it is not a little noteworthy that he, the most
apparently irregular and spasmodic of men of genius, perfectly
understands the importance of Form.
And all this, let it be remembered, was written, not merely in distress,
and in disease, and sometimes in despair, but—to adapt the Dickensian
and Gautieresque juxtaposition—in the ’Thirties and 'Forties, when, as
we have seen, criticism in England itself had fallen into the state from
which it was aroused by Matthew Arnold years after Poe’s death; when
Carlyle was turning his back on it, when Macaulay was acknowledging that
he was not the man for it, when the men who meddled with it were showing
absolute want of comprehension of Tennyson, and passing Browning over as
beneath their notice. It was written in spite of the bad influence
(discernible enough, as it is, in Poe) of the swaggering, swashbuckler
fashion of “British” criticism itself. It was written before—long before
in most cases—Lowell came to his maturity as a critic. It is, except in
flashes and indications, mostly a might-have-been. But that
might-have-been, translated into fact, would, I think, have ranked with
the most noteworthy critical achievements that we possess in regard to
poetry and _belles-lettres_. On other departments Poe could probably
never, in the most favourable circumstances, have laid much hold. But in
his own sphere he not only did the works, but knew those who did them
and how they were done.
[Sidenote: _Lowell: his general position._]
On the whole, however, I suppose that a majority of the best judges
would award the place of premier critic of America to Mr Lowell, and I
should certainly not attempt to contest the judgment. He had, in an
eminent degree, most of the qualities which our long examination has
enabled us to specify as generally found in good critics; catholic and
observant reading, real enthusiasm for literature, sanity of judgment,
good-humour, width of view, and (though this perhaps in rather less
measure than the others) methodic arrangement and grasp. He was free,
not merely from the defects which are the opposites of these good
qualities, but from others—the niggling and carping of the
gerund-grinder and the _gradus_-hunter,[1154] the hideboundness of the
type-and-kind critic, and above all the incomprehensible and yet
all-pervading inability to like something because it is not something
else. He could put his perceptions brightly and forcibly—in a way
perhaps rather tempting to re-read than at once sinking into the memory,
but not the less excellent, and perhaps (in criticism) rather the more
uncommon, for that.
On the wrong side of the account there are of course some things to put.
I shall not be suspected of wishing to banish quips and cranks from
criticism, but Mr Lowell was perhaps a little too prodigal of them. His
patriotism was a little aggressive—not in the way (which he had far too
much critical good sense ever to tread) of overvaluing his countrymen’s
literary performances, but in too often infusing into his criticism a
sort of _Nemo-me-impune-lacessit_ flavour which was quite unnecessary,
and in fact almost entirely irrelevant. And lastly, as has been hinted
above, his grasp was not always sure. To compare the two papers on Gray,
written at no great interval of time, by him and by his slightly younger
contemporary Mr Arnold, is very interesting and instructive. I am not
sure that, if it were just (or indeed possible) to extract separate good
critical things, like nuggets, from the two essays, and weigh the
parcels against each other, the American would not prove the richer,
even allowing weight for length. But Gray is not “put” in the Harvard
man’s essay as he is in the Oxonian’s: the critical contact is less full
and vital, the congress less complete. It may be urged, indeed, that the
selection is not quite fair, because of the unusual sympathy, and as it
were harmony pre-established, between the Graian and the Arnoldian
temperaments; but the same slight shortcoming will be found
elsewhere.[1155]
[Sidenote: Among my Books.]
Mr Lowell’s best known book of literary criticism is, no doubt, _Among
my Books_; but though it shows his method characteristically enough, it
is by no means mainly bookish: in fact, I think there is rather less in
it about the literary part of the matter than in others. The famous
essay on “Dryden” is of course a standard, and perhaps its author’s
diploma-piece as a critic; and the “Shakespeare once More” (a title
suggested by Goethe) is a very interesting literary _pot-pourri_. But
the “Lessing” and the “Rousseau” are chiefly biographical; and such
papers as “Witchcraft” and “New England,” attractive as they are, are
from the literary point of view quite “off,” as literary slang has it.
There is nothing to object to in this, for the general title covers
subjects suggested by books, or the subjects of books, quite as amply as
books-by-themselves-books; and there can be no doubt that the reader
usually likes the others best. But the whole volume shows its author
well as a scholar but not a pedant, a man of letters who is also a man
of the world, and a judge who, though by no means ideally impartial, and
even with a tolerably well-stuffed portfolio of prejudices, can give
judgments not to be pooh-poohed at the worst, and at the best things
worthy to take their place with the best of judge-made law in our
subject.
[Sidenote: My Study Windows.]
The equally well-known _My Study Windows_ does not contain, as the title
may seem to intimate, matter of _more_ mixed quality as regards pure
literature, but the quality is still mixed. Mr Lowell was not happy in
his reception of the avatar of Mr Swinburne: it is indeed so rare for a
man of more than middle age to be quite at focus with a new poet, that
some of the wiser or more pusillanimous of our kind decline in such
cases to register a formal judgment. The “Carlyle” is much tainted by
political prejudice, though it does credit to Mr Lowell’s perspicacity
to have so early found out in Carlyle that real “Toryism” which was so
long mistaken. But the “Chaucer” and the “Pope”—differ here and there
with them as we may or must—are solid and substantive contributions to
the main shelf of criticism; while in the lower ranges “The Life and
Letters of James Gates Perceval” only needed more quotation and more
ruthlessness to make it a pendant to Macaulay’s “Montgomery.”
[Sidenote: Essays on the English Poets.]
The Essays which have been reprinted in England, with the permission of
Mr Lowell and with a Preface by his own hands, as _Essays on the English
Poets_[1156] (including those on Lessing and Rousseau as a very welcome
though not exceedingly relevant bonus or make-weight), are partly drawn
from the two books just noticed. Some of them seem to have been written
rather early; most were originally lectures to a university, and may
have a little sacrificed literature to instruction. The best by a good
deal is, I think, the “Wordsworth,”[1157] which, though there are many
good essays on Wordsworth to make up for the many bad ones, deserves to
rank almost with the best. It is seldom that in a single essay one finds
such a capital specimen of delicate appreciation as the comparison of
the fall of Goethe’s _Ueber allen Gipfeln_ to “blossoms shaken down by a
noonday breeze on turf”; so good an example of the criticism of epigram
as “Wordsworth is the historian of Wordsworthshire”;[1158] and so fine
and just a critical simile as the comparison of Milton’s verse to a
mixed fleet of men-of-war and merchantmen, which comes shortly after.
The “Milton” itself has more to do with Milton’s editor and biographer
than with Milton, and is marred by that curious impatience of a reasoned
prosody which appears in Mr Lowell so often. So is the Spenser—quite
admirable in great part of it—by the author’s well-known and excessive
depreciation of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century poetry.[1159] The
“Keats” leaves off just when we are expecting the critic to begin. As if
to carry out unity of cross-purpose, if of nothing more, the “Lessing”
hardly says anything about Lessing’s criticism, and the “Rousseau” is
chiefly about Rousseau as a man. But though, putting the “Wordsworth”
aside, the contents of the volume would hardly have given us a fair idea
of Mr Lowell’s critical powers by themselves, it could have been written
by no bad critic as a whole, and in part could only have been written by
a very good one.
[Sidenote: _Last Essays._]
As nearly always, too, this critic’s last work is of his best. The
“Gray” we have noticed. The “Landor” is mainly, though not wholly,
personal; and the “Walton,” as a “Walton” must be and ought to be,
rather of life rather than of literature. But the paper on the
_Areopagitica_ is an admirable piece, and “On the Study of Modern
Languages” stands, I think, alone among the arguments on its side,
distinguished at once by competent knowledge and judicial fairness in
regard to ancient and modern alike.
So much critical gift, indeed, of so wide a range and so happy in its
display, is seldom to be found. And though nothing is more impertinent
than to recommend a representative to a constituency to which you do not
yourself belong, I think that perhaps these volumes may give me the
right to say that if I were an American I should vote for Mr Lowell, and
that whatever might be my nationality I should say “Well done!” if he
were elected.
[Sidenote: _O. W. Holmes._]
To pass to yet another of the same distinguished group. There is, though
a great deal of indirect, not much direct criticism in the omniform and
(when the writer could keep the cant of anti-cant out) almost always
agreeable trilogy of the _Breakfast-Table_. But there is one
passage[1160] in the last of the three which, with hardly an alteration,
is so admirable and final a description of the duty of the critic
himself that I must borrow it with some slight interlineations. These, I
am sure, Dr Holmes—if only as to a brother member of the Rabelais Club
of pleasant memory—would not have refused me:—
[Sidenote: _The whole duty of critics stated by him_ in alia materia.]
