ESSAYS
IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE
1780-1860
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
PERCIVAL AND CO.
_KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN_
LONDON
1890
PREFACE
Of the essays in this volume, the introductory paper on "The Kinds of
Criticism" has not before appeared in print. All the rest, with one
exception (the Essay on Lockhart which appeared in the _National
Review_), were originally published in _Macmillan's Magazine_. To the
Editors and Publishers of both these periodicals I owe my best thanks
for permission to reprint the articles. To the Editor of _Macmillan's
Magazine_ in particular (to whom, if dedications were not somewhat in
ill odour, I should, in memory of friendship old and new, have dedicated
the book), I am further indebted for suggesting several of the subjects
as well as accepting the essays. These appear in the main as they
appeared; but I have not scrupled to alter phrase or substance where it
seemed desirable, and I have in a few places restored passages which had
been sacrificed to the usual exigencies of space. In two cases, those of
Lockhart and De Quincey, I have thought it best to discuss, in a brief
appendix, some questions which have presented themselves since the
original publications. In consequence of these alterations and additions
as well as for other reasons, it may be convenient to give the dates and
places of the original appearance of each essay. They are as follows:--
Lockhart, _National Review_, Aug. 1884. Borrow, _Macmillan's
Magazine_, Jan. 1886. Peacock, do. April 1886. Wilson (under the
title of "Christopher North"), do. July 1886. Hazlitt, do. March
1887. Jeffrey, do. August 1887. Moore, do. March 1888. Sydney
Smith, do. May 1888. Praed, do. Sept. 1888. Leigh Hunt, do.
April 1889. Crabbe, do. June 1889. Hogg, do. Sept. 1889. De
Quincey, do. June 1890.
The present order is chronological, following the birth-years of the
authors discussed.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY--
THE KINDS OF CRITICISM ix
I. CRABBE 1
II. HOGG 33
III. SYDNEY SMITH 67
IV. JEFFREY 100
V. HAZLITT 135
VI. MOORE 170
VII. LEIGH HUNT 201
VIII. PEACOCK 234
IX. WILSON 270
X. DE QUINCEY 304
XI. LOCKHART 339
XII. PRAED 374
XIII. BORROW 403
APPENDIX--A. DE QUINCEY 440
B. LOCKHART 444
INDEX 449
INTRODUCTION
THE KINDS OF CRITICISM
It is probably unnecessary, and might possibly be impertinent, to renew
here at any length the old debate between reviewers as reviewers, and
reviewers as authors--the debate whether the reissue of work contributed
to periodicals is desirable or not. The plea that half the best prose
literature of this century would be inaccessible if the practice had
been forbidden, and the retort that anything which can pretend to keep
company with the best literature of the century will be readily relieved
from the objection, at once sum up the whole quarrel, and leave it
undecided. For my own part, I think that there is a sufficient
connection of subject in the following chapters, and I hope that there
is a sufficient uniformity of treatment. The former point, as the least
important, may be dismissed first. All the literature here discussed
is--with the exception of Crabbe's earliest poems, and the late
aftermath of Peacock and Borrow--work of one and the same period, the
first half of the present century. The authors criticised were all
contemporaries; with only one exception, if with one, they were all
writing more or less busily within a single decade, that of 1820 to
1830. And they have the further connection (which has at least the
reality of having been present to my mind in selecting them), that while
every one of them was a man of great literary power, hardly one has been
by general consent, or except by private crotchet would be, put among
the very greatest. They stand not far below, but distinctly below,
Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Yet again, they
agree in the fact that hardly one of them has yet been securely set in
the literary niche which is his due, all having been at some time either
unduly valued or unduly neglected, and one or two never having yet
received even due appreciation. The greatest of all critics was accused,
unjustly, of having a certain dislike of clear, undoubted supremacy. It
would be far more fair to say that Sainte-Beuve had eminently, what
perhaps all critics who are not mere carpers on the one hand, or mere
splashers of superlatives on the other, have more or less--an affection
for subjects possessing but qualified merit, and so giving to criticism
a certain additional interest in the task of placing and appraising
them.
This last sentence may not meet with universal assent, but it will bring
me conveniently to the second part of my subject. I should not have
republished these essays if I had not thought that, whatever may be
their faults (and a man who does not see the faults of his own writing
on revising it a second time for the press after an interval, must be
either a great genius or an intolerable fool), they possess a certain
unity of critical method. Nor should I have republished them if it had
seemed to me that this method was exactly identical with that of any
other critic of the present day in England. I have at least endeavoured
to wear my rue with a difference, and that not merely for the sake of
differing.
