Opening…

Preface

In the first volume of this History we had to summarise the critical work of nearly two thousand years; in the second, that of two whole centuries, with the major part of that of the third. In this we have had the apparently more manageable task of considering the whole work of the nineteenth century only, with the remanets (left over, not by accident but design) from the eighteenth and earlier. Yet it would be a poor compliment to the reader’s intelligence to waste time in explaining to him that the weight of the task is very little lightened by the lessened number of the years with which we have to deal. And the actual congestion of the volume ought all the less to be increased by repetition of things already said in former Prefaces, or by single-stick play with reviewers. Some points, which seemed to be really worth handling, I have dealt with in the text; the others I must let alone. I have little fear that many impartial and competent critics will dispute my claim to have surveyed the matter with the actual documents in hand, and not (save in the rare cases specified) from comments and go-betweens, from abstracts and translations; while such critics may even grant my “mass,” as some indeed have in their kindness granted it already, a fair share of “agitating mind,” under the conditions and with the limitations specified in the original preface. I may at least hope that I shall not be charged with

“la fretta Che l’onestade ad ogni atto dismaga,”

in regard to a book which has been the actual work and companion of seven years in its composition, the result of more than seven-and-twenty in direct or indirect preparation.

After all it is, as Dante says elsewhere, for knowledge “not to prove but to set forth its subject,” and I do not see any further necessity to argue against the notion that Criticism, alone of the departments of literary energy, is to be denied a simple and straightforward History of its actual accomplishments. That is what I set myself to give. If other people want other things, let them go and do them. When the next History of Criticism is written it will doubtless be, if the author knows his business, a much better book than mine; but I may perhaps hope that his might be worse, and would certainly cost him more time and labour, were it not for this.

One final point I think it may be well to take up. A friend who is at once friendly, most competent, and of a different complexion in critical thought, objected to me that I “treat literature as something by itself.” I hastened to admit the impeachment, and to declare that this is the very postulate of my book. That literature can be absolutely isolated is, of course, not to be thought of; nothing human can be absolutely isolated from the general conditions of humanity, and from the other functions and operations thereof. But in that comparative isolation and separate presentation which Aristotle meant by his caution against confusion of kinds, I do thoroughly believe. With which profession of faith, and with all renewed acknowledgments to friends and helpers, especially to Professors Elton, Ker, and Raleigh for their kindness in reading the proofs of this volume, I must leave the book to its fate.[1]

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

HOLMBURY ST MARY, Lammas 1904.

ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA.

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VOLUME I.

P. 63, note. “_Lu_dhaus” should be “_Su_dhaus.” I received from Professor Gudeman of Cornell University, along with the notice of this misprint, and some other minor corrections which I gratefully acknowledge, a large number of much more important animadversions, for noticing which generally I may make it a pretext. I have the highest respect for their author: and it is quite natural that to him, as a professed and professional classical philologist, my treatment should in many respects seem superficial, or amateurish, or even positively wrong. But on at least one point we are, I fear, irreconcilable. Professor Gudeman thinks that Kaibel has “settled once for all” the question of the Περὶ Ὕψους,—has “given incontrovertible proof” that it cannot be later than the first century. Now, as an old student of Logic and of Law, and as a literary critic of thirty years’ standing, I absolutely deny the possibility of “settling once for all,” of “incontrovertible proof,” in this matter as in many others. The evidence is not extant, if it is existent. It may turn up, but it has not turned up yet. On this point—the point as to what constitutes literary evidence and what does not—I am well aware that I am at issue, perhaps with the majority, at any rate with a large number, of scholars in the ancient and modern languages; but I am quite content to remain so. As to another protest of Professor Gudeman’s against my neglect of the latest editions, I might refer him to Schopenhauer (v. infra, p. 567); but I will only say that for my purpose the date of an edition is of very little importance, and the spelling of “_G_næus” or “_C_næus,” “_iu_ris” or “_ju_ris,” of no importance at all. I am sorry to appear stiff-necked in reference to criticisms made with many obliging expressions, but Ich kann nicht anders, as also in reference to Theophrastus, the Alexandrians, and others, whose substantive works are lost, but with whom Mr Gudeman would like me to deal in the usual manner of conjectural and inferential patchwork.

P. 280. I had not observed (oddly enough) that Clæris had crept into text and headings, where it has no business, and that “Fabius” was misprinted “Falinus,” till Professor Gudeman kindly brought both to my notice.

Pp. 410, 411. I owe to Dr Sandys (in Hermathena, vol. xii. p. 438) the removal of certain ignorances or forgetfulnesses here. “Solymarius,” as I most assuredly ought to have remembered, seeing that the information is in Warton, was a poem on the Crusades by Gunther, the author of the better known Ligurinus on Barbarossa, and the “Guntero” to whom I myself, in vol. ii. p. 96, alluded in connection with Patrizzi. “Paraclitus” and “Sidonius” were two poems by Warnerius of Basle. I am even more indebted to Dr Sandys for a sheaf of privately communicated annotations on vol. i., of many of which I hope to avail myself in a future edition—if such a thing is called for.

VOLUME II.

P. 23 sq. A reference of Hallam’s (Literature of Europe, iii. 5, 76, 77) to the Miscellanies of Politian has led some critics, who apparently do not know the book itself, and have not even read Hallam carefully, to object to its omission here. Their authority might have saved them; for he very correctly describes these Miscellanies as “sometimes grammatical, but more frequently relating to obscure customs and mythological allusions.” In other words, the book—which I have read—is hardly, in my sense, critical at all.

P. 29, note 3, l. 3, for “ii.” read “i.” (The first vol. of Pope.)

P. 30, for “with his two great disciples” read “between his master Horace and his pupil Boileau.”

P. 38, note, for first sentence read: “But most of this latter part had been written in 1548-49, and all must have been before 1550, when T. died.”

P. 51, l. 7 from bottom, for “Rote” read “Rota.”

P. 67, l. 4, for “prose” read “poor.”

P. 80, note. When I wrote on Castelvetro I was not aware that the Commentary on Dante (at least that on Inf., Cantos i.-xxix.) had been recovered and published by Signor Giovanni Franciosi (Modena, 1886) in a stately royal 4to (which I have now read, and possess), with the owl and the pitcher, but without the Kekrika, and without the proper resolution in the owl’s countenance. This may be metaphysically connected with the fact that the editor is rather unhappy about his author, and tells us that he was long in two minds about sending him out at last to the world. He admires Castelvetro’s boldness, scholarship, intellect; but thinks him sadly destitute of reverence for Dante, and deplores his “lack of lively and cheerful sense of the Beautiful.” If it were not that my gratitude to the man who gives me a text seals my mouth as to everything else, I should be a little inclined to cry “Fudge!” at this. Nobody would expect from any Renaissance scholar, and least of all from Castelvetro, “unction,” mysticism, rapture at the things that give us rapture in Dante. All the more honour to him that, as in the case of Petrarch, he thought it worth while to bestow on that vernacular, which too many Renaissance scholars despised, the same intense desire to understand, the same pains, the same “taking seriously,” which he showed towards the ancients. This is the true reverence: the rest is but “leather and prunella.”

P. 87, l. 5, for “ideals” read “idols.”

P. 107. Some time after vol. ii. was published I came across (in the catalogues of Mr Voynich, who might really inscribe on these documents for motto

“Das Unzulängliche Hier wird’s Ereignis”)

quite a nest of Zinanos, mostly written about that year 1590, which seems to have been this curious writer’s most active time; and I bought two of them as specially appurtenant to our subject. One is a Discorso della Tragedia, appended (though separately paged and dedicated) to the author’s tragedy of Almerigo; the other Le Due Giornate della Ninfa overo del Diletto e delle Muse, all printed by Bartholi, at Reggio, and the two prose books or booklets dated 1590. The Discorso is chiefly occupied with an attack on the position that Tragedy (especially according to Aristotle) ought to be busied with true subjects only. The Giornate (which contain another reference to Patrizzi) deal—more or less fancifully, but in a manner following Boethius, which is interesting at so late a date—with philosophy and things in general, rather than with literature.

P. 140, l. 3 from bottom, delete “of” before Catullus.

P. 162, l. 17. “Thomas” should have been “George,” as it appears correctly elsewhere: and “fourth” in the note should be “quarto” (“4th,” “4to”).

P. 191. “Topmost Verulam” should, of course, be “large-browed Verulam”—a curious instance of the tricks played by memory. I know The Palace of Art so well as to see it all printed before me; but the treacherous mind’s eye must have slipped from the epithet of the first line, “topmost oriels,” to the name of the third.

P. 248. In the line beginning O, débile raison! “lors” has been misprinted for “ores,” thereby spoiling the metre.

P. 263, l. 12, for “Beni—Pacius” read “Beni and Pazzi (Pacius) as well as of Heinsius.”

P. 301, note, “Grands Écrivains Français” should be “G. E. de la France.”

P. 319, note. Gibert is, it seems, appended to some edd. of Baillet.

P. 322, bk. IV. chap. i. I ought, perhaps, to have noticed in this context a book rather widely spread—Sorel’s De La Connaissance des Bons Livres, Paris, 1671. It contains some not uninteresting things on literature in general, on novels, poetry, comedy, &c., on the laws of good speaking and writing, on the “new language of French.” But it is, on the whole, as anybody acquainted with any part of the voluminous work of the author of Francion would expect, mainly not disagreeable nor ignorant chat—newspaper work before the newspaper.

P. 350. The opposition of the two “doctors” is perhaps too sharply put.

P. 376, note, for “Schenck” read “Strunk.”

P. 436. I should like to add as a special “place” for Dennis’s criticism, his comparatively early Remarks on Prince Arthur and Virgil (title abbreviated), London, 1696. It is, as it stands, of some elaboration; but its author tells us that he “meant” to do things which would have made it an almost complete Poetic from his point of view. It is pervaded with that refrain of “this ought to be” and “that must have been” to which I have referred in the text; and bristles with purely arbitrary preceptist statements, such as that Criticism cannot be ill-natured because Good Nature in man cannot be contrary to Justice and Reason; that a man must not like what he ought not to like—a doctrine underlying, of course, the whole Neo-classic teaching, and not that only; almost literally cropping up in Wordsworth; and the very formulation, in categorical-imperative, of La Harpe’s “monstrous beauty.” The book (in which poet and critic are very comfortably and equally yoked together) is full of agreeable things; and may possibly have suggested one of Swift’s most exquisite pieces of irony in its contention that Mr Blackmore’s Celestial Machines are directly contrary to the Doctrine of the Church of England.

P. 449, l. 1, for “is more curious” read “gives rather more.”

P. 478, l. 12 from bottom, for “and in some cases” read “in the lady’s case.”

P. 546. Denina. This author is a good instance of the things which the reader sometimes rather reproachfully demands, when the writer would only too fain have supplied them. I could write more than a page with satisfaction on Denina’s Discorso sopra le Vicende della Litteratura, which, rather surprisingly, underwent its second edition in Glasgow at the Foulis press (1763), and which not only deals at large with the subject in an interesting manner, but accepts the religio loci by dealing specially with Scottish literature. But, once more, this is for a fourth volume—or even a fifth—things belonging to the Thinkable-Unthinkable.

P. 550, note. Something like “pie” has been made of this. It should read: “This Gallicism was not universal. As Mr Ticknor,” &c.

P. 554, l. 3. For the Paragone see the present volume under Conti, Antonio.

VOLUME III.

P. 152, note, l. 6 from bottom, for “condenses” read “condemns.”

P. 173, l. 11, for “he” read “Spenser.”

P. 208, ll. 1, 2, for “moon_light_” read “moon_shine_.”

P. 254, note, add, “as well as sometimes on Southey.”

P. 267, l. 4. I am glad to know that Blake’s poems at least, and at last, are being edited more than competently.

P. 283, note 2. I accepted too hastily the statement that T. Wright contributed to the Retrospective Review proper. Dates (see Index) will show that he could not have done so, though he might to the so-called “Third” series.

P. 308, l. 8 from bottom, for “Mestre” read “Maistre.”

P. 312, l. 24, for “nor” read “or.”

P. 357, for “Walder” read “Wälder.”

P. 357, sidenote, for “Geschmack” read “Geschmacks.”

P. 471, l. 1, for “more” read “so.”

P. 488. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this parody-criticism is Aytoun’a Firmilian, an astonishing satire-judgment, not merely of the actual “Spasmodics,” but of the long-subsequent class, all over Europe, of whom Dr Ibsen is the chief.

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I. INTRODUCTORY AND RETROSPECTIVE

PAGE Scope of the volume 3 The term Modern 3 The origins 4 Need of caution here 5 Case of Butler on Rymer, Denham 5 And Benlowes 6

PAGE Of Addison and others 7 Of La Bruyère and “Tout est dit” 8 Of Fénelon and Gravina 9 Of Dryden and Fontenelle 9 The more excellent way 10

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II. THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING

Starting-point of this volume 11

Neo-Classic complacency and exclusiveness illustrated from Callières 12

Béat de Muralt 13

His attention to English 13

And to French 14

German Criticism proper 15

A glance backward 15

Theobald Hoeck 16

Weckherlin and others 17

Weise, Wernicke, Werenfels, &c. 17

Some mutineers: Gryphius and Neumeister 18

Gottsched once more 19

Bodmer and Breitinger 20

The Diskurse der Maler 21

Gradual divergence from their stand-point; König on “Taste” 22

Main works of the Swiss School 23

Breitinger’s Kritische Dichtkunst, &c. 24

Bodmer’s Von dem Wunderbaren, &c. 24

Special criticisms of both 26

Bodmer’s verse criticism 26

Their later work in mediæval poetry, and their general position 27

The “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel 27 The elder Schlegels: Johann Adolf 29 Johann Elias 30 Moses Mendelssohn 32 Lessing 33 Some cautions respecting him 33 His moral obsession; on Soliman the Second 34 The strictures on Ariosto’s portrait of Alcina 36 Hamlet and Semiramis 37 The Comte d’Essex, Rodogune, Mérope 37 Lessing’s Gallophobia 38 And typomania 38 His study of antiquity more than compensating 39 And especially of Aristotle 40 With whom he combines Diderot 41 His deficiencies in regard to mediæval literature 41 The close of the Dramaturgie and its moral 42 Miscellaneous specimens of his criticism 44 His attitude to Æschylus and Aristophanes 46 Frederic the Great 48 De la Littérature Allemande 49

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III. THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS

The first group 53 Mediæval reaction 53 Gray 54 Peculiarity of his critical position 55 The Letters 56 The Observations on Aristophanes and Plato 59 The Metrum 60 The Lydgate Notes 61 Shenstone 63 Percy 64 The Wartons 66 Joseph’s Essay on Pope 66 The Adventurer Essays 67 Thomas Warton on Spenser 68 His History of English Poetry 70

Hurd: his Commentary on Addison 72

The Horace 73

The Dissertations 74

Other Works 75

The Letters on Chivalry and Romance 75

Their doctrine 76

His real importance 78

Alleged imperfections of the group 79

Studies in Prosody 80

John Mason: his Power of Numbers in Prose and Poetry 81

Mitford: his Harmony of Language 83

Importance of prosodic inquiry 86

Sterne and the stop-watch 86

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IV. DIDEROT AND THE FRENCH TRANSITION

The position of Diderot 89 Difficult to authenticate 90 But hardly to be exaggerated. His Impressionism 91 The Richardson éloge 92 The Reflections on Terence 93 The Review of the Lettres d’Amabed 94 The Examination of Seneca 94 The quality and eminence of his critical position 95 Rousseau revisited 97 Madame de Staël 100 Her critical position 100 And work 100 The Lettres sur Rousseau 101 The Essai sur les Fictions 102 The De La Littérature 102 The De l’Allemagne 105 Her critical achievement: imputed 107 And actual 108 Chateaubriand: his difficulties 109 His Criticism 110 Indirect 111 And Direct 111 The Génie du Christianisme 112 Its saturation with literary criticism 113 Survey and examples 114 Single points of excellence 116

And general importance 117 Joubert: his reputation 118 His literary αὐτάρκεια 118 The Law of Poetry 119 More on that subject 119 On Style 120 Miscellaneous Criticisms 121 His individual judgments more dubious 122 The reason for this 123 Additional illustrations 123 General remarks 125 The other “Empire Critics” 126 Fontanes 127 Geoffroy 128 Dussault 129 Hoffman, Garat, &c. 129 Ginguené 130 M. J. Chénier 131 Lemercier 131 Feletz 132 Cousin 133 Villemain 133 His claims 133 Deductions to be made from them 134 Beyle 135 Racine et Shakespeare 136 His attitude here 138 And elsewhere 138 Nodier 139

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V. ÆSTHETICS AND THEIR INFLUENCE

The present chapter itself a kind of excursus 141

A parabasis on “philosophical” criticism 141

Modern Æsthetics: their fount in Descartes and its branches 146

In Germany: negative as well as positive inducements 147

Baumgarten 148

De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus 148

And its definition of poetry 148

The Aletheophilus 149

The Æsthetica 149

Sulzer 150

Eberhard 151

France: the Père André, his Essai sur le Beau 151

Italy: Vico 152

His literary places 152

The De Studiorum Ratione 153

The De Constantia Jurisprudentis 153

The first Scienza Nuova 154

The second 154

Rationale of all this 155

A very great man and thinker, but in pure Criticism an influence malign or null 156

England 157

Shaftesbury 157

Hume 159

Examples of his critical opinions 160

His inconsistency 162

Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful 163

The Scottish æsthetic-empirics: Alison 164

The Essay on Taste 165

Its confusions 166

And arbitrary absurdities 167

An interim conclusion on the æsthetic matter 168

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VI. THE STUDY OF LITERATURE

Bearings of the chapter 171 England 171 The study of Shakespeare 172 Of Spenser 173 Chaucer 174 Elizabethan minors 174 Middle and Old English 175 Influence of English abroad 176

The study of French at home and abroad 177 Of Italian 179 Especially Dante 179 Of Spanish 180 Especially Cervantes 182 Of German 182

INTERCHAPTER VII. 184

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I. WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES

Wordsworth and Coleridge 200

The former’s Prefaces 201

That to Lyrical Ballads, 1800 202

Its history 202

The argument against poetic diction, and even against metre 203

The appendix: Poetic Diction again 204

The Minor Critical Papers 204

Coleridge’s examination of Wordsworth’s views 205

His critical qualifications 206

Unusual integrity of his critique 207

Analysis of it 207

The “suspension of disbelief” 208

Attitude to metre 208

Excursus on Shakespeare’s Poems 210

Challenges Wordsworth on “real” and “rustic” life 210

“Prose” diction and metre again 211

Condemnation in form of Wordsworth’s theory 212

The Argumentum ad Gulielmum 212

The study of his poetry 213

High merits of the examination 213

Wordsworth a rebel to Longinus and Dante 214

The Preface compared more specially with the _De Vulgari_ 215

And Dante’s practice 215

With Wordsworth’s 216

The comparison fatal to Wordsworth as a critic 217

Other critical places in Coleridge 218

The rest of the Biographia 218

The Friend 219

Aids to Reflection, &c. 220

The Lectures on Shakespeare, &c. 220

Their chaotic character 221

And preciousness 222

Some noteworthy things in them: general 223

And particular 224

Coleridge on other dramatists 224

The Table Talk 224

The Miscellanies 225

The Lecture On Style 226

The Anima Poetæ 227

The Letters 229

The Coleridgean position and quality 230

He introduces once for all the criterion of Imagination, realising and disrealising 231