“Now the present case, as the (critic)/doctor sees it, is just exactly
such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before—a
snarl and tangle of special conditions out of which it is his business
to wind as much thread as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter
goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him.
He has seen just such noses, and just such eyes, and just such mouths:
but he never saw exactly such a face before, and his business is with
that and no other person’s—with the features of the worthy father of a
family before him, and not with the portraits he has seen in
galleries, or books, or Mr Copley’s grand pictures of the fine old
Tories, or the Apollos and Jupiters of Greek sculpture. It is the same
with (critic’s subject)/the patient. His (production)/disease has
features of its own; there never was and never will be another case in
all respects exactly like it. If a (critic)/doctor has science without
common-sense he treats a (book)/fever, but not this man’s
(book)/fever. If he has common-sense without science he treats this
man’s (book)/fever without knowing the general laws that govern (books
and all literature)/all fevers and all vital movements.”
Which thing let it be frontlet and wristlet to whosoever meddles with
criticism.
[Sidenote: _Whitman and the “Democratic” ideal._]
The poet who seems to some possibly rash non-American persons to divide
with Poe the prize due to the worthiest in American poetry, was also a
critic—less of the professional kind, much more _borné_, but more
concentrated, and in some ways more influential. The critical views of
Walt Whitman are scattered all over his not inconsiderable works, but
are to be found brought together and marshalled most aggressively in his
prose _Democratic Vistas_, with their “General Notes,” and in the
_numeris lege solutis_ of the _Song of the Exposition_. According to
these views, though Whitman speaks of individual writers (not merely
Shakespeare but even Scott) with warm admiration, and with nothing of
the curious blindness which has characterised some of his followers in
the line, “English literature is not great” because it is
anti-Democratic and Feudal. These “Notes” must develop something quite
different, and of the nature of an antidote. All “warrior epics” are
“void, inanimate, passed,” and so forth. The expression of this is
often, as Whitman’s expression constantly is, admirable, and the temper
of it is always intentionally wholesome and generous. If I regard it as
hopelessly bad criticism, it is not (to repeat the refrain once more)
because I disagree with its conclusions, but because it seems to me to
start from a hopelessly wrong principle, and to proceed on hopelessly
mistaken methods. That principle and those methods, _mutatis mutandis_,
would justify _me_ in dismissing—nay, would force me to dismiss—as void,
inanimate, worthless, mischievous, something of Heine, much of Shelley,
more of Hugo, and very nearly the whole of Whitman himself—four poets in
four different countries born, whom, as it happens, if I were the
responsible literary adviser of a new King Arthur of Poetry, I should
bid him summon among the very first to his Round Table. To the critic,
as I understand criticism (and if I may adapt a famous text of
Scripture), Feudalism is nothing and Democracy is nothing, but the
Spirit of Literature. Whitman did not think so, and unfortunately his
ideas (which may have been partly suggested by Emerson) have found
followers who have not always mellowed and antidoted the crude poison of
theory with the generous wine of temperament and expression.
Of the remarkable, if somewhat abortive, “Transcendental” group in the
latter part of the first half of the nineteenth century, George Ripley
and Margaret Fuller seem to call for notice here: as specimens of later
writers, Whipple and Sidney Lanier may suffice, in the impossibility of
including a considerable _numerus_.[1161]
[Sidenote: _Margaret Fuller._]
The critical writings of the Marchesa Ossoli are, I suppose, chiefly
contained in the volumes of her works entitled _Art, Literature, and
Drama_, and _Life Without and Life Within_. They have much interest, and
I think deserve the position assigned to her[1162] as the first American
woman who had regularly trained for criticism, and as being in a way the
chief of all such to the present day. They have, however, certain
characteristics which perhaps might be anticipated. The merely silly
reproach of transcendentalism leaves “Margaret” unscathed. She does not
talk nonsense. But she does talk a little vaguely and loosely; and it
does seem rather difficult for her to keep her eye steadily on any one
object. We know that she will overvalue Goethe; it was, as we have
pointed out, the very form and pressure of the time that made her do so,
and probably to no country was the gospel according to Wolfgang a more
powerful and beneficent gospel than to the United States of America in
the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But when we read, _in
English_, that “the frail Philina, graceful though contemptible,
presents the degradation incident to an attempt at leading an
exclusively poetic life,” or that “not even in Shakespeare” has she
“felt the organising power of genius as in” Ottilie of the
_Wahlverwandtschaften_, we think a great deal more than there is room or
necessity here to say. The article on Poe’s Poems is very curious; the
critic appears as a sort of she-Balaam, without that unlucky prophet’s
generous frankness when he found he could not help it; she cannot ban,
and will not bless freely. That on _Philip van Artevelde_ is more
curious still in another way. It makes the most enormous and yet
indecisive sweeps before attacking its subject, feints at the whole
question of Classic _v._ Romantic, says more about Alfieri (who seems to
have been Margaret’s favourite poet) than about Taylor, and finally
despatches the nominal theme in very few and very inadequate words. She
is always attractive[1163]—this “_Margarita_ del Occidente”—this new
“Margarite of America,” and the ideas which, before reading, some may
have formed of her as of a sort of “mother of all such as are
schoolmarms” melt at once in contact with her work. But would she ever
have become a great critic? I doubt it; she certainly had not become one
when she died. She was thinking of things other than the Power of the
Word. Better, if anybody likes; but other.
[Sidenote: _Ripley._]
Her editor, I think, and, with Emerson, certainly her teacher, the
Reverend George Ripley, did very much to imbue his country with foreign
literature; not a little to help it to understand that literature.
Ripley has been very highly spoken of, by good authorities, for the
attempts which he made to produce a higher standard and a wider range of
literary scholarship in the United States: and in fact there is no doubt
that the Transcendental group did yeoman’s service in this way, their
work not a little resembling that done in Germany a hundred years, or a
little less, earlier. But I do not know many of his later Reviews in the
_Tribune_, and his _Specimens of Foreign Literature_, two volumes
published at Boston in 1838 as the ushers and samples of a much larger
library of the subject, are not in the least literary, but purely
philosophical. They give translated extracts from Cousin, Jouffroy, and
Benjamin Constant, with Introductions and rather copious notes or short
excursus. The whole shows knowledge, judgment, and a real critical
capacity; but these good gifts are, as has been said, devoted to the
philosophic, not the literary character and achievement of their
subjects, and it is very noticeable that of the nearly twenty books or
parts of books which are announced as to form the intended library, more
than half are purely philosophical and only a small part purely
literary.
[Sidenote: _Whipple._]
Of Whipple I chiefly know the two volumes of _Essays and Reviews_, which
appeared as long ago as 1849. He must have written much else, as he did
not die till 1886; but the contents of these volumes are bulky enough
and varied enough, I should suppose, to afford a fair field of judgment.
His countrymen have, I believe, rather outgrown him, and do not at
present rank him very high; but the “perspective of the past,” as it
“firms,” will probably establish him in a fair though not a very high
place. He seems to me to have been one of the first American writers who
set themselves to be critics without further ambitions, and took
literature calmly to be their province in the judicial way. He might, no
doubt, have had more style: not that his is bad, but that it is
undistinguished, wanting more grace to win that prize and more vigour to
win the other. He might also have had more grasp. His dicta are
occasionally unfortunate: one reads that Pinkney has written “as well as
Lovelace and Carew, better than Waller, Sedley, _Etherege_, and Dorset”;
and asks for those works of Pinkney which are as good as “To Althea,”
and “To Lucasta,” and “To A. L.”; better than “Phillis is my only Joy”
and “To all you Ladies.”[1164] And it is strange to find a man in two
minds about Keats, and sure that Barry Cornwall has “splendid traits of
genius.” But these things will happen. I do not know what Whipple’s
education was, but I should rather doubt whether he had been
sufficiently brought up on the chief and principal things to keep his
eye from wandering and “wobbling.” His article on the Elizabethan
dramatists has a fatal look of being founded rather on Lamb and Hunt and
Hazlitt than on Dodsley and Dilke. Still he is by no means a merely
negligible quantity in our calculus. He has interesting separate things—
a capital, and, for an American at the moment, very magnanimous article
on Sydney Smith; two notable ones on Talfourd and “British Critics”;
early, and so valuable, notices of _Jane Eyre_ and _Vanity Fair_. A
paper on “South’s Sermons” makes one regret that he did not turn his
attention more to older literature—perhaps he would have had more doubts
about the superiority of Pinkney if he had. Again, he saw, what has
often to this very day been foolishly denied, the _intellectual_
importance of Tennyson—in fact, he seems to have been on the whole more
disposed to the philosophical than to the purely artistic side of
poetry. Of perhaps his two most ambitious essays the “Byron” has the
commonplaceness which Byron’s eulogists and detractors alike so commonly
display; but the “Wordsworth” is much better. He could hardly be called
a critic of genius or even of great talent, but he was fair, not
ill-informed, interested and disinterested (both in the good senses) and
evidently a “corn-and-seeds-man”—that is to say, a critic—“in his
heart.” Which things, if they could be said of all of us, so much the
better.