Mr. Goldwin Smith, whose work is not likely to be impeached for defect
either in form or in substance, wrote but a few months ago, in
melancholy mood, that the province of criticism appeared to be now
limited to the saying of fine things. I agree with him that this is one
vicious extreme of the popular conception of the art; but in order to
define correctly, we cannot be contented with one only. The other, as it
seems to me, is fixed by the notion, now warmly championed by some
younger critics both at home and abroad, that criticism must be of all
things "scientific." For my own part, I have gravely and strenuously
endeavoured to ascertain from the writings both of foreign critics (the
chief of whom was the late M. Hennequin in France), and of their
disciples at home, what "scientific" criticism means. In no case have I
been able to obtain any clear conception of its connotation in the
mouths or minds of those who use the phrase. The new heaven and the new
earth which they promise are no doubt to be very different from our own
old earth and heaven; of that they are sure, and their sureness does not
fail to make itself plain. But what the flora and fauna, the biology and
geology of the new heaven and earth are to be, I have never succeeded in
ascertaining. The country would appear to be like that Land of Ignorance
which, as Lord Brooke says, "none can describe until he be past it."
Only I have perceived that when this "scientific" criticism sticks
closest to its own formulas and ways, it appears to me to be very bad
criticism; and that when, as sometimes happens, it is good criticism,
its ways and formulas are not perceptibly distinguishable from those of
criticism which is not "scientific." For the rest, it is all but
demonstrable that "scientific" literary criticism is impossible, unless
the word "scientific" is to have its meaning very illegitimately
altered. For the essential qualities of literature, as of all art, are
communicated by the individual, they depend upon idiosyncrasy: and this
makes science in any proper sense powerless. _She_ can deal only with
classes, only with general laws; and so long as these classes are
constantly reduced to "species of one," and these laws are set at nought
by incalculable and singular influences, she must be constantly baffled
and find all her elaborate plant of formulas and generalisations
useless. Of course, there are generalisations possible in literature,
and to such I may return presently; but scientific criticism of
literature must always be a contradiction in terms. You may to some
considerable extent ascertain the general laws of language, of metre, of
music, as applied to verbal rhythm and cadence; you may classify the
subjects which appeal to the general, and further classify their
particular manners of appeal; you may arrange the most ingenious
"product-of-the-circumstances" theories about race, climate, religion.
But always sooner or later, and much more often sooner than later, the
mocking demon of the individual, or, if a different phrase be preferred,
the great and splendid mystery of the idiosyncrasy of the artist, will
meet and baffle you. You will find that on the showing of this science
falsely so called, there is no reason why Chapelain should not be a
poet, and none why Shakespeare is. You will ask science in vain to tell
you why some dozen or sixteen of the simplest words in language arranged
by one man or in one fashion, why a certain number of dabs of colour
arranged by another man or in another fashion, make a permanent addition
to the delight of the world, while other words and other dabs of colour,
differently arranged by others, do not. To put the matter yet otherwise,
the whole end, aim, and object of literature and the criticism of
literature, as of all art, and the criticism of all art, is beauty and
the enjoyment of beauty. With beauty science has absolutely nothing to
do.
It is no doubt the sense, conscious or unconscious, of this that has
inclined men to that other conception of criticism as a saying of fine
things, of which Mr. Goldwin Smith complains, and which certainly has
many votaries, in most countries at the present day. These votaries have
their various kinds. There is the critic who simply uses his subject as
a sort of springboard or platform, on and from which to display his
natural grace and agility, his urbane learning, his faculty of pleasant
wit. This is perhaps the most popular of all critics, and no age has
ever had better examples of him than this age. There is a more serious
kind who founds on his subject (if indeed founding be not too solemn a
term) elaborate descants, makes it the theme of complicated variations.
There is a third, closely allied to him, who seeks in it apparently
first of all, and sometimes with no further aim, an opportunity for the
display of style. And lastly (though as usual all these kinds pervade
and melt into one another, so that, while in any individual one may
prevail, it is rare to find an individual in whom that one is alone
present) there is the purely impressionist critic who endeavours in his
own way to show the impression which the subject has, or which he
chooses to represent that it has, produced on him. This last is in a
better case than the others; but still he, as it seems to me, misses
the full and proper office of the critic, though he may have an
agreeable and even useful function of his own.
For the full and proper office of the critic (again as it seems to me)
can never be discharged except by those who remember that "critic" means
"judge." Expressions of personal liking, though they can hardly be kept
out of criticism, are not by themselves judgment. The famous "J'aime
mieux Alfred de Musset," though it came from a man of extraordinary
mental power and no small specially critical ability, is not criticism.