The “Companions” 232

Southey 233

General characteristics of his Criticism 234

Reviews 235

The Doctor 235

Altogether somewhat impar sibi 236

Lamb 237

His “occultism” 238

And alleged inconstancy 238

The early Letters 239

The Specimens 240

The Garrick Play Notes 241

Miscellaneous Essays 242

Elia 242

The later Letters 243

Uniqueness of Lamb’s critical style 244

And thought 245

Leigh Hunt: his somewhat inferior position 246

Reasons for it 246

His attitude to Dante 247

Examples from Imagination and Fancy 248

Hazlitt 251

Method of dealing with him 251

His surface and occasional faults: Imperfect knowledge and method 252

Extra-literary prejudice 253

His radical and usual excellence 254

The English Poets 255

The Comic Writers 256

The Age of Elizabeth 257

Characters of Shakespeare 258

The Plain Speaker 259

The Round Table, &c. 261

The Spirit of the Age 262

Sketches and Essays 263

Winterslow 263

Hazlitt’s critical virtue 263

In set pieces 264

And universally 265

Blake 266

His critical position and dicta 267

The “Notes on Reynolds” 268

And Wordsworth 268

Commanding position of these 268

Sir Walter Scott commonly undervalued as a critic 270

Injustice of this 271

Campbell: his Lectures on Poetry 272

His Specimens 272

Shelley: his Defence of Poetry 274

Landor 276

His lack of judicial quality 276

In regular Criticism 276

The Conversations 277

Loculus Aureolus 278

But again disappointing 278

The revival of the Pope quarrels 279

Bowles 279

Byron 281

The Letter to Murray, &c. 281

Others: Isaac Disraeli 282

Sir Egerton Brydges 283

The Retrospective Review 283

The Baviad and Anti-Jacobin 286

With Wolcot and Mathias 287

The influence of the new Reviews, &c. 288

Jeffrey 289

His loss of place and its cause 289

His inconsistency 290

His criticism on Madame de Staël 291

Its lesson 293

Hallam 293

His achievement 294

Its merits 294

And defects 295

In general distribution and treatment 295

In some particular instances 296

His central weakness 297

And the value left by it 298

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II. MIL-HUIT-CENT-TRENTE

The Globe 299 Charles de Rémusat, Vitet, J. J. Ampère 300 Sainte-Beuve: his topography 301 The earlier articles 302 Portraits Littéraires and Portraits de Femmes 304 The Portraits Contemporains 306 He “arrives” 309 Port-Royal 310 Its literary episodes 311 On Racine 312 Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire 313 Faults found with it 314 Its extraordinary merits 315 And final dicta 316 The Causeries at last 317 Their length, &c. 318 Bricks of the house 319 His occasional polemic 322 The Nouveaux Lundis 324 The conclusion of this matter 326

Michelet and Quinet 329 Hugo 330 William Shakespeare 331 Littérature et Philosophie 331 The Cromwell Preface 332 And that to the Orientales 333 Capital position of this latter 334 The “work” 335 Nisard: his Ægri Somnia 335 His Essais sur le Romantisme 336 Their culpa maxima 338 Gautier 339 His theory—“Art for Art’s sake,” &c. 340 His practice—Les Grotesques 341 Histoire du Romantisme, &c. 341 Ubiquity of felicity in his criticism 342 Saint-Marc Girardin 343 Planche 344 Weight of his criticism 344 Magnin 347 Mérimée 348

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III. GOETHE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Hamann 352

Lichtenberg 354

Herder 355

His drawbacks of tediousness 355

Pedagogy 355

And meteorosophia 356

But great merits 356

The Fragmente 356

The Kritische Walder 357

The Ursachen des Gesunknen Geschmacks 357

The Ideen, &c. 358

Age-, Country-, and Race-, Criticism 358

Specimens and Remarks 359

Wieland 360

Goethe 361

The Hamlet criticism, &c. 361

The Sprüche in Prosa 362

The Sterne passages 363

Reviews and Notices 365

The Conversations 366

Some more general things: Goethe on Scott and Byron 372

On the historic and comparative estimate of literature 372

Summing up: the merits of Goethe’s criticism 373

Its drawbacks: too much of his age 374

Too much a utilitarian of Culture 375

Unduly neglectful of literature as literature 376

Schiller 377

His Æsthetic Discourses 378

The Bürger review 378

The Xenien 380

The Correspondence with Goethe 381

The Naïve and Sentimental Poetry 383

Others: Bürger 384

Richter 385

The Vorschule der Æsthetik 385

The so-called “Romantic School” 386

Novalis 387

The Heinrich 387

The earlier Fragments 388

The later 389

His critical magic 390

Tieck 390

The Schlegels 391

Their general position and drift 392

The Characteristiken 393

A. W.: the Kritische Schriften of 1828 394

On Voss 394

On Bürger 395

The Urtheile, &c. 396

The _Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und Literatur_ 396

Their initial and other merit 397

The Schlegelian position 398

The Vorlesungen über Schöne Literatur und Kunst 399

Illustrated still more by Friedrich 401

Uhland 402

Schubarth 403

Solger 404

Periodicals, Histories, &c. 404

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Chapter IV

THE CHANGE IN THE OTHER NATIONS 406

INTERCHAPTER VIII. (WITH AN EXCURSUS ON PERIODICAL CRITICISM.) 408

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I. THE SUCCESSORS OF SAINTE-BEUVE

Ordonnance of this chapter 431

Philarète Chasles 432

Barbey d’Aurévilly 433

On Hugo 434

On others 435

Strong redeeming points in him 436

Doudan 436

Interest of his general attitude 437

And particular utterances 437

Renan 439

Taine 440

His culpa 440

His miscellaneous critical work 441

His Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise 442

Its shortcomings 443

Instances of them 443

Moutégut: his peculiarities 444

Delicacy and range of his work 446

Scherer: peculiar moral character of his criticism 447

Its consequent limitations 448

The solid merits accompanying them 448

Sainte-Beuve + Gautier 450 Banville 450 Saint-Victor 451 Baudelaire 452 Crépet’s Les Poètes Français 453 Flaubert: the “Single Word” 454 “Naturalism” 454 Zola 455 Le Roman Experimental 456 Examples of his criticism 456 The reasons of his critical incompetency 458 “Les Deux Goncourt” 458 “Scientific criticism”: Hennequin 459 “Comparative Literature”: Texte 462 Academic Criticism: Gaston Paris 464 Caro, Taillandier, &c. 465 The “Light Horsemen”: Janin 466 Pontmartin 467 Veuillot 468 Not so black as, &c. 469 The present 469

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II. BETWEEN COLERIDGE AND ARNOLD

The English Critics of 1830-60 472

Wilson 472

Strange medley of his criticism 473

The Homer and the other larger critical 473 collections

The Spenser 474

The Specimens of British Critics 475

Dies Boreales 476

Faults in all 476

And in the republished work 477

De Quincey: his anomalies 478

And perversities as a critic 479

In regard to all literatures 480

Their causes 480

The Rhetoric and the Style 481

His compensations 482

Lockhart 483

Difficulty of appraising his criticism 483

The Tennyson review 483

On Coleridge, Burns, Scott, and Hook 484

His general critical character 485

Hartley Coleridge 485

Forlorn condition of his criticism 485

Its quality 486

Defects 486

And examples 487

Maginn 487

His parody-criticisms 488

And more serious efforts 488

Macaulay 490 His exceptional competence in some ways 490 The early articles 490 His drawbacks 490 The practical choking of the good seed 491 His literary surveys in the Letters 492 His confession 493 The Essays 493 Similar dwindling in Carlyle 495 The earlier Essays 497 The later 497 The attitude of the Latter-day Pamphlets 498 The conclusion of this matter 499 Thackeray 500 His one critical weakness 500 And excellence 501 Blackwood in 1849 on Tennyson 502 George Brimley 504 His Essay on Tennyson 505 His other work 507 His intrinsic and chronological importance 508 “Gyas and Cloanthus” 508 Milman, Croker, Hayward 509 Sydney Smith, Senior, Helps 509 Elwin, Lancaster, Hannay 510 Dallas 511 The Poetics 511 The Gay Science 512 Others: J. S. Mill 514

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III. ENGLISH CRITICISM—1860-1900

Matthew Arnold: one of the greater critics 515

His position defined early 516

The Preface of 1853 517

Analysis of it 517

And interim summary of its gist 520

Contrast with Dryden 520

Chair-work at Oxford, and contributions to periodicals 521

On Translating Homer 522

The “grand style” 522

Discussion of it 523

The Study of Celtic Literature 526

Its assumptions 527

The Essays: their case for Criticism 527

Their examples thereof 529

The latest work 530

The Introduction to Ward’s English Poets 531

“Criticism of Life” 531

Poetic Subject or Poetic Moment 532

Arnold’s accomplishment and position as a critic 534

The Carlylians 537

Kingsley 538

Froude 539

Mr Buskin 539

G. H. Lewes 540

His Principles of Success in Literature 540

His Inner Life of Art 542

Bagehot 542

R. H. Hutton 543

His evasions of literary criticism 544

Pater 544

His frank Hedonism 545

His polytechny and his style 545

His formulation of the new critical attitude 546

The Renaissance 546

Objections to its process 547

Importance of Marius the Epicurean 547

Appreciations and the “Guardian” Essays 548

Universality of his method 551

Mr J. A. Symonds 551

Thomson (“B. V.”) 552

William Minto 553

His books on English Prose and Poetry 554

H. D. Traill 554

His critical strength 555

On Sterne and Coleridge 555

Essays on Fiction 556

“The Future of Humour” 556

Others: Mansel, Venables, Stephen, Lord Houghton, Pattison, Church, &c. 557

Patmore 558

Mr Edmund Gurney 559

The Power of Sound 559

Tertium Quid 560

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IV. LATER GERMAN CRITICISM

Heine: deceptiveness of his criticism 563

In the Romantische Schule, and elsewhere 563

The qualities and delights of it 564

Schopenhauer 566

Vividness and originality of his critical observation 567

Die Welt als Wille, &c. 568

Grillparzer 569

His motto in criticism 569

His results in aphorism 570

And in individual judgment 571

A critic of limitations: but a critic 571

Carrière: his Æsthetik 573

Later German Shakespeare-critics 575

Gervinus: his German Poetry 575

On Bürger 576

The Shakespeare-heretics: Rümelin 577

Freytag 578

Hillebrand and cosmopolitan criticism 579

Nietzsche 581

Zarathustra, the Birth of Tragedy, and _Der Fall Wagner_ 582

Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen 582

La Gaya Scienza 583

Jenseits von Gut und Böse, &c. 584

Götzen-Dämmerung 585

His general critical position 586

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V. REVIVALS AND COMMENCEMENTS

Limitations of this chapter 587 Spain 588 Italy 588 De Sanctis 589 Character of his work 590 Switzerland 591 Vinet 592 Sainte-Beuve on him 592

His criticism of Chateaubriand and Hugo 593 His general quality 593 Amiel: great interest of his critical impressions 594 Examples thereof 595 The pity of it 597

CONCLUSION.

§ I. THE PRESENT STATE OF CRITICISM 603

§ II. THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER 610

APPENDIX I.

THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.

The holders 615 Eighteenth-century minors 616 Lowth 617 Hurdis 617 The rally: Copleston 618 Conybeare 620 Milman 620 Keble 621

The Occasional [English] Papers 622 The Prælections 622 Garbett 625 Claughton 626 Doyle 626 Shairp 627 Palgrave 628 Salutantur vivi 629

APPENDIX II.

AMERICAN CRITICISM.

An attempt in outline only 630 Its difficulties 631 The early stages 631 The origins and pioneers 632 Ticknor 632 Longfellow 633 Emerson 633 Poe 634 Lowell: his general position 636 Among my Books 637 My Study Windows 637

Essays on the English Poets 638

Last Essays 639

O. W. Holmes 639

The whole duty of critics stated by him _in alia materia_ 639

Whitman and the “Democratic” ideal 640

Margaret Fuller 641

Ripley 642

Whipple 642

Lanier 643

INDEX 647

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VII. THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM

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“May there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?”—HURD.

“Quelquefois un besoin de philosopher gâte tout.”—JOUBERT.

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I. INTRODUCTORY AND RETROSPECTIVE

SCOPE OF THE VOLUME—THE TERM MODERN—THE ORIGINS—NEED OF CAUTION HERE— CASE OF BUTLER ON RYMER, DENHAM—AND BENLOWES—OF ADDISON AND OTHERS— OF LA BRUYÈRE AND “TOUT EST DIT”—OF FÉNELON AND GRAVINA—OF DRYDEN AND FONTENELLE—THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY.

[Sidenote: Scope of the volume.]

The present volume takes the work of no more than one century, the nineteenth, as a whole; but, according to our plan, casts back to the eighteenth, and even earlier, in order to deal with those dissidents or pioneers who then laid the foundation of the chief critical performances of the nineteenth itself.

[Sidenote: The term Modern.]

For this work—foundation and superstructure—there is no more convenient and suitable appellation than “Modern,” used neither in the complimentary and rather question-begging sense which has recently been attached to it,[2] nor in the more slighting one of Shakespeare, but with a merely accurate and chronological connotation. Some would call this criticism “Romantic”; but that term, in addition to a certain vagueness, has the drawbacks both of question-begging and of provocation. There is no other that has the slightest claim to enter into competition, though we may have in passing to refer to such pretenders as “Æsthetic,” “Dogmatic,” “Scientific,” and what not.

The term “Modern” has, moreover,—so long as it is dissociated from any such futile belittling of “Ancient” as was implied in its use during the Quarrel,—the great advantage of keeping a secondary, but very convenient and in no way objectionable, opposition to “Ancient” itself. We have seen that, with much intelligent and judicious, there was more unintelligent and corrupt, following of the ancients during the period which we surveyed in the last volume: and that there was a still more dangerous and hurtful tendency to disfranchise modern literature as an equal source with ancient for the discovery of critical truths. Now, if there is a point wholly to be counted for righteousness, to at least the better part of the criticism which has prevailed for the last hundred years, and was a militant force for at least fifty years earlier, it is this taking into consideration of “Modern” literature, not to the exclusion of “Ancient,” but on even terms with it. It is no doubt much easier to say nullo discrimine habebo[3] than to carry it out, especially as a man grows older. But it is the cardinal principle of “Modern” criticism that the most modern of works is to be judged, not by adjustment to anything else, but on its own merits—that the critic must always behave as if the book he takes from its wrapper might be a new Hamlet or a new Waverley,—or something as good as either, but more absolutely novel in kind than even Waverley,—however shrewdly he may suspect that it is very unlikely to be any such thing.

[Sidenote: The origins.]

The actual investigation of the last volume brought us down to (and in La Harpe’s case a little beyond) the close of the eighteenth century itself, and showed us the final stages of the Neo-Classic dynasty, which still, in all European countries except Germany, reigned, and even appeared to govern; but which, not merely in Germany but to some extent also in England, was on the point of having the sceptre wrenched out of its hands. We had traced this critical system from its construction or reconstruction by the Italians of the sixteenth century onwards; we saw its merits and its defects. And we saw likewise that, in the usual general, gradual, incalculable way, opposition to it, conscious or unconscious, began to grow up at different times and in different places. This opposition was a plant of early but slow and fitful growth in England, rather later but more vigorous and rapid in Germany; while in the Southern countries it hardly grew at all, and in France was cruelly attacked and kept down, if not exactly extirpated, by the weeding-hook of authority.

[Sidenote: Need of caution here.]

But it does not follow that we can put the finger on this and that person as having “begun” the new movement. Such an opinion is always tempting to not too judicious inquirers, and there has been no lack of books on Le Romantisme des Classiques and the like. The fact, of course, simply is that everything human exists essentially or potentially in the men of every time; and that you may not only find books in the running brooks but (what appears at first more contradictory) dry stones in them: while, on the other hand, founts of water habitually gush from the midst of the driest rock. Indagation of the kind is always treacherous, and has to be conducted with a great deal of circumspection.

[Sidenote: Case of Butler on Rymer, Denham,]

It would be difficult to find an author who illustrates this danger and treachery better than Butler, whom some may have been surprised not to find in the last volume. The author of Hudibras was born not long after Milton, and nearly twenty years before Dryden, who outlived him by the same space. His great poem did not give much room for critical utterances in literature; but the Genuine Remains[4] are full of it in separate places, both verse and prose. Take these singly, and you may make Butler out to be, not merely a critic, but half a dozen critics. In perhaps the best known of his minor pieces, the Repartees between Cat and Puss, he satirises “Heroic” Plays, and is therefore clearly for “the last age,” as also in the savage and admirable “On Critics who Judge Modern Plays precisely by the Rules of the Ancients,” which has been reasonably, or certainly, thought to be directed against Rymer’s blasphemy of Beaumont and Fletcher, published two years before Butler’s death. The satirist’s references and illustrations (as in that to “the laws of good King Howel’s days”) are sometimes too Caroline to be quotable; but the force and sweep of his protest is simply glorious. The Panegyric on Sir John Denham is chiefly personal; but if Butler had been convinced that Cooper’s Hill was the ne plus ultra of English poetry he could hardly have written it: and though the main victim of “To a Bad Poet” has not been identified,[5] the lines—

“For so the rhyme be at the verse’s end, No matter whither all the rest does tend”—

could scarcely have been written except against the new poetry. The “Pindaric Ode on Modern Critics” is chiefly directed against the general critical vice of snarling, and the passages on critics and poets in the Miscellaneous Thoughts follow suit. But if we had only the verse Remains we should be to some extent justified in taking Butler, if not for a precursor of the new Romanticism, at any rate for a rather strenuous defender of the old.

[Sidenote: and Benlowes.]

But turn to the Characters. Most of these that deal with literature are in the general vein which the average seventeenth-century character-writer took from Theophrastus, though few put so much salt of personal wit into this as Butler. In “A Small Poet” the earlier pages might be aimed at almost anybody from Dryden himself (whom Butler, it is said, did not love) down to Flecknoe. But there is only one name mentioned in the piece; and that name, which is made the object of a furious and direct attack, lightened by some of the brightest flashes of Butler’s audacious and acrid humour, is the name of Edward Benlowes.[6] Now, that Benlowes is a person taillable et corvéable à merci et à miséricorde by any critical oppressor, nobody who has read him can deny. He is as extravagant as Crashaw without so much poetry, and as Cleveland without so much cleverness. But he is a poet, and a “metaphysical” poet (as Butler was himself in another way), and an example, though a rather awful example, of that “poetic fury” which makes Elizabethan poetry. Yet Butler is more savage with him than with Denham.

The fact is that Butler’s criticism is merely the occasional determination of a man of active genius and satiric temper to matters literary. Absurdities strike him from whatever school they come; and he lashes them unmercifully whensoever and whencesoever they present themselves. But he has no general creed: he speaks merely to his brief as public prosecutor of the ridiculous, and also as a staunch John Bull. If he had been writing at the time when his Remains were first actually published, it is exceedingly probable that he would have “horsed” Gray as pitilessly as he horses Benlowes; if he had been writing sixty years later still, that he would have been as “savage and Tartarly” to Keats and Shelley, or seventy years later, to Tennyson, as the Quarterly itself. This is not criticism: and we must look later and more carefully before we discern any real revolution in literary taste.

[Sidenote: Of Addison and others.]

It is even very unsafe to attempt to discover much definite and intentional precursorship in Addison, who was born sixty years after Butler. There is no need to repeat what has been said of what seems to me misconception as to his use of the word Imagination: nor is this the point which is principally aimed at here. But the more we examine Addison’s critical utterances, whether we agree with Hurd or not that they are “shallow,” we shall, I think, be forced to conclude that any depth they may have has nothing to do with Romanticism. Addison likes Milton, no doubt, because he is a sensible man and a good critic, as a general reason. But when we come to investigate special ones we shall find that he likes him rather because he himself is a Whig, a pupil of Dryden, and a religious man—nay, perhaps even because he really does think that Milton carries out the classical idea of Epic—than because of Milton’s mystery, his “romantic vague,” his splendour of diction and verse and imagery. So, too, the admiration of Chevy Chase is partly a whim or a joke, partly determined by the fact that at that time the Whigs were the “Jingoes,” and that Chevy Chase is very pugnacious and very patriotic. Nowhere, from the articles on True and False Wit to the Imagination papers, do we find any real sense of unrest or dissatisfaction with the accepted theory of poetry. There is actually more in Prior, with all his profanation of the Nut-browne Maid and his distortions of the Spenserian stanza.

[Sidenote: Of La Bruyère and “Tout est dit.”]

So if we look backward a little, and a little southward, we shall, despite the praise which we were able to accord to some critical dicta of La Bruyère, find very little reason to regard that admirable master of Addison himself as a “Romantic before Romanticism.” He is a sensible man with a fairly catholic taste: but that is all. Nay, his principle of Tout est dit, though not quite irresistibly in practice, almost certainly leads to the conclusion that the oldest writers are likely to be the best, and to the habit of extending to new writers, or to the mass of precedent writing, a rather lukewarm welcome and a distinctly prejudiced criticism. In a certain sense, no doubt, all has been said long ago—in gist, in matter, in subject. But then in literature, and especially in poetry, there is so much which is beside the gist, that is superadded to the matter, that does not depend upon the subject! The thoughts suggested by birth and death, by dawn and sunset, by a blush and a smile, by the red wine when it moveth itself aright in the glass, and the green sea stretching from the white cliff-foot, and the “huge and thoughtful night,” will always be at bottom and in essence the same. But he must be a blind person who does not see that at any moment any poet who can may give them an entirely new form and cast and presentation. In this sense—and it is the sense of the best “modern” criticism—“tout est à dire.”

