_3 Nov. '10_
I learn that Mr. Elkin Mathews is about to publish a collected uniform
edition of the works (poems and criticism) and correspondence of the late
Lionel Johnson. I presume that this edition will comprise his study of
Thomas Hardy. The enterprise proves that Lionel Johnson has admirers
capable of an excellent piety; and it also argues a certain continuance of
the demand for his books. I was never deeply impressed by Lionel Johnson's
criticisms, and still less by his verse, but in the days of his activity I
was young and difficult and hasty. Perhaps my net was too coarse for his
fineness. But, anyhow, I would give much to have a large homogeneous body
of English literary criticism to read _at_. And I should be obliged to any
one who would point out to me where such a body of first-rate criticism is
to be found. I have never been able to find it for myself. When I think of
Pierre Bayle, Sainte-Beuve, and Taine, and of the keen pleasure I derive
from the immense pasture offered by their voluminous and consistently
admirable works, I ask in vain where are the great English critics of
English literature. Beside these French critics, the best of our own seem
either fragmentary or provincial--yes, curiously provincial. Except
Hazlitt we have, I believe, no even approximately first-class writer who
devoted his main activity to criticism. And Hazlitt, though he is very
readable, has neither the urbaneness, nor the science, nor the learning,
nor the wide grasp of life and of history that characterizes the three
above-named. Briefly, he didn't know enough.
* * * * *
Lamb would have been a first-class critic if he hadn't given the chief
part of his life to clerkship. Lamb at any rate is not provincial. His
perceptions are never at fault. Every sentence of Lamb proves his taste
and his powerful intelligence. Coleridge--well, Coleridge has his
comprehensible moments, but they are few; Matthew Arnold, with study and
discipline, might perhaps have been a great critic, only his passion for
literature was not strong enough to make him give up
school-inspecting--and there you are! Moreover, Matthew Arnold could never
have written of women as Sainte-Beuve did. There were a lot of vastly
interesting things that Matthew Arnold did not understand and did not
want to understand. He, too, was provincial (I regret to say)--you can
feel it throughout his letters, though his letters make very good quiet
reading. Churton Collins was a scholar of an extreme type; unfortunately
he possessed no real feeling for literature, and thus his judgment, when
it had to stand alone, cut a figure prodigiously absurd. And among living
practitioners? Well, I have no hesitation in de-classing the whole
professorial squad--Bradley, Herford, Dowden, Walter Raleigh, Elton,
Saintsbury. The first business of any writer, and especially of any
critical writer, is not to be mandarinic and tedious, and these lecturers
have not yet learnt that first business. The best of them is George
Saintsbury, but his style is such that even in Carmelite Street the
sub-editors would try to correct it. Imagine the reception of such a style
in Paris! Still, Professor Saintsbury does occasionally stray out of the
university quadrangles, and puts on the semblance of a male human being as
distinguished from an asexual pedagogue. Professor Walter Raleigh is
improving. Professor Elton has never fallen to the depths of sterile and
pretentious banality which are the natural and customary level of the
remaining three.... You think I am letting my pen run away with me? Not at
all. That is nothing to what I could say if I tried. Mr. J.W. Mackail
might have been one of our major critics, but there again--he, too,
prefers the security of a Government office, like Mr. Austin Dobson, who,
by the way, is very good in a very limited sphere. Perhaps Austin Dobson
is as good as we have. Compare his low flight with the terrific sweeping
range of a Sainte-Beuve or a Taine. I wish that some greatly gifted youth
now aged about seventeen would make up his mind to be a literary critic
and nothing else.