[Sidenote: _Lanier._]
Mr Sidney Lanier was, I believe, greatly thought of, and was the object
of still greater hopes on the part of those who knew him personally; and
though his career was cut short, there appear in his remains such a love
for literature, and such an ardent desire to keep that love pure and
high, that one cannot but be well affected to him. It is, however,
rather difficult to believe that he would ever have been a really great,
or even a fairly catholic and competent, critic. Occasional utterances
and _aperçus_, when the planets were kind, must at most have been his
portion. In the literature of criticism, which has many strange things,
there is hardly anything odder than his _The English Novel and the
Principle of its Development_,[1165] which is simply a long, rather
discursive, and wholly laudatory review of George Eliot. The selection
of the individual is a matter of little consequence: I wish that I could
save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog’s-ear place
of these pages the warning, “_Never_ judge a critic by your agreement
with his likes and dislikes.” But the narrowing down of so mighty a
theme to the glorification of _any_ single novelist of a passing day
would have been enough to throw the gravest doubts on Mr Lanier’s
competence.
Unluckily there is more. “The quiet and elegant narratives of Miss
Austen,” as the sole notice dealt out to its subject by the author of a
treatise on _the English Novel_, “speaks” that author with a disastrous
finality. A man need not go all lengths for Miss Austen, just as he need
not for Milton or Virgil; but if in a study of Latin or English poetry
as a whole he contented himself with referring _obiter_ to “the elegant
and scholarly verse of Virgil” and the “serious and careful productions
of Milton,” we should know what to think of him. The oddest thing in Mr
Lanier’s book, however, is his intense, his obviously genuine, and I
think his quite nationally disinterested abhorrence[1166] of the “Four
Masters”—of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. _Pamela_ is “a
silly and hideous realisation” of a really immoral idea. Fielding’s
morality is similar, but “more clownish.” Sterne “spent his life in low,
brutish, inane pursuits.” He “can read none of these books without
feeling as if his soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy,
miserable.” He would “blot them from the face of the earth.” They are
“muck.” Praise of them is simply “well-meaning ignorance.” Is it
ungenerous in face of this last statement to ask whether it is
well-meaning _knowledge_ which represents “Mr B.” not once but often as
not an orphan but a widower, and Pamela as the servant, not of his
mother but of his wife? I know that Mr Lanier died before he could
revise these lectures for publication. But the point happens to be of
some, if slight, importance, and when we take it in conjunction with the
facts that Mr Lanier thought admirers of _Tom Jones_ must centre their
admiration on Allworthy, and that he accounted for the unpopularity of
_Daniel Deronda_ by asserting that English society felt its satire too
keenly, our old brocard of _judicia ignorantium_ doth something buzz i’
the ear.
But Mr Lanier, though a younger man than Mr Lowell, was, to say nothing
of his inferiority in genius, practically a member of an older school,
corresponding, as I have already remarked, to one which not all
contemporaries of his had outgone in England itself, and which, for the
matter of that, we have not universally outgone even now. Since his day
American criticism (except for that in all probability passing diversion
into “Democratic” parochialism which has been noticed) has become very
much more cosmopolitan, very much more fully developed, and in
particular very much more learned. It has perhaps, of the very latest
years, gone a little too much to Germany for patterns, and plunged too
often into the German _cul-de-sac_ maze of specialist monographs—a
dangerous and soul-killing wilderness, wherein many positively foolish
and hurtful things are done, and where at the best the places are all
too often dry. Yet some of these very monographs have been executed in a
manner escaping the dangers and avoiding the drynesses, and not a few
both of the authors of them and of others have shown soul and sight
considerably above the mere trail-hunting of the specialist. If all
living American critics were to be carried off by a special epidemic, I
should be sorry for two reasons—first of all, because several of them
are my personal friends, and secondly, because I should have to extend
this appendix to an altogether unmanageable length. But meanwhile there
is no doubt that Mr Lowell handed in, once for all, the “proofs” of
American criticism, and that it has nothing now to do but to go on and
prosper.
-----
Footnote 1146:
Vol. ii., Nos. 1 and 2, July and August 1900 (Burlington, Vt.) The
author is Mr W. M. Payne.
Footnote 1147:
In the colonial period not even the untiring industry and the
microscopic enthusiasm of Professor Tyler have discovered anything
critical. Mr Charles F. Richardson in _American Literature, 1607-1885_
(New York and London: Putnams, 1887), i. 396, says plumply, “Criticism
did not exist in this country during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, nor did it make much showing until the nineteenth century
was well advanced.” There is far less of it, for instance, in
Washington Irving than one might expect. Perhaps some may think that
an exception ought to be made for Channing. But his Essay on Milton,
which is the chief critical thing of his known to me, produces that
sense of bafflement which, if I remember rightly, Renan expresses in
regard to him on other grounds: “We are aware that it is objected to
poetry that it gives wrong views of life....” “We gaze on Satan with
an awe not unmixed with mysterious pleasure....” &c., &c. With such
matter we have known how to deal in the sixteenth, the seventeenth,
the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth it loses significance.
Footnote 1148:
The chief source of my direct knowledge of his work of the kind is the
collection called _Drift-Wood_, which I have known for very many
years. Somewhat later—the _Drift-Wood_ papers date from before 1840—he
inserted critical introductions in his _Poets and Poetry of Europe_
(1845).
Footnote 1149:
It fills half the third volume and all the fourth in Mr Ingram’s
edition of the works (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1874).
Footnote 1150:
In the article on Lever, where some special gadfly seems to have stung
Poe.
Footnote 1151:
_Marg._, 76.
Footnote 1152:
Ibid., 114.
Footnote 1153:
Ibid., 177.
Footnote 1154:
He comes perhaps too close to this in his paper on “The Library of Old
Authors”; but there was certainly no little provocation in the
editing, and even in the selection, of some of the volumes of that
always comely and mainly comfortable series.
Footnote 1155:
On some minor defects it is not worth while to dwell. Lowell could see
that Guest had no ear for verse: yet he was all his life long as
impatient as Guest himself of that duly transferred and adapted
“classical” system of English prosody which could be easily shown to
justify almost all the things he himself liked, and to explain the
badness of those which he thought bad. He began this impatience quite
early with Poe in the _Fable for Critics_; and he never shook it off.
Footnote 1156:
London, n. d. The Preface is dated 1888.
Footnote 1157:
Ed. cit., pp. 184-239.
Footnote 1158:
Unfortunately the readers of that very peculiar kind of literature the
“County History” are not often critical students of literature itself:
so the charm of this remark may be missed.
Footnote 1159:
This intolerance of things not quite “best and principal” was almost
as much a _tic_ with him as with Mr Arnold. I was once praising some
recently printed Old French poems to him. “Are they better than
Chrestien?” he said. And he would not read them.
Footnote 1160:
_The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, chap. v.
Footnote 1161:
The poets Bryant and Whittier have respectable reputations as critics,
and, from what I know of their other work, are likely to have deserved
them. But on the same ground I rather doubt whether it is necessary to
investigate their criticism for the present purpose. Nor do I think
that the critical work of Bayard Taylor, of which I have some
knowledge, imperatively calls for notice. American Shakespeare-critics
(with Richard Grant White at their head) might occupy a special
excursus, not without advantage.
Footnote 1162:
As, for instance, by Professor Brander Matthews, _Introduction to
American Literature_ (New York, 1896), p. 226.
Footnote 1163:
And she can sometimes be piquant. This of the Schlegels: “Men to find
plausible meaning for the deepest enigma, or to hang up each map of
literature, well painted and dotted, on its proper roller,” is quite
inspiriting and tempts one to regret that she was thrown away on
Transcendentalism and Italomania.