[Sidenote: Of Fénelon and Gravina.]

We may seem to have got into an impasse: nor will such excellent persons as Fénelon, and to go to yet another country, Gravina,[7] help us out of it. Fénelon indeed had, as we saw, some striking resipiscences, some individual pronouncements which, if they were as unaccompanied by others as they are disconnected from them, would be very promising indeed. But this very company that they do not keep disestates them unluckily: and you cannot doubt, as you read Télémaque, that if the world had had to depend upon its author for leadership in the migration from the critical House of Bondage, it would never have got over the Red Sea, if it had even started on the journey. Gravina, to that general perspicacity and equity which distinguishes all these doubtful cases, added an unusually early and thorough appreciation of Greek, and the advantage, peculiar to an Italian, of having an actual classical period of modern literature extending over four entire centuries: of all which he made good use. But it is at least very difficult to discover, either in his original work or in the general trend of his critical utterances, any dissatisfaction with the prevailing direction of criticism in his time, or any determination to take a wider outlook.

[Sidenote: Of Dryden and Fontenelle.]

Indeed, putting aside Dryden (whose method led straight to the Promised Land, and whose utterances show that he occasionally saw it afar off) as one who came too early to feel any very conscious desire of setting out on the pilgrimage of discovery, Fontenelle is perhaps the very earliest critic of distinction who shows a decided restlessness. And he, as we have sufficiently set forth, has too much of the critical Puck about him to be a safe guide for the wayfaring man. In fact, “Lord! what fools these mortals be!” is an exclamation which is always hovering on the door of his lips, and sometimes all but escapes it.

[Sidenote: The more excellent way.]

But this history must have been told to very little purpose if readers still expect sharp and decided turns, assignable to definite hours and particular men, in the evolutions of criticism. Rather has it been one of our special lessons—it would be uncritical to say our special objects—to prove that these things are not to be expected. It is a part of the Neo-Classic error itself to assume some definite goal of critical perfection towards which all things tend, and which, when you have attained it, permits you to take no further trouble except of imitation and repetition. Just as you never know what new literary form the human genius may take, and can therefore never lay down any absolute and final schedule of literary kinds, and of literary perfection within these kinds, so you can never shape the set of the prevalent taste, and you can never do much more than give the boat the full benefit of the current by dexterous rowing and steering. Indeed, as we have seen, the taste in criticism and the taste in creation unite, or diverge, or set dead against each other in a manner quite incalculable, and only interpretable as making somehow for the greater glory of Literature. Somewhere about the time to which we have harked back—the meeting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or a little later, or much later, as the genius of different countries and persons would have it—a veering of the wind, an eddy of the current, did take place. And it is of this that we have to give account in the present Book—of the consequences of it that we have to give an account in the present volume.

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II. THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING

STARTING-POINT OF THIS VOLUME—NEO-CLASSIC COMPLACENCY AND EXCLUSIVENESS ILLUSTRATED FROM CALLIÈRES—BÉAT DE MURALT—HIS ATTENTION TO ENGLISH— AND TO FRENCH—GERMAN CRITICISM PROPER—A GLANCE BACKWARD—THEOBALD HOECK—WECKHERLIN AND OTHERS—WEISE, WERNICKE, WERENFELS, ETC.—SOME MUTINEERS: GRYPHIUS AND NEUMEISTER—GOTTSCHED ONCE MORE—BODMER AND BREITINGER—THE ‘DISKURSE DER MALER’—GRADUAL DIVERGENCE FROM THEIR STANDPOINT; KÖNIG ON “TASTE”—MAIN WORKS OF THE SWISS SCHOOL— BREITINGER’S ‘KRITISCHE DICHTKUNST,’ ETC.—BODMER’S ‘VON DEM WUNDERBAREN,’ ETC.—SPECIAL CRITICISMS OF BOTH—BODMER’S VERSE CRITICISM—THEIR LATER WORK IN MEDIÆVAL POETRY, AND THEIR GENERAL POSITION—THE “SWISS-SAXON” QUARREL—THE ELDER SCHLEGELS: JOHANN ADOLF—JOHANN ELIAS—MOSES MENDELSSOHN—LESSING—SOME CAUTIONS RESPECTING HIM—HIS MORAL OBSESSION; ON ‘SOLIMAN THE SECOND’—THE STRICTURES ON ARIOSTO’S PORTRAIT OF ALCINA—‘HAMLET’ AND ‘SEMIRAMIS’— THE ‘COMTE D’ESSEX,’ ‘RODOGUNE,’ ‘MÉROPE’—LESSING’S GALLOPHOBIA—AND TYPOMANIA—HIS STUDY OF ANTIQUITY MORE THAN COMPENSATING—AND ESPECIALLY OF ARISTOTLE—WITH WHOM HE COMBINES DIDEROT—HIS DEFICIENCIES IN REGARD TO MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE—THE CLOSE OF THE ‘DRAMATURGIE’ AND ITS MORAL—MISCELLANEOUS SPECIMENS OF HIS CRITICISM—HIS ATTITUDE TO ÆSCHYLUS AND ARISTOPHANES—FREDERIC THE GREAT—‘DE LA LITTÉRATURE ALLEMANDE’.

[Sidenote: Starting point of this volume.]

It should not be necessary to make much further observation of the linking kind between this volume and the last; but a few more words may be desirable on the fact that from a very early period of the eighteenth century itself there were perceptible underground mutterings of revolt; and that, steadily or fitfully, another current of criticism, fed likewise by springs underground, [Sidenote: Neo-Classic complacency and exclusiveness illustrated from Callières.] made its appearance side by side with, but running counter to, the orthodox, yet almost entirely neglected by orthodoxy. Orthodoxy indeed, in its special home, would have specially emphasised the scornful question, “Can any good thing come out of Germany?” The locus of Bouhours is hackneyed, and has been quoted already (ii. 315). But nothing can better show the state of complacent fatuity to which Neo-Classicism, plus national conceit, had reduced the French at the close of the seventeenth century, than the “Laws of Apollo,” which, in the twelfth book of the treatise which has the honour to have given suggestions to Swift, Callières[8] represents the god as promulgating to appease the strife of Ancients and Moderns. Les trois nations polies are the French, the Italians, and the Spaniards: all others are more or less barbarians. These barbarians (including not only the Germans, but the nation which had to its credit Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, with others who, if lesser than these, were the equals of the two or three best of France) may be allowed to write Latin as a concession to the literary incompetence of their own tongues; but the polished nations should not do so. Homer is the greatest of all poets, and Virgil the second; the third place had better remain vacant. No witchcraft or romance of chivalry is to be admitted into poetry. Acrostics and anagrams are to be banished from it. Et patati et patata. Apollo himself could at the time hardly have got into the head of Callières, not merely academician but diplomatist as he was, what an utterly ridiculous figure he would cut to all but the most philosophical and tolerant of posterity. Yet be it remembered that Gottsched held no different creed nearly fifty years after in Germany itself, and La Harpe no very different one more than a hundred years after in France; while among ourselves, and halfway between these two, even such iconoclasts in other ways as Adam Smith and David Hume would have made very little difficulty about accepting it. The overthrow of a belief of such prevalence, such toughness, such duration, cannot have been achieved but by agencies widespreading, patient, various: and it is these agencies that we must now investigate.

[Sidenote: The Béat de Muralt.]

Not very many years later than the Histoire Poétique there was written, in French also, but not by a Frenchman, a document curiously different in tenor, though by no means ostensibly, or indeed to any great extent really, breaking with Neo-Classicism. The Swiss—as their peculiar position, not merely politically in the midst of Europe, but racially as overlapping and overlapped by France, Germany, and Italy, made almost necessary—had begun early to take a sort of bystander-view of European Literature. The excellent essay of Herr Hamelius[9] was perhaps the first recent document to attract much attention to the Lettres sur les Anglois et sur les Francois of Béat Louis de Muralt. Muralt was a French-writing but a German-speaking Swiss; he says (rather to his disadvantage as a critic, but usefully on this head) that “H_ou_mour” is “ce que nous appellons Einfall,” and what the French mean by “dire de bons mots,” from which we can at least see that the excellent M. de Muralt had not the faintest notion of what Humour specifically is. He travelled in England during the last decade of the seventeenth century; but his Letters upon us and the French were not published till 1727, in 12mo, with no imprint of place. They acquired, after the fashion of the time, a sort of “snow-ball” increment of comment by apologists (a “Lord,” of course, for England), and are chiefly valuable as symptoms. [Sidenote: His attention to English,] Muralt is, as we should expect, much more occupied with manners than with letters; and in fact, as regards English, deals in detail with hardly any literary kind save comedy. Here (as the orbis terrarum often remarks of our alter orbis) he thinks that we have too good an opinion of ourselves: “Sur toutes sortes de sujets il faut qu’ils se préfèrent au reste du monde.” He thinks Corneille and Molière (whom he would specially avenge) ill-treated by the English dramatists who borrow from them. He accuses Dryden—not by name, but transparently and truly as “the most famous of their poets”—of stealing from Corneille and abusing him; neither of which articles is just. On the other hand, he is certainly too complimentary (though Saint-Evremond[10] was responsible for the exaggeration) in calling Shadwell “one of the most famous” of the same poets; and we may abandon The Miser to his arrows. He admits that our literature outside the theatre is “full of good sense and originality,” but says little about it. He has himself the good sense to object to Louis Quatorze dress, for Romans and Carthaginians, on both stages.

[Sidenote: and to French.]

He is much more copious on French Literature; and his judgments here are more interesting, because he is at a more original angle. Much of his outlook is purely Neo-Classic. He has a thorough belief in Kinds; he has abundance to say “in the _aib_stract” about bon sens and bel esprit; and for one writing so late he is surprisingly copious on Voiture and Sarrasin and Balzac. He thinks Rabelais quite “beneath humanity,”—having indeed, here and elsewhere, a good deal of solid German morals about him. The most surprising thing is his attitude to Boileau, whom he pronounces to have plenty of sense and art, but no great genius. This attitude, and the taking of English literature into serious literary consideration for almost the first time on the Continent, since Lilius Giraldus,[11] are the things which, from the literary side, deserve most note in Muralt.[12] And the latter—not by any means merely from that point of view of “preferring ourselves to others”—is the most important of all. So long as general critical attention to modern literature was confined to French, Italian, and Spanish, all intimately connected with and indebted to each other, and all descended from Latin, no real “fermentation” could take place. The English yeast set it going at once, in Germany as elsewhere.

Muralt, however, was an exceptional and cosmopolitan sort of person, and the note which he sounded was not immediately taken up, though it is very noteworthy that when it was, it was again in Switzerland.

[Sidenote: German Criticism proper.]

The account which we gave of German criticism proper before 1700, and of that part of it which belongs to the Neo-Classic dispensation after that date, was avowedly scanty: the reasons for this apparent stinginess being twofold—the comparative paucity of the materials, and even more the comparative unimportance of almost all those that do exist. But we undertook in a manner to make good the seeming slight; and it is our present business to do so.[13]

[Sidenote: A glance backward.]

We saw that up to the eighteenth century, and indeed nearly up to the end of its first quarter, German criticism had done very little, and that it was never to do much in the direction of “correctness.” Indirectly, however, in the later half of the seventeenth century, when the furia of the Thirty Years’ War had in a manner sunk to rest, something was done in the way of preliminary fermentation both by the late inoculation of Germany with the Euphuist-Marinist-Gongorist measles, which is there identified chiefly with the names of Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, and by reaction against this,[14] while something further has, at least by some, been considered to have been done by Gottsched himself.

[Sidenote: Theobald Hoeck.]

The works of this period are not, I believe, very common even in Germany, but the unwearied intelligence with which the British Museum has been managed for the last two generations has supplied English readers with a very fair, though not yet quite satisfying, proportion of the most important. The earliest of these authors—a predecessor of Opitz even, who might, and perhaps should, have been mentioned in the last volume—was Theobald Hoeck, or as he is called on the title-page of his quaintly-named Poems,[15] Othoblad Oeckhe. Hoeck makes the nineteenth chapter of his “Fair Field of Flowers” an ode of fourteen five-lined stanzas, Von Art der Deutschen Poeterey, which perhaps ranks next to, and certainly marks the new departure from, the vernacular Meister-song Arts referred to above.[16] But the style and the gist of the piece are, I think, fairly enough shown in the following stanza—

“Warumb sollen wir denn unser Teutsche Sprache[n] In gwisse Form und Gsatz nit auch mögen machen, Und Deutsches Carmen schreiben, Die Kunst zu treiben Bey Mann und Weiben?”

But it is hard for the poet when he has both metre and rhyme to look to— when

“Mann muss die Pedes gleich so wol scandiren Den dactylum und auch Spondaeum rieren,”

and at the same time see that his rhymes are proper. The thing is interesting as exhibiting modern German poetry in the go-cart with laudable anxiety on the part of the infant to go rightly.

[Sidenote: Weckherlin and others.]

The chief ferment, however, of German poetic and criticism of a kind did not come till towards the middle of the century and when the Thirty Years’ War was dying down (though it is thought to have been to some extent determined by the sojourning of at least one German of letters[17] in England quite in the earlier stage of that convulsion): and it took final colour from French rather than from English, partly in the form of Pléiade and Louis Treize ampullæ, partly in that of “correctness” (as far as the Germans could reach it) à la Boileau. The earlier inquirers, such as Schottel, Zesen, Buchner, were painful and estimable rhetoricians, anxious to get German into good scholastic ways. Schottel, in his Teutsche Sprachkunst[18] and other works, is quite of the old fashion in compounding rhetoric-poetic-composition books with dictionary. Zesen’s Hochdeutscher Helikon[19] is an extremely fat little book, the component parts of which are separately paged, and sometimes not paged at all, and which discusses with the utmost care the terms of the art in metre, rhyme, stanza-building, &c., gives rhyming dictionaries first of masculine then of feminine rhymes, supplies plenteous example-verse, and finishes with a De Poetica of a more general kind. Augustine Buchner[20] is still older-fashioned, and reminds one of the sixteenth-century Italians in his little tractate on the office and aim of poetry, its kinds, ornaments, &c.

[Sidenote: Weise, Wernicke, Werenfels, &c.]

These are hardly at all critical; they are rhetorical-preceptist. But the later men, such as Weise, Wernicke, and Werenfels, exhibit the revolt against the school of conceit and bombast which in the later part of the seventeenth century radiates from France all over Europe. Christian Weise, Professor Poeseos as he called himself, degrades Poetry in his Curiose Gedanken neben Deutschen Versen (1691) to the position of a mere ancilla of Rhetoric, and seems to have anticipated Shaftesbury in making “ridicule the test of truth.” His namesake, Wernicke, in the “Ad Lectorem” of his Poetische Versuche,[21] extols Longinus, and makes “polite” remarks on Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau. But the German manifesto against the florid is the Dissertatio de Meteoris Orationis appended to the De Logomachiis Eruditorum of Samuel Werenfels, which appeared at Amsterdam within the eighteenth century,[22] dedicated to no less a person than Gilbert Burnet, but presents the matter of two theses composed fourteen and ten years earlier. The De Logomachiis itself has a certain interest for us, as it hits among other things at frivolous and verbal criticism; but the Dissertatio is all ours. Werenfels, as usual basing himself upon Longinus, without the slightest suspicion that he will be undone by his reliance, distinguishes between ὕψηλα and μετέωρα—our old friends the True and the False Sublime. He admits the importance of Imagination, but will have it strictly ruled by Judgment, and makes another distinction (not without acuteness) between good Figures and bad. He harks as far back as Longolius and the Ciceronians for examples of literary will-worship; but is evidently thinking throughout rather of gorgeousness than of over-precision, and directs his attacks specially at Claudian among the ancients, though he names Gongora among the moderns. His final decision is that Italians, Spaniards, and Germans are all painfully given to the meteoric; the French are saniores.[23]

[Sidenote: Some mutineers: Gryphius and Neumeister.]

The germaner spirit of Germany, however,—to speak “meteorically” and in character,—was by no means quenched by these douches of correctness, and continued to assert itself at intervals between the practice of the Silesians and the theory of the Swiss. The most considerable German dramatist of the seventeenth century, Andreas Gryphius, not merely neglected the “classical” rules in his plays, but made light of them in prefaces and lectures. Just before the end of the century, Erdmann Neumeister (who was to live sixty years longer and overlap the time of Goethe), enthusiastically recommending the fashionable opera, dismisses the rules with a contemptuous inaccuracy[24] much more humiliating than any polemic.

Without therefore wandering longer in these side-walks, we may say that they form a real approach to the Romantic Revolt of the next century, quite as much as—perhaps more than—they lead to the Gottschedian preciseness. And this should sufficiently justify the notice of them here.

[Sidenote: Gottsched once more.]

The most important—perhaps one might say the only important—critical document furnished by Gottsched himself to our general history is the Kritische Dichtung, which has been already disposed of,[25] and this is a document of the extremest Neo-Classicism. But he did not reach this point at once: and the successive hardenings of heart by which he did reach it are a curious topsy-turvy document in the other sense—a document of the growth of Romanticism, and its effect in making its enemies the more stubborn. These stages have been traced diligently and clearly, if perhaps with a little unnecessary animus and polemic, by Herr Braitmaier.[26] When the appearance of the Diskurse der Maler (_The_v. infra) induced Gottsched (who is allowed by friends and foes to have had a very shrewd literary sense of the journalist’s or publisher’s kind) to imitate them in the periodical entitled Die Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen[27]—“The Intelligent Blamingwomen” or “Carperesses”—his attitude was not at first very different from that of his then friends, Bodmer and Breitinger, in appearance at least. But he proceeded to pay attention (perhaps guided by them) to French criticism: and he henceforward followed it, more and more to do evil in another periodical, the Biedermann, in the successive editions of his Kritische Dichtkunst, with increasing intensity in the important Beiträge zur Kritischen Historie der Deutschen Sprache, Poesie und Beredsamkeit, which he directed from 1732 to 1744, and lastly, in the pamphlets and articles of the so-called Swiss-Saxon or Leipzig-Zürich war.

As for the claims of Gottsched to be not a mere critical fossil, but a real reformer and even a kind of precursor of the great German literary school, in criticism as well as on creation, from Lessing to Goethe, they were first put forward many years ago by Danzel, and after the usual manner of literary whitewashings of the paradoxical kind, have been accepted by some since. But they never could have commended themselves to impartial and instructed students of literary history: and they have been quite sufficiently disposed of by Herr Braitmaier. One may fully take the view which was put forward towards the end of the last volume about Gottsched’s critical worth, and yet have formed it with full knowledge of the fact that he was an active and well-intentioned worker in that enormous effort towards self-improvement to which justice has there been done. But the notion that he was really a fellow-worker with the Swiss school is, I must repeat, mistaken; and the further notions of his having played the part of Dante, or at least of Du Bellay, towards the purification and exaltation of German language, and almost that of Dryden towards the refashioning of German literature, are but fond things.[28]

[Sidenote: Bodmer and Breitinger.]

The two Swiss professors, Bodmer and Breitinger, who have already several times been named, form one of the most curious pairs of brothers-in-arms whereof literary story makes mention. They were both born in or near the same town, Zürich; the long lives of both (though Breitinger’s was a little the shorter at both ends) nearly coincided; both were christened John James; and they very early began, and long continued, to qualify themselves for the position of heroes of a new “Legend of Friendship” without even finding it necessary to begin with a fight like Spenser’s Cambel and Triamond. Both pugnacious, they always took the same side in their battles; they prefaced each other’s books alternately, and sometimes finding even this association not close enough, signed them jointly J. J. J. J. In this kind of society it is generally difficult to be certain whether even the writings which appear to belong to one writer only do not contain a good deal of the other’s, and therefore to assign a sharply differential character to either: nor is it really of much importance. The general opinion, I believe, is that Bodmer had more originality and enterprise, Breitinger a sounder judgment, wider learning, and a more philosophical ethos: but in such collaborations the parts are almost always thus distributed. There can, however, be no reasonable question that the pair were—more than any other pair or person—responsible for the Rally of Germany: or rather, to use the phrase of our saner custom, that they mark the turn of the tide which neither they nor any one could have caused. Nor is it surprising to find that this turn is at first almost imperceptible.