Mere _obiter dicta_ of any kind, though they may be most agreeable and
even most legitimate sets-off to critical conversation, are not
criticism. The most admirable discourses from the merely literary point
of view on taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses, with some
parenthetic reference to the matter in hand, are not criticism. There
must be at least some attempt to take in and render the whole virtue of
the subjects considered, some effort to compare them with their likes in
other as well as the same languages, some endeavour to class and value
them. And as a condition preliminary to this process, there must, I
think, be a not inconsiderable study of widely differing periods, forms,
manners, of literature itself. The test question, as I should put it, of
the value of criticism is "What idea of the original would this critic
give to a tolerably instructed person who did not know that original?"
And again, "How far has this critic seen steadily and seen whole, the
subject which he has set himself to consider? How far has he referred
the main peculiarities of that subject to their proximate causes and
effects? How far has he attempted to place, and succeeded in placing,
the subject in the general history of literature, in the particular
history of its own language, in the collection of authors of its own
department?" How far, in short, has he applied what I may perhaps be
excused for calling the comparative method in literature to the
particular instance? I have read very famous and in their way very
accomplished examples of literature ostensibly critical, in which few if
any of these questions seem to have been even considered by the critic.
He may have said many pretty things; he may have shown what a clever
fellow he is; he may have in his own person contributed good literature
to swell the literary sum. But has he done anything to aid the general
grasp of that literary sum, to place his man under certain lights and in
certain aspects, with due allowance for the possibility of other aspects
and other lights? Very often, I think, it must be admitted that he has
not. I should be the first to admit that my own attempts to do this are
unsuccessful and faulty; and I only plead for them that they are such
attempts, and that they have been made on the basis of tolerably wide
and tolerably careful reading.
For, after all, it is this reading which is the main and principal
thing. It will not of course by itself make a critic; but few are the
critics that will ever be made without it. We have at this moment an
awful example of an exceedingly clever writer who has commenced critic,
disdaining this preparation. Some of my friends jeer or comminate at Mr.
Howells; for my part I only shudder and echo the celebrated "There, but
for the grace of God." Here is a clever man, a very clever man, an
excellent though of late years slightly depraved practitioner in one
branch of art, who, suddenly and without preparation, takes to another,
and becomes a spectacle to men and angels. I hope that we shall one day
have a collection of Mr. Howells's critical _dicta_ on novels and other
things; they will be one of the most valuable, one of the most terrible
of books as showing what happens when a man speaks without knowledge. To
read what Mr. Howells says of Mr. Thackeray is almost an illiberal
education. The reason of the error is quite obvious. It is simply that
the clever American does not know; he has not sufficient range of
comparison. For my own part, I should not dare to continue criticising
so much as a circulating library novel, if I did not perpetually pay my
respects to the classics of many literatures: and I am not sure that I
do not appreciate the classics of many literatures all the better from
my not infrequent reading of circulating library novels.
The only objection of validity that I have ever seen taken to what I
have ventured to call comparative criticism, is that it proceeds too
much, as the most learned of living French critics once observed of an
English writer, _par cases et par compartiments_, that is to say, as I
understand M. Brunetière, with a rather too methodical classification.
This, however, was written some seven or eight years ago, and since then
I have found M. Brunetière speaking about critical method as
distinguished from the science of criticism, and insisting on the
necessity of comparison, not less positively, and no doubt with far more
authority, than I have done myself. Yet I half think that M. Brunetière,
like most of us, does not practise quite up to the level of his
preaching; and I should say that on mediæval literature, on Romantic
literature, and on some other things, his own excellent censorship might
be further improved by a still more catholic sympathy, and a still more
constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction
with their analogues and their opposites in the same and other
literatures. This constant reference of comparison may indeed stand in
the way of those flowing deliverances of personal opinion, in more or
less agreeable language, which are perhaps, or rather certainly, what is
most popular in criticism; I do not think that they will ever stand in
the way of criticism proper. As I understand that long and difficult
art, its end, as far as the individual is concerned, is to provide the
mind with a sort of conspectus of literature, as a good atlas thoroughly
conned provides a man with a conspectus of the _orbis terrarum_. To the
man with a geographical head, the mention of a place at once suggests
its bearings to other places, its history, its products, all its
relations in short; to the man with a critical head, the mention of a
book or an author should call up a similar mental picture. The picture,
indeed, will never be as complete in the one instance as in the other,
because the intellect and the artistic faculty of man are far vaster
than this planet, far more diverse, far more intricately and
perplexingly arranged than all its abundant material dispositions and
products. The life of Methuselah and the mind of Shakespeare together
could hardly take the whole of critical knowledge to be their joint
province. But the area of survey may be constantly increased; the
particularity of knowledge constantly made more minute.