Footnote 1164:
One might add the question, “What has ‘Gentle George’ Etherege to do
in this galley?” though he pulls a good oar in another.
Footnote 1165:
New York, 1883. The characteristics here noted appear also in the
recently and handsomely produced book on the Elizabethan period,
_Shakespeare and his Forerunners_, 2 vols., 1903. The much earlier
_Science of English Verse_, 1880, attempts to explain prosody by
musical signs, and is thus out of the pale.
Footnote 1166:
The expressions quoted and others will be found at pp. 169-183, _op.
cit._ Lanier, though quite unprejudiced, I think, by nationality, was
badly bitten by the equally fatal though less ignoble mania of
“Progress,” and by the moral heresy. He shows the same marks as do so
many pre-Arnoldian English critics of the mid-nineteenth century.
INDEX.
Adolphus, John Leycester (1795-1862), 272 _note_.
Addison, 7, 8, 38, 54, 58, 72 _sq._, 146, 176, 189, 194, 227 _note_,
231, 398.
_Adventurer, The_, 67 _sq._
_Advice to an Author_, 158.
_Ægri Somnia_, 337 _sq._
Æschylus, 46, 47, 103, 225, 226, 400.
_Æsthetica_, Baumgarten’s, 148 _sq._
Æsthetics, v. Bk. vii. ch. v., ibid., ch. vii. _passim_.
Ainger, Canon, 257 _sq._
Akenside, 57.
_Aletheophilus_, 149.
_Alice Fell_, 216 _note_.
Alison, Archibald (1757-1839), 164-167, 291 _note_.
_Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste_, 150.
Amiel, Henri Frédéric (1821-1881), 388, 594-598.
_Among my Books_, 637.
Ampère, J. J. (1800-1864), 300.
_Ancient Mariner, The_, 219.
André, Yves Marc de l’Isle-, Père (1675-1764), 146, 151, 186 _note_.
Andrieux, François G. J. S. (1759-1833), 130 _note_.
_Anima Poetæ_, 218 _sq._, 227 _sq._
_Anti-Jacobin, The_, 286 _sq._
Antoniewicz, Herr J. von, 15 _note_, 30, 147.
_Appreciations_, 548 _sq._
Ariosto, 36, 69, 77, 161, 179, 400.
Aristophanes, 46, 47, 252.
Aristotle, _passim_.
Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888), 33, 37, 46 _note_, 55, 57, 96, 118, 120,
126, 150 _note_, 218, 222, 230, 245, 286, 295, 302 _note_, 312, 320,
326 _note_, 369, 420, 482, 505 _note_, 515-537, 589, 623.
_Art d’Écrire_, Condillac’s, 99 _note_.
Ashe, Thomas (1836-1889), 220 _note_.
Asselineau, Charles (1820-1874), 453.
_Atala_, 316.
Auger, Louis S. (1772-1829), 132, 133 _note_, 136.
Austen, Miss, 108.
Babou, Hippolyte (1824-1878), 453.
Bacon, 153, 176, 232.
Bagehot, Walter (1826-1877), 542, 543.
Balzac (the elder), 311, 312.
—-- (the younger), 303, 457.
Banville, Théodore de (1823-1891), 450.
Barbazan, 177.
Barbey d’Aurévilly, Jules (1808-1889), 433-436.
Basil, St, 538 _note_.
Batteux, 29, 43, 131.
Baudelaire, Charles (1821-1867), 452.
Baumgarten, Alex. G. (1714-1762), 148-150, 392.
_Baviad_ and _Mæviad, The_, 286 _sq._
Béat de Muralt. See Muralt.
Beattie, 57.
Beaumont, Sir George, 205.
Beddoes, 620, 621.
Beers, Mr H. A., 69 _note_.
_Beiträge_, Gottsched’s, 20.
Benlowes, Edward (1603-1676), 6, 7.
Bentley, 183 _note_.
_Bertram_, Coleridge’s critique on, 213 _note_, 219 _note_.
Beyle, Henri (1783-1842), 135-139, 160.
_Bijoux Indiscrets, Les_, 94.
_Biographia Literaria_, 201 _sq._
_Blackwood’s Magazine_, 502-504.
See also De Quincey, Lockhart, Maginn, Wilson.
Blair, 104, 128, 131, 157 _note_, 163 _note_, 166.
Blake, William (1757-1827), 232, 236, 244, 266-269.
Blankenberg, 150.
_Blossoms of Helicon, The_, 7 _note_.
Boas, Herr, 380 _note_.
Boccaccio, 124.
Bodmer, Johann Jakob (1698-1785), 20-28, 193, 392.
Boileau, 14, 21, 124, 129, 177, 377.
_Bon Gaultier Ballads, The_, 289.
Borinski, Dr K., 16 _note_, _sq._
Borrow, George, 283 _note_.
Bosanquet, Mr, 168, 169 _note_, 183 _note_, 573 _note_.
Bouhours, 12, 131.
Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850), 218, 229, 279-281.
Boyer [Bowyer], 218.
—-- Philoxène (1827-1867), 453.
Bradley, Prof., 616, 629.
Braitmaier, Herr F., 15 _note_, and Bk. vii. ch. ii. _passim_, 148.
Brandes, Dr, 386 _note_.
Breitinger, Johann Jakob (1701-1776), 20-28, 148.
Bridges, Mr Robert, 207 _note_.
Brimley, George (1819-1857), 504-508.
_British Muse, The_, 175 _note_.
Browne, Sir T., 297.
Browning, Mrs, 514 _note_.
Brumoy, 39, 43 _note_.
Brunetière, M., 184, 309, 455, 469.
Bryant, 641 _note_.
Brydges, Sir Samuel Egerton (1762-1837), 283, 284.
Buchanan, Mr Robert, 561 _note_.
Buchner, August (1591-1661), 17.
Bunyan, 161, 163.
Bürger, Gottfried August (1747-1794), 378, 379, 384, 576.
Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), 162-164, 229, 400.
Butler, Samuel (1612-1680), 5-7.
Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788-1824), 110, 136, 228, 234, 280-282,
371 _sq._, 376.
Caine, Mr Hall, 426 _note_.
Callières, 12, 176.
Campbell, Mr Dykes, 219 _note_, 221 _note_.
—-- Thomas (1777-1844), 112 _note_, 232, 272-274.
Canning, 288 _sq._
Capell, Edward (1713-1781), 175 _note_.
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 38, 48, 385, 387 _sq._, 393, 416 _sq._,
405-409, 537 _sq._
Caro, Esme Marie (1826-1887), 465, 466.
Carrière, Moritz (b. 1817), 573-575.
Castelvetro, viii, 195.
Catullus, 124, 277.
_Causeries_, Sainte-Beuve’s, 317 _sq._
_Censura Literaria_, 282, 283 _note_.
Cervantes, 159, 182.
Channing, William E. (1780-1842), 631 _note_.
_Character of a Small Poet_, 6, 7.
_Characteristics_, 158, 159.
_Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_, 258, 259.
Chasles, V. E. Philarète (1798-1873), 432, 433.
Chateaubriand, François Aug., Vicomte de (1768-1848), 99, 109-117, 131,
194, 313-317.
_Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire_, 313-317.
Chaucer, 71, 77, 174, 256, 258, 273, 409.
Chenier, A., 117.
—-- M. J. (1764-1811), 130, 131.
Chesterfield, 504 _note_.
Christopher North. See Wilson, John.
Church, Richard William (1815-1890), 558.
Cicero, 124.
Claudian, 282.
Claughton, Thomas Legh, Bishop of Rochester (1808-1892), 626.
Coleridge, Mr Ernest, 218, 227.
—-- Hartley (1796-1849), 283 _note_, 485-487.
—-- Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), 37, 126, 142, 149, 155, 168, 194, 197
half-title, 200-233, 236, 239, 243, 249, 250, 256, 258, 278, 288,
291 _note_, 310, 375, 392, 393, 396 _note_, 411 _sq._, 418 _note_,
472, 478, 484, 487 _note_, 489, 536, 541, 548.
Collier, J. P., 209 _note_.
Collier, Jeremy, 257.
Collins, 58.
—-- Mr Churton, 427 _note_.
_Comic Writers, The English_, 256, 257.
“Comparative Literature,” 460 _note_, 462 _sq._
Condillac, 99 _note_.
Congreve, 161, 239.