[Sidenote: The Diskurse der Maler.]

The Discourses of the Painters took its title directly from a sort of coterie which Bodmer had founded; and was named, probably after Italian models, but indirectly, as no doubt was the coterie also, from the strong prominence in the founder’s mind of the doctrine ut pictura poesis. Started in 1721, the periodical was one, and the most important, of these imitations of The Spectator which, as has been said, played so great a part not merely in English, but in Continental, and especially German, culture. Like the model, the copy was intended to reform manners and morals, speech and style. In the latter respect Bodmer did not merely follow Addison, but fell back to some extent on the French preceptists of “correctness,” cheerfully echoing Boileau’s recommendations of “nature,” though his eclecticism already appears in admiration of Fontenelle likewise. As Boileau himself had made awful examples of the extravagants of the Louis XIII. time, and as Addison had denounced “false wit,” conceits, and so forth, so did Bodmer take up his parable anew against the bombast and preciousness of the Lohenstein School in German. Like both, he believes thoroughly in “Taste,” though the “German paste” in him is not contented without an attempt at a more philosophical treatment of this than either the Frenchman or the Englishman had thought necessary. He makes something of a theory of Poetry as Imitation of Nature: he refines upon the doctrines about Imagination which he finds in Addison. But in all this there is not very much advance upon Addison himself. Bodmer has only been brought by Addison to the threshold of Milton, and, it would seem, not even to that of Shakespeare,[29] while the divine, the instinctive, the all-saving caution, antiquam exquirite matrem, does not in the case of old German poetry carry him beyond Opitz as yet.

[Sidenote: Gradual divergence from their standpoint; König on “Taste.”]

For some years, therefore, it was quite possible for Swiss and Saxons to work together. The literature of the Ancient and Modern quarrel had much influence on both; and that odd upshot of it, the Fénelonian and La Mothian dislike to rhyme, was destined to exercise a very great influence in Germany. For a time, however, attention was principally fixed on the general subject of “Taste,”[30] and a dispute, really important in its results, if not exactly in itself, grew up round a short dissertation by the Saxon Poet-Laureate König, and led, among other things, to an exchange of letters between Bodmer and the Italian Conti,[31] on the nature of this much-discussed quality or faculty. König’s work appeared in 1727, two years before the first edition of Gottsched’s Dichtkunst, but in the same year with a treatise on Imagination from the Swiss side, in which may be seen the first sketch of their elaborate dealings with Poetics many years later.

[Sidenote: Main works of the Swiss School.]

By this time the tendencies of the contending parties—of Bodmer and Breitinger in the Æsthetic-Romantic direction, and of Gottsched in the Classical-Preceptist—had been strengthened and developed, in the one case by study of Milton specially, in the other by that of the French: and the gulf between them was deepened and widened in various writings, especially in the successive editions of Gottsched’s Dichtkunst, and in occasional utterances of his Beiträge. But the great manifestos of the Swiss school—four in number, but it would seem representing a larger and more uniform scheme, of which the Imagination had been the pioneer—did not appear till nearly twenty years after the first publication of the Diskurse. Three of them came out at Zürich in the single year 1740; the fourth, a year later, in 1741. The titles given below require no comment in their exhibition of the odd enlacements of the pair.[32]

[Sidenote: Breitinger’s Kritische Dichtkunst, &c.]

Of these the Kritische Dichtung is the largest, the most ambitious, and, according to Herr Braitmaier, the most important. It was certainly that which hurt and shocked Gottsched most, and which drew from him the pathetically ludicrous expostulation with its unpractical character, which was quoted in the last volume.[33] And no doubt it must appear so to those who pay most attention to the theory of poetry in general. As the very title shows, Breitinger here nails the poetic-pictorial principle to the mast, and he defends it in the book itself, and in the Dissertation on Similes, which is a sort of tender to it, with no insufficient learning and variety of application, with reinforcements of philosophy from Leibnitz and Wolff, even with the sketching of a “Logic of Phantasy,” which is to be regulator and administrator of things poetical.

[Sidenote: Bodmer’s Von Dem Wunderbaren, &c.]

From my point of view, however, the most important of the four is the Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren by Bodmer, and next to this, the same writer’s elaborate examination, in the Poetische Gemahlde, of Don Quixote, and of that Durchlauchstigste Syrerin Aramena, which is one of the chief German Heroic Romances, and one of the literary achievements of the House of Brunswick, having been written by Duke Anton Ulrich. The generalities of the Kritische Dichtkunst are, no doubt, as one of the characters in Westward Ho! says, “all very good and godly”: but the unfortunate Gottsched, if he had had a little more wit, might so have couched his complaint of their unpracticality that it would not have been ridiculous. “Logics of Phantasy” are all very well: doctrines that the poet must be thus and thus minded are all very well. But we want poems, we want imaginative literature itself; and these were the most difficult things in the world to get in the first half of the eighteenth century. Bodmer, in dealing with prose fiction, recognises, as few critics had recognised, the second greatest division of the imaginative literature of the world—greater even than drama in a way, because it borrows nothing from poetry, but stands on its own merits,—the division which was at last slowly rising from the ocean where it had been so long submerged. And in the Dissertation on the Wonderful he boldly unlocked the tabooed treasury wherein men had been so long forbidden to seek the true riches of poetry.

There was the real labor, the real opus. It is not too much to say that the prevailing doctrine—during the seventeenth century increasingly, and at the beginning of the eighteenth as a recognised orthodoxy—made poetry almost impossible. In spite of the grudging permission of such inadequate safety-valves as furor poeticus, beau désordre, “lucky license,” and the rest, this doctrine was that even the Wunderbar had got to submit itself to the Wahrscheinlich, with a very distinct understanding that it was far the safer way to attend to the Verisimilar and let the Wonderful alone. Even Bodmer himself seems to have been rather led to a sounder creed by his admiration for Milton and his revolt against such things as Voltaire’s condemnation of parts of Paradise Lost,[34] than by a clear, straightforward apperception of the prerogative of Wonder. Even he proceeds rather by extension of “machinery,” by pointing out the capabilities and interest of the use of Angels and the like, than by any thorough-going anticipation of the Coleridgean “suspension of disbelief.” But this was very natural and almost necessary: while it may be pointed out that his attention to the Prose Romance—in which, for this reason or that, the unexpected and the exceptional had always held rather a prominent place—tended in the same direction as his doctrine of the Wonderful in Poetry.

[Sidenote: Special criticisms of both.]

It is, however, only fair to say that neither Breitinger nor Bodmer fails in that critical examination of actual literature which, as it has been one of the objects of this book to show, is the most fruitful way of the critic. Bodmer’s study of Paradise Lost, which he translated, nay, even that of Opitz, who was edited by the pair, provided perhaps the most important element in his critical education. And whatever gaps there may have been in their literary accomplishment, they knew and used the greatest critics of antiquity. If they did not know or use all its greatest poets, they used what they did know freshly and independently. They knew French and Italian literature fairly, and Breitinger at least had studied the Ancient and Modern Quarrel. They knew something of English besides Milton, though little or nothing of “Sasper,” and their earnest and affectionate study of German literature itself, reaching by-and-by to the treasures of the “Middle High” period, is, to me at least, one of their greatest titles to credit. They may have pushed the picture-poetry notion too far—Lessing was at the door with a veritable “two-handed engine” to cut off any superfluity here. But in their time, and in all times, it could but do more good than harm.

[Sidenote: Bodmer’s verse criticism.]

With the commentatorial side of their activity may be connected the four verse pieces edited with much care by Herr Baechtold in the Deutsche Literatur-Denkmale.[35] The two last of these, dating from the author’s latest years, when he felt himself among those that knew not Joseph— Untergang der Beruhmten Namen, and Bodmer nicht verkannt—are in hexameters, and are only pathetic curiosities. The first, Character der Teutschen Gedichte, 1734, with an appendix, Versuch einer Kritik über die Deutschen Dichter, and a second but more independent sequel, Die Drollingerische Muse (Drollinger was a poet and friend of Bodmer’s who had just died), have more substantive interest.[36] They are in Alexandrines, duly arranged with masculine and feminine alternation, and contain not a little mostly sound criticism of mostly much-forgotten bards.

[Sidenote: Their later work in mediæval poetry, and their general position.]

I find myself, perhaps necessarily from the difference of our points of view, again in disagreement with Herr Braitmaier as to the critical importance of Bodmer’s later industry (shared again in part by Breitinger) on older German literature. To me, the mere fact that Bodmer in 1748—that is to say, before the middle of the eighteenth century, and nearly twenty years before the appearance of Percy’s Reliques— published with his faithful double J. J. his Specimens of Old Suabian Poetry, the Middle High German poetry of the thirteenth century; nine or ten years later, and still before Percy, before Hurd, Fabeln aus der Zeiten der Minnesänger; with, later again, parts of the Nibelungenlied and collections of Minnesong itself, is, as perhaps the reader knows by this time, an almost greater claim to importance in the History of Criticism and Literary Taste than his earlier directly critical work, and a much greater one than the more abstract æsthetic inquiries of Breitinger even, still more of Baumgarten and Sulzer and the rest. Taken with these earlier inquiries they give him and his coadjutor a high and most memorable place in the general story of the appreciation of literature. He was certainly not a man of much—and Breitinger does not seem to have been one of any—original poetical power; he does not himself seem to have had even so much as his colleague had of learning or acuteness: and both were echt Deutsch in their long-windedness and want of concinnity. But they did what they could; and it turned out that they had done a great deal.

[Sidenote: The “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel.]

Of the famous “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel[37] which followed the publication of Breitinger’s Kritische Dichtkunst and Gottsched’s denunciation thereof in a new edition of his own, I shall, according to my previous practice, say little. It has in all the books the usual disproportionate prominence of such things, and its actual importance was even less than usual. A brief but good account of it, and of all the underground jealousies and littlenesses that led up to it, may be found in Braitmaier. These jealousies, especially the general revolt against the sort of tyranny of letters which Gottsched’s skilful management of his periodicals and his pedagogic temper had instituted, were much more noticeable in it than any clear classic-romantic “dependence.” But, on the whole, the revolt against Gottsched was in the direction of revolt against at least Neo-Classicism. By degrees, too, it branched out into an attack on, and a defence of, two particular poets—Haller and Klopstock; and though neither of these is very delectable “to us,” both were distinctly in their time champions of the freedom of the poetic Jerusalem. It was fought out in Gottsched’s Beiträge on his side, and in a kind of periodical entitled Sammlung Kritischer, poetischer, und geistvoller Schriften, which Bodmer brought out in opposition,[38] in divers others,[39] and in numerous pamphlets. The most important critics whom it produced, and these indirectly for the most part, were the elder Schlegels, especially the eldest, Johann Elias, who, from a contributor, though never exactly a partisan, of Gottsched, became one of the objects of his special indignation. Of others, Schwabe, Cramer, Mylius, Pyra, we can but take note in passing here. Gellert has been mentioned in the last volume.[40]

[Sidenote: The elder Schlegels: Johann Adolf.]

If not every schoolboy, every one with the slightest tincture of letters, is supposed to be aware that there were two persons of the name of Schlegel, who are of very great account in German and in European criticism. Not merely the schoolboy, but the person ordinarily tinged with letters, may perhaps be excused if he does not know that at least[41] four of the name and family have claim to rank here—Johann Elias, his younger brother Johann Adolf, August Wilhelm, and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, these two last being sons of Johann Adolf. Of these the elder pair concern us in this particular place. And of them it will be most convenient to take Johann Adolf first, not for the sake of his famous offspring, but because his critical work is the less important. He took part in the obscure and uninteresting squabble over the Pastoral school,[42] but his main contribution to our subject is a translation, with notes and elaborate Abhandlungen, of Batteux. In this, published as early as 1751, and reprinted later,[43] he is still an evidence of the domination of French, which his more original brother at least partly rejected. But there are signs and tokens. He is constantly making respectful suggestions and limitations: “This conclusion is too large,” “this is true to a certain extent,” and so forth.

The Abhandlungen show the German tendency to generalisation and abstract disquisition:—On the Origin of Arts, the Building up of Taste, the divisions of Poetry, its foundation in imitation or illusion, its distinction from History, and from Ornate Prose, &c. Schlegel is very much cumbered about Kinds, insists that we must try each new kind and see whether it comes naturally or not. If it does, that is right. The Wonderful has “a natural right to please us, a right founded in the constitution of our souls.” The soul demands novelty, &c. But like his part-master, Gottsched, he is very doubtful about Ariosto and Milton (Death and Sin are such “shadowy persons”!), and I do not think he mentions Shakespeare. He has a considerable position in the list of writers on German versification, a subject which was acquiring much importance from the set against rhyme, mentioned above.

[Sidenote: Johann Elias.]

His elder brother, Johann Elias, is a much more original and independent person. The very high claims made for him by his editor, Herr von Antoniewicz,[44] and by Herr Braitmaier, may require some deduction when we consider his actual work; but not much. He died (1749) at a little over thirty: and during this short life he had been a diplomatist, a professor, a prolific and remarkable dramatist, and a miscellaneous poet. So that he had not much time to spare for criticism. But his work in it has that rare quality, or combination of qualities, which we have noted in Dryden, the quality of marking and learning the things that a man reads and writes of, and correcting himself by both processes. It is quite astonishing to read his first critical work, a “Letter on Ancient and Modern Tragedy,” and to note, though his actual standpoint is not very advanced, the thoroughness and freshness of appreciation shown by a boy of one-and-twenty, in the very dawn and almost the twilight of the great period of German literature. Other interesting papers lead to the still more remarkable review of Borck’s prose translation of Julius Cæsar, with its parallel between that play and the Leo Armenius of the German seventeenth-century dramatist, Andreas Gryphius. There is, of course, a danger, if this be uncritically read, of our failing to grasp Schlegel’s standpoint in regard to both the subjects, and of the excellent Gryph appearing to us too much in the light in which Shakespeare himself appeared to Voltaire. Moreover, the German Alexandrine is—even to an ear broken to a thousand measures in half a dozen languages—one of the most disagreeable that can be found. But allow for all these things, as criticism demands, and you will have a piece of appreciation such as (so far at least as I know) had not appeared in German before, and one of which, æquatis æquandis, hardly any of the greatest English or French critics since need have been ashamed in his Lehrjahre. The discussions of Imitation,[45] which the lovers of abstract criticism seem to regard as Schlegel’s greatest title to fame, and which are certainly his largest, though very sound and stimulating for their time, and not even obsolete in regard to the “realist” and “naturalist” debates of the latest nineteenth century, are a little scholastic in method. From reading some estimates of Schlegel the student might almost be prepared to find in him a promulgation of one of the last secrets of criticism, the discovery that not only need you not always realise but you nearly always must _dis_realise—give the things as they are not in nature; and that by no means merely to suppress uglinesses and the like. So far as this I do not think he gets anywhere,[46] but he gets pretty far: and his argument was most valuable at the time when Gottsched was priding himself on having once more based Poetic on a rigid Imitation-principle. But some of the best of Schlegel’s work is to be found in the last example of it, the “Gedanken zur Aufnahme des Dänischen Theaters,” where the good and bad points of both English and French drama, and the imitation or avoidance which they deserve accordingly, are set forth with an insight, a range, and a power of appreciation which do not come much behind Lessing, not to mention an impartiality which Lessing by no means always shows. In the Shakespeare-and-Gryph parallel Johann Elias had practically founded German Shakespeare-study, and in this piece he takes the line necessary to prevent a too one-sided pursuit of it. His actual critical achievement is not, and could not be, large; but it is precious in itself, and it shows that, had he lived, there was almost nothing at all possible in his time that he might not have done in criticism. You could trust him, I think, on the English novel, and you could trust him on German and mediæval poetry, with the certainty that, in the long-run at any rate, he would come

right.

[Sidenote: Moses Mendelssohn.]

Of the praiseworthy industry of Nicolai we have spoken in the last volume: and the only critic whom it is necessary to mention in any detail before passing to Lessing, who is himself in a way the critical sum and substance as well as the crown and flower of this period—Moses Mendelssohn—belongs rather to the æstheticians pure and simple. He did, however, much solid actual critical work, to a great extent in collaboration with both of the persons just mentioned. Those who are curious about him may consult the very extensive (indeed, I fear it must rather be called the disproportionately extensive) notice of him by Herr Braitmaier, who gives this learned Jew some two-thirds of his second volume, and not much less than one-third of his whole book. Mendelssohn, however, is really an important person in the history of German criticism, and probably counted for something in the development of Lessing, who was his intimate friend. He seems to have had little tincture of classical literature, but was intensely interested in modern; and was for some twenty years a constant reviewer of it. He inclines somewhat to the moral rather than to the purely literary judgment in his notices of English writers, even of Shakespeare, much more of Young and Richardson, and he was not disposed to accept the Wartonian view of Pope. Indeed, with all his merits he seems to me to be further “below proof,” from the literary point of view, not merely than Lessing but than J. E. Schlegel. The actual critical work[47] of this Moses, as shown in his collected writings, leaves us, if not in the depths of the wilderness, at any rate at some distance from the Promised Land. There is a certain amount of criticism in his Letters, and he illustrates eighteenth-century tendencies by writing on Das Erhabene und das Naïve. His general drift is very frankly displayed in the epistles of Aristes to Hylas, on “How the Young should read Old and New Poetry,” where Plutarch’s title[48] is not more closely followed than his spirit. The treatise, though in no way contemptible, is one of those which have been described (no doubt by a reminiscence of Hobbes) as “all -keit and -lung.” And Mendelssohn’s attitude to criticism could not be better indicated than in the following sentence:[49] “We laugh at Regnard’s Le Joueur and avoid being called gamblers; we weep over the English Gamester and are ashamed to be such.” Perhaps so; perhaps also not. But the symptoms, if existent, are quite compatible with the existence of any degree of literary merit in either case, if not also with the existence of none.

Baumgarten, Sulzer, and some others must be relegated to the Æsthetic pound.

[Sidenote: Lessing.]

The general reputations which are wholly or mainly founded on criticism are so few that it behoves the historian thereof to approach them with unusual circumspection, to “put on the inquirer’s holy robe and a purged considerate mind,” as Mr Arnold says. There is the obvious danger of merely indorsing the general opinion in a tame and banal assentation; and there is the not much less obvious (and perhaps not a little greater) danger of succumbing to the temptation of “saying something different”—of aiming at a cheap distinction by paradox or eccentricity. Perhaps it is even easier to escape these dangers in reality than to seem to escape them: more particularly in the case of Lessing, of whom, in England at least, almost every educated person knows that he was a great critic, while only specialists know much more.

[Sidenote: Some cautions respecting him.]

That he was a great critic nobody can deny: but it is perhaps desirable to warn those who come to him knowing something of literary criticism already, and expecting great things in it from him, that they should not raise their expectations too high, and that they should thoroughly master certain preliminary facts. The most important of these is that Lessing’s interests were not, as the interests of very great critics almost invariably have been, either wholly literary, or literary first of all, or, as in Aristotle’s case, as literary as possible. As it was said of Clarissa that “there is always something that she prefers to the truth,” so there is nearly always something that Lessing prefers to literature, constantly as he was occupied with books. Now it is the theatre;[50] now it is art—especially art viewed from the side of archæology; now it is classical scholarship of the minuter kind; now philosophy or theology; now it is morals; not unfrequently it is more, or fewer, or all of these things together, which engage his attention while literature is left out in the cold.

[Sidenote: His moral obsession; on Soliman the Second.]

The most curious instance of his moral preoccupation (which, as the commonest and that with which we are most familiar, we may get rid of first) has reference[51] to Marmontel’s conte of Soliman the Second.[52] Lessing rather liked Marmontel, who had been civil to Miss Sara Sampson, I think, and whom he somewhere couples with Diderot, thereby showing that he at any rate was able to distinguish in the author of the Eléments de Littérature something very different from a perruque. He admits “the wit, the knowledge of the world, the elegance, the grace” of this “excellent and delightful” tale. But he is fearfully disturbed at its morality. The Sultan, it seems, is “a satiated libertine”; [but would not Rymer be for once justified in urging this as “a character worn by them in all ages of the world” in which there were Sultans?] Roxelane is “a baggage which gets its way.” [Undoubtedly: but do not baggages as a rule get theirs?] Lessing, however, cannot away with “the thing,” as he calls the owner of the petit nez retroussé. What a wretched part is the great Soliman made to play! He and Roxelane “belong neither to the actual world, nor to a world in which cause and effect follow a different order, but to the general effect of good.” “The Turk only knows sensual love” [Rymer! Rymer!]. Lessing is afraid that the lune rousse will rise for Soliman on the very morrow of his wedding: and that he will see in Roxelane “nothing but her impudence and the nez retroussé.” [Now as these were the very things that captivated him, it might rather seem that all would be well.] In Soliman the instructive is lacking. “We ought to despise both him and Roxelane; or rather one [which one?] ought to disgust and the other to anger us,” though, or perhaps more particularly, because “they are painted in the most seductive colours.”