Another objection, more fantastic in appearance but rather attractive in
its way, is that the comparative critic becomes too much of a universal
lover, and too little of an enthusiast, that he has an irritating and
ungentlemanly habit of seeing blemishes in the greatest, a pottering and
peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that
he lacks the exclusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual
aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of æsthetic passion. To this, one
can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of
this kind will very rarely be able to indulge in the _engouement_ which
is the apparent delight of some of his class. He will deal very
cautiously in superlatives, and his commendations, when he gives them,
will sometimes have, to more gushing persons, the slightly ludicrous air
which attached to the modest boast of somebody that he was "the third
best authority in England on gray shirtings." On the other hand, the
critic of this kind will not be able to neglect the uninteresting with
the serene nonchalance of some of his fellows. He will sometimes have to
look back on days and months and years of laborious reading and say to
himself, "Were it not well for us, as others use, to take all this for
granted?" But to say this is to say no more than that the thorough-going
practice of any art and mystery involves a great deal of tedious,
thankless, and even positively fruitless work, brushes away a good many
illusions, and interferes a good deal with personal comfort. Cockaigne
is a delightful country, and the Cockaigne of criticism is as agreeable
as the other provinces. But none of these provinces has usually been
accounted a wise man's paradise.
It may be asked, "What is the end which you propose for this comparative
reading? A method must lead somewhere; whither does this method lead? or
does it lead only to statistics and classifications?" Certainly it does
not, or at least should not. It leads, like all method, to
generalisations which, though as I have said I do not believe that they
have attained or ever will attain the character of science, at least
throw no small light and interest on the study of literature as a whole,
and of its examples as particulars. It gives, I think (speaking as a
fool), a constantly greater power of distinguishing good work from bad
work, by giving constantly nearer approach (though perhaps it may never
wholly and finally attain) to the knowledge of the exact characteristics
which distinguish the two. And the way in which it does this is by a
constant process of weakening or strengthening, as the case may be, the
less or more correct generalisations with which the critic starts, or
which he forms in the early days of his reading. There has often been
brought against some great critics the charge that their critical
standards have altered at different times of their career. This simply
means that they have been constantly applying the comparative method,
and profiting by the application. After all, there are few, though there
are some, absolute truths in criticism; and a man will often be
relatively right in condemning, from certain aspects and in certain
combinations, work which, under other aspects and in other combinations,
he has been relatively quite as right in admiring. Occasionally, no
doubt, there will be an apparent exception to the rule of critical
development, as in the case of Hazlitt: but that remarkable exception
does not fail to justify the rule. For in truth, Hazlitt's critical
range was not so wide as his penetration was deep; and he avows, almost
exultingly, that after a comparatively early time of life, he
practically left off reading. That is to say, he carefully avoided
renewing his plant, and he usually eschewed new material--conditions
which, no doubt, conduce to the uniformity, and, within obvious limits,
are not prejudicial to the excellence of the product.
It is possible that the title "The Kinds of Criticism" may have excited
in some readers expectations of the discussion of a subject which has
not yet been handled. We have recently seen revived the sempiternal
argument between authors and critics--an argument in which it may be as
well to say that the present writer has not yet taken part either
anonymously or otherwise. The authors, or some of them, have remarked
that they have never personally benefited by criticism; and the critics,
after their disagreeable way, have retorted that this was obvious. A
critic of great ingenuity, my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, has, with his
usual humour, suggested that critics and reviewers are two different
kinds, and have nothing to do with each other essentially, though
accidentally, and in the imperfect arrangements of the world, the
discharge of their functions may happen to be combined in the same
person. As a matter of practice, this is no doubt too often the case; as
a matter of theory, nothing ought much less to be the case. I think
that if I were dictator, one of the first non-political things that I
should do, would be to make the order of reviewers as close a one, at
least, as the bench of judges, or the staff of the Mint, or of any
public establishment of a similar character. That any large amount of
reviewing is determined by fear or favour is a general idea which has
little more basis than a good many other general ideas. But that a very
large amount of reviewing is determined by doubtless well-meaning
incompetence, there is no doubt whatever. It is on the whole the most
difficult kind of newspaper writing, and it is on the whole the most
lightly assigned and the most irresponsibly performed. I have heard of
newspapers where the reviews depended almost wholly on the accident of
some of the staff taking a holiday, or being laid for a time on the
shelf, or being considered not up to other work; of others, though this
I own is scarcely credible, where the whole reviewing was farmed out to
a manager, to be allotted to devils as good to him seemed; of many where
the reviews were a sort of exercising-ground on which novices were
trained, broken-down hacks turned out to grass, and invalids allowed a
little gentle exercise. And I know of not a few papers and not a few
reviewers in which and by whom, errors and accidents excepted, the best
work possible is given to one of the most important kinds of work. Of
common mistakes on the subject, which are not merely silly crazes, such
as the log-rolling craze and the five-pound note craze and the like, the
worst known to me, though it is shared by some who should know better,
is that a specialist is the best reviewer. I do not say that he is
always the worst; but that is about as far as my charity, informed by
much experience, can go. Even if he has no special craze or megrim, and
does not decide offhand that a man is hopeless because he calls Charles
the Great Charlemagne, or _vice versâ_, he is constantly out of focus.