Conti, Antonio (1677-1749), 23 and _note_, 51 _note_.
Conybeare, John Josias (1779-1824), 620.
Copleston, Edward, Bishop of Llandaff (1776-1849), 618-620.
Corneille, 13, 37, 161, 397.
Courthope, Mr, 616, 629.
Cousin, Victor (1792-1867), 133.
Cowper, 204, 228.
Creed, The Romantic, 409, 410.
Creighton, Bishop, 603.
Crépet’s _Poètes Français_, 450 _sq._
Crisp, “Daddy,” 39 _note_, 43 _note_.
“Criticism of Life,” 531 _sq._
Croce, Signor Benedetto, 152 _note_, 155, 169 _note_, 589 _note_.
Croker, John Wilson (1780-1857), 494, 509.
_Cromwell_, Preface to, 331 _sq._
Dallas, Eneas Sweetland (1828-1879), 511-513.
Dante, vi, 114, 179, 180, 210 _note_, 214-216, 228, 247, 248, 256, 534
_sq._
Danzel, 19 _note_, 20.
_Defence of Poetry_, Shelley’s, 274, 275.
_De la Littérature_, Madame de Staël’s, 101 _sq._
_De la Littérature Allemande_, 48-51.
_De l’Allemagne_, 101 _sq._
_De Constantia Jurisprudentis_, 153.
_De Logomachiis Eruditorum_, 18.
_De Meteoris Orationis_, 19.
_De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus_, 148, 149.
_De Studiorum Ratione_, 152.
_De Vulgari Eloquio_, 201, 210, 215, 216.
Defoe, 242.
Delille, 122 _sq._, 333.
Delius, 575.
Denham, 6.
Denina, ix.
Dennis, ix, 286, 408.
De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859), 81, 355 _note_, 405 _note_, 412,
478-482.
De Sanctis, Francesco (1817-1883), 589-591.
Descartes, 146.
Dickens, 364 _note_.
Diderot, Denis (1713-1784), 41, 89-97, 99, 109, 111, 117, 178, 185, 190
_note_, 192, 194, 217.
_Die Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen_, 19.
_Dies Boreales_, 473 _sq._
_Diskurse der Maler_, 19 _sq._
Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848), 284.
_Divina Commedia, The_, 108.
Dobell, Sydney, 514 _note_.
_Doctor, The_, 235 _sq._
_Don Quixote_, 182.
Doudan, Ximenès (1800-1872), 436-438.
Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings Charles (1810-1888), 626, 627.
Dryden, 6, 9, 14, 44 _note_, 54, 55, 71, 159, 179, 192, 200, 222, 229,
249, 256, 310, 330, 364, 398, 418 _note_, 443, 504, 513 _note_, 520.
Du Bellay, 200.
Ducange, 177.
Dussault, Jean F. J. (1769-1824), 129.
Dyer, 58.
Eberhard, Joh. Aug. (1739-1809), 151.
Eckermann, Joh. Peter (1792-1854), 301, 366 _sq._
_Edinburgh Review, The_, 213 _note_, 286, 290.
Egger, M., 319.
_Elia_, 237 _sq._
Elton, Professor, vi.
Elwin, Whitwell (1816-1900), 510.
Elze, 575.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), 633, 634.
_Emile_, 98.
_English Metrists_, 83 _note_.
_English Rhythms_, 235 _note_.
_Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, 296.
“Esemplastic,” }
“Esenoplastic,” } 228.
_Essai sur le Beau_, 151.
_Essai sur les Fictions_, 102.
_Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron_, 94.
_Essay on Genius_, 164 _note_.
_Essay on Pope_, 66.
_Essay on Taste_, Alison’s, 164-167.
—-- Gerard’s, 164 _note_.
—-- Jeffrey’s, 164, 291 _note_.
_Essays in Criticism_, 521 _sq._
_Essays on Men and Manners_, 63.
_Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary_, 160.
Etienne, 130.
Euripides, 200.
_Excursion, The_, 213.
Faguet, M. Émile, 339, 469.
Farmer, Dr, 488.
Feletz, C. M. Dorimont, Abbé de (1767-1850), 132.
Felltham, Owen, 297 _note_.
Fénelon, 177.
Feydeau, 324 _note_.
Fichte, 417.
Fiévée, 130.
Finlay, Mr F. G., 62 _note_.
Fiorentino, 348 _note_.
_Firmilian_, x.
Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880), 116, 120, 189, 228, 454, 461, 545, 581.
Flemming, 369.
Flint, Professor, 152 _note_, 153 _note_, 156.
Fontanes, Louis, Marquis de (1757-1821), 112 _not_, 113, 127.
Fontenelle, 9, 56, 177, 195, 230.
_Fool of Quality, The_, 539.
Forman, Mr Buxton, 473 _note_.
Foscolo, Ugo (1778-1827), 407 _note_.
Foster, John (1731-1774), 83.
—-- (1770-1843), 513.
Fournier, Edouard (1819-1880), 453.
Fox, W. J. (1786-1864), 513.
France, M. Anatole, 455 _note_, 469.
Franciosi, Signor, viii.
Frederick the Great (1712-1786), 48-51.
Freytag, Gustav (_b._ 1816), 578, 579.
_Friend, The_, 219.
Froude, James Anthony (1818-1894), 539.
Fuller, Margaret (1810-1850), 164, 642.
Garat, Dominique Joseph (1749-1833), 130.
Garbett, James (1802-1879), 625, 626.
_Gaspard de la Nuit_, 305.
Gautier, Théophile (1811-1872), 36, 120, 324 _note_, 338-342, 450, 475
_note_.
_Gay Science, The_, 512 _sq._
_Gaya Scienza, La_, 583.
Gellert, 28 and _note_, 50.
_Génie du Christianisme_, 111 _sq._
Geoffroy, Jules-Louis (1743-1814), 128, 129.
Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795), 165 _note_, 291 _note_.
Gervinus, G. G. (1805-1871), 575-577.
Gibbon, 323.
Gifford, William (1756-1826), 232, 242, 253, 286 _sq._, 289 _note_.
Gilpin, 83.
Ginguené, Pierre Louis (1748-1816), 130.
Girardin, Saint-Marc (1801-1873), 320, 343, 344.
_Globe_, The, 300 _sq._, 367, 368.
Godwin, 243, 253, 263, 270 _note_.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832), 50, 97, 106, 117, 168, 193,
223 _note_, 251, 300, 301, 366-377, 388.
_Goetz von Berlichingen_, 50.
Goncourt, Émile (1822-1867); and Jules (1830-1870), de, 124, 307
_note_, 452 _note_, 458, 459.
Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 56 _note_, 128, 546 _note_.
—-- M. Etienne, 128.
Gottsched, 12, 19, 20, 24 and _note_, 193, 392.
_Götzen-Dammerung_, 585.
“Grand Style,” The, 522 _sq._
Gravina, 9, 56.
Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), 53, 63, 81, 186, 194, 203, 212, 217, 418
_note_.
Grillparzer, Franz (1791-1872), Bk. ix. half-title, 569-573, 582
_note_.
_Grotesques, Les_, 341.
Gryphius, Andreas (1616-1664), 18, 30, 31.
Gudeman, Professor, vii.
Guest, Edwin (1800-1880), 235 _note_, 637 _note_.
Guizot, François P. G. (1787-1874), 133 _note_.
—-- Mme., see Meulan.
Gurney, Edmund (1847-1888), 559-661.
Guttinguer, Ulric (1785-1886), 308 _note_.
Haldane, Mr, 582.
Hallam, Arthur Henry (1811-1837), 513 _note_.
—-- Henry (1777-1859), viii, 293-298, 474.
Haller, 28 and _note_.
Hamann, Johann Georg (1730-1788), 352, 353, 359.
_Hamburgische Dramaturgie_, 34 _sq._, 94 _note_.
Hamelius, Herr, 13.
Hannay, Mr D., 48.
—-- James (1827-1873), 511.
Hardenberg, F. von, see Novalis.
Hawkins, William (1722-1801), 616 _note_.
Haym, R., 386 _note_.
Hayward, Abraham (1801-1894), 509.
—-- Thomas (_d._ 1779?), 175 _note_.
Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 224, 229, 232, 234, 238, 239, 244, 247,
248, 251-266, 273, 280, 314 _note_, 412 _sq._
Hegel, G. W. F. (1776-1831), 188.
Heine, Heinrich (1799-1856), 27 _note_, 50, 386, 563-566, 571, 573
_note_.