There is really nothing to be said to this but ὦ πόποι! In the first place, all this good moral indignation simply explodes through the touch-hole. The tale is pure satire on the actual weakness of man and triumph of woman—and this actuality who dare deny? If Lessing does not think both Soliman and Roxelane natural, so much the worse for Lessing. In the second place, neither is in the least degree held up for our admiration, though the skill of the artist may deserve that admiration in almost the highest degree. We may, if we like, pronounce Soliman a weak man and rather immoral ruler, and suspect Roxelane (as he suspected her himself) of being very little better than she should be. But not only does the critic waste his powder in the direction in which he actually fires; he loses the opportunity of bringing down excellent game. He lets slip altogether (as Tassoni[53] had not altogether, though he did not follow it out) the chance of arguing that most important and interesting critical question of the attraction of the irregular, the unexpected, the capricious, the teasing. He might have got “instruction” to his heart’s content, for us and for himself, out of this shocking story of the great Sultan and the petit nez retroussé. Surely it were better done thus to profit by the curves of Roxelane’s countenance than to read us a dull sermon on her want of moral rectitude? But Lessing does not think so—master though he be, at least according to German notions, of that very irony which should have kept him right.

[Sidenote: The strictures on Ariosto’s portrait of Alcina.]

His merely dramatic and his merely artistic preoccupations deserve less severe treatment, because it cannot be said that they lead him wrong or even astray, except from our special point of view. But from that special point of view they do lead him astray: at least in the sense that he becomes sometimes unimportant to us. In the whole of the Laocoön, reserving a point to be returned to later, I remember only one passage of any length which is really literary,[54] and that is the famous and not undeserved, but somewhat insufficiently worked out, censure of Ariosto’s description of Alcina.[55] Here Lessing does show what a critic he is by his triumphant demonstration that the carefully accumulated strokes which would in the sister art go towards making, if they would not completely make, a most attractive picture, produce very little definite effect as a passage. Even here he allows himself to be called off from the discovery which he was on the point, it might seem, of making. He excepts for praise the beautiful—in fact consummate— simile of the breasts which—

“Vengono e van, come onda al primo margo quando piacevole aura il mar combatte.”

Here of course the charm arises from the fact that the image is new, personal—that is to say, that it is literary. The curves of the wind-engrailed surge on the sand are not Vida’s “stealings,” they are originals—whoso takes them will not make them, though in themselves they remain delightful for ever. They are like the “chrysoprase” eyes of Clarimonde in Gautier’s Morte Amoureuse, which make that piece immortal. The man who now gives us eyes of chrysoprase might as well make them gooseberries. Lessing does not say this, does not hint it: indeed (as Lamb’s Scotchman would point out) it would have been, in reference to the Morte Amoureuse, impossible for him to do so. But he is on the way to saying it, and he instigates others to do so if he does not.[56]

[Sidenote: Hamlet and Semiramis.]

The objection indeed which may be most justly taken to these dramatic and artistic preoccupations is that they too often directly prevent him in this way from doing what he might have done. The Dramaturgie is to the student of properly literary criticism a mixture of irritation and delight—a parallel to Coleridge’s conversation, in which “glorious” literary “islets” constantly loom through the dramatic haze, and then get engulfed again. How admirable in principle that comparison[57] of Voltaire’s and of Shakespeare’s ghosts! Yet how we sigh for concrete illustrations from the actual words—for a little, little Zusammensetzung, say, of

“This eternal blazon,”

—three words only, but three words with the whole soul of poetry in them, and of

“Arrête! et respecte ma cendre.”[58]

[Sidenote: The Comte d’Essex, Rodogune, Mérope.]

The defence of Thomas Corneille’s Comte d’Essex[59] against Voltaire’s unhistorical history is very good; but then it is so unnecessary! and in the longest criticisms of all, those given to the greater Corneille s Rodogune[60] and to Maffei’s and Voltaire’s Merope[61] (once more one wishes that Lessing could have taken in Mr Arnold’s), the entanglements of the preoccupation reach, for a literary critic, the exasperating.

[Sidenote: Lessing’s Gallophobia]

The truth is that in reading the Dramaturgie[62] one cannot help remembering Carlyle’s capital complaint of Voltaire that “to him the Universe was one larger patrimony of St Peter from which it were good and pleasant to chase the Pope,” and regretting that Lessing should have thought it necessary to substitute Voltaire himself for the Holy Father. It was inevitable perhaps and necessary for the time: but the result is tedious. And unfortunately this Gallophobia in general, this Corneliophobia and Voltairiophobia in particular, affects, and very unfavourably affects, those rectifications and reconstructions of Aristotle which have given the Dramaturgie its great reputation. With all his talent, all his freshness, Lessing is to a very great extent merely varying the Addisonian error—and indeed, as with all these early German critics, Addison himself had too great an influence on him. As Addison had wasted his powers on showing that Milton, whom the pseudo-Aristotelians had decried, was very Aristotelian, or at least Homeric, after all, so Lessing devotes a most unnecessary amount of energy to showing that the pseudo-Aristotelians themselves were not Aristotelian at all. It was true; it was in a sense well worth doing; but there was so much else to do! There is a famous passage at the beginning of No. 7 which itself really annihilates the whole proceeding, and laughs “boundary lines of criticism” out of court. Nor is Lessing’s aberration a mere accidental one. It comes from the fact that he had not cleared up his own mind on some important parts of the question. He says, for instance, in his criticism of Rodogune (No. 31, beginning), “The revenge of an ambitious woman should never resemble that of a jealous one.” Æternum vulnus! What is “the revenge of an ambitious woman?” “the revenge of a jealous one?” Show me the revenge of your jealous Amaryllis, the revenge of your ambitious Neæra; and then I will tell you whether they are right or not.

[Sidenote: and typomania.]

The fact is, that on what we may call the other side of his virtue—to call it the defect of his quality would be rather to beg the question—he is, after all, a preceptist with some difference. Not merely is he an unflinching and almost “right-or-wrong” Aristotelian, but from genuine agreement of taste and judgment he still criticises almost wholly by Kinds. It is the drama, the epic, the fable, the lyric, the epigram that he makes for, across or sometimes almost outside of the actual examples of their classes. And here, too, we find that the more poetical divisions and the more poetical aspects of these and others have no very special appeal to him. He belittles Lyric altogether; if he is particularly fond of the Fable in the special sense, it is because it also has a “fable” in the general, it is an imitation of life, a criticism of it. His attempt to prove that Horace had no looking-glasses in his bedroom[63] is a pleasant pendant to his indignation with Roxalana’s minois chiffonné: and though there is a great deal to be said for Martial, Lessing[64] is bribed to adopt the vita proba view rather by the Roman poet’s intense vivacity than by his literary merit.

[Sidenote: His study of antiquity more than compensating.]

Yet this, once more, is but “the other side of a virtue.” The best authorities agree that to Lessing may be assigned absolutely the return to, if not the very initiation of,[65] a direct, scholarly, intelligent, literary study of the ancients themselves. As far as the Greek Theatre itself is concerned, Brumoy had anticipated him: far too little justice has often been done to the work of this modest and solid scholar. But Brumoy’s outlook was wanting in range. Lessing had in his mind, as well as Latin and Greek, English,[66] French and German always, Italian, even Spanish[67] to some extent. And he read the Latin and the Greek in themselves—and with all due apparatus of technical scholarship considering his time. He was as far from the twice- and thrice-garbled sciolism of the average French, and even English, critic of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, as from the arid pedantry of the Dutch and German scholars of the same date. To him, more perhaps than to any one else, it is due that modern criticism has not followed, more than it has done, the mere foolishness of the “modern” advocates in the Quarrel—that it has fortified itself with those sound and solid studies which antiquity alone can supply. For once more let it be said that if, from the pure critical point of view, Ancient without Modern is a stumbling-block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable.

[Sidenote: And especially of Aristotle.]

Perhaps Lessing’s greatest glory is that he has given answer to the despairing question which his master quoted in the Ethics.[68] “If the water chokes, what must one drink on the top of it?” “More and purer water” is that answer, of course: and Lessing scoured the clogged and stagnant channels of Neo-Classicism by recurrence to the original fount. Of course he was not himself absolutely original. He owed something to Heinsius, in that most remarkable tractate to which we did justice in its place, among the more distant moderns, to Dacier, pedant as he is, to Brumoy, to Hurd among the nearer. But more than to any of them he devoted himself to the real text of the Poetics, interpreted by a combination of scholarship and mother-wit. To this day he has to be consulted upon the cruces of Fable and Character, of Unity, of knotting and unknotting, of katharsis.[69] That he has said no final word on them matters nothing: final words are not to be said on things of opinion and probability

Until God’s great Venite change the song.

But on these and not a few other matters he reorganised the whole method and the whole tenor of the inquiry. And so he not only earns his own place in the story, but half unintentionally establishes, or helps us to establish, the great truth that the whole is a story, a history, a chain of opinion and comment on opinion, now going more, now less, right, but to be kept as a chain.

[Sidenote: With whom he combines Diderot.]

Nothing can illustrate this better than the fact that Lessing’s second master in criticism is—Diderot! He does not regard that erratic and cometic genius as he regards Aristotle, he does not think the Bijoux Indiscrets, and the remarks on the Fils Naturel, and the rest, as being “as infallible as the Elements of Euclid.”[70] He would have disqualified himself from serious consideration if he had. He dissents from some of Diderot’s opinions; he combats some of his arguments. But he admits, almost in so many words, and in a constant attitude which is more valuable than any verbal admission, that this most irregular, revolutionary, casual of modern thinkers has set him on his own path of independent revaluation of critical principles.

[Sidenote: His deficiencies in regard to mediæval literature.]

And we find confirmation of this in those of his critical writings which have not yet been mentioned, as well as illustrations of other critical characteristics in him. It is curious that Lessing, so sensitive and receptive to ancient and later modern influences, is almost as proof against mediæval and (in his own language) early modern as Gottsched himself. His low estimate of Lyric seems to come partly from the fact that Aristotle had slighted it, or at least passed it over, partly from the fact that in relation to Germany he is not thinking of her ballads and lays, not even of the extravagances of the seventeenth century, but of the tame Anacreontic of Hagedorn, Gleim, and Company. Even his study of Shakespeare has not set him right in this respect. It is most curious to read his contemporary Hurd, a contemporary for whom Lessing had a just respect, and to remember that Hurd could appreciate not merely both Aristotle and Shakespeare, but both Horace and Spenser. And there are few things which bring out more clearly that immense debt to Shakespeare and Spenser themselves which has been insisted on as due by English criticism. It was too early for Lessing to have gone back to Gottfried and Walther;[71] the German Renaissance had nothing (save the ballads, which he would not have) to offer him.

[Sidenote: The close of the Dramaturgie and its moral.]

The greatest places of the Dramaturgie are those at the close of No. 95, and the penultimate passage of all. In the former, after a long discussion of the Aristotelian commentaries of Hurd and Dacier, he refashions his master’s famous dictum in other matter, that “accuracy must not be expected.” He is not, he says, “obliged to solve all the problems he raises.” His thoughts may seem desultory, or even contradictory: but it does not matter if they supply others with the germ of individual thought. He would but scatter “fermenta cognitionis.” In the other, he proceeds still farther, though still perhaps without a clear idea how far the path itself will lead. Germans, he says (I shorten somewhat here), had imitated the French because the French were believed to be your only followers of the ancients. Then English plays came in, an entirely different style of drama was revealed, and the Germans concluded that the aim of tragedy could be fulfilled without the French rules—that the rules were wrong. And then they went on to object to rules altogether as mere genius-hampering pedantry. “In short, we had very nearly thrown away in wantonness all past experience, insisting that the poet shall in every instance discover the whole art for himself.” Lessing has endeavoured “to arrest this secondary fermentation,” and that is all.

Invaluable words! and, if somewhat extra-literary,—or, from another point of view, directed to too narrow a part of literature,—yet in their true acceptation governing and guiding the whole method, the entire campaign, of literary criticism. Whether Lessing had taken any suggestion from Batteux,[72] who had written long before him, I do not know: but the different attitude of the French critic and the German is most interesting, and gives the reason why we have treated Batteux in the last volume and are treating Lessing in this. Both writers perceive, each in his own fashion, that every work of genius is, or at any rate contains, a rule. I do not even know that it can be denied that Lessing, almost as much as Batteux, though under happier stars, has an idea of working out one general rule of all the particulars—a process which is but too likely to lead back again into the House of Bondage; but his actual notion takes a far more catholic form, leads far more directly to the way of salvation. You must study each work of genius in order to get its contribution to the Inner Rule, the highest formula. And if you do this all will be well. It is not the Rule—as some falsely hold, and as perhaps some even have falsely thought that the present writer holds— that does the harm, but its exclusive and disfranchising application a priori—not even the Kind, but its elevation into a caste, with the correlative institution of pariahdom. And Lessing’s principle of never neglecting study of former experience saves this danger at once.[73]

[Sidenote: Miscellaneous specimens of his criticism.]

But the twenty volumes of Lessing’s Works, or rather the round dozen, more or less, of them which contain or concern criticism, are not to be passed over without some more detailed mention. The first contains (besides the early and not uninteresting Preface to his collected Poems in 1753) the famous Dissertations on the Fable, which, whether one agrees or not with them, give an admirable example of the thoroughness, the sense, and the scholarship of Lessing’s critical method. He lays out the history of opinion on his subject from Aristotle and Aphthonius to Breitinger and Batteux; he combats, not long-windedly but scientifically, those opinions with which he disagrees; he sets forth his own with such further disposition of the subject as he thinks proper. And in sixty pages he has given as masterly an example of “criticism on a kind,” of general criticism (for we must maintain the reservations above outlined), as need be desired—an example uniting antique clearness and proportion, scholastic method, and modern vivacity and illustrative variety. A somewhat different kind of document, but the kind which we have so often looked for in vain hitherto, is given by the great mass of reviews, literary letters, the rhetorical discussions of various kinds, and the like, which fill four successive volumes.[74] From the very first, written when Lessing was but two-and-twenty, his scholarship, his reading, and his formidable and rather aggressive intellectual ability, appear unmistakably. Much is mere abstract, but more independent work appears from the long and early criticism of the Captivi[75] to the review of Meinhardt’s Italian Poets, which came just before the Laocoön.

Here may be found all manner of dealings with interesting and heterogeneous subjects and persons, from Rousseau’s Dijon Discourse through Klopstock and Piron, Bodmer’s sacred epics (“Three Epic Poets in Germany at once!” says Lessing, setting the tone of mischievous reviewing early; “too much! too much of a good thing!”), and “Gentil” Bernard on the Art of Love, to elaborate dissertations on Simon Lemnius, the author of that edifying work the Monachopornomachia.[76] And later,[77] in more extensive reference to German Literature, much about the early work of Klopstock and Wieland, a sustained polemic against Gottsched, ranging from serious attacks on his authority as a literary historian and critic to “skits” tending to prove that he was the author of Candide,[78] not unaccompanied by businesslike abstracts of the critic’s own work to adjust the same to more general acceptance.[79]

Of the Kleinere Philologische Abhandlungen, which fill the 15th volume, the curious “Rettungen des Horaz” have been glanced at above. The opening “Vademecum für Lange,” a vitriolic and practically destructive retort on that blundering translator of Horace himself, who had not had the sense to sit down quietly under a severe but not offensive review of Lessing’s, is one of the capital examples of its kind—a kind questionable but sometimes to be allowed. The “Anmerkungen über das Epigramm,” the principal single constituent of the volume,[80] are very noteworthy. The rest consist mainly of textual and other animadversions of the kind which we reluctantly leave out here from the Renaissance downward. The chief are on Paulus Silentiarius, and on that interesting book the fables of the so-called Anonymus Neveleti.

He returns to this in one[81] of the numerous papers of vol. xvi., another collection of notes, notices (some of Old German Literature), and reviews, the last mostly very short and sometimes a little perfunctory. What might have been the most, and is not the least, interesting of these,[82] has for subject a German translation of the first two volumes of The Rambler in 1754. Lessing does not name Johnson, nor does he seem to know anything about him; but he praises the Essays highly. Now, if you could have combined the good points of these two, and “sprinkled in,” as Mambrun might say,[83] a little furor romanticus, it would have been difficult to get a better critical mixture than the result.

The still further collection of critical miscellanea in vol. xix. is mostly philosophical or, according to Lessing’s unfortunate later habit, theological in character,[84] but the long “Pope als Metaphysiker” deserves mention as at least partially literary and as more than partially good. Finally, the numerous and not seldom interesting notes or motes of the Kollectaneen or Commonplace Book published after Lessing’s death, though they frequently approach or flit round strictly literary criticism, never, I think, actually constitute it.[85]

[Sidenote: His attitude to Æschylus and Aristophanes.]

In the case of so great a name occupying the most prominent position at the last turning-point of the recorded critical course, it is necessary to insist on those reserves which have been made already. Everybody who has read Lessing carefully must have noticed, whether with immediate understanding of the reason or not, the very small attention which he pays to two writers in his own favourite department, whom some would call the very greatest in it, as far as Greece is concerned, and to whom hardly any nowadays would deny a place among the greatest of Greece or of the world—that is to say, Æschylus and Aristophanes. His defenders are prompt with an excuse at least as damaging as most excuses. People did not, says Lessing’s very able and very erudite commentator, M. Kont, fully understand in those days the importance of Æschylus in connection with Greek myths: and the forms of drama which he, and still more Aristophanes, adopted were unsuitable to that modern use and application which Lessing always had at heart. Alas! the value of an author in connection with Greek myths is so exceedingly indifferent to literature! and his value as helping to fill a stage at the present day is also of so very little importance! If ignorance of one of these things and consciousness of the absence of the other determined Lessing’s neglect of the greatest tragic poet of Greece,—of the greatest comic poet, except Shakespeare, of the world,—then it will be but too clear that whatever Lessing cared most for, it was not poetry,—that his care for poetry as such—nay, for literature as such—was even rather small. To call him a “king of criticism” is foolish, because that is just what he is not. He is grand-duke of not a few critical provinces which, somehow or other, he never can consolidate into a universal monarchy of critical wit.

Let me, however, assure any of my readers who are apt to regard as “unfriendly” or “unsympathetic” criticism which is not eulogy thick and slab, neat and unmixed, that there is no intention here of belittling Lessing’s critical qualities,[86] only one of indicating critically what they were and what they were not. The gift of critical expression he most certainly had in a very high degree. His exposition is masterly: though he is constantly, as has been said, leading the discussion aside from concrete to abstract, and from particular to general points, he is scarcely ever obscure, confused, or vague. His language is precise, without being technical or jargonish. He has something of the German lack of urbanity, but he often has a felicity of expression that is French rather than German, with depth and humour which are far more German than French. Never has one of the tricks of the critical pedant— common to the kind in our day as in his—been so happily described as in the opening of Wie die Alten den Tod gebildeten: “Herr Klotz always thinks he is at my heels. But when I look back at his yelp, I see him lost in a cloud of dust quite astray from the road I have trodden.”[87] The unlucky distraction of his later years, to theological or anti-theological squabbling may—nay, must—have lost us much. But as it is, he never fails for long together to give those fermenta cognitionis of which he speaks. He is always “for thoughts”: that fecundity, as a result of the critical congress, which we shall remark in his part-master Diderot, is everywhere present in him.

[Sidenote: Frederic the Great.]

Lessing, whom the king neglected, may suggest Frederic the Great, whose De la Littérature Allemande (1780) the Germans have most forgivingly translated into the language despised by the writer, and adopted as a “monument” of its literature.[88] It is certainly a monument of a kind, and the most striking contrast possible to Lessing’s work. I shall not say that it shows, as a Carlylian not less fervent than myself[89] has admitted of Frederic’s historian on Marryat, that Frederic “was stupid for once in his life.” But it certainly shows that he could be absurdly narrow and perverse, and could push the confidence of ignorance to a wonderful length. That Frederic was very ignorant of literature there is no doubt. It is known that he “had small Latin[90] and no Greek”; his expressions about English, the language and the literature, in this very tractatule, are, if possible, more impudently ignorant than those about German: he does not, I think, so much as name a Spanish author; and his references to Italian might have been, and probably were, derived from mere hearsay.