The perfect reviewer would be (and the only reviewer whose reviews are
worth reading is he who more or less approximates to this ideal) the
Platonic or pseudo-Platonic philosopher who is "second best in
everything," who has enough special knowledge not to miss merits or
defects, and enough general knowledge to estimate the particular subject
at, and not above, its relative value to the whole. There have been good
critics who were unable to bring themselves down to the mere reading of
ephemeral work, but I do not think they were the better for this; I am
sure that there never was a good reviewer, even of the lowest trash, who
was not _in posse_ or _in esse_ a good critic of the highest and most
enduring literature. The writer of funny articles, and the "slater," and
the intelligent _compte-rendu_ man, and the person who writes six
columns on the general theory of poetry when he professes to review Mr.
Apollo's last book, may do all these things well and not be good
critics; but then all these things may be done, and done well, and yet
not be good reviews.
Whether the reviewer and the critic are valuable members of society or
useless encumbrances, must be questions left to the decision of the
world at large, which apparently is not in a hurry to decide either way.
There are, no doubt, certain things that the critic, whether he be
critic major or critic minor, Sainte-Beuve or Mr. Gall, cannot do. He
cannot certainly, and for the present, sell or prevent the sale of a
book. "You slated this and it has gone through twenty editions" is not a
more uncommon remark than the other, "They slated that and you extol it
to the skies." Both, as generally urged, rest on fallacy. In the first
case, nothing was probably farther from the critic's intention than to
say "this book is not popular"; the most that he intended was "this book
is not good." In the second case, it has been discovered of late (it is
one of the few things that we have discovered) that very rarely has any
really good thing, even in the most famous or infamous attacks on it,
been attacked, even with a shadow of success, for its goodness. The
critics were severe on Byron's faults, on Keats's faults, and on the
present Laureate's faults; they were seldom severe on their goodness,
though they often failed to appreciate it fully.
This, however, is in one sense a digression, for there is no criticism
of contemporary work in this volume. I think, however, as I have just
endeavoured to point out, that criticism of contemporary work and
criticism of classics should proceed on the same lines, and I think that
both require the same qualities and the same outfit. Nor am I certain
that if narrow inquiry were made, some of the best criticism in all
times and in all languages would not be found in the merest casual
reviewing. That in all cases the critic must start from a wide
comparative study of different languages and literatures, is the first
position to be laid down. In the next place he must, I think, constantly
refer back his sensations of agreement and disagreement, of liking and
disliking, in the same comparative fashion. "Why do I like the
_Agamemnon_ and dislike Mr. Dash's five-act tragedy?" is a question to
be constantly put, and to be answered only by a pretty close personal
inquiry as to what "I" really do like in the _Agamemnon_ and do dislike
in Mr. Dash. And in answering it, it will hardly be possible to consider
too large a number of instances of all degrees of merit, from Aeschylus
himself to Mr. Dash himself, of all languages, of all times. Let
Englishmen be compared with Englishmen of other times to bring out this
set of differences, with foreigners of modern times to bring out that,
with Greeks and Romans to bring out the other. Let poets of old days be
compared with poets of new, classics with romantics, rhymed with
unrhymed. Let the straitest doctrinaire criticism of men of talent like
Boileau and simpletons like Rymer be compared with the fullest
appreciations of Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Sainte-Beuve and Mr. Arnold.
"Compare, always compare" is the first axiom of criticism.[1]
The second, I think, is "Always make sure, as far as you possibly can,
that what you like and dislike is the literary and not the
extra-literary character of the matter under examination." Make sure,
that is to say, that admiration for the author is not due to his having
taken care that the Whig dogs or the Tory dogs shall not have the best
of it, to his having written as a gentleman for gentlemen, or as an
uneasy anti-aristocrat for uneasy anti-aristocrats, as a believer
(fervent or acquiescent) in the supernatural, or as a person who lays
it down that miracles do not happen, as an Englishman or a Frenchman, a
classic or a romantic. Very difficult indeed is the chase and discovery
of these enemies: for extra-literary prejudices are as cunning as winter
hares or leaf-insects, in disguising themselves by simulating literary
forms.