Heinsius, 40.
_Héloise, La Nouvelle_, 98, 102.
Helps, Sir Arthur (1813-1875), 509, 510.
Henley, Mr W. E., 561 _note_.
Hennequin, Émile (1859-1888), 222, 459-462.
_Henriade_, The, 114.
Herder, Johann G. (1744-1803), 49, 149, 353, 355-359, 380, 392.
Héricault, Charles d’ (1823-?), 453.
Heywood, 239.
Hillebrand, Karl (1829-1884), 579-581, 582 _note_.
_Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise_, 440 _sq._
_Histoire du Romantisme_, 341 _sq._
_Histoire Littéraire de La France_, 177.
_History of English Poetry_ (Warton’s), 70 _sq._
Hoeck, Theobald, 16, 17.
Hoffman, François B. (1760-1828), 129, 130.
Hoffmann, 565.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1884), 639, 640.
—-- Robert (1748-1805), 616 _note_.
Homer, 114, 154 _sq._, 162, 521 _sq._
_Hommes et Dieux_, 451.
Horace, 39, 49, 73 _sq._
Horne, Richard Hengist (1803-1884), 263 _note_, 514 _note_.
Houghton, Lord (Milnes, Richard Monckton) (1809-1885), 557.
_Hudibras_, 104.
Hueffer, Mr, 560.
Hughes (editor of Spenser), 173.
Hugo, Victor F. M. (1802-1885), 120, 127, 131, 185, 197 half-title,
307, 330-335, 336, 337, 345, 346, 369, 371, 434, 438, 461, 591, 593.
Hume, David (1711-1776), 159-162.
Hunt, James Henry Leigh (1784-1869), 232, 234, 239, 246-251, 257, 412
_sq._
Hurd, Richard (1720-1808), Bishop of Worcester, 1, 7, 40, 41, 53,
72-80, 93, 179, 185, 189 _note_, 190 _note_, 192, 273.
Hurdis, James (1763-1801), 617, 618.
Hutton, Richard Holt (1826-1897), 543, 544.
_Ideen_ (Herder’s), 357, 358.
_Imagination and Fancy_, 248.
_Inner Life of Art, The_, 542.
_Inquiry into the Principles of Harmony in Language_, 85, 86.
Irving, Sir H., 96 _note_.
—-- Washington, 631 _note_.
_Jacques le Fataliste_, 91.
Janin, Jules (1804-1874), 453.
Jean Paul, see Richter.
Jeffrey, Francis (1773-1850), 112 _note_, 128 _note_, 232, 274 _note_,
289-293, 408.
Johnson, 75, 85, 194, 195, 217, 222, 279, 310, 398, 408, 424, 435, 605.
Joubert, Joseph (1754-1824), 1, 99, 117-126, 128, 194, 264 _note_, 333,
370, 390.
Jouffroy, 300.
Keats, John (1795-1821), 55, 275 _note_.
Keble, John (1792-1866), 621-625.
Ker, Professor, vi.
Kingsley, Charles (1819-1875), 538, 539.
Kirke-White, 234.
Klopstock, 28, 359 _note_.
Klotz, 45, 47, 357.
_Knight’s Quarterly_, 490 _sq._
Koberstein, 15 _note_.
König, N. (1688-1744), 22, 23, 51 _note_.
Kont, M., 39 _note sq._
Krantz, M., 146 _note_.
_Kritische Dichtkunst_, _K. Betrachtung_, &c., see Bodmer.
La Bruyère, 8.
Lacretelle, 130.
La Fontaine, 124.
La Harpe, 4, 12, 289, 296.
Lamartine, 137 _note_, 346.
Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 232, 234, 236-246, 257, 412 _sq._
Lancaster, Henry Hill (1829-1875), 511.
Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864), 276-279.
Langhorne, 533.
Lanier, Sidney (1842-1881), 643, 644.
_Laocoön, The_, 36 _sq._
Latouche, H. de, 348 _note_.
_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, 498.
_Leader, The_, 542 _note_.
Le Bossu, 131.
Leibnitz, 228.
_Lectures_, Coleridge’s, 220 _sq._
_Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth_, 257, 258.
_Lectures on the English Poets_, 252 _sq._
Legouvé, 130.
Lemaître, M. Jules, 470.
Lemcke, Professor, 419.
Lemercier, L. Népomucène (1771-1840), 131, 132.
Lemoyne, the Père, 116.
_Les Deux Masques_, 451.
_Les Templiers_, 106.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-1781), 33-48, 94 _note_, 97, 117, 163
_note_, 176, 178, 181, 185, 187, 193, 214, 222, 249, 388, 392, 545.
_Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns_, 201 _note_.
_Letter to John Murray_, 280.
Letters of Schiller and Goethe, 381 _sq._
_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, 75 _sq._
_Lettres d’Amabed, Les_, 94.
_Lettres sur les Anglois et sur les François_, 13, 14.
_Lettres sur Rousseau_, 101, 102.
Lewes, George Henry (1812-1878), 540-542.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1742-1799), 354.
_Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées_, 331 _sq._
Locke, 146, 176.
Lockhart, John Gibson (1794-1854), 412, 482-485.
_London_, 561 _note_.
_London Magazine, The_, 554 _note_.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882), 632, 633.
Longinus _passim_.
Lope de Vega, 39 _note_.
Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891), 286, 630, 636-639.
Lowth, Robert, Bishop of London (1710-1787), 617.
Lucian, 252.
Lucretius, 159, 161, 200.
Lydgate, Gray on, 61, 62.
_Lyrical Ballads_, Preface to, 201 _sq._
Macaulay, Thomas B. (1800-1859), 14 _note_, 39 _note_, 257, 272, 297,
489-495.
Mackenzie, Henry, 345.
Maginn, William (1793-1842), 166, 437-449.
Magnin, C. (1793-1862), 347, 348.
_Maid of the Mill_, The, 224.
Maistre, Joseph de, 139, 305.
Malebranche, 146.
Mambrun, 46.
Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820-1871), 557.
_Marginalia_, Coleridge’s, 220 _sq._
_Marius the Epicurean_, 544 _sq._
Marivaux, 178.
Marmontel, 34, 35, 131, 177.
Martial, 39 and _note_, 381.
Mason, John (1706-1763), 79-82.
—-- William, 57 _sq._
Masson, Professor, 478 _note_, 480.
Matthews, Professor Brander, 641 _note_.
Maupassant, Guy de, 454 _note_.
Mazzini, 589 _note_.
_Mélanges Littéraires_ (Chateaubriand’s), 112 _note_.
_Mélanges tirés d’une Petite Bibliothèque_, 140.
_Mémoires d’un Touriste_, 139.
Mendelssohn, Moses (1729-1786), 32, 33.
Menéndez y Pelayo, Señor, 588.
Mérimée, Prosper (1803-1870), 135, 137, 348-350, 435.
Meulan, Pauline de, 133 _note_.
Michelet, Jules (1798-1874), 329, 330.
Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873), 106, 514.
Milman, Henry Hart (1791-1868), 509, 620, 621.
Milnes, see Houghton.
Milton, 8, 22 _sq._, 61, 114, 122, 176, 212, 229, 279, 400, 523 _sq._
Minto, William (1845-1893), 553, 554.
_Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary_, 225.
Mitford, William (1744-1827), 83-86, 491.
“Modern,” the term, 3, 4.
Moland, Louis (_b._ 1824), 453.
Molière, 124, 136, 397.
_Monachopornomachia_, 45.
_Monsieur Nicolas_, 382.
Montagu, Mrs (Elizabeth Robinson) (1720-1810), 173 _note_.
Montaiglon, M. de (_b._ 1824), 310 _note_, 453.
Montaigne, 177.
Montégut, Émile (_b._ 1825), Bk. ix. half-title, 443 _note_, 444-447.
Montgomery, Robert, 493.
Morandi, Signor Luigi, 588.
Morley, Mr John, 591.
_Morte Amoureuse, La_, 36.
Munro, H. A. J. (1819-1885), 183 _note_.
Muralt, Louis Béat de (1665-1741), 13-15.
Myers, Frederic William Henry (1843-1901), 552 _note_.
Mylius, Christlob (1722-1754), 28 and _note_.
_My Study Windows_, 637, 638.
Nerval, Gérard de (= Gérard Labrunie), 450 _note_.
Nettleship, Henry (1839-1893), 183 _note_.
_Neveu de Rameau, Le_, 91.
Nicholls, 180.