All this was a good preparation for judging a literature in the very peculiar state of German in 1780, when, to do it justice, a man should have had the knowledge, then almost impossible, of the various periods from “Middle High” onwards, the power to appreciate its very different phases, which few had, and the power, which hardly anybody ever has, of appreciating the literary present, and even future. But Frederic need not have made so near an approach to stupidity as he makes here.[91]

[Sidenote: De la Littérature Allemande.]

That there is considerable truth and shrewdness in the king’s censure of his subjects’ pedantry and want of taste is quite certain; that the German language was in a less favourable condition for literature than any other of the great European languages is certain also. Many of his practical precepts are as sensible as we should expect from a man so great in affairs. But his literary criticism is rather worse than we should expect even from a disciple of Voltaire, whose pet prejudices they not merely reflect but exaggerate. Of all the “answers” (a most interesting list of which, with account of them where possible, from that one of Goethe’s, which has the here most deplorable “defect of being lost,” downwards, will be found in Herr Geiger’s Introduction) the happiest is in three words of Herder’s, which describe the treatise as “ein comisches Meisterstück.”[92] Frederic attributes to Horace, and in the Ars Poetica too, four words[93] which do not occur there, which would not be very easy to get into the metre without destroying their juxtaposition, and which it would be not much easier to adjust to any context of the actual piece. He attributes to Aristotle not merely the Three Unities, but instead of the “Unity of Action” the “Unity of Interest,” thus handing over

the whole position to the anti-Aristotelians after a fashion which, if one of the king’s own generals had imitated it in actual war, would have “broken” him for life, if it had not put him against a wall, and opposite to a file of grenadiers. He thinks that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote in Latin; that Toland wrote the Leviathan; that Marot, Rabelais, and Montaigne wrote a jargon at least as bad as any German— “gross and destitute of grace.” In the most celebrated passage[94]— perhaps the only one generally known—he not only out-Voltaires Voltaire by speaking of the “abominable pieces of Shakespeare,” those absurd “farces worthy of Canadian savages,” but stigmatises Goetz von Berlichingen as a “detestable imitation” of them. He hardly knows of any other German writers, and of those whom he praises Gellert and Gessner are the only ones who have retained the least reputation. If for one thing that he did—the injunction to write in German and not take refuge in other languages—one is tempted to spare him, the merit almost disappears when one remembers that he meant the German to be written in the teeth of the natural bent of the language. The bulk of his positive directions has nothing to do with literature whatsoever, but with the teaching of physical science, of law, &c. And the real apex of the comisches Meisterstück (for Herder’s words are too good not to be repeated) is to be found at the end. He prophesies, and (such is the unending and unfathomable irony of Fate!) he prophesies quite truly, that “the palmy days of our Literature have not come, but they are approaching,” that he is their harbinger, that they are just about to appear, “that though he shall not see them, his age making it hopeless, he, like Moses, sees the Promised Land, but must not enter it.” The inevitable jests at Moses himself, and the bare “rocks of sterile Idumea,” follow. But it was Moses who laughed last. Every word of Frederic’s prophecy came true; but it was because Germany neglected every item of Frederic’s prescription. The palmy days did come: they lasted for fifty glorious years and (with Heine) longer. But their light was the light borrowed from the abominable Shakespeare, and their leader was the author of Goetz von Berlichingen.[95]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

III. THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS

THE FIRST GROUP—MEDIÆVAL REACTION—GRAY—PECULIARITY OF HIS CRITICAL POSITION—THE LETTERS—THE ‘OBSERVATIONS’ ON ARISTOPHANES AND PLATO— THE ‘METRUM’—THE LYDGATE NOTES—SHENSTONE—PERCY—THE WARTONS—JOSEPH’S ‘ESSAY ON POPE’—THE ‘ADVENTURER’ ESSAYS—THOMAS WARTON ON SPENSER—HIS ‘HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY’—HURD: HIS COMMENTARY ON ADDISON—THE HORACE—THE DISSERTATIONS—OTHER WORKS—THE 'LETTERS ON CHIVALRY AND ROMANCE’—THEIR DOCTRINE—HIS REAL IMPORTANCE—ALLEGED IMPERFECTIONS OF THE GROUP—STUDIES IN PROSODY—JOHN MASON: HIS ‘POWER OF NUMBERS’ IN PROSE AND POETRY—MITFORD: HIS ‘HARMONY OF LANGUAGE’—IMPORTANCE OF PROSODIC INQUIRY—STERNE AND THE STOP-WATCH.

We have already, in the last volume, seen that in England, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the tables of criticism turned, and that a company of critics, not large, not as a rule very great men of letters, began slowly, tentatively, with a great deal of rawness, and blindness, and even backsliding, to grope for a catholic and free theory of literature, and especially of poetry. We are now to examine this group[96] more narrowly. With the not quite certainly to be allowed exception of Gray, no one of them could pretend to the first rank in the literature of the time; and most of them (Hurd and Percy were the chief exceptions) did not live to see, even at the extreme verge of life, the advent of the champions who were to carry their principles into practice. But they were the harbingers of the dawn, little as in some cases (perhaps in all) they comprehended the light that faintly and fitfully illuminated them beforehand.

[Sidenote: The first group.]

Three of the writers of this class whom it is necessary to name here have been alluded to already; the others were Shenstone and the Wartons. As so often happens in similar cases, it is exceedingly difficult to assign exact priority, for mere dates of publication are always misleading; and in this case, from their close juxtaposition, they almost of themselves give the warning that they are not to be trusted. How early, in his indolent industry at Cambridge, Gray had come to a Pisgah-sight of the true course of English poetry; Shenstone, in pottering and maundering at the Leasowes, to glimpses of the same; Percy and Shenstone again to their design, afterwards executed by Percy alone, of publishing the Reliques; the Wartons to their revolutionary views of Pope on the one side and Spenser on the other; Hurd to his curious mixture of true and false aperçus;—it is really impossible to say. The last-named, judging all his work together, may seem the least likely, early as some of that work is, to have struck out a distinctly original way for himself; but all, no doubt, were really driven, nolentes volentes, conscious or unconscious, by the Time-Spirit.

[Sidenote: Mediæval reaction.]

The process which the Spirit employed for effecting this great change was a simple one; indeed, we have almost summed up his inspiration in the oracular admonition, Antiquam exquirite matrem. For more than two hundred years literary criticism had been insolently or ignorantly neglecting its mother, the Middle Age—now with a tacit assumption that this period ought to be neglected, now with an open and expressed scorn of it. But, as usually happens, a return had begun to be made just when the opposite progress seemed to have reached its highest point. Dryden himself had “translated” and warmly praised Chaucer; Addison had patronised Chevy Chase. But before the death of Pope much larger and more audacious explorations had been attempted. In Scotland—whether consciously stung or not by the disgrace of a century almost barren of literature—Watson the printer[97] and Allan Ramsay[98] had, in 1706-11 and 1724-40, unearthed a good deal of old poetry. In England the anonymous compiler[99] of the Ballads of 1723 had done something, and Oldys the antiquary, under the shelter of “Mrs Cooper’s” petticoat, had done more with the Muses’ Library of 1737. These examples[100] were followed out, not without a little cheap contempt from those who would be in the fashion, and knew not that this fashion had received warning. But they were followed, and their most remarkable result, in criticism and creation combined, is the work of Gray.

[Sidenote: _Gray _]

We have not so very many fairer figures in our “fair” herd than Gray, though the fairness may be somewhat like that of Crispa,[101] visible chiefly to a lover of criticism itself. His actual critical performance is, in proportion, scantier even than his poetical; and the scantiness may at first sight seem even stranger, since a man can but poetise when he can, but may, if he has the critical faculty, criticise almost when he will and has the opportunity. That opportunity (again at first sight) Gray may seem to have had, as scarcely another man in our whole long history has had it. He had nothing else to do, and was not inclined to do anything else. He had sufficient means, no professional avocations, the knowledge, the circumstances, the locale, the wits, the taste, even the velleity—everything but, in the full sense, the will. This indeed he might, in all circumstances and at all times, have lacked, for Mr Arnold showed himself no philosophic student of humanity when he said that at the date of Milton, or at the date of Keats, Gray would have been a different man. His work would doubtless have been a different work; but that is another matter. At all times, probably, Gray would have had the same fastidiousness, the same liability to be “put off”; and if his preliminary difficulties had been lightened by the provision, in times nearer our own, of the necessary rough-hewing and first research by others, yet this very provision would probably have prevented him from pursuing what he would have disdainfully regarded as a second-hand business. We may—we must—regret that he never finished that History of English Poetry which he hardly began, that he never attempted the half-dozen other things of the kind, which he was better equipped for doing than any man then living, and than all but three or four men who have lived since. But the regret must be tempered by a secret consciousness that on the whole he probably would not have done them, let time and chance and circumstance have favoured him never so lavishly.

[Sidenote: Peculiarity of his critical position.]

Yet this very idiosyncrasy of limitation and hamper in him made, in a sense, for criticism; inasmuch as there are two kinds of critical temperament, neither of which could be spared. There is the eager, strenuous, almost headlong critical disposition of a Dryden, which races like a conflagration[102] over all the field it can cover; and there is the hesitating, ephectic, intermittent temperament of a Gray, which directs an intense and all-dissolving, but ill-maintained heat at this and that special part of the subject. In what is called, and sometimes is, “originality,” this latter temperament is perhaps the more fertile of the two, and Gray has it in an almost astounding measure. Great as was his own reading, a man might, I think, be as well read as himself without discovering any real indebtedness of his, except to a certain general influence of literary study in many times and tongues. He knew indeed, directly or indirectly, most of the other agents in the quiet and gradual revolution which was coming on English poetic and literary taste; but he was much in advance of all of them in time. Well as he was read in Italian, he nowhere, I think, cites Gravina, in whom there was something to put him on new tracks; and though he was at least equally well read in French, and does cite Fontenelle, it is not for any of the critical germs which we have discovered in that elusive oracle. The one modern language to which he seems to have paid little or no attention was German,[103] where the half-blind strugglings of the Zürich school might have had some stimulus for him. Whatever he did, alone he did it; and though the volume of his strictly critical observations (not directed to mere common tutorial scholarship) would, if printed consecutively, perhaps not fill twenty—certainly not fifty—pages of this book, its virtue, intrinsic and suggestive, surpasses that of libraries full of Rapins and even of Batteux.

[Sidenote: The Letters.]

From the very first these observations have, to us, no uncertain sound. In a letter to West,[104] when the writer was about six-and-twenty, we find it stated with equal dogmatism, truth, and independence of authority that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs nothing from prose,” with a long and valuable citation, illustrating this defence of “poetic diction,” and no doubt thereby arousing the wrath of Wordsworth. Less developed, but equally important and equally original, is the subsequent description of our language as not being “a settled thing” like the French. Gray, indeed, makes this with explicit reference only to the revival of archaisms, which he defends; but, as we see from other places as well as by natural deduction, it extends to reasonable neologisms also. In this respect Gray is with all the best original writers, from Chaucer and Langland downwards, but against a respectably mistaken body of critics who would fain not merely introduce the caste system into English, but, like Sir Boyle Roche, make it hereditary in this caste not to have any children.

This same letter contains some of Gray’s best-known criticisms, in his faint praise of Joseph Andrews and his warm appreciation of Marivaux and Crébillon. I am not quite certain that, in this last, Gray intended any uncomplimentary comparison, or that he meant anything more than a defence of the novel generally—a defence which itself deserves whatever crown is appropriated to critical merit, inasmuch as the novel had succeeded to the place of Cinderella of Literature. However, both Fielding and Smollett were probably too boisterous for Gray, who could appreciate Sterne better, though he disliked “Tristram’s” faults.

But the fact is that it is not in criticisms of his contemporaries, or indeed in definite critical appreciation at all, that Gray’s strength lies. For any defects in the former he has, of course, the excuse that his was a day of rather small things in poetry; but, once more, it is not quite certain that circumstances would have much altered the case. We must remember that Mr Arnold also does not come very well out of this test; and indeed, that second variety of the critical temperament which we have defined above is not conducive to enthusiasm.[105] It is, of course, unlucky that Gray’s personal affection for Mason directed his most elaborate praises to a tenth-rate object; but it is fair to remember that he does reprehend in Mason faults—such as excessive personification—which were not merely those of his friend, the husband of “dead Maria,” but his own. It is a thousand pities that, thanks to Mason himself, we have the similar criticisms of Beattie only in a garbled condition; but they too are sound and sensible, if very merciful. The mercy, however, which Gray showed perhaps too plentifully to friends and relations he did not extend to others. That the “frozen grace” of Akenside appealed little to him is less remarkable than his famous pair of judgments on “Joe” Warton and Collins.

The coupling itself, moreover, and even the prophecy that “neither will last,” are less extraordinary (for the very keenest eyes, when unassisted by “the firm perspective of the past,” will err in this way, and Joseph’s Odes are, as his friend, Dr. Johnson, said of the rumps and kidneys, “very pretty little things”) than the ascription of “a bad ear” to Collins. This is certainly “a term inexplicable to the Muse.” It was written in 1746. Five years later an undated but clearly datable letter to Walpole contains (lxxxiv., ed. cit.) in a notice of Dodsley’s Miscellany, quite a sheaf of criticisms. That of Tickell—“a poor short-winded imitator of Addison, who had himself not above three or four notes in poetry, sweet enough indeed, like those of a German flute, but such as soon tire and satiate the ear with their frequent return”—is very notable for this glance backward on the great Mr Addison, though it would have been unjust to Tickell if (which does not quite appear) it had been intended to include his fine elegy on Addison himself, and the still finer one on Cadogan.[106] Gray is quite amiable to The Spleen and The Schoolmistress, and London; justly assigns to Dyer (the Dyer of Grongar Hill, not of The Fleece) “more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number,” but unjustly calls him “rough and injudicious,” and brushes most of the rest away, not too superciliously. A year later (December 1752, to Wharton) he grants to Hall’s Satires “fulness of spirit and poetry; as much of the first as Dr Donne, and far more of the latter.” In the elaborate “buckwashing” of Mason’s Caractacus ode, which occupies great part of the very long letter of December 19, 1756, there is a passage of great importance on Epic and Lyric style, which exhibits as well perhaps as anything else the independence, and at the same time the transitional consistency, of Gray’s criticism.

He says first (which is true, and which no rigidly orthodox Neo-Classic would or could have admitted): “The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy ornaments, heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to every other style.” Then he says that this is just the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great length; then that the epic “therefore assumed graver colours,” and only stuck on a diamond borrowed from her sister here and there; then that it is “natural and delightful” to pass from the graver stuff to the diamond, and then that to pass from lyric to epic is to drop from verse to mere prose. All of which seems to argue a curious inequality in clearing the mind from cant. It is true, as has been said, that Lyric is the highest style. But surely the reason why this height cannot be kept is the weakness, not of human receptivity but of human productiveness. Give us an Iliad at the pitch of the best chorus of the Agamemnon, and we will gladly see whether we can bear it or not. Again, if you can pass from the dress to the diamond, why not pass from the diamond to the dress? It is true that in Mason’s case the diamonds were paste, and bad paste; but that does not affect the argument. When, in still a later letter (clxii.) to the same “Skroddles”[107] he lays it down that “extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry,” we must accentuate one of the. But there is a bombshell for Neo-Classicism in cvii., still to “Skroddles.” “I insist that sense is nothing in poetry, but according to the dress she wears and the scene she appears in.”

Gray’s attitude to Ossian is interesting, but very much what we should have expected. He was bribed by its difference from the styles of which he was weary; but he seems from the very first to have had qualms (to which he did some violence, without quite succeeding, in order to stifle them) as to its genuineness.

[Sidenote: The Observations on Aristophanes and Plato.]

No intelligent lover of the classics, whose love is not limited to them, can fail to regret that by very far the larger bulk of Gray’s critical Observations is directed to Aristophanes and Plato. The annotator is not incompetent, and the annotated are supremely worthy of his labours; but the work was not specially in need of doing, and there have been very large numbers of men as well or better qualified to do it. Such things as this—Aves, 1114: “These were plates of brass with which they shaded the heads of statues to guard them from the weather and the birds”—are things which we do not want from a Gray at all. They are the business of that harmless drudge, the lexicographer, in general, of a competent fifth-form master editing the play, in particular. But there was probably at that time not a single man in Europe equally qualified by natural gifts and by study to deliver really critical and comparative opinions on literature, to discuss the history and changes of English, and the like. Nor has there probably at any date been any man better qualified for this, having regard to the conditions of his own time and country. One cannot, then, but feel it annoying that a life, not long but by no means very short, and devoted exclusively to literary leisure, should have resulted, as far as this special vocation of the author is concerned, in some eighty small pages of Dissertation devoted to English metres and to the Poems of Lydgate.

Let us, however, rather be thankful for what we have got, and examine it, such as it is, with care.

[Sidenote: The Metrum.]

In the very first words of the Metrum it is curious and delightful to see a man at this early period cutting right and left at the error of the older editors, who calmly shoved in, or left out, words and syllables to make what they thought correct versification for Chaucer, and at the other error committed by the majority of philologists to-day in holding that Chaucer’s syntax, accidence, and orthography were as precise as those of a writer in the school of the French Academy. Even more refreshing are, on the one hand, his knowledge and heed of Puttenham, and, on the other, his correction of Puttenham’s doctrine of the fixed Caesura, his admissions of this in the case of the Alexandrine, and his quiet demonstration that the admission of it in the decasyllable and octosyllable would make havoc of our best poetry. The contrast of this reasonable method and just conclusion, not merely with the ignorant or overbearing dogmatism of Bysshe half a century earlier, but with the perversity, in the face of light and knowledge, of Guest a century later, is as remarkable as anything in the history of English criticism.

Gray, of course, was fallible. He entangles himself rather on the subject of “Riding Rhyme”; and though he, first (I think) of all English writers, notices the equivalenced dimeter iambics of Spenser’s Oak and Bryar, and compares Milton’s octosyllables with them, he goes wrong by saying that this is the only English metre in which such a liberty of choice is allowed, and more wrong still in bringing Donne’s well-known ruggedness under this head. And he does not allow himself to do more than glance at the Classical-metre craze, his remarks on which would have been very interesting.

His subsequent analysis of “measures” with the chief books or poems in which they are used is of very great interest, but as it is a mere table it hardly lends itself to comment, though it fills nearly twenty pages. The conclusion, however, is important, and, without undue guessing, gives us fair warrant for inferring that Gray would have had much (and not a favourable much) to say on the contemporary practice he describes if the table had been expanded into a dissertation. And the table itself, with its notes, shows that though his knowledge of Middle English before Chaucer was necessarily limited, yet he knew and had drawn right conclusions from Robert of Gloucester and Robert of Brunne, The Owl and the Nightingale, the early English Life of St. Margaret, and the Poema Morale.[108]

His observations on “the pseudo-Rhythmus” (which odd and misleading term simply means Rhyme) present a learned and judicious summary of the facts as then known with the shorter appendices on the same subject.

[Sidenote: The Lydgate Notes.]

The observations on John Lydgate which close Gray’s critical dossier might have been devoted to a more interesting subject, but they enable us to see what the average quality of the History would have been. And they certainly go, in scheme and quality, very far beyond any previous literary history of any country with which I am acquainted. The article (as we may call it) is made up of a judicious mixture of biography, account of books (in both cases, of course, as far as known to the writer only), citation, exposition of points of interest in subject, history, manners, &c., criticisms of poetical characteristics in the individual, and now and then critical excursus of a more general kind suggested by the subject. In one place, indeed, Gray does introduce Homer in justification of Lydgate: but no one will hesitate to do this now and then; and it is quite clear that he does not do it from any delusion as to a cut-and-dried pattern, or set of patterns, to which every poem, new or old, was bound to conform.

And to this we have to add certain facts which, if not critical utterances, speak as few such utterances have done—the novelty of Gray’s original English poetry, and his selection of Welsh and Scandinavian originals for translation and imitation. These things were themselves unspoken criticism of the most important kind on the literary habits and tastes of his country, and of Europe at large. The, to us, almost unintelligible puzzlement of his contemporaries—the “hard as Greek” of the excellent Garrick, and the bewilderment of the three lords at York races, establish[109] the first point; as for the second, it establishes itself. To these outlying languages and literatures nobody had paid any attention whatever previously;[110] they were now not merely admitted to literary attention, but actually allowed and invited to exercise the most momentous influence on the costume, the manners, the standards of those literatures which had previously alone enjoyed the citizenship of Parnassus.