Lastly, never be content without at least endeavouring to connect cause
and effect in some way, without giving something like a reason for the
faith that is in you. No doubt the critic will often be tempted, will
sometimes be actually forced to say, "'J'aime mieux Alfred de Musset,'
and there's an end of it." All the imperfect kinds, as they seem to me,
of criticism are recommended by the fact that they are, unlike some
other literary matter, not only easier writing but also easier reading.
The agreeable exercises of style where adjectives meet substantives to
whom they never thought they could possibly be introduced (as a certain
naughty wit has it), the pleasant chatter about personal reminiscences,
the flowers of rhetoric, the fruits of wit, may not be easy, but they
are at any rate easier than fashioning some intelligent and intelligible
response to the perpetual "Why?" the _quare stans_ of criticism.
In the following pages, I shall no doubt be found, like other people, to
have come very far short of my own ideal, and my own precepts. I may
even say that I have knowingly and intentionally come short of them to
some extent. Biographical and anecdotic detail has, I believe, much
less to do with the real appreciation of the literary value of an author
than is generally thought. In rare instances, it throws a light, but the
examples in which we know practically nothing at all, as in that of
Shakespeare, or only a few leading facts as in that of Dante, are not
those in which criticism is least useful or least satisfactory. At the
same time biographical and anecdotic details please most people, and if
they are not allowed to shoulder out criticism altogether, there can be
no harm in them. For myself, I should like to have the whole works of
every author of merit, and I should care little to know anything
whatever about his life; but that is a mere private opinion and possibly
a private crotchet. Accordingly some space has been given in most of
these Essays to a sketch of the life of the subject. Nor has it seemed
advisable (except as a matter of necessary, but very occasional,
digression) to argue at length upon abstract and general questions such
as the definition of poetry, or the kinds and limits of the novel. Large
as is the body of criticism so-called which the last hundred years have
seen, it may be doubted whether there is even yet accumulated a
sufficient _corpus_ of really critical discussion of individuals. If I
have in these Essays contributed even a very little to such an
accumulation, I shall have done that which I purposed.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Only by dint of this constant comparison, can the critic save
himself from the besetting error which makes men believe that there is
some absolute progress in life and art, instead of, for the most part,
mere eddyings-round in the same circle. I am tempted to glance at this,
because of a passage which I read while this Essay was a-writing, a
passage signed by a person whom I name altogether for the sake of
honour, Mr. James Sully. "If we compare," says Mr. Sully, "Fielding for
example with Balzac, Thackeray, or one of the great Russian novelists,
we see at once what a simple toylike structure used to serve art for a
human world. A mind versed in life as contemporary fiction depicts it,
feels, on turning to the already antiquated forms of the eighteenth
century, that it has to divest itself for the nonce of more than half
its equipment of habitual thought and emotion." This might serve as text
for a long sermon, I only cite it in passing as an interesting example
of the _idola specus_ which beset a clever man who loses the power of
comparative vision, and sees _Tom Jones_ as a toylike structure with the
_Kreutzer Sonata_ beside it as a human world.
I
CRABBE
There is a certain small class of persons in the history of literature
the members of which possess, at least for literary students, an
interest peculiar to themselves. They are the writers who having
attained, not merely popular vogue, but fame as solid as fame can ever
be, in their own day, having been praised by the praised, and having as
far as can be seen owed this praise to none of the merely external and
irrelevant causes--politics, religion, fashion or what not--from which
it sometimes arises, experience in a more or less short time after their
death the fate of being, not exactly cast down from their high place,
but left respectfully alone in it, unvisited, unincensed, unread. Among
these writers, over the gate of whose division of the literary Elysium
the famous, "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" might serve as motto, the
author of "The Village" and "Tales of the Hall" is one of the most
remarkable. As for Crabbe's popularity in his own day there is no
mistake about that. It was extraordinarily long, it was extremely wide,
it included the select few as well as the vulgar, it was felt and more
or less fully acquiesced in by persons of the most diverse tastes,
habits, and literary standards. His was not the case, which occurs now
and then, of a man who makes a great reputation in early life and long
afterwards preserves it because, either by accident or prudence, he does
not enter the lists with his younger rivals, and therefore these rivals
can afford to show him a reverence which is at once graceful and cheap.