Nicolai, 32.
Nicolas, Sir N. Harris (1799-1848), 283, 284.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900), 581-586.
Nisard, Désiré (1806-1888), 335-338.
_Noctes Ambrosianæ_, 472 _sq._
Nodier, Charles (1780-1844), 139, 140.
North, Christopher, see Wilson, John.
_Nouveaux Lundis_, 324 _sq._
“Novalis,” _i.e._, Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), 386-390, 565.
_Observations on Poetry_, 83 _note_.
_Observations on Spenser_, 68 _sq._
Oeckhe Othoblad, see Hoeck, Theobald.
Oldys, William (1696-1761), 54, 174, 175 and _note_.
_Omniana_, 225.
Omond, Mr T. S., 83 _note_.
_On Translating Homer_, 521 _sq._
Opitz, 192, 298 _note_, 357 _note_, 400.
_Orientales_, Preface to the, 85, 331 _sq._
_Ossian_, 59, 104, 112 _note_, 116, 135, 176, 359.
Ozanam, 348 _note_.
Paculford, Professor, 538 _note._
Palgrave, Francis Turner (1824-1897), 628, 629.
_Paradoxe sur le Comédien_, 91 _sq._
_Parerga und Paralipomena_, 566 _sq._
Paris, Gaston (1839-1903), 464, 465.
Pascal, 124.
Pater, Walter Horatio (1839-1894), 120, 183 _note_, 326 _note_, 451,
544-551.
Patmore, Coventry K. D. (1823-1890), 558, 559.
Patrizzi, 222, 334, 533.
Pattison, Mark (1813-1884), 557.
_Paul et Virginie_, 115.
Paul, Mr Kegan, 538.
Payne, Mr W. M., 631 _note_.
Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866), 162 _note_, 274, 537.
Pemberton, Henry (1694-1771), 83 _note_.
Percy, Thomas (1729-1811), Bishop of Dromore, 53, 64-66, 192.
Petrarch, 179.
Petronius, 209 _note_.
_Pharonnida_, 273, 290, 408.
Philips, Ambrose (1675?-1749), 54 _note_.
Phillips, Edward, 244.
Philostratus, 275 _note_.
Pindar, Peter. See Wolcot.
_Plain Speaker, The_, 259, 260.
Planche, J.B. Gustave (1808-1857), 344-347.
Plato, 142, 156, 274.
Plutarch, 97.
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849), 634-636.
“Poetic Moment, The,” 143 _sq._, 532 _sq._
Poitou, M., 118 _note_.
Politian, viii, 183 _note_, 277, 296.
Pollock, Mr W. H., 96 _note_.
Pontmartin, Armand, Comte de (1811-1890), 467, 468.
Pope, 66, 67, 104, 161, 176, 194, 200, 273, 279-282, 368, 424.
_Port Royal_, 310-313.
_Portraits Contemporains_, 306 _sq._
_Portraits Littéraires, Portraits de Femmes_, Sainte-Beuve’s, 303 _sq._
_Power of Numbers, The, in Prose and Poetry_, 80-82.
_Prœlectiones Academicæ._ See Copleston, Keble, &c.
_Preface_ to _Lyrical Ballads_, &c., 200 _sq._
—-- to Mr Arnold’s _Poems_, 517 _sq._
_Premiers Lundis_, 200 _sq._
Prior, 8, 173.
_Principles of Success in Literature, The_, 540 _sq._
Pringle-Pattison, Professor, 514 _note_.
_Promenades dans Rome_, 139.
Prudhomme, M. Sully, 465.
_Pursuits of Literature, The_, 287 _sq._
Posnett, Mr H. M., 460 _note_.
_Power of Sound, The_, 559.
Pye, 83.
_Quarterly Review, The_, 213 _note_.
Quinet, Edgar (1803-1875), 329, 330.
Quintilian, 124, 222, 228 _note_.
Quintus Smyrnæus, 302 _note_.
Rabelais, 177-225.
Racine, 115, 123, 136, 161, 311-313.
_Racine et Shakespeare_, 155-157.
Radcliffe, Mrs, 253.
Raleigh, Professor, vi, 202 _note_, 212 _note_, 216 _note_.
Ramsay, Allan, 54.
Randolph, John (1749-1813), Bishop of London, 616 _note_.
Raynouard, 106.
_Recreations of Christopher North_, 472 _sq._
_Reisebilder_, The, 563 _sq._
_Rejected Addresses_, 289.
_Reliques_, Percy’s, 65 _sq._
Rémusat, Charles de, 300.
Renan, Ernest (1723-1892), 348, 439, 446.
Repplier, Miss Agnes, 219 _note,_.
_Retrospective Review, The_, x, 283, 286.
Reynolds, Sir J., 523.
_Rhadamanthus_, 234 _note_.
_Rhetoric_, De Quincey on, 481 _sq._
Rhys, Mr E., 201 _note_, 279 _note_, 280 _note_.
Richardson, 92, 93, 102, 256, 257.
—--, Mr C. F., 631 _note_.
Richter, Jean Paul F. (1763-1825), 106, 384-386.
Ripley, George (1802-1880), 642.
Ritson, 65.
Rivarol, 287.
Rogers, Henry (1806-1877), 514.
_Rolliad_, The, 288 _note_.
_Roman Experimental, Le_, 455 _sq._
_Romania_, 464 _sq._
_Romeo and Juliet_, 108.
Rönnfeldt, Mr, 360 _note_.
Ronsard, 177, 192, 298 _note_.
Roscoe, W. C., 514 _note_.
Rousseau, 97-99, 108, 110, 178.
Rümelin, Gustav (1815-1889), 577, 578.
Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 115 _note_, 120, 228, 539, 540.
Rymer, 34, 35, 247, 297.
_Saint Louis_, 116 _note_.
Saint-Victor, Paul, Comte de (1827-1881), 120, 440, 441, 450, 451.
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (1804-1869), 46 _note_, 119, 126, 127,
133 _note_, 135, 138, 189, 197 _half-title_, 222, 230, 300-329, 343
_note_, 414 _sq._, 420, 431, 443, 450, 513 _note_, 585, 589, 592.
Sainte-Palaye, 172, 177.
_Salons_, Diderot’s, 96.
Sand, George, 260 _note_, 435.
Sandys, Dr, vii, 183 _note_.
_Satyrane’s Letters_, 218 _note_, 219 _note_.
Saunders, Mr Bailey, 566 _note_.
Scaliger, 69, 222, 377.
Schack, 181.
Schelling, Professor, 419.
Scherer, Edmond (1815-1889), 96, 443, 447-450, 594.
Schiller, Joh. Chr. Friedrich (1759-1805), 105 _note_, 106, 193, 225,
229, 367, 368, 377-384.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1767-1845), 29, 378, 381, 391-402, 438.
—--, Johann Adolf (1721-1793), 29, 30, 43 _note_.
—--, Johann Elias (1718-1749), 30-32, 147, 193, 359.
Schlegel, Johann Heinrich, 20 _note_.
—--, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (1772-1829), 29, 391-402, 571.
Schlegels, The, 29 _sq._, 101 _sq._, 117, 133, 181, 221 _note_, 222,
273, 371, 391-402.
Schlosser, 405.
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860), 566-568.
Schreyvogel, Joseph, 573 _note_.
Schubarth, Karl Ernst (1796-1861), 403, 404.
_Scienza Nuova_, 152-157.
_Schönes Blumenfeldt_, 16.
Schottel, Justus G. (1612-1676), 17.
Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 136, 179, 232, 247, 253, 260, 263,
270-272, 290, 371 _sq._, 457, 533 _note_.
Sellar, William G. (1825-1890), 183 _note_.
Seneca, Diderot on, 94, 95.
Senior, N. W. (1790-1864), 509.
Sévigné, Mme. de, 52 _note_.
Shadwell, 14.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of (1671-1713), 157-159.
Shairp, John Campbell (1819-1885), 627, 628.
Shakespeare, 22, 30, 37, 41, 42, 50, 52 _note_, 104, 122, 127, 132,
170, 172, 173, 176, 187, 188, 220 _sq._, 225, 241 _sq._, 258, 259,
260, 297, 353, 359, 361, 376, 388, 519 _sq._, 533, 550.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 232, 244, 260, 274, 275, 376, 387,
507.
Shenstone, William (1714-1763), 53, 63, 64, 174, 202.
Sidney, 229, 253, 257.
Sismondi, 592 _note_.
“Skroddles,” 59.