Small, therefore, as is the extent of deliberate critical work which Gray has left us, we may perceive in it nearly all the notes of reformed, revived, we might almost say reborn, criticism. The two dominants of these have been already dwelt upon—to wit, the constant appeal to history, and the readiness to take new matter, whether actually new in time, or new in the sense of having been hitherto neglected, on its own merits; not indeed with any neglect of the ancients—for Gray was saturated with “classical” poetry in every possible sense of the word, with Homer and Virgil, as with Dante and Milton and Dryden—but purely from the acknowledgment at last of the plain and obvious truth, “other times, other ways.” As a deduction from these two we note, as hardly anywhere earlier, a willingness to take literature as it is, and not to prescribe to it what it should be—in short, a mixture of catholicity with tolerance, which simply does not exist anywhere before. Lastly, we may note a special and very particular attention to prosody. This is a matter of so much importance that we must[111] ourselves bestow presently some special attention upon it, and may advantageously note some other exercitations of the kind at the time or shortly afterwards.

[Sidenote: Shenstone.]

Of the rest of the group mentioned above, Shenstone[112] is the earliest, the most isolated, and the least directly affected by the mediæval influence. Yet he, too, must have felt it to have engaged, as we know he did, with Percy in that enterprise of the Reliques which his early death cut him off from sharing fully. From his pretty generally known poems no one need have inferred much tendency of the kind in him: for his Spenserian imitation, The Schoolmistress, has as much of burlesque as of discipleship in it. Nor are indications of the kind extremely plentiful in his prose works. But the remarkable Essays on Men and Manners, which give a much higher notion of Shenstone’s power than his excursions into the rococo, whether versified or hortulary, are full of the new germs. Even here, however, he is, after the prevailing manner of his century, much more ethical than literary, and shows deference, if not reverence, to not a few of its literary idols. The mixed character of his remarks on Pope[113] (which are, however, on the whole very just) may be set down by the Devil’s Advocate to the kind of jealousy commonly entertained by the “younger generations who are knocking at the door”; and his objection to the plan of Spenser is neo-classically purblind. But his remarks on Prosody[114] breathe a new spirit, which, a little later, we shall be able to trace in development. His preference for rhymes that are “long” in pronunciation over snip-snaps like “cat” and “not”; his discovery—herald of the great Coleridgean reaction—that “there is a vast beauty in emphasising in the eighth and ninth place a word that is virtually a dactyl”; the way in which he lays stress on harmony of period and music of style as sources of literary pleasure; and above all the fact, that when examining the “dactylic” idea just given, he urges the absurdity of barring trisyllabic feet in any place, and declares that a person ignorant of Latin can discern Virgil’s harmony, show us the new principles at work. Perhaps his acutest critical passage is the maxim, “Every good poet includes a critic: the reverse will not hold”; his most Romantic, “The words ‘no more’ have a singular pathos, reminding us at once of past pleasure and the future exclusion of it.”[115]

[Sidenote: Percy.]

Shenstone’s colleague in the intended, his executor in the actual, scheme of the Reliques was allowed by Fate to go very much further in the same path. At no time, perhaps, has Bishop Percy had quite fair play. In his own day his friend Johnson laughed at him, and his enemy Ritson attacked him with his usual savagery. In ours the publication at last of his famous Folio Manuscript[116] has resulted in a good deal of not exactly violent, but strong language as to his timorous and eclectic use of the precious material he had obtained, and his scarcely pardonable tamperings with such things as he did extract. Nobody indeed less one-sided and fanatical than Ritson himself, or less prejudiced than the great lexicographer, could ignore the vastness of the benefit which the Reliques actually conferred upon English literature, or the enormous influence which it has directly and indirectly exercised; but there has been a slight tendency to confine Percy’s merits to the corners of this acknowledgment.

Yet there is much more, by no means always in the way of mere allowance, to be said for Percy than this. His poetic taste was not perfect: it could not be so. It was unlucky that he had a certain not wholly contemptible faculty for producing as well as for relishing verse, and an itch for exercising this; while he suffered, as everybody did till at least the close of his own life, from failing entirely to comprehend the late and rather decadent principle that you must let ruins alone—that you must not “improve” your original. But a man must either be strangely favoured by the gods, or else have a real genius for the matter, who succeeds, at such a time and in such circumstances, in getting together and publishing such a collection as the Reliques. Nor are Percy’s dissertations destitute of critical as well as of instinctive merit. Modern scholarship—which has the advantage rather of knowing more than Percy could know than of making a better use of what it does know, and which is much too apt to forget that the scholars of all ages are

“Priests that slay the slayer And shall themselves be slain”—

can find, of course, plenty of errors and shortcomings in the essays on the Minstrels and the Ancient Drama, the metre of Piers Plowman, and the Romances; and they are all unnecessarily adulterated with theories and fancies about origin, &c. But this last adulteration has scarcely ceased to be a favourite

“form of competition” among critics; while I am bound to say that the literary sense which is so active and pervading in Percy seems to have deserted our modern philologists only too frequently.

At any rate, whatever may be his errors and whatever his shortcomings, the enormous, the incalculable stimulus and reagency of the Reliques is not now matter of dispute; while it is equally undeniable that the poetical material supplied was reinforced by a method of historical and critical inquiry which, again with all faults, could not fail to have effects almost equally momentous on criticism if not quite so momentous on creation.

[Sidenote: The Wartons.]

The two Wartons and Hurd gave still more powerful assistance in this latter department, while Thomas Warton at least supplied a great deal of fresh actual material in his History. To none of the three has full justice, as it seems to me, been recently done; while to one of them it seems to me that there has been done very great injustice. The main documents which we have to consider in the case of the two brothers are for Joseph, his Essay on Pope (1756-71), and the numerous critical papers in The Adventurer; for Thomas, the Observations on The Faerie Queene (1754), and of course The History of English Poetry (1774-81).

[Sidenote: Joseph’s Essay on Pope.]

Warton’s Essay on Pope[117]—vaguely famous as a daring act of iconoclasm, and really important as a document in the Romantic Revolt— almost literally anticipates the jest of a hundred years later on another document, about “chalking up ‘No Popery!’ and then running away.” It also shows the uncertainty of stand-point which is quite pardonable and indeed inevitable in these early reformers. To us it is exceedingly unlucky that Warton should at page ii. of his Preface ask, “What traces has Donne of pure poetry?” Yet when we come immediately afterwards to the (for the time) bold and very nearly true statement that Boileau is no more poetical than La Bruyère, we see that Warton was thinking only of the satirist, not of the author of The Anniversaries and the “Bracelet” poems.

Further, Warton lays down, sans phrase and with no Addisonian limitations, that “a poet must have imagination.” He is sure (we may feel a little more doubtful) that Young, his dedicatee, would not insist on being called a poet on the strength of his own Satires. And he works himself up to the position that in Pope there is nothing transcendently sublime or pathetic, supporting this by a very curious and for its time instructive division of English poets into four classes. The first contains poets of the first rank on the sublime-pathetic-imaginative standard, and is limited to three—Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The second company—headed by Dryden, but including, not a little to our surprise, Fenton—has less of this poetic intensity, but some, and excels in rhetorical and didactic vigour. The third is reserved for those—Butler, Swift, Donne, Dorset, &c.—who, with little poetry, have abundant wit; and the fourth “gulfs” the mere versifiers, among whom we grieve to find Sandys and even Fairfax herded with Pitt and Broome.

There is evidently, both in its rightgoings and its short-comings, considerable matter in this for discussion were such discussion in place. But the main heads of it, which alone would be important, must be obvious to every one. In the body of the Essay, Warton, as was hinted above, rather “hedges.” He maintains his position that Pope was not transcendently a poet; and indulges in much detailed and sometimes rather niggling criticism of his work; but readmits him after a fashion to a sort of place in Parnassus, not quite “utmost, last, provincial,” but, as far as we can make out, on the fence between Class Two and Class Three. The book, as has also been said, is a real document, showing drift, but also drifting. The Time-Spirit is carrying the man along, but he is carried half-unconsciously.

[Sidenote: The Adventurer Essays.]

Warton’s Adventurer essays are specially interesting. They were written early in 1753-54, some years before the critical period of 1760-65, and two or three before his Pope essay; and they were produced at the recommendation, if not under the direct editorship, of Johnson. Further, in the peroratorical remarks which were usual with these artificial periodicals, Warton explains that they were planned with a definite intention not merely to reintroduce Criticism among polite society, but to reinvest her with something more of exactness and scholarship than had been usual since Addison followed the French critics in talking politely about critical subjects. Warton’s own exercitations are distinguished by a touch which may be best called “gingerly.” He opens (No. 49) with a “Parallel between Ancient and Modern Learning,” which is in effect an almost violent attack on French critics, with exceptions for Fénelon, Le Bossu, and Brumoy. Then, taking the hint of Longinus’s reference to “the legislator of the Jews,” he feigns a fresh discovery of criticisms of the Bible by the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους. He anticipates his examination of Pope by some remarks (No. 63) on that poet from the plagiarism-and-parallel-passage standpoint; upholds the Odyssey (Nos. 75, 80, 83) as of equal value with the Iliad, and of perhaps greater for youthful students; insinuates some objections to Milton (No. 101); studies The Tempest (Nos. 93, 97) and Lear (Nos. 113, 116, 122) more or less elaborately.[118] Throughout he appears to be conditioned not merely by the facts glanced at above, by the ethical tendency of these periodicals generally, and by his own profession of schoolmaster, but also by a general transition feeling, a know-not-what-to-think-of-it. Yet his inclination is evidently towards something new—perhaps he does not quite know what—and away from something old, which we at least can perceive without much difficulty to be the Neo-Classic creed. He would probably by no means abjure that creed if it were presented to him as a test, but he would take it with no small qualifications.

[Sidenote: Thomas Warton on Spenser.]

For a combination of earliness, extension, and character no book noticed in this chapter exceeds in interest Thomas Warton’s Observations on Spenser.[119] To an ordinary reader, who has heard that Warton was one of the great ushers of Romanticism in England, and that Spenser was one of the greatest influences which these ushers applied, the opening of the piece, and not a very few passages later, may seem curiously half-hearted and unsympathetic. Such a reader, from another though closely connected point of view, may be disappointed by the fragmentary and annotatory character of the book, its deficiency in vues d’ensemble, its apologies, and compromises, and hesitations. But those who have taken a little trouble to inform themselves on the matter, either by their own inquiries or by following the course which has been indicated in this book, will be much better satisfied. They will see that he says what he ought to have said in the concatenation accordingly.

It is impossible to decide how much of yet not discarded orthodoxy, and how much of characteristic eighteenth-century compromise there is in the opening about “depths of Gothic ignorance and barbarity,” “ridiculous and incoherent excursions,” “old Provençal vein,” and the like. Probably there is a good deal of both;[120] there is certainly a good deal which requires both to excuse it. Yet before long Warton fastens a sudden petard on the main gate of the Neo-Classic stronghold by saying: “But it is absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to.” Absurd, indeed! But what becomes of those antecedent laws of poetry, those rules of the kind and so forth, which for more than two hundred years had been accumulating authority? It is no good for him to go on: “We who live in the days of writing by rule.... Critical taste is universally diffused ...” and so on. The petard goes on fizzing and sparkling at the gate, and will blow it in before long.

In the scattered annotations, which follow for a long time, the attitude of compromise is fairly kept; and even Neo-Classics, as we have seen, need not necessarily have objected to Warton’s demonstration[121] pièces en main, that Scaliger “had no notion of simple and genuine beauty”; while the whole of his section (iv.) on Spenser’s stanza, &c., is full of lèse-poésie, and that (vii.) on Spenser’s inaccuracies is not much better. But the very next section is an important attack on the plagiarism-and-parallel-passage mania which almost invariably develops itself in bad critics; and the defence of his author’s Allegory (§ x.), nay, the plump avowal of him as a Romantic poet, more than atones for some backslidings even here. Above all, the whole book is distinguished by a genuine if not always understanding love of the subject; secondly, by an obvious refusal—sometimes vocal, always latent—to accept a priori rules of criticism; thirdly, and most valuably of all, by recurrence to contemporary and preceding models as criteria instead of to the ancients alone. Much of the last part of the book is occupied with a sort of first draft in little of the author’s subsequent History; he is obviously full of knowledge (if sometimes flawed) and of study (if sometimes misdirected) of early English literature. And this is what was wanted. “Nullum numen abest si sit conscientia” (putting the verse aside) might almost be the critic’s sole motto if it were not that he certainly cannot do without Prudentia itself. But Prudentia without her sister is almost useless: she can at best give inklings, and murmur, “If you are not conscious of what has actually been done in literature you can never decide what ought and ought not to have been done.”

[Sidenote: His History of English Poetry.]

This is what gives the immense, the almost unequalled importance which Warton’s History of English Poetry[122] should possess in the eyes of persons who can judge just judgment. It has errors: there is no division of literature in which it is so unreasonable to expect accuracy as in history, and no division of history to which that good-natured Aristotelian dictum applies so strongly as to literary history. Its method is most certainly defective, and one of its greatest defects is the disproportion in the treatment of authors and subjects. When the author expatiates into Dissertation, he may often be justly accused of first getting out of his depth as regards the subject, and then recovering himself by making the treatment shallow.[123] And I do not know that his individual criticisms betray any very frequent or very extraordinary acuteness of appreciation. To say of the lovely

“Lenten is come with love to town,”

that it “displays glimmerings of imagination, and exhibits some faint ideas of poetical expression,” is surely to be, as Dryden said of Smith and Johnson in The Rehearsal, a “cool and insignificant gentleman”; and though it is quite accurate to recognise “much humour and spirit” in Piers Plowman, it is a little inadequate and banal.

But this is mere hole-picking at worst, at best the necessary or desirable ballast or set-off to a generous appreciation of Warton’s achievement. If his erudition is not unflawed, its bulk and mass are astonishing in a man of his time; if his method and proportion are defective, this is almost inevitable in the work of a pioneer; and we have seen enough since of critics and historians who make all their geese swans, not to be too hard on one who sometimes talked of peacocks or humming-birds as if they were barndoor fowls or sparrows. The good which the book, with its wealth of quotation as well as of summary, must have done, is something difficult to realise but almost impossible to exaggerate. Now at least, for England and for English, the missing links were supplied, the hidden origins revealed, the Forbidden Country thrown open to exploration. It is worth while (though in no unkind spirit) once more to recall Addison’s péché de jeunesse in his Account of the English Poets, in order to contrast it with the picture presented by Warton. Instead of a millennium of illiteracy and barbarism, with nothing in it worth noticing at all but Chaucer and Spenser—presented, the one as a vulgar and obsolete merryandrew, and the other as half old-wives’-fabulist and half droning preacher—century after century, from at least the thirteenth onward (Warton does not profess to handle Anglo-Saxon)’ was presented in regular literary development, with abundant examples of complicated literary kinds, and a crowded bead-roll of poets, with specimens of their works. Men had before them—for the first time, except in cases of quite extraordinary leisure, opportunities, taste, and energy—the actual progress of English prosody and English poetic diction, to set against the orthodox doctrine that one fine day not so very early in the seventeenth century Mr Waller achieved a sort of minor miracle of creation in respect of both. And all these works and persons were accorded serious literary and critical treatment, such as had been hitherto reserved for the classics of old, for the masterpieces of what Callières calls les trois nations polies abroad, and for English writers since Mr Waller. That Warton did not gush about them was no fault; it was exactly what could have been desired. What was wanted was the entrance of mediæval and Renaissance poetry into full recognition; the making of it Hoffähig; the reconstitution of literary history so as to place the work of the Middle Period on a level basis, and in a continuous series, with work ancient and modern. And this Warton, to the immortal glory of himself, his University, and his Chair,[124] effected.

[Sidenote: Hurd. His Commentary on Addison.]

The remaining member of the group requires handling with some care. Not much notice has been taken of Bishop Hurd for a long time past, and some authorities who have given him notice have been far from kind. Their unkindness, I think, comes very near injustice; but Hurd has himself to blame for a good deal of it. As a man he seems to have been, if fairly respectable, not in the least attractive; an early but complete incarnation of the disposition called “donnishness”; a toady in his earlier manhood, and an exacter of toadying in his later. He lived long enough to endanger even his critical fair fame; by representing his admiration for Shakespeare as an aberration, and declaring that he returned to his first love Addison.[125] And his work upon Addison himself (by which, I suppose, he is most commonly known) is of a meticulous and peddling kind for the most part, by no means likely to conciliate the majority of recent critics. Most of Hurd’s notes deal with mere grammar; and while nearly all of them forget that writers like Addison make grammar and are not made by it, some are choice examples of the sheer senseless arbitrariness which makes grammar itself too often a mere Lordship of Misrule and Abbacy of Unreason.[126] Yet even here there are good things; especially some attempts[127]—very early and till recently with very few companions in English—to bring out and analyse the rhythmical quality of prose. But it may be frankly admitted that if the long-lived Bishop[128] had been a critic only in his Addisonian commentary, he would hardly have deserved a reference, and would certainly have deserved no long reference, here.

[Sidenote: The Horace.]

His own Works[129] are of much higher importance. The edition (with commentary, notes, and dissertations) of Horace’s Epistles to the Pisos and to Augustus is in part of the class of work to which in this stage of our history we can devote but slight attention, but even that part shows scholarship, acuteness, and—what is for our purpose almost more important than either—wide and comparative acquaintance with critical authorities, from Aristotle and Longinus to Fontenelle and Hume.[130]

[Sidenote: The Dissertations.]

The “Critical Dissertations” which follow mark a higher flight, indeed, as their titles may premonish, they rather dare that critical inane to which we have more than once referred. Hurd is here a classicist with tell-tale excursions and divagations. In his Idea of Universal Poetry he will not at first include verse in his definition, nor will he accept the commonplace but irresistibly cogent argument of universal practice and expectation. Poetry is the only form of composition which has pleasure for its end; verse gives pleasure; therefore poetry must use verse. The fiction or imitation is the soul of poetry; but style is its body (not “dress,” mark). Hurd even takes the odd and not maintainable but rather original view that the new prose fiction is a clumsy thing, foolishly sacrificing its proper aids of verse.[131] He is most neo-classically peremptory as to the laws of Kinds, which are not arbitrary things by any means, nor “to be varied at pleasure.”[132] But the long Second Dissertation On the Provinces of the Drama, which avowedly starts from this principle shows, before long, something more than those easements and compromises by which, as was said in the last volume, eighteenth-century critics often temper the straitness of their orthodoxy. “It is true,” says Hurd,[133] “the laws of the drama, as formed by Aristotle out of the Greek poets, can of themselves be no rule to us in this matter, because these poets had given no examples of such intermediate species.” It is, indeed, most true; but it will be a little difficult to reconcile it with the prohibition of multiplying and varying Kinds. The Third and Fourth Dissertations, filling a volume to themselves, deal with Poetical Imitation and its Marks, the hard-worked word “imitation” being used in its secondary or less honourable sense.

The Discourses are, in short, of the “parallel passage” kind, but written in a liberal spirit,[134] showing not merely wide reading but real acuteness, and possessing, in the second instance, the additional interest of being addressed to “Skroddles” Mason, who certainly “imitated” in this sense pretty freely. Even here that differentia which saves Hurd appears, as where he says,[135] “The golden times of the English poetry were undoubtedly the reigns of our two queens,” while, as we saw in the last volume,[136] Blair was teaching, and for years was to teach,

his students at Edinburgh, a scheme of literary golden ages in which that of Elizabeth was simply left out.

Still, these three volumes, though they would put Hurd much higher than the Addison Commentary, are not those which give him the position sought to be vindicated for him here.

[Sidenote: Other Works.]