Crabbe won his spurs in full eighteenth century, and might have boasted,
altering Landor's words, that he had dined early and in the best of
company, or have parodied Goldsmith, and said, "I have Johnson and
Burke: all the wits have been here." But when his studious though barren
manhood was passed, and he again began, as almost an old man, to write
poetry, he entered into full competition with the giants of the new
school, whose ideals and whose education were utterly different from
his. While "The Library" and "The Village" came to a public which still
had Johnson, which had but just lost Goldsmith, and which had no other
poetical novelty before it than Cowper, "The Borough" and the later
Tales entered the lists with "Marmion" and "Childe Harold," with
"Christabel" and "The Excursion," even with "Endymion" and "The Revolt
of Islam." Yet these later works of Crabbe met with the fullest
recognition both from readers and from critics of the most opposite
tendencies. Scott, the most generous, and Wordsworth,[2] the most
grudging, of all the poets of the day towards their fellows, united in
praising Crabbe; and unromantic as the poet of "The Village" seems to us
he was perhaps Sir Walter's favourite English bard. Scott read him
constantly, he quotes him incessantly; and no one who has read it can
ever forget how Crabbe figures in the most pathetic biographical pages
ever written--Lockhart's account of the death at Abbotsford. Byron's
criticism was as weak as his verse was powerful, but still Byron had no
doubt about Crabbe. The utmost flight of memory or even of imagination
can hardly get together three contemporary critics whose standards,
tempers, and verdicts, were more different than those of Gifford,
Jeffrey, and Wilson. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that they are
all in a tale about Crabbe. In this unexampled chorus of eulogy there
rose (for some others who can hardly have admired him much were simply
silent) one single note, so far as I know, or rather one single rattling
peal of thunder on the other side. It is true that this was significant
enough, for it came from William Hazlitt.
Yet against this chorus, which was not, as has sometimes happened, the
mere utterance of a loud-voiced few, but was echoed by a great multitude
who eagerly bought and read Crabbe, must be set the almost total
forgetfulness of his work which has followed. It is true that of living
or lately living persons in the first rank of literature some great
names can be cited on his side; and what is more, that these great names
show the same curious diversity in agreement which has been already
noticed as one of Crabbe's triumphs. The translator of Omar Khayyám, his
friend the present Laureate, and the author of "The Dream of Gerontius,"
are men whose literary ideals are known to be different enough; yet they
add a third trinity as remarkable as those others of Gifford, Jeffrey,
and Wilson, of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. Much more recently Mr.
Courthope has used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with
literary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite to the
comprehension of his fellow-critics; Mr. Leslie Stephen has discussed
him as one who knows and loves his eighteenth century. But who reads
him? Who quotes him? Who likes him? I think I can venture to say, with
all proper humility, that I know Crabbe pretty well; I think I may say
with neither humility nor pride, but simply as a person whose business
it has been for some years to read books, and articles, and debates,
that I know what has been written and said in England lately. You will
find hardly a note of Crabbe in these writings and sayings. He does not
even survive, as "Matthew Green, who wrote 'The Spleen,'" and others
survive, by quotations which formerly made their mark, and are retained
without a knowledge of their original. If anything is known about Crabbe
to the general reader, it is the parody in "Rejected Addresses," an
extraordinarily happy parody no doubt, in fact rather better Crabbe in
Crabbe's weakest moments than Crabbe himself. But naturally there is
nothing of his best there; and it is by his best things, let it be
repeated over and over in face of all opposition, that a poet must be
judged.
Although Crabbe's life, save for one dramatic revolution, was one of the
least eventful in our literary history, it is by no means one of the
least interesting. Mr. Kebbel's book[3] gives a very fair summary of it;
but the Life by Crabbe's son which is prefixed to the collected editions
of the poems, and on which Mr. Kebbel's own is avowedly based, is
perhaps the more interesting of the two. It is written with a curious
mixture of the old literary state and formality, and of a feeling on
the writer's part that he is not a literary man himself, and that not
only his father, but Mr. Lockhart, Mr. Moore, Mr. Bowles and the other
high literary persons who assisted him were august beings of another
sphere. This is all the more agreeable, in that Crabbe's sons had
advantages of education and otherwise which were denied to their father,
and might in the ordinary course of things have been expected to show
towards him a lofty patronage rather than any filial reverence. The poet
himself was born at Aldborough, a now tolerably well-known
watering-place (the fortune of which was made by Mr. Wilkie Collins in
_No Name_) on Christmas Eve, 1754. That not uncommon infirmity of noble
minds which seeks to prove distinguished ancestry seems to have had no
hold on the plain common sense of the Crabbe family, who maintained
themselves to be at the best Norfolk yeomen, and though they possessed a
coat-of-arms, avowed with much frankness that they did not know how they
got it. A hundred and forty years ago they had apparently lost even the
dignity of yeomanhood, and occupied stations quite in the lower rank of
the middle class as tradesmen, non-commissioned officers in the navy or
the merchant service, and so forth. George Crabbe, the grandfather, was
collector of customs at Aldborough, but his son, also a George, was a
parish schoolmaster and a parish clerk before he returned to the
Suffolk port as deputy collector and then as salt-master, or collector