Smith, Adam (1723-1790), 12, 157 _note_.
—-- Mr D. Nichol, 68 _note_, 173 _note_.
—-- Mr Gregory, 83 _note_.
—-- Sydney, 509.
—-- William H. (1808-1872), 502 _note_.
Solger, Karl W. F. (1780-1819), 404.
_Soliman the Second_, 34, 35, 188.
_Sophocles_, 161, 162.
Sorel, Ch., ix.
Soret, 370 _note_.
Southern, Henry (1799-1853), 283.
Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 218 _note_, 225, 229, 232-237, 243, 244,
272, 617 _note_.
_Specimens_, Campbell’s, 272.
—-- Lamb’s, 240.
_Specimens of British Critics_, 473 _sq._
_Spectator, The_, 20.
Spence, 616.
Spenser, 64, 68 _sq._, 71, 76 _sq._, 104, 173, 174, 225, 249, 256, 273,
409, 473 _sq._
_Spirit of the Age, The_, 262, 263.
_Sprüche in Prosa_, 361 _sq._
Staël, A. L. Germaine Necker, Mme. de (1766-1817), 99-109, 116, 127,
194, 291 _sq._, 392 _sq._
Stapfer, M. Paul, 294 _note_.
Stephen, Sir James (1789-1859), 514.
—-- Sir J. Fitzjames (1829-1894), 557.
—-- Sir Leslie, 561 _note_.
Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768), 86-88, 176, 178, 363, 364, 435.
Stevenson, Mr E., 426 _note_.
—-- Robert Louis (1850-1894), 251, 494 _note_, 561 _note_.
Stryienski, M., 135.
_Studies in the History of the Renaissance_, 544 _sq._
_Study of Celtic Literature, The_, 521 _sq._
_Style, Lecture on_, Coleridge’s, 226 _sq._
—-- De Quincey on, 481 _sq._
Sulzer, Johann G. (1720-1779), 150, 365, 366.
Swift, 176, 229, 443.
Swiss-Saxon Quarrel, the, 27 _sq._
Symonds, John Addington (1840-1893), 551, 552.
_Table Talk_, Coleridge’s, 224 _sq._
—-- Hazlitt’s, 261.
Taillandier, Saint-René (1817-1879), 465, 466.
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe (1828-1893), 107, 307 _note_, 440-444.
Talfourd, 283 _note_.
Tasso, 76, 179.
Tassoni, 35.
Taylor, Bayard, 641 _note_.
—-- William, “of Norwich” (1765-1836), 497.
Tennyson, 225, 425 _sq._, 484, 502-507.
Terence (Diderot on), 93, 94, 161.
_Tertium Quid_, 559 _sq._
Texte, Joseph (1865-1900), 97, 99, 107, 177 _note_, 462-464.
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863), 98, 263, 452, 499-502, 555.
Theocritus, 277.
_Theophila_, 6 _note_.
Thomson, James (I.), 176, 400.
—-- James (II.) (1834-1882), 552, 553.
Tickell, 58.
Ticknor, George (1791-1871), 181, 348 _note_, 632.
Tieck, Ludwig (1773-1853), 390, 391.
Tollemache, Mrs L., 96 _note_.
Traill, Henry Duff (1842-1900), 231, 232, 554-557.
Trapp, 616.
Tressan, Comte de, 177.
_Tristram Shandy_, 86.
Tyler, Professor, 631 _note_.
Uhland, Johann Ludwig (1787-1862), 402, 403.
Ulrici, 575.
Vaughan, Professor, 274 _note_, 499.
Venables, George Stovin (1810-1888), 557.
Veuillot, Louis (1815-1883), 468, 469.
Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 9 _note_, 146, 152-157, 185 _note_, 267
_note_, 356 _note_, 589 _note_.
Vida, 36.
Vigny, Alfred de, 306 _note_.
Villemain, Abel François (1790-1865), 126, 133-135, 327.
Vinet, Alexandre R. (1797-1847), 592-594.
Virgil, 115, _note_.
Vitet, Louis (1802-1873), 300.
Voltaire, 37, 77, 115, 125, 138, 176, 370.
_Vorschule der Æsthetik_, 385.
Voynich, Mr, viii.
Wagner, 582 _sq._
Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths (1794-1852), 266 _note_.
Walpole, Horace, 52 _note_.
Ward, Mr Humphry, his _English Poets_, 531 _sq._
Warton, Joseph (1722-1800), 53, 66, 68, 279.
—-- Thomas, the elder (1688?-1745), 616.
—-- the younger (1728-1790), vii, 53, 68-72, 192, 616.
Watson (the printer), 54.
Weckerlin, G. R. (1584-1651), 17.
Weise, Christian (1642-1708), 17, 18.
Werenfels, Samuel (1625-1703), 17, 18.
Wernicke, Christian (1661-1725), 17, 18.
Wheeler, Benjamin, 616.
Whipple, Edwin P. (1819-1886), 642, 643.
Whitfeld, John, 616.
Whitman, Walt (1819-1892), 640.
Whittier, J. G., 641 _note_.
Wilson, John, “Christopher North” (1785-1854), 412, 472-478, 486.
Wieland, Christoph R. (1733-1813), 106, 359, 360, 385, 392, 400.
_Wilhelm Meister_, 117, 361 _sq._
_William Shakespeare_, 336 _sq._
_Wither_, 242.
Wolcot, John, “Peter Pindar” (1738-1819), 286 _sq._
Wolf, 156.
Wolff, 147.
Wonderful, The, Bodmer on, 24 _sq._
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 200-218, 229, 243, 249, 268, 290, 322,
622 _sq._
Woty, William (1731-1791), 6 _note_.
Wrangham, Archdeacon, 201.
Wright, Thomas (1810-1877), x, 283 _note_.
Wynn, C. W., 234.
.sp 1
.ix
_Xenien_, The, 380 _sq._
Young, 176.
Zesen, Philip von (1619-1689), 17.
Zinano, vii.
Zola, Émile (1840-1903), 454-458.
Zürich School, the, Bk. vii. ch. ii. _passim_, 56.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Note
There is a section after the Preface which specifies corrections and
additions to be made in the current volume, as well as volumes 1 and 2.
These changes were _not_ made.
No attempt was made to check the validity of each index entry’s
references, however several of them seem spurious:
“Professor Pringle-Patterson” is referred to only in a note on p. 581,
but the page mentioned in the Index is incorrectly given as p.
514.
The entry for “Thomas Love Peacock” refers to a note on p. 207, but he
is mentioned in none of those notes. He is, however, mentioned in
a footnote on p. 162. The page number has been changed.
The second page reference (p. 137) for Adam Smith was incorrect. The
correct page is p. 157, and has been changed.
Notes
494.4: A passage (“What! ... in the “Bunyan”?) opens with a quotation
mark, but employs a double quote for two quoted words, and fails
to provide a closing quote.
160.11: The title of Hume’s “Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary” is
partially italicized, with the last phrase in normal font as
emphasis.
Corrections
Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.
16.33 die Anf[ang/änge] der literarischen Kritik Replaced.
20.4 _Historie der Deutschen Sprache[,] Poesie_ Added.
24.13 philosophy from Leibni[t]z and Wolff Added.
26.39 Heilbron[n], 1883. Added.
82.38 [(]_Power of Numbers_ Removed.
112.5 and perhaps to[o] hasty Added.
133.41 [e]ven less of a critic “in his heart” Restored.
138.23 as little more than a boy[./,] Replaced.
133.42 [th]an Cousin. Restored.
149.34 the old notion back again[,/.] Replaced.
150.23 by her eighteenth-century writers[.] Added.
201.34 It is wi[s/d]ely usual Replaced.
234.29 ii. 91[)] Removed.
243.9 “On Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney[”] Added.
272.25 one of the least agree[e]able Removed.
296.11 but in politics ecc[l]esiastical and civil Inserted.
320.18 the whole twelvemo[u/n]th Replaced.
357.40 the so-called “British[’/”] or Miltonic Replaced.
scansion
378.11 as Dryden’s or Corneill[l]e’s. Removed.
394.6 rule the ro[a/o]st so absolutely Replaced.
401.21 “judging of books[”] Added.
449.27 a very useful alter[n]ative Inserted.
496.28 his strictly critical facul[i]ties Removed.
558.37 in a newspaper[.] Added.
567.36 [“]Über Urtheil, Kritik, Beifall und Ruhren,” Added.
617.47 for his grandsire or his dam[.] Added.