Neither will his titles be sought by any one in his Lectures on the Prophecies: while even that edition of Cowley’s Selected Works the principle of which Johnson[137] at one time attacked, while at another he admitted it to more favour, can only be drawn on as a proof that Hurd was superior to mere “correctness” in harking back to this poet. Nay, the Moral and Political Dialogues (which drew from the same redoubtable judge[138] the remark, “I fear he is a Whig still in his heart”), though very well written and interesting in their probable effect on Lander, are not in the main literary. Literary characters— Waller, Cowley, and others—often figure in them, but only the third, “On the Age of Queen Elizabeth,” has something of a literary bent, and this itself would scarcely be noteworthy but for its practically independent appendix, the Letters on Chivalry and Romance. Here—not exactly in a nutshell, but in less than one hundred and fifty small pages—lie all Hurd’s “proofs,” his claims, his titles: and they seem, to me at least, to be very considerable. It is true that even here we must make some deductions. [Sidenote: The Letters on Chivalry and Romance.] The passages about Chivalry and about the Crusades not merely suffer from necessarily insufficient information, but are exposed to the diabolical arrows of that great advocatus diaboli Johnson when he said[139] that Hurd was “one of a set of men who account for everything systematically. For instance, it has been a fashion to wear scarlet breeches; these men would tell you that according to causes and effects no other wear could at the time have been chosen.” This is a most destructive shrapnel to the whole eighteenth century, and by no means to the eighteenth century only; but it is fair to remember that Hurd’s Romance was almost as distasteful to Johnson as his Whiggery. And now there is no need for any further application of the refiner’s fire and the fuller’s soap; while on the other hand what remains of the Letters (and it is much) is of altogether astonishing quality. I know nothing like it outside England, even in Germany, at its own time; I know nothing like it in England for more than thirty years after its date; I should be puzzled to pick out anything superior to the best of it (with the proper time allowance) since.

[Sidenote: Their doctrine.]

At the very opening of the Letters, Hurd meets the current chatter about “monkish barbarism,” “old wives’ tales,” and the rest, full tilt. “The greatest geniuses,” he says, “of our own and foreign countries, such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic Romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in them? Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual contempt and ridicule of it?” There is no mistake possible about this; and if the author afterwards digresses not a little in his “Chivalry” discussions— if he even falls into the Addisonian track, which he elsewhere condemns, of comparing classical and romantic methods, as a kind of apology for the latter, one ought, perhaps, to admit that it was desirable, perhaps necessary, in his day to do so. But when he returns to his real subject, the uncompromisingness and the originality of his views are equally evident, and they gain not a little by being compared with Warton, whose Observations on the Faërie Queene had already appeared. After arguing, not without much truth, that both Shakespeare and Milton are greater when they “use Gothic manners” than when they employ classical, he comes[140] to Spenser himself, and undertakes to “criticise the Faërie Queene under the idea not of a classical, but of a Gothic composition.” He shows that he knows what he is about by subjoining that, “if you judge Gothic architecture by Grecian rules, you find nothing but deformity, but when you examine it by its own the result is quite different.” A few pages later[141] he lays the axe even more directly to the root of the tree. “The objection to Spenser’s method arises from your classic ideas of Unity, which have no place here.” There is unity in the Faërie Queene, but it is the unity not of action, but of design.[142] Hurd even reprobates the additional unities which Spenser communicates by the ubiquity of Prince Arthur, and by his allegory. (He may be thought wrong here, but this does not matter.) Then he proceeds to compare Spenser with Tasso, who tries to introduce classic unity, and gives the Englishman much the higher place; and then again he unmasks the whole of his batteries on the French critics. He points out, most cleverly, that they, after using Tasso to depreciate Ariosto, turned on Tasso himself; and, having dealt dexterous slaps in the face to Davenant, Rymer, and Shaftesbury, he has a very happy passage[143] on Boileau’s clinquant du Tasse, and the way in which everybody, even Addison, dutifully proceeded to think that Tasso was clinquant, and nothing else. Next he takes the offensive-defensive for “the golden dreams of Ariosto, the celestial visions of Tasso” themselves, champions “the fairy way,” and convicts Voltaire out of the mouth of Addison, to whom he had appealed. And then, warming as he goes on, he pours his broadsides into the very galère capitaine of the pirate fleet, the maxim “of following Nature.” “The source of bad criticism, as universally of bad philosophy, is the abuse of terms.”[144] A poet, no doubt, must follow “Nature”; but it is the nature of the poetical world, not of that of science and experience. Further, there is not only confusion general, but confusion particular. You must follow the ordinary nature in satire, in epigram, in didactics, not in other kinds. Incredulus odi has been absurdly misunderstood.[145] The “divine dream”[146] is among the noblest of the poet’s prerogatives. “The Henriade,” for want of it, “will in a short time be no more read than Gondibert.”[147] And he winds up a very intelligent account of Chaucer’s satire on Romance in Sir Thopas by a still more intelligent argument, that it was only the abuse of Romance that Chaucer satirised, and by an at least plausible criticism of the advent of Good Sense,

“Stooping with disenchanted wings to earth.”

“What,” he concludes, “we have gotten is, you will say, a great deal of good sense; what we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the illusion of which is so grateful to the charmed spirit that, in spite of philosophy and fashion, ‘Fairy’ Spenser still ranks highest among the poets; I mean, with all those who are either come of that house, or have any kindness for it.”

And now I should like to ask whether it is just or fair to say that the work of the man who wrote this thirty-three years before Lyrical Ballads is “vapid and perverted,” that it is “empirical, dull, and preposterous,” and, at the best, “not very useful as criticism”?

[Sidenote: His real importance.]

On the contrary, I should say that it was not only useful as criticism, but that it was at the moment, and for the men, the unum necessarium therein. Why the Time-Spirit chose Hurd[148] for his mouthpiece in this instance I know no more than those who have used this harsh language of him; this Spirit, like others, has a singular fashion of blowing where he lists. But, at any rate, he does not blow hot and cold here. Scraps and orts of Hurd’s doctrine may of course be found earlier—in Dryden, in Fontenelle, in Addison, even in Pope; but, though somebody else may know an original for the whole or the bulk of it, I, at least, do not. The three propositions—that Goths and Greeks are to be judged by their own laws and not by each other’s; that there are several unities, and that “unity of Action” is not the only one that affects and justifies even the fable; and that “follow Nature” is meaningless if not limited, and pestilent heresy as limited by the prevailing criticism of the day—these three abide. They may be more necessary and sovereign at one time than at another, but in themselves they are for all time, and they were for Hurd’s more than for almost any other of which Time itself leaves record.

[Sidenote: Alleged imperfections of the group.]

Literary currishness and literary cubbishness (an ignoble but hardy and vivacious pair of brethren) have not failed almost from the first to growl and gambol over the mistakes which—in most cases save that of Gray—were made by these pioneers. Some of these mistakes they might no doubt have avoided, as he did, by the exercise of a more scholarly care. But it may be doubted whether even Gray was not saved to a great extent from committing himself by the timidity which restrained him from launching out into extensive hypotheses, and the indolence or bashfulness which held him back from extensive publication, or even writing. It was indeed impossible that any man, without almost superhuman energy and industry, and without a quite extraordinary share of learning, means, health, leisure, and long life, should have at that time informed himself with any thoroughness of the contents and chronological disposition of mediæval literature. The documents were, to all but an infinitesimal extent, unpublished; in very few cases had even the slightest critical editing been bestowed on those that were in print; and the others lay in places far distant, and accessible with the utmost difficulty, from each other; for the most part catalogued very insufficiently, or not at all, and necessitating a huge expense of time and personal labour even to ascertain their existence. At the beginning of the twentieth century any one who in these islands cannot find what he wants in a published form could in forty-eight hours obtain from the librarians at the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Cambridge Library, that of Trinity College, Dublin, and that of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, information on the point whether what he wants is at any of them, and by exerting himself a little beyond the ordinary could visit all the five in less than a week. When the British Museum was first opened, in the middle of the last century, and Gray went to read in it “through the jaws of a whale,” it would have taken a week or so to communicate with the librarians; they would probably have had to make tedious researches before they could, if they chose to do so, reply, and when the replies were received, the inquirer would have had to spend the best part of a month or more in exhausting, costly, and not always safe journeys, before he could have got at the books.

There was, therefore, much direct excuse for the incompleteness and inaccuracy of the facts given by Percy, and Warton, and even Hurd; and not a little indirect excuse for the wildness and baselessness of their conjectures on such points as the Origin of Romance and the like. It is scarcely more than thirty or forty years—it is certainly not more than fifty or sixty—since it began to be possible for the student to acquaint himself with the texts, and inexcusable for the teacher not to do so. It is a very much shorter time than the shortest of these since theories, equally baseless and wild with those of these three, have been confidently and even arrogantly put forward about the origin of the Arthurian legends, and since mere linguistic crotchets have been allowed to interfere with the proper historical survey of European literature. The point of importance, the point of value, was that Percy, and Warton, and Hurd, not only to the huge impatience of Johnson, the common friend of the first two, devoted their attention to ballad, and romance, and saga, and mediæval treatise—not only recognised and allowed the principle that in dealing with new literary forms we must use new literary measures—not only in practice, if not in explicit theory, accepted the pleasure of the reader, and the idiosyncrasy of the book, and the “leaden rule” which adapts itself to Art and not Art to itself, as the grounds of criticism, but laid the foundations of that wider study of literary history which is not so much indispensable to literary criticism as it is literary criticism itself.

[Sidenote: Studies in Prosody.]

To this remarkable group of general precursors may be added, for a reason previously given, a couple of pioneers in a particular branch—one contemporary with and indeed in most cases anticipating their general work; the other coming level with its latest instances. It is for the author of the missing History of English Prosody—which the present writer would have attempted long ago if his time and studies had been at his own disposal, and which he may yet adventure if the night and the shadows permit—to account for if he can, to set forth and analyse as he may, the curious and unique coincidences of metrical with general criticism in England. The fact of them is not contestable, and, as we have seen already, the tyranny of the absolutely syllabic, middle-paused, end-stopped couplet coincides exactly with the “prose-and-sense” dynasty in English poetry. We have seen also that most of the precursors, explicitly or incidentally, by theory or by practice, attacked or evaded this tyranny. But not one of them—though Gray’s Metrum shows what he might have done if in this matter, as in others, he could only have persuaded himself to “speak out”—had the inclination or the courage to tackle the whole subject of the nature and laws of harmony in English composition. The two whom we have mentioned were bolder, and we must give them as much space as is allowable without unduly invading the province of that other History.

[Sidenote: John Mason: his Power of Numbers in Prose and Poetry.]

In 1749 appeared two pamphlets, on The Power of Numbers and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic Compositions, and on The Power and Harmony of Prosaic Numbers. No author’s name is on either title-page, but they are known to be by a Dissenting minister named John[149] Mason. He seems to have given much attention to the study and teaching of elocution, and he published another pamphlet on that special subject, which attained its fourth edition in 1757.[150]

In his poetical tractate Mason plunges into the subject after a very promising fashion, by posing the question with which he has to deal as “What is the cause and source of that pleasure which, in reading either poetry or prose, we derive not only from the sound and sense of the words, but the order in which they are disposed?” or, as an alternative, “Why a sentence conveying just the same thought, and containing the very same words, should afford the ear a greater pleasure when expressed one way than another, though the difference may perhaps arise only from the transposition of a single word?” One feels, after reading only so far, that De Quincey’s well-known phrase, “This is what you can recommend to a friend!” is applicable—that whether the man gives the right answers or not he has fixed at once on the right questions, and has acknowledged the right ground of argument. Not “How ought sentences to be arranged?” not “How did A. B. C. arrange them or bid them be arranged?” but “How and why do they give the greatest pleasure as the result of arrangement?”

So also, in his prose tractate, Mason starts from the position that “numerous” arrangement adds wonderfully to the pleasure of the reader. To enter into the details of his working out of the principle in the two respects would be to commit that “digression to another kind” from which we have warned ourselves off. But it is not improper to say that, a hundred and fifty years ago, he had already cleared his mind of all the cant and confusion which to this day beset too many minds in regard to the question of Accent v. Quantity, by adopting the sufficient and final principle[151] that “that which principally fixes and determines the quantities in English numbers is the accent and emphasis”; that though he is not quite so sharply happy in his definition, he evidently uses “quantity” itself merely as an equivalent for “unit of metrical value”; that he clears away all the hideous and ruinous nonsense about “elision,” observing[152] that in

“And many an amorous, many a humorous lay”

there are fourteen syllables instead of ten, and that “the ear finds nothing in it redundant, defective, or disagreeable, but is sensible of a sweetness not ordinarily found in the common iambic verse.” Further, he had anticipated[153] Hurd by giving elaborate examples of quantified analysis of prose rhythm. The minutiæ of all this, interesting as they are, are not for us; the point is that here is a man who has not the fear of Bysshe before his eyes, or the fear of anybody; who will not be “connoisseured out of his senses,” and whose brain, when his ear tells it that a line is beautiful, proceeds calmly to analyse if possible the cause of the beauty, without troubling itself to ask whether anybody has said that it ought not to exist.[154]

[Sidenote: Mitford—his Harmony of Language.]

These inquiries into prosody and rhythm formed no unimportant part of the English criticism of the mid-eighteenth century.[155] The two different ways in which they were regarded by contemporaries may be easily guessed, but we have documentary evidence of them in an interesting passage of the dedication to John Gilpin[156] of the second edition of the book in which they culminated, and to which we now come. Mitford’s Inquiry into the Principles of Harmony in Language represents himself as having paid a visit to Pye, afterwards Laureate; and, finding him with books of the kind before him, as having expostulated with “a votary of fancy and the Muses” for his “patience with such dull and uninteresting controversy.” Pye, it seems, replied that “interest in the subject so warmly and extensively taken by English men of letters” had excited his curiosity, which had been gratified by Foster’s elucidation of the subject itself. And Mitford, borrowing the book, soon found his own excited too.[157]

The volume of which this was the genesis, appeared first in 1774.[158] The second edition, very carefully revised and extended, was not published till 1804. It may appear at first sight unfortunate, but on reflection will probably be seen to have been a distinct advantage, that even this second edition preceded the appearance of any of the capital works of the new school except the Lyrical Ballads. For had it been otherwise, and had Mitford taken any notice of the new poetry, we should in all probability have had either the kind of reactionary protest which often comes from pioneers who have been overtaken and passed, or at best an attempt at awkward adjustment of two very different points of view. As it is, the book, besides exhibiting much original talent, belongs to a distinct school and platform—that of the later but still eighteenth-century Romantic beginners, while at the same time it represents a much greater knowledge of old literature, helped by Ellis’s Specimens, by Ritson’s work, and other products of the last years of the century, than had been possible to Shenstone, to Gray, or even to Warton.

Once more, its detailed tenets and pronouncements, with all but the general methods by which they are arrived at, belong to another story. But these general methods, and some special exemplifications of them, belong to us. Rightly or wrongly, Mitford sought his explanations of the articulate music of poetry from the laws of inarticulate music itself. For this reason, or for another, he was disposed to join the accentual and not the quantitative school of prosodists, and to express strong disapproval of the adoption of classical prosodic terms in regard to English. He is sometimes arbitrary, as when he lays down[159] “that in English every word has one syllable always made eminent by accent”; and we have to remember that he was writing after nearly a hundred years of couplet verse on Bysshian principles before we can excuse—while we can never endorse—his statement[160] that “to all who have any familiarity with English poetry a regularity in the disposition of accents is its most striking characteristic.” He is rather unsound on the Pause, but lays down the all-important rule that “rhyme is a time-beater” without hesitation. He admits trisyllabic feet even in what he calls “common time”; but (in consequence of his accentual theories probably) troubles himself with “aberration” of accent (i.e., substitution of trochee for iamb), with redundant or extra-metrical syllables in the middle of the line, and with other epicyclic and cumbrous superfluities. But the most important thing in the whole book—the thing which alone makes it really important to us—is that he supports his theories by a regular examination of the whole of English verse as far as he knows it, even back to Anglo-Saxon times, and that in making the examination, he appeals not to this supposed rule or to that accepted principle, but to the actual practice of the actual poets as interpreted to him by his own ear.

In his errors, therefore (or in what may seem to some his errors), as well as in his felicities, Mitford exhibits himself to the full as an adherent of that changed school of poetical criticism which in the first place strives to master the actual documents, in the second to ascertain, as far as possible and as closely as possible, their chronological relation to each other, and in the third to take them as they are and explain them as well as it may, without any selection of a particular form of a particular metre at a particular time as a norm which had been painfully reached and must on no account be departed from. He shows the same leaning by his constant reference to the ear, not the rule, as the authority. The first draft of his book was published not only when Johnson was still alive, but long before the Lives of the Poets appeared; and it is most interesting to see the different sides from which they attack the prosodic character, say of Milton. Johnson—it is quite evident from his earlier and more appreciative handling of the subject in the Rambler—approaching Milton with the orthodox decasyllabic rules in hand, found lines which most undoubtedly do not accord with those rules, and termed them harsh accordingly. Mitford approaches the lines with nothing but a listening ear, finds them “not harsh and crabbed, but musical as Apollo’s lute,” and then proceeds to construct, rightly or wrongly, such a rule as will allow and register their music.

[Sidenote: Importance of prosodic inquiry.]

The truth is, that these inquirers both builded and pulled down better than they knew. Many persons besides Mitford have begun by thinking controversies about prosody dull and uninteresting, while only too few have allowed themselves to be converted as he did; nor is it common to the present day to find a really intelligent comprehension of the importance of the subject. On the contrary, a kind of petulant indignation is apt to be excited by any criticism of poetry which pursues these “mechanical” lines, as they are called, and the critic has sometimes even to endure the last indignity of being styled a “philologist” for his pains.

Yet nothing is more certain than that these inquiries into prosody were among the chief agencies in the revolution which came over English poetry at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next. A sort of superstition of the decasyllable, hardened into a fanaticism of fixed pause, rigidly disyllabic feet and the rest, had grown upon our verse-writers. A large part of the infinite metrical wealth of English was hidden away and locked up under taboo. Inquiries into prosody broke this taboo inevitably; and something much more than mere metrical wealth was sure to be found, and was found, in the treasure-houses thus thrown open.

[Sidenote: Sterne and the stop-watch.]

One expected figure of a different kind may perhaps have been hitherto missed in this part of our gallery. Sterne’s well-known outburst as to criticism, in the twelfth chapter of the third book of Tristram Shandy, is far too famous a thing to be passed over with the mere allusion given to it in the last volume, or with another in this. Nay, it may be said at once, from its fame and from its forcible expression, to have had, and even in a sense still to have, no small place among the Dissolvents of Judgment by Rule. “Looking only at the stop-watch” is one of those admirable and consummate phrases which settle themselves once for all in the human memory, and not merely possess—as precisians complain, illegitimately—the force of an argument, but have a property of self-preservation and recurrence at the proper moment in which arguments proper are too often sadly lacking.

Further, it must be admitted that there are few better instances of the combined sprightliness and ingenuity of Sterne’s humour. “Befetiched with the bobs and trinkets of criticism” is in reality even happier than the “stop-watch,” and of an extraordinary propriety. Though he did “fetch it from the coast of Guinea,” nothing was ever less far-fetched or more home-driven. The “nothing of the colouring of Titian” is equally happy in its rebuke of the singular negativeness—the attention to what is not there, not to what is—of Neo-Classicism; while the outburst, again world-known, as to the “tormenting cant of criticism,” and the ingenious and thoroughly English application of this cant itself to the eulogy of the curse of Ernulphus, are all too delightful, and have been too effective for good, not to deserve the heartiest acknowledgment.

At the same time the Devil’s Advocate—who is always a critic, if a critic is not always an officer of the devil—-may, nay must, point out that Sterne’s main object in the passage is not strictly literary. It is assuredly from the sentimental point of view that he attacks the Neo-Classic “fetichism”; the “generous heart” is to “give up the reins of its imagination into the author’s hands,” to “be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.” To which Criticism, not merely of the Neo-Classic persuasion, can only cry, “Softly! Before the most generous of hearts gives up the reins of imagination (which, by the way, are not entirely under the heart’s control) to an author, he must show that he can manage them, he must take them, in short. And it is by no means superfluous—it is highly desirable, if not absolutely necessary—to know and care for the wherefore of your pleasing.” Nor, wide as was Sterne’s reading, and ingenious as are the uses which he makes of it, does it appear that he had any very great interest in literature as such—as being good, and not merely odd, or naughty, or out-of-the-way, or conducive to outpourings of heart. He might even, by a very ungenerous person, be described as by no means disinterested in his protests. For certainly his own style of writing had very little chance of being adjudged to keep time according to the classical stop-watch, of satisfying, with its angles and its dimensions, the requirements of the classical scale. So he is rather a “Hal o’ the Wynd” in the War of Critical Independence—he fights for his own hand, though he does yeoman’s service to the general cause.

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