of the salt duties. He seems to have had no kind of polish, and late in
life was a mere rough drinking exciseman; but his education, especially
in mathematics, appears to have been considerable, and his ability in
business not small. The third George, his eldest son, was also fairly
though very irregularly educated for a time, and his father, perceiving
that he was "a fool about a boat," had the rather unusual common sense
to destine him to a learned profession. Unluckily his will was better
than his means, and while the profession which Crabbe chose or which was
chosen for him--that of medicine--was not the best suited to his tastes
or talents, the resources of the family were not equal to giving him a
full education, even in that. He was still at intervals employed in the
Customs warehouses at "piling up butter and cheese" even after he was
apprenticed at fourteen to a country surgeon. The twelve years which he
spent in this apprenticeship, in an abhorred return for a short time to
the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means
to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no
qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of
apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love was, for once, most truly
and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his
patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice, and
possessed, as far as can be made out, of neither manners nor prospects,
he met a certain Miss Sarah Elmy. She was three or four years older than
himself and much better connected, being the niece and eventual
co-heiress of a wealthy yeoman squire. She was, it is said, pretty; she
was evidently accomplished, and she seems to have had access to the
country society of those days. But Mira, as Crabbe called her, perhaps
merely in the fashion of the eighteenth century, perhaps in remembrance
of Fulke Greville's heroine (for he knew his Elizabethans rather well
for a man of those days), and no doubt also with a secret joy to think
that the last syllables of her Christian name and surname in a way spelt
the appellation, fell in love with the boy and made his fortune. But for
her Crabbe would probably have subsided, not contentedly but stolidly,
into the lot of a Doctor Slop of the time, consoling himself with snuff
(which he always loved) and schnaps (to which we have hints that in his
youth he was not averse). Mira was at once unalterably faithful to him
and unalterably determined not to marry unless he could give her
something like a position. Their long engagement (they were not married
till he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-three) may, as we shall see,
have carried with it some of the penalties of long engagements. But it
is as certain as any such thing can be that but for it English
literature would have lacked the name of Crabbe.
There is no space here to go through the sufferings of the novitiate. At
last, at the extreme end of 1779, Crabbe made up his mind once more to
seek his fortune, this time by aid of literature only, in London. His
son too has printed rare scraps of a very interesting Journal to Mira
which he kept during at least a part of the terrible year of struggle
which he passed there. He saw the riots of '80; he canvassed, always
more or less in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent
three-and-sixpence of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was
much less disturbed about imminent starvation than by the delay of a
letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally" she becomes with a pathetic lapse
from convention, when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he
had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes prayers (but not
for the public eye), abstracts of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather
adulatory) to Lord Shelburne, which received no answer. All this has the
most genuine note that ever man of letters put into his work, for
whatever Crabbe was or was not, now or at any time, he was utterly
sincere; and his sincerity makes his not very abundant letters and
journals unusually interesting. At last, after a year, during which his
means of subsistence are for the most part absolutely unknown, he, as he
says himself, fixed "by some propitious influence, in some happy moment"
on Edmund Burke as the subject of a last appeal.
Nothing in all literary history is, in a modest way and without pearls
and gold, quite so like a fairy tale as the difference in Crabbe's
fortunes which this propitious influence brought about. On the day when
he wrote to Burke he was, as he said in the letter, "an outcast, without
friends, without employment, without bread." In some twenty-four hours
(the night-term of which he passed in ceaselessly pacing Westminster
Bridge to cheat the agony of expectation) he was a made man. It was not
merely that, directly or indirectly, Burke procured him a solid and an
increasing income. He did much more than that. Crabbe, like most
self-educated men, was quite uncritical of his own work: Burke took him
into his own house for months, encouraged him to submit his poems,
criticised them at once without mercy and with judgment, found him
publishers, found him a public, turned him from a raw country boy into a
man who at least had met society of the best kind. It is a platitude to
say that for a hundred persons who will give money or patronage there is
scarcely one who will take trouble of this kind; and if any devil's
advocate objects the delight of producing a "lion," it may be answered
that for Burke at least this delight would not have been delightful at
all.
The immediate form which the patronage of Burke and that, soon added, of
Thurlow took, is one which rather shocks the present day. They made
Crabbe turn to the Church, and got a complaisant bishop to ordain him.
They sent him (a rather dangerous experiment) to be curate in his own
native place, and finally Burke procured him the chaplaincy at Belvoir.
The young Duke of Rutland, who had been made a strong Tory by Pitt, was
fond of letters, and his Duchess Isabel, who was,--like her elder
kinswoman, Dryden's Duchess of Ormond--
A daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite
The varying beauties of the red